Modernism, Feminism and the Culture of Boredom [1 ed.] 9781139226493

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MODE R N ISM, FE M I N ISM, A N D T H E C U LT U R E OF BOR E D OM

Bored women populate many of the most celebrated works of British modernist literature. Whether in popular offerings such as Robert Hitchens’s The Garden of Allah, the esteemed middlebrow novels of May Sinclair or H. G. Wells, or the now-canonized works such as Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, women’s boredom frequently serves as narrative impetus, antagonist, and climax. In this book, Allison Pease explains how the changing meaning of boredom reshapes our understanding of modernist narrative techniques, feminism’s struggle to define women as individuals, and male modernists’ preoccupation with female sexuality. To this end, Pease characterizes boredom as an important category of critique against the constraints of women’s lives, arguing that such critique surfaces in modernist fiction in an undeniably gendered way. Engaging with a wide variety of well- and lesser-known modernist writers, Pease’s study appeals especially to researchers and graduates in modernist studies and British literature.           is associate professor of English at John Jay College, City University of New York, where she also serves as chair of the English department. She is the author of Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity () and has published widely in journals such as Modernism/Modernity, Criticism, The Journal of Gender Studies, and English Literature in Transition. She received her MA and PhD in English Literature from New York University.

MODE R N ISM, FE M I N ISM, A N D T H E C U LT U R E OF BOR E DOM A L L ISON PE A SE John Jay College, CUNY

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press  Avenue of the Americas, New York,   -,    www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ © Allison Pease  Th is publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published  Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Pease, Allison. Modernism, feminism, and the culture of boredom / Allison Pease. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.     ---- (hardback) . Boredom in literature. . Women in literature. . Modernism (Literature) . Feminism and literature. I. Title.  .   ′.–dc      ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of    s for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

MODE R N ISM, FE M I N ISM, A N D T H E C U LT U R E OF BOR E D OM

Bored women populate many of the most celebrated works of British modernist literature. Whether in popular offerings such as Robert Hitchens’s The Garden of Allah, the esteemed middlebrow novels of May Sinclair or H. G. Wells, or the now-canonized works such as Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, women’s boredom frequently serves as narrative impetus, antagonist, and climax. In this book, Allison Pease explains how the changing meaning of boredom reshapes our understanding of modernist narrative techniques, feminism’s struggle to define women as individuals, and male modernists’ preoccupation with female sexuality. To this end, Pease characterizes boredom as an important category of critique against the constraints of women’s lives, arguing that such critique surfaces in modernist fiction in an undeniably gendered way. Engaging with a wide variety of well- and lesser-known modernist writers, Pease’s study appeals especially to researchers and graduates in modernist studies and British literature.           is associate professor of English at John Jay College, City University of New York, where she also serves as chair of the English department. She is the author of Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity () and has published widely in journals such as Modernism/Modernity, Criticism, The Journal of Gender Studies, and English Literature in Transition. She received her MA and PhD in English Literature from New York University.

MODE R N ISM, FE M I N ISM, A N D T H E C U LT U R E OF BOR E DOM A L L ISON PE A SE John Jay College, CUNY

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press  Avenue of the Americas, New York,   -,    www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ © Allison Pease  Th is publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published  Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Pease, Allison. Modernism, feminism, and the culture of boredom / Allison Pease. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.     ---- (hardback) . Boredom in literature. . Women in literature. . Modernism (Literature) . Feminism and literature. I. Title.  .   ′.–dc      ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of    s for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

MODE R N ISM, FE M I N ISM, A N D T H E C U LT U R E OF BOR E D OM

Bored women populate many of the most celebrated works of British modernist literature. Whether in popular offerings such as Robert Hitchens’s The Garden of Allah, the esteemed middlebrow novels of May Sinclair or H. G. Wells, or the now-canonized works such as Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, women’s boredom frequently serves as narrative impetus, antagonist, and climax. In this book, Allison Pease explains how the changing meaning of boredom reshapes our understanding of modernist narrative techniques, feminism’s struggle to define women as individuals, and male modernists’ preoccupation with female sexuality. To this end, Pease characterizes boredom as an important category of critique against the constraints of women’s lives, arguing that such critique surfaces in modernist fiction in an undeniably gendered way. Engaging with a wide variety of well- and lesser-known modernist writers, Pease’s study appeals especially to researchers and graduates in modernist studies and British literature.           is associate professor of English at John Jay College, City University of New York, where she also serves as chair of the English department. She is the author of Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity () and has published widely in journals such as Modernism/Modernity, Criticism, The Journal of Gender Studies, and English Literature in Transition. She received her MA and PhD in English Literature from New York University.

MODE R N ISM, FE M I N ISM, A N D T H E C U LT U R E OF BOR E DOM A L L ISON PE A SE John Jay College, CUNY

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press  Avenue of the Americas, New York,   -,    www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ © Allison Pease  Th is publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published  Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Pease, Allison. Modernism, feminism, and the culture of boredom / Allison Pease. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.     ---- (hardback) . Boredom in literature. . Women in literature. . Modernism (Literature) . Feminism and literature. I. Title.  .   ′.–dc      ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of    s for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Preface .

page vii

Boredom and Bored Women in the Early Twentieth Century



.

Overcoming Nihilism: Male-Authored Female Boredom



.

May Sinclair, Feminism, and Boredom



. Boredom as Social System in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage .

Boredom and Individualism in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out

 

Conclusion



Notes Bibliography Index

  

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Open a novel written in England between  and , and the odds are you will encounter a bored woman. Modernist literature is replete with women reclining on sofas, muttering to themselves on trains, moping about country villages, rolling dental papers in offices, pouring out tea and stifling yawns while engaging in small talk. The central claim of this book is that, more profoundly than has yet been understood, literary modernism shaped – and was shaped by – a broad-ranging set of ideas about women’s boredom. Readers of modernism frequently identify shifting narrative perspectives and incantatory repetition as some of modernism’s formal innovations. Likewise, modernism is notorious for its bold engagement with human sexuality. What critical history has overlooked, however, is that these modernist innovations emerge in part out of a need to articulate, understand, and in some cases remedy women’s boredom. In simplest form, boredom is the inability to find interest or meaning. As manifest in British representations and discussions of women in the early twentieth century, boredom can appear as emptiness or deadness, a lack, or simply passive dissatisfaction. From the final decades of the nineteenth century to the first few decades of the twentieth century, “boredom” is used, sometimes interchangeably, with a number of other terms defining psychic, spiritual, moral, and physical states in which the self has difficulty accessing authenticity, productivity, and desire – all qualities attributed to one’s success as an individual. Not coincidentally, these terms proliferate at a pivotal moment in British history as Britain, like most Western countries at this time, negotiated women’s emergence into the public sphere. Equally, these terms are inextricably linked to the history of the novel in the West, which privileges individuality, agency, action, self-knowledge, and desire – all qualities from which the bored subject finds herself estranged. The representation of bored women in the experimental modernist texts by May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, and vii

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Virginia Woolf is not just a renunciation of the cultural status of women in this period; it is also an attempt to alter the form and narrative techniques of the novel in which individualism, agency, and masculinity are equivalents. Boredom’s constitutive role in modernism is a manifestation of broader social and cultural forces in which British women agitated for recognition as men’s legal and social equals. Surprisingly, while suffragists were chanting in the streets, chaining themselves to railings, and staging hunger strikes, popular and professional texts of the period described an epidemic of female boredom. Women’s boredom was pathologized in medical literature, decried in political and feminist tracts, lamented in popular journalism, and elaborately theorized in the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis. In the meantime, female modernists searched for ways to narrate women’s experiences of themselves as alternately agentic and bored. Feminist modernist texts, whether written by men or women, confront boredom as a problem originating out of the question of what it means to be a self in a culture shaped by masculine-defined individualism. Looking at suffrage, medical, journalistic, labor, and philosophic texts of the early twentieth century makes clear that a significant number of women were grappling with themselves as self-represented subjects who were not able to enter consistently and meaningfully into a broad array of contexts. Their boredom is a reflection at once of the demand that they be subjects, self-recognized individuals, while at the same time the discursive template for such new ways of being had yet to be written. What had been written was a norm of women’s lack of agency that explained her discomfited awareness of such a state as pathological; her boredom was medicalized and treated with more boredom. British suffragists and feminists of the early twentieth century worked to counter such limiting notions of women’s potential through their demands that women become individuals, enfranchised citizens, and contributors to the public sphere. With these and other competing claims as backdrop, modernist writers of the female bildungsroman confronted boredom as a core constituent of their narratives. Boredom functioned not only as chronological descriptor of women’s lived experience in time, but also as the dilemma of accessing a subjectivity that was without previous definition. Their boredom manifests as an irritating awareness of what they lack and an inability to envision a successful resolution to this tense drama of self-consciousness. In the novels by Arnold Bennett, May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf explored in this book, such boredom features in the narrative, but there is no satisfying resolution to the problem. The

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question of what a female self can be – and whether it can be – within the modern conception of the individual is at the heart of their explorations. For Bennett, the female self is an alien in male territory, subject not just to traditions that exclude her, but to biological necessities that preclude her full participation in a life of desire and possibility. For Sinclair and Richardson, the female self can exist, but must be a closely guarded secret. Their celebrations of the female subject in transcendent communion with self and nature offer no real solution to the problem of how women can exist as individuals in relation to others. Sinclair’s heroines publicly deny themselves toward the end of their respective novels, and Richardson’s Miriam Henderson denies the social system and conventional behavior as false consciousness for a woman who would be a self. They thus form innovative romantic templates for selfhood that have no application in either the real world or the classic bildungsroman as a form that propagates reconciliation between the subject and the social world. Woolf demonstrates the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to her female protagonist’s achieved individualism and selfhood and kills Rachel Vinrace off in a move that upends individualism as a determining construct of epistemology or the novel. Like Richardson and Sinclair, Woolf determines a solution to the problem of women’s publicly perceived emptiness, their boredom, by pointing to a fullness that exists in a state of indifference to the political: being at large. By contrast, male authors of the female bildungsroman – Robert Hichens, E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells, and D. H. Lawrence – all forge political solutions to women’s boredom through depicting their intense, sexual love with men. These texts imply that fulfilled sexual desire has the power to transform the female from a state of lack into “an eff ulgence of unseen glory” in which she is able to “see the whole of everything at once,” including the “deep delight” of her body. A woman learns “that if she gave herself to the man, it was real. But if she kept herself for herself, it was nothing.” Their solution simply reinscribes women into their former roles with a difference. Placing these distinct approaches to women’s boredom side by side, and allowing for the differences between art and politics, it is difficult to deny the predominantly gendered approach to the problem and the limited, or perhaps failed, solutions represented in these modernist texts. Given boredom’s passivity and indifference, the claim of this book that representations of boredom in early-twentieth-century novels form a part of early-twentieth-century feminism’s protest against the patriarchal order may seem counterintuitive. Isn’t protest by its nature an active,

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direct statement against something? Not according to suffragist Teresa Billington-Grieg, who argued in , “It is a mistake to assume all rebels know when and how to rebel, or why they should rebel. Rebellion is often a spasmodic and bitter outbreak under the spur of half-realised needs and pains.” To protest, one must have a sense of equality in order to believe one’s complaints will be recognized. But the fact is, men in Great Britain did not recognize women in the early twentieth century: women had restricted legal rights, were less educated than men, and worked in limited fields in small numbers. Modern women were not like women of previous eras in which their secondary status was presumed natural and fitting. Rather, modern women were painfully aware of themselves as transitional figures, legally and socially classed as subordinate to men but educated enough to recognize the possibilities that were denied them. Boredom as a practice of self-reflection that delivers one over to a something that refuses itself – creating desire with no object – is not just an internalized replication of the social real, but its result. The representation of boredom in modernist literature displays the conflict women experienced between their desires and the few outlets for such desires in earlytwentieth-century British culture. Although feminist modernist novels feature a woman’s quest for self-realization, or self-production, these novels more frequently employ a rhetoric of boredom to demonstrate their female protagonist’s failure. As such, modernist boredom should be understood not as evidence of the tediousness of the characters presented or as minor disturbances in their lives, but rather as a gauge of the feminist struggle in the early twentieth century. Literary representations of boredom demonstrate the tremendous difficulty women experienced in realizing and pursuing their desires, and thus in realizing themselves as anything other than bored. Chapter  of this book situates boredom within a number of modern discourses: labor, leisure, suffrage, feminism, psychoanalysis, medicine, education, individualism, and evolutionary eugenics. In the early twentieth century, boredom was articulated multiply and understood along surprisingly gendered lines. Educated men had access to a culture and a set of practices that allowed them to produce themselves as nihilists, pronouncing God dead and the world empty of meaning. Women, without a shared culture of selfhood, were bored, without viable selves to access truth or meaning. Bored women were put under the care of medical professionals who diagnosed them as neurasthenic, pathologically unfit to pursue their own interests in the world, and prescribed bed rest – more boredom – as a cure. Female discontent was given neither philosophical

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nor political legitimacy, but rather was pathologized and relegated to the body. Where male ennui is of the cultivated soul, ennoblingly individualized, women’s boredom is of the singular, pathologized body. Yet where boredom can be represented as failure, it can also function as protest and protection, an inhabiting of indifference that is a form of cultural resistance. Chapter  explores the complex and multiple positions of boredom in the early twentieth century in order to begin to question why and how male and female modernists represent women’s experience of boredom differently. To a surprising degree, the relegation of female meaning to the body is confirmed in early-twentieth-century novels about women’s boredom written by men. As Chapter  shows, male authors of female boredom reiterate a remarkably uniform narrative arc to resituate women in their bodies. In the novels of Robert Hichens, Arnold Bennett, E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells, and D. H. Lawrence – authors known for their cultural authority rather than narrative innovation – boredom is often concomitant with an overall mood of nihilism, a worldview privileged over boredom in its totalizing, seemingly universal quality. With the exception of Arnold Bennett’s work, these male-authored narratives seek to overcome the nihilistic worldview and resolve the problem of their female protagonists’ boredom by having these characters relinquish their independence, and often their feminist ideals, in order to experience sexual fulfillment with men. In these popular and critically acclaimed narratives, the world is replenished with meaning not simply in romantic terms, but specifically in sexual terms that reflect a post-Darwinian, sexological view that women’s biology determines their lives. The sexual frankness of earlytwentieth-century literature by men positions women’s sexual realization as self-realization and her boredom as a denial of her fundamental, biological purpose. The tendency to particularize and trivialize female complaint and female boredom in the twentieth century may be one reason for the inexplicably slight critical attention given to Britain’s most prestigious female novelist between  and : May Sinclair. Chapter  explains how Sinclair uses women’s boredom to counter narratives defining women’s purpose as biological. An avid early reader of psychoanalysis, Sinclair features boredom as a problem resulting from women’s conditioning in psychological repression. In the cause of feminism, she represents female boredom not as a personal deficiency, but as a socially systematic form of violence against women who were unable to access their own desires as a result of their conditioning. At the same time that she presents

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boredom as an almost unavoidable fact in women’s lives, she also suggests that women who are strong enough to resist internalizing the repressive forces surrounding them can consciously choose to sublimate their own drives and energies. This willful sublimation is rewarded with moments of ecstatic vision coupled with intense self-connection. The ability to sublimate, Sinclair suggests, requires the strength to assert one’s individuality, one’s unique vision, and to reject the social institutions such as family or religion, which impinge on that individuality, while not abandoning the responsibilities that these social institutions impose. Chapter  further demonstrates how early modernist texts by women subverted culturally dominant narratives, by showing how Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (–), consistently critiqued as itself boring, forges new narrative techniques out of female boredom. Pilgrimage rejects formal and social conventionality, figured in the novels as boredom, through the documentation of its protagonist’s technê of selfhood. Continuous and instantaneous perception is for Miriam, as subject, a practice of freedom, an assertion of self and strength against given reality, and specifically women’s reality, as boredom. Where May Sinclair’s novels posit the female as individual only apart from social conventions, Pilgrimage ’s Miriam Henderson experiences individuality as an end in itself, and thus the novels participate in feminist and suffragist projects of the early decades of the twentieth century to secure selfhood for women. In the quest for selfhood, Richardson exposes the promise and potential of the bourgeois narrative of labor as identityconfi rming, but she also demonstrates boredom and lack of meaning that can accompany work. Addressing the question of whether women can be individuals within a patriarchal system in which individuality is equated with masculinity, Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, questions the premises of liberal individualism and feminism’s reliance on it. Published in  after the first of Sinclair’s three novels on the subject and at the same time as Richardson’s first volume of Pilgrimage, The Voyage Out depicts Rachel Vinrace’s failure to become an individual. Woolf uses the diff use mood of boredom throughout her novel as a vehicle by which to express doubt about her young heroine’s ability to access any meaning or individual purpose, and through this to question individualism as defining the social system and one’s apprehension of experience. In distinction from other feminist modernists, Woolf presents boredom as the unraveling of meaning as known by the subject, and, as such, as that which puts a Cartesian, subject-centered apprehension of experience into question.

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Boredom is frequently seen as a minor, insignificant emotion, as fleeting as it is opaque. But research for this book suggests otherwise. For women in Britain in the early twentieth century, boredom was equal parts plague and protest, vehicle of self-discovery and impediment to the same. For literary modernism, the focus on boredom as a problem for and of women creates new quest plots focused on self-relating while helping to shape modernism’s formal obscurity, its haunting repetitions, its obsessive fascination with time, and its celebration of sexuality as a maker of meaning and a wellspring of vitality. Boredom, as an experience that is at once abject and critical, provokes reconsideration of modernist impulses.

 

Boredom and Bored Women in the Early Twentieth Century

Anglo-American modernist literature is full of bored characters, from the obvious ones such as the unnamed narrator of Charlotte Gilman Perkins’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” () or T.S. Eliot’s typewriter girl in The Waste Land () to less obvious ones such as Nella Larsen’s Helga Crane in Quicksand (), Virginia Woolf’s Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out (), or Connie Chatterley in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (). Even Molly Bloom talks of her boredom in the “Penelope” chapter of Ulysses (). Modern boredom is not confined to the AngloAmerican tradition, of course. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary () is a forbearer to a French literary preoccupation with ennui and boredom that peaks in Jean-Paul Sartre’s mid-twentieth-century existentialism, and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain () features a male character who does nothing for seven years. Henrik Ibsen’s famous women, Nora Helmer and Hedda Gabler, are wildly bored, Norwegian Nobel Laureate Knut Hamson’s The Hunger () waxes lyrical on boredom, and Anton Chekhov’s dramatic characters are defined by their boredom. Examples proliferate. In English, boredom may reach its literary apotheosis in the works of Samuel Beckett, whose characters wait, repeat actions and words, do nothing, and experience odd relationships to time. Boredom and the experience of emptiness that signals its curiously negative presence are implicit in modern and modernist writing. But when we accept that boredom, along with contingent ideas about identity and agency, shapes modernism, we might well ask whose boredom and whose modernism? Here is where the argument of this book begins. More than a confined set of experiences on the pages of literary novels, boredom in the early twentieth century is a cultural phenomenon: a structure of feeling that includes affective, emergent but not wholly realized or defined personal and social relationships, relationships in process. Examining British modernist literature and the many cultural discourses from which the literature evolves and borrows, this chapter – indeed this 



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

book – argues that representational boredom in the modernist period, defined for the purposes of this study as –, is a gendered experience. Representations of boredom as a structure of feeling for British women during this time are an acknowledgment of the profound dissatisfaction of a group of people who found themselves on the wrong side of agency, interest, and meaning as the twentieth century began. By depicting individual women enduring, struggling against, and made subject to boredom, the constellation of modernist novels that do so together manifest the putatively personal, subjective emotion of boredom as a public feeling. Lauren Berlant usefully calls such affective, mediated collectives “intimate publics.” An intimate public is “a space made of mediation in which the personal is refracted through the general, what’s salient for its consumers is that it is a place of recognition and reflection. In an intimate public sphere emotional contact, of a sort, is made.” To explore and give shape to the experiences of boredom was to forge a public form of inquiry into women’s lives that simultaneously created political and affective identities for women as suppressed, or would-be, agents. But not all representations of boredom were the same; indeed there were multiple boredoms. Boredom comes to be read and interpreted by modernists so schismatically as to create a gendered divide. To understand this claim, one must first understand the varied ways in which boredom is recognized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the ways that it has been differently defined for men and for women in the modern period.                        In modern use, boredom is understood as a loss of personal meaning, occasioned either by the withdrawal or absence of the meaningful or by the imposition of the meaningless. Despite related antecedents in the ancient and medieval worlds – horror loci, taedium vitae, acedia, melancholy, ennui, spleen – recent scholarship has explained the English expression of boredom as a particularly modern articulation of experience dating from the late eighteenth century. Before this, the word “bore” first appeared in English not in reference to the modern understanding of boredom, but dating from about the year  as that which pierces, perforates, makes a hole, or makes something hollow. This primary meaning conveys a violence that will become the palimpsest on which later meanings of boredom rest. The modern conception of “bore” is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary in an exchange of aristocratic letters written in

Boredom and Bored Women



 and  complaining of chamber “bores,” presumably men who talked so tediously as to metaphorically pierce holes in their listeners and render them hollow. How, then, does English come to coin the word “boredom”? Not surprisingly, boredom’s first entry in the OED is in the form of a bored woman. In his  novel Bleak House, Charles Dickens describes Lady Dedlock – her name also signifying the stasis characteristic of this elusive state – as suffering from a “chronic malady of boredom.” The OED defines boredom, unhelpfully, as the state of being bored. To be bored (the term first appeared in the OED in ) is to be wearied, suffering from ennui, another term adopted into English in the eighteenth century. The self-referentiality of these definitions does little to shed light on the experience of boredom and does much to suggest that boredom itself is elusive, appearing as an emptiness that resists definition. To pursue the word from its original use, one might conclude that to be bored is to be rendered metaphorically, or psychologically, hollow, and that boredom is the resulting experience of emptiness. But what is the discursive understanding of subject formation that renders experience, or indeed the self, either full or hollow? Boredom has no essential character; it functions as a stance toward, or a gauge of, not only what is valued and meaningful, but also one’s access to that meaning and value at any given point in time. Boredom thus emerges as an important register of British women’s experiences as they become increasingly aware of their lack of access to what is valued in their society. Boredom shares an overlapping history with other, previously mentioned older terms, each with its own historical articulation of emptiness, sadness, and restless irritation. Perhaps its most significant precursor is in the early Christian term acedia. Known as “the demon of noontide” when it appeared in the fourth century, acedia was a sin committed by monks who, in the quiet listlessness of the afternoon, found themselves unable to communicate with God in their prayers. John Cassian (ca. – ..) characterizes acedia in his writings by “laziness and inertia, by an unwillingness to pursue spiritual exercises, by a desire to escape present circumstances, by tiredness, hunger, the slowing of time, by a desire to escape oneself through sleep or company.” Fascinating in this description is the agency ascribed to the individual who refuses to inhabit the given ideological space – in this instance, Christian diligence. Boredom clearly overlaps with, and shares characteristics of, acedia in its encounter with emptiness and its apparent refusal of the given world. Both straddle interiority and exteriority and delineate a conflict between the self and the order of things.



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

Modern boredom is distinguished from its antecedents by the cultural order into which it is articulated. Through a shift in worldview characterized by the philosophies of René Descartes and Immanuel Kant in the West, the individual, not God, becomes the source of value and meaning, and self-knowledge becomes a register of truth. In what Foucault describes as the “Cartesian moment,” knowledge of the self becomes a form of consciousness: “by putting the self-evidence of the subject’s own existence at the very source of access to being, this knowledge of oneself . . . made the ‘know yourself ’ into a fundamental means of access to the truth.” Boredom serves as a register of the success or failure of this project. If one is bored, one cannot access oneself, and therefore one has no access to truth as understood in modern terms. Counterintuitively, boredom should be understood here as a practice of the self. As literary critic Bryony Randall explains it, boredom is a mode of attention that opens the “self onto itself, demonstrating to the subject its own subjectivity formed through the absolute duration of human consciousness.” Modern boredom’s emphasis on the individual as producer of his or her own meaning is critical to reading the politics of boredom in modernism. Modern and modernist boredom arise as a way of establishing value, or its lack, and defining a new way of interpreting human experience connected to individual productivity. Adopting the earlier use of the word “bore” to understand the state or condition of being bored (“-dom”), it is useful to understand boredom not simply as an experience of disgusting weariness (tedium), but importantly as a moment in which that which contains one as a discreet entity has been pierced – bored – so that there is no longer an impregnable barrier between what is outside and what is inside. Boredom is a metaphorical permeability, an awareness of, at the same time that one is without, subjectivity. Boredom can be temporary or lifelong, and it straddles subjective and objective worldviews. As such, boredom is both an emotion – the frustration and emptiness that occurs to and within a subject – and an affect relational and transformative experiences/moods/feelings of stifled meaninglessness that can happen to, or between, subjects and objects. At root, boredom is a problem of meaning. The bored subject cannot make or does not find his or her situation meaningful. Such boredom is experienced as an irritating emptiness, a desire for something unknown to relieve the claustrophobic, enervating sense of time passing slowly. The experience of boredom is painful and agitating; it is a prolonged sensation of a hollow within or emptiness without. Under the spell of boredom, time feels, as one of the German terms for boredom suggests, like a “long

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while,” langweile. Boredom is a “confrontation with time,” says Martin Heidegger, whose ideas on boredom are discussed later in this chapter, in which the feeling of “being left empty” emerges. This prolonged absence of a sense of self, a tedious inability to take interest or pleasure, suggests an identity crisis in miniature. But it also begs the question: what is the self that is interested? This is the question that becomes of decided importance to Anglophone women in the early twentieth century. As manifest in British depictions of women in the early twentieth century, boredom can appear as emptiness or deadness, a lack, or passive dissatisfaction. There is a mechanical, repetitive aspect to their boredom that might be characterized as soulless. In the very opening lines of Woolf ’s Night and Day (), for instance, the protagonist Katherine Hilberry is shown pouring out tea, using “one-fi fth” of her mind and automatically going through the motions “for the sixth hundredth time . . . without bringing into play any of her unoccupied faculties.” The opening scene of May Sinclair’s The Three Sisters () is a long, drawn-out depiction of the boredom the three sisters endure every evening as they wait for their father, a vicar, to come and say ten o’clock prayers. The three sisters are introduced as “sitting there in the dining-room behind the yellow blind, doing nothing. In the supine, motionless attitudes they seemed to be waiting for something to happen.” They brood, watch “vaguely,” and let out “weary moan[s]” until the Vicar arrives. As the brief last paragraph of the chapter explains, “That was all they were waiting for. It was all that could happen. It happened every night at ten o’clock.” Unable to give shape to their own lives, these women find themselves dependent on external factors most frequently linked to male authority to shape it for them. Th is inability to exert agency in their lives leads to a series of narrative pauses and moments of torpor figured in the terms of boredom. Modernist literature rarely uses the word “boredom” as its own descriptor. Rather, individual authors develop unique rhetorics of boredom. Authors employ repeated phrases; ellipses and em dashes signifying time passing wordlessly; associative words such as “stillness,” “dull,” “weary,” “nothing,” “emptiness,” or “tired”; physical descriptions of characters as supine, still, or staring into the middle distance; and irony to suggest a split between the possible and the real. Representations of boredom differ, but modernist representations of bored women by May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson share a common characteristic of bringing the reader into the experience of boredom through narrative elisions and fissures that reproduce their characters’ perceptions of their



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

own blocked agency, interest, and meaning making for the reader. This accounts for some of the challenges of reading their texts. From the final decades of the nineteenth century to the first few decades of the twentieth century, boredom was used, sometimes interchangeably, with a number of other terms defining psychic, spiritual, moral, and physical states in which one has difficulty accessing authenticity, productivity, and desire. To the medical professions, including the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis, boredom might be a symptom of, or concomitant with, neurasthenia, hysteria, melancholia, depression, or “nerves” – all medical terms of wide-ranging definition that included low-affect states in which one was unable to participate with pleasure. For politicians, economists, and evolutionists, boredom was frequently conflated with dangerously degenerative idleness. For philosophers and sociologists, boredom was associated with ennui, nihilism, anomie, disenchantment, or alienation. Important to this study, each of these terms reflects a particularly modern, post-Enlightenment articulation of the self as the authentic and productive author of his or her desire, and hence an individual self, experienced as such. Where modernist women’s boredom conflicts with the dominant concept of boredom as the inability to produce one’s desire is in the difference between male-identified subjective individualism and woman’s inherited role as the second sex, the helpmate, and object of male-authored desire. How can a woman be both the authentic and productive author of her desire and a helpmate? Luce Irigaray argues that the lack of instinctual aim or desire is definitive of women under patriarchy. Woman finds “no possible way to represent or tell the story of the economy of her libido . . . the libido is masculine, or at any rate neuter.” Woman is “a void, a lack of all representation, re-presentation, and even strictly speaking of all mimesis of her desire for origin. That desire will henceforth pass through the discourse-desire-law of man’s desire.” In Irigaray’s logic, woman is always bored, or melancholic, as manifest in the absence of libidinal activity, her lack of effort to master the external world, her inability to love herself or other women, and the inhibition of all activity displayed in her pure passivity. Woman remains outside of a signifying economy and cannot coin signifiers, but she is (a) subject to its norms. This study asks why so many women are represented as bored in modernist literature. Although broadly generalized, Irigaray’s theory delineates how exclusion from social power can lead to the withdrawal into boredom. “How can one take part in social life,” Irigaray asks, “when one has no available currency, when one possesses nothing of one’s own to put in relation to the properties of the other, or others?”

Boredom and Bored Women



In Britain in the early twentieth century, woman’s agon with boredom is a struggle to subvert the given world and to achieve subjecthood at the same time. As women’s agitation for their place in public life gains momentum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, boredom comes to the fore as both symptom and diagnosis of women’s diminished and circumscribed experience. Women are bored, and in the modernist period, this boredom is presented for the first time as a public problem.          Underpinning Enlightenment philosophy is the notion of the modern subject as an individual who experiences the world first through sensations, out of which he later composes ideas and judgments. Humans give shape to reality by perceiving it; truth is an individual matter. Boredom is a concomitant phenomenon with this subjectivist view of the world, as boredom is the problem of meaning making. As Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen argues, “To be able to be bored, the subject must be able to perceive himself as an individual that can enter into various meaning contexts, and this subject demands meaning of the world and himself.” Building on Enlightenment ideas, women’s rights advocates in the early twentieth century worked within the discourse of individualism to argue that women needed to realize themselves as individuals, and that only full legal status as such could guarantee their agency. Women’s boredom in the early twentieth century, however, cannot be explained simply as a failure of meaning making, but rather as a failure to become an individual. In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault distinguishes the individual from the subject as a product of the modern shift in which the subject’s access to the truth is defined within knowledge. He argues that access to the truth is contingent on cultural conditions: “to have access to the truth we must have studied, have an education, and operate within a certain scientific consensus” and these, along with other moral conditions, “do not concern the subject in his being; they only concern the individual in his concrete existence.” One cannot know oneself in the realm of the universal; one becomes an individual through socially privileged experiences and networks that define these kinds of self-relations as truthful. For most women, long excluded from these practices, individualism was simply not attainable. In fact, women’s secondary status creates a complex, and classically modernist, version of the struggle for selfhood that is frequently expressed through boredom. The bored woman in modernist literature fails to make meaning because her status as an individual



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

is tenuous at best. Further, and complexly, boredom serves as a form of resistance to the ideological constructions of the individual. Complicating the politics of individualism, British feminists in the early decades of the twentieth century worked to eradicate the illusion that female boredom was a singular, subjective experience, and instead strove to demonstrate the ways in which women’s lack of equality and their conditioning into passivity lead to an emptiness of experience for women as a group. At the same time they were identifying women’s lack of individuality, they were creating it. As Sowon S. Park has argued, “feminist politics transformed the institutionalization and production of women’s writing through newly created suffrage and popular presses,” which in turn enabled “the power of the written word to formulate, disseminate, and consolidate ideas of selfhood.” Feminists diagnosed female boredom as one of the maladies of modern patriarchal culture. They thus articulated boredom as both subjective and objective: a public, structural element that conditioned a set of private emotional experiences. In her widely read “feminist bible” Women and Labour (), novelist and political activist Olive Schreiner wrote that because of patriarchal expectations in industrial society, women – and by this she meant middle- and upper-class women – had been reduced to a state of “morbid inactivity.” Authors representing boredom in literature and feminist tracts participated in protesting the conditions under which women struggled to find meaning and/or themselves. As Berlant argues, “One of the main jobs of the minoritized arts that circulate through mass culture is to tell identifying consumers that ‘you are not alone (in your struggles, desires, pleasures)’: this is something we know but never tire of hearing confirmed, because aloneness is one of the affective experiences of being collectively, structurally unprivileged.” Boredom and, as this study shows, the representation of boredom can function as political dissent. In Melancholy and Society, German sociologist Wolf Lepenies describes boredom as a structural response on the part of social groups whose lack of public significance inhibits their action, leaving them bored. Lepenies’s work grows out of Emile Durkheim and Robert Merton’s use of the term anomie to describe the absence or diminution of values, norms, or standards, and the feeling of alienation or purposelessness that accompanies such moments of social instability. Lepenies argues that as institutions stabilize actions, “they prescribe preferences toward which human action can orient itself.” In the early twentieth century, middle- and upper-class women’s feminism was a response to the institutional discrimination of patriarchy that inhibited

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

women’s actions and limited their social usefulness to their sexual functions. The individual self was represented as a universal value, but it was clear to feminists that such selfhood was accessible only to some. Mina Loy’s  “Feminist Manifesto,” for instance, points out the precise schism that denied women agency and promoted their boredom: “The value of man is assessed entirely according to his use or interest to the community, the value of woman, depends entirely on chance, her success or insuccess in manoeuvering a man into taking the life-long responsibility of her.” Whether reading feminist manifestos, suffrage pamphlets, little magazines, or popular or genteel novels, modern women consumed narratives about themselves that allowed them to self-identify affectively as blocked, bored, dulled, and empty. The first decades of the twentieth century represent a significant period in the history of British feminism precisely because of the broad-scale, collective nature of agitation for legal and social reforms. Activists built on the momentum of significant legal and educational changes in the nineteenth century during which girls began to be educated en masse for the first time in British history. In the s, colleges for women began to train them for careers as governesses. Following their success, public boarding schools for girls were opened in the s and s. The Endowed Schools Act of  and the Elementary Education Act of  ensured that girls of the working classes would receive at least a basic education. In , the first women’s college was opened at Cambridge University, and a few others at Oxford University and the University of London opened thereafter. Royal Holloway College of the University of London was the first British university to award degrees to women in . Oxford followed much later in , and Cambridge stalled until . Female literacy increased from about  percent in  to almost  percent in . This shift altered the cultural landscape irrevocably, but it is important to keep in mind that even though women as a group were being educated for the first time, the number of highly educated women was still relatively small. Vicinus reports that in , the total number of women attending the nine colleges open to women in Britain was . Career opportunities outside of teaching were few. Thus, as a group, British women’s intellectual capacities were cultivated more than ever before in history, but they were still expected to become mothers and wives and to be fulfilled as such. The boredom of the intelligent, educated female who becomes wife and mother is a recurrent trope in popular literature of the early twentieth century. In Ada Leverson’s trilogy The Little Ottleys (–), the

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

protagonist, Edith Ottley, is introduced at the opening of Love’s Shadow () as play-acting remorse and patience while her petulant husband berates her for a series of slights, mostly imagined. After marveling that “with all the fuss about modern culture and higher education these days, girls are not even taught to spell!” he leaves and Edith wanders about their flat staring gravely into mirrors and murmuring to herself, “Yes, I am beginning to look bored!” Wifehood and motherhood are not enough for Edith Ottley. The second volume, Tenterhooks (), notes of Edith, “The children were a deep and intense preoccupation. To say she adored them is insufficient . . . for both she had the strongest feeling a mother could have. And yet the fact remained that they did not nearly fill her life. With Edith’s intellect and temperament they could only fill a part.” Education assisted women to reflect skeptically on their lives like men, and in doing so it also allowed them to recognize the ways in which their lives were empty and limited compared to men’s. Boredom – as either a sign of the lack of access to meaning-making or as a protest against the already made world – resulted. In addition to educational gains, women made legal gains in the nineteenth century, which laid the groundwork for the push toward suffrage and improved work laws. The  and  Married Women’s Property Acts recognized married women as legal entities with rights to their earnings, inheritances, and properties. The  law was the first in British history to recognize women as individuals in their own right. Despite this, early-twentieth-century popular literature still represents marriage as an infringement on a woman’s sense of selfhood. In a story of a working-class woman’s boredom, Victoria Cross’s  best seller, Life’s Shop Window, made into a popular  movie, Lydia, a house servant, marries a farmhand to escape the “dullness” of her existence, only to realize: “This absolute, legal right of another person to herself, at any hour, time or season, whatever her own will at the moment might be, came before her suddenly with a sort of staggering self-assertion.” Lydia abandons her first marriage and child in a protest against a life of “ceaseless, never-varying manual toil” and the “wild-brain hunger” that accompanies it. After she leaves her first marriage because she is bored and bold enough to flaunt conventions she has long questioned, she comes to realize that her financial dependence on her next lover keeps her in a subordinate position: “Man’s attitude to the animals is one of cruel oppression, because they are helpless and dependent, and whenever a woman drifts into the position of an animal, namely of helpless dependence on a man, she too has to bear his brutality.” With such blunt observations about the problems

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

of inequity reaching large reading and moviegoing audiences, feminist arguments contributed to the creation of an intimate public based on the affective experience of stunted personhood. That said, it is easy to overlook the political content of early modernist and modernist women’s writing. As Sowon S. Park has argued, the interdependence between politics and women’s writing in the early twentieth century has been largely dismissed by literary critics, including feminists, because of high modernism’s now-debunked claims that the aesthetic excludes the political. Yet political concerns frequently ground the plots and techniques of modernist women’s writing, as can be seen by looking not just at early-twentiethcentury feminist claims, but at the affects with which both aesthetics and politics are invested. By looking at boredom as the affect that motivates female political and literary narratives in the early twentieth century, one can discover their common ground. In the early twentieth century, women’s rights advocates engaged on multiple fronts to earn their rights as equals to men. In a  journal article, suffragette leader Teresa Billington-Greig explains: The daughters of the Western races are demanding the power and status of citizens in all the great empires of the world, and this demand means far more than the expression of their desire to share in the wider life of their nations; it means that women are demanding a world-wide recognition of their humanhood as co-equal with the humanhood of man. Behind the claim for equality of voting rights lies the conviction that women are entitled just as men are to all liberties of thought, action, and expression; that liberty is a human, and not a sex necessity.

The idea expressed here is clear: Western women are ready to be recognized as individual human beings. But Billington-Greig also lays out the difficulty in women’s actualization as individuals when she explains that “on the one side, human rights are claimed for woman because of her humanhood; on the other, human rights are denied her because of that alleged incapacity for using them which makes necessary her subjection to man.” In other words, women should have human rights because they are in fact human, but some people cannot see this because women act, and are positioned legally, as men’s dependents. Women have not been given a chance to prove themselves individuals. To explain women’s assumed incapacity, Billington-Greig relies on psychological explanation: Where women dare not rebel in an open and organised way, they sometimes seek to preserve their outward dignity by a pretence of acquiescence, though at heart they are in revolt. It is a mistake to assume all rebels know when and how to rebel, or why they should rebel. Rebellion is often a spasmodic and bitter

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

outbreak under the spur of half-realised needs and pains. That the majority of so-called contented women rebel in this way cannot be denied, and though they do not know it, their rebellion is due to the denial of liberty of life, labour and growth. In addition to this, training and environment, the strongest of forces, have been brought to bear upon women in such a way as to weaken their powers of self-assertion and independence.

Here Billington-Greig blames two factors for women’s submission to men: () their training and () the psychological processes as a result of this training that prevent them from knowing themselves and expressing their rebellion in a straightforward, rational manner. These forces operating on women become problematic for women’s rights advocates and for the kind of individual meaning-making that elides boredom. New Woman novelist and suffrage activist Mona Caird further explains in a  journal article that women’s overly prescribed social roles silence and remove them from themselves: “Over and above their political vassalage [women] are hampered socially, domestically, in fact, universally. Their very ‘sentiments’ and ‘nature’ are under stern dictatorship, so overwhelming is the social pressure in silencing indirectly, if not punishing all departures from the ‘sentiments’ and ‘nature’ which women are for ever assured belong inherently to their sex.” Women, according to feminists of the period, are conflicted and silenced, unsure of their desires and, as a result, of themselves as individuals. Dramatic narratives of spasmodic rebellion and self-conflict appear in the case histories of the early psychoanalysts. Freud and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria is a record of female boredom, rebellion, and women’s presumed inability to understand their own motivations. Early psychoanalysis under the influence of Freud articulates boredom as a fear of agency, a repression of desires and aims that do not fit in with larger, more dominant social forces such as family or social group. In Freud and Breuer’s Studies, women are the victims of their own conflict with the social order: women repress their desires in order to achieve the secondary gains of a secure place in the social order, even though this results in their own hysteria, which presents as often in boredom as it does some of the other, less acceptable symptoms such as spasmodic moans and subjectively smelling burnt pudding. Austrian psychoanalyst and one-time student of Freud, Otto Fenichel, was the first analyst to write an extended theory of boredom, “On the Psychology of Boredom,” published in German in . Distinguishing between “normal” and “pathological” boredom, Fenichel explains that normal boredom comes about when one must not do what one wants to

Boredom and Bored Women



do, or must do what one does not want to do. In either case, something expected or desired does not occur. In pathological boredom, “it fails to occur because the subject represses his instinctual action out of anxiety.” The bored individual represses his instinctual aims or desires and then experiences instinctual tension without its typically concomitant aim. “A person who is bored,” says Fenichel, “is searching for an object, not in order to act upon it with his instinctual impulses, but rather to be helped by it to find the instinctual aim that he lacks.” In boredom, “the subject seeks to be freed by means of a passive experience from a tension which set in because he was afraid of his own active impulses.” Women were taught to fear and deny their active impulses as socially unacceptable. Much in keeping with suffragists’ and literary modernists’ depictions of women in the early twentieth century, in early psychoanalytic theory the bored subject is in conflict between what she actually wants and what is acceptable to want. In the inaugural issue of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, a psychoanalyst explains that “in boredom we find a self-administered deprivation; the loss of thoughts and fantasies which would lead to satisfaction.” Women lose touch with their own needs to such an extent that they are unrecognized and undeveloped, but, much like an anorectic who deprives herself of food in order to control herself and conform to an idealized norm, bored women do so voluntarily in concert with patrisocial desires. The individualized self in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is presumed to have an internally coherent identity. By contrast, in the early twentieth century, the subject is understood, as Nancy Armstrong phrases it, as “layered by successive displacements. This subject is necessarily divided against itself, as the desire essential to that subject’s growth and development comes to pose a threat to its individuality.” Thus at the same time that early-twentieth-century feminism was advocating individualism to codify women’s rights and/or self-realization, the representation of boredom in modernist literature reveals a different strain in feminist thought, enmeshed in another modernist discourse – psychoanalysis. Unlike individualism’s focus on the singular and feminism’s focus on the collective, psychoanalysis writes a dialectic of self and other. This layered, psychoanalytic portrait of boredom characterizes the modern subject and what Elizabeth Goodstein in her excellent book, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (), calls the discourse of reflection on subjective malaise. Boredom individuates and creates reflective distance from cultural certainties. According to Goodstein, “the discursive triumph of individualism occluded the importance of the historical and

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

collective context of subjective experience . . . . What had once characterized an entire social group was henceforth a pathology of the individual self.” By contrast, some feminist arguments strove against modernity’s atomization of individuals from a potentially collective experience in the early twentieth century by telling women their experiences of dissatisfaction and boredom were not in fact individual failings, but structured by patriarchy’s unjust demands. Women experienced their desire as displaced, but this was, in part, a result of their training as women. John Stuart Mill had made the same claim some forty years earlier in The Subjection of Women () where he identifies women’s training in self-abnegation: All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of the other. All the moralities of women that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections.

Feminists echoed Mill’s thoughts for decades, suggesting that women were so conditioned culturally, that what women might be, in fact, was unknown. In a  review of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics, writer Vernon Lee declares, “We do not really know what women are. Women, so to speak, as a natural product, as distinguished from women as a creation of men . . . . Woman . . . [is] the last scientific survival of the pre-Darwinian belief in the invariability of types.” As an individual, how might a woman be, do, think? The concept was novel, as activist actress and writer Elizabeth Robins satirizes in the suffragist novel The Convert (). When a young woman becomes engaged, her aunt and uncle exclaim, “We naturally expect now that you’ll begin to think like Geoffrey Stonor, and to feel like Geoffrey Stonor, and to talk like Geoffrey Stonor. And quite proper too!” Women, it was commonly believed, could not be individuals. More so, in the post-Enlightenment thinking that equated individualism with humanity, American activist Mary Ritter Beard decried in Young Oxford, “Woman has never been human.” Modernist novels of female boredom deny and affirm masculine individualism by displaying the female struggle to individuate and become human. The intense difficulty of becoming an individual in a culture that equates individuality with masculinity is made clear in Virginia Woolf’s novel The Voyage Out. At one point the young protagonist, Rachel Vinrace, is asked what she likes to do and she replies, quite stunned, “You see, I am

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a woman.” In the logic of individualism, self-consciousness and desire form a self-confirming circle leading to selfhood. For, as Foucault notes, “What object can one always want, without having to change it over time or on different occasions? It is the self.” Rachel Vinrace is aware of herself only as a type, a woman who has learned from an early age to displace her desire, if not to repress it. To be in possession of her own desires and interests is utterly alien to the young, twentieth-century woman, despite the fact that will, interest, and desire define the subject as an “I.” As such, her path to individuation is unclear – or, in the case of The Voyage Out, doomed. Contemporary psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin defines “recognition” of oneself by another, based on the Hegelian logic of the master-slave dialectic, as an essential need and response that confirms an individual as such, and avers that “serious impairment of the sense of mastery and the capacity for pleasure results when the self-other matrix is disrupted.” Using this contemporary theoretical lens, one might argue that early-twentieth-century feminism is a quest for recognition by men and the legal and social entities they run and define. Modernist literature of female boredom is a record of women’s lack of recognition and struggle for identity. “The complement to the male refusal to recognize the other,” Benjamin says, “is woman’s own acceptance of her lack of subjectivity, her willingness to offer recognition without expecting it in return,” an explanation of female psychology echoing Virginia Woolf’s  claim that “women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” Female boredom as depicted in modernism is not the acceptance of the lack of subjectivity, but rather a discomfited awareness of it. Boredom is neither effaced subjectivity nor its achievement; it is awareness of the lack of a meaningful, satisfying subjectivity. As a child patient says to contemporary psychotherapist Adam Phillips, “When I am bored, I don’t know myself.” Like the bored subject, early-twentiethcentury representations of women show them consciously realizing themselves but unable to access their desire or make manifest their will. These women can only verify their indefiniteness, their desire for desire that is also, according to the Hegelian logic, the desire to be recognized. Feminist editor Dora Marsden, a modernist advocate of individualism, argued in , “Seeking the realization of the will of others, and not their own, women have almost lost the instinct for self-realization, the instinct for achievement in their own persons.” Being born female, and therefore marginalized, put into the service of others, and effectively excluded



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

from active and public life creates an almost insuperable barrier to selfdefinition and development. Woman’s agency is inhibited and her desire is most often expressed by choosing subordination as an assurance that she can belong and realize someone else’s desire. In a  article “The Lot of Women,” Mona Caird acknowledges women’s self suppression as part of the social structure: The testimony of what may be called the ‘average woman’ (if such a thing really exists) has . . . to be taken with a grain of salt. Not that she may not sincerely believe what she says, but she knows (subconsciously) that she is not free to feel as she really does feel, so to speak. She must feel more or less to order, and she industriously prompts herself in the required direction, and checks with horror the first hint of unorthodox divergence; so that she ends by setting up emotional currents in her being that are perhaps quite genuine, and yet are largely, if not entirely, the result of popular suggestion. And she thinks, as she euphoniously calls it – to match.

Social orthodoxy makes women incapable of individual thought, Caird claims. Certainly the many early-twentieth-century writers who advocated for suffrage and women’s rights in the periodical press in Britain had a clear vision of what women lacked. Dora Marsden, editor of The Freewoman (–), The New Freewoman (), and the Egoist (– ), for instance, articulated women’s need to be individuals on a biweekly basis. However, with a circulation of less than , Marsden’s Freewoman did not reach, and was not intended for, a mass audience. Its anarchist, individualist ideas were addressed to an elite of freethinking feminists who, through positive identification with others like themselves, could risk the recrimination of a larger, more conservative society. In reality, “few women could successfully navigate the distance between cultural norms of femininity and individual ambition and achievement.” The publication of novels that represent women’s self-suppressions through boredom expose women as would-be individuals and/or social protesters. Where Victorian novels often end when a woman’s experience as an individual did – with marriage – modernist novels frequently examine spinsters and married women only to find them . . . bored. Their boredom is an indictment of a social structure that both privileges individualism and excludes women from its defining characteristics. Significantly, the literature of woman’s struggle to become individuals crossed reading publics. From popular novels to literary novels, female characters alternate between boredom and nascent individualism. For instance, in the last of six novels by popular Edwardian novelist Katherine Thurston, Max (), a Russian princess, on the eve of

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her marriage, dresses as a man and flees to Paris to pursue life alone as an artist. Disguised as “Max,” the princess becomes companions with another aspiring artist, the Irishman Ned Blake. The homoerotic tension between the two consumes much of the narrative, and eventually Max struggles with her increasing love for Blake. The conflict rests not just in the protagonist’s assumed identity as a man and the potential betrayal of a revelation, but more so in Max’s absolute desire for autonomy and self-assertion. “I know myself for an individual,” says Max, “for a definite entity . . . I have power – power to think – power to achieve.” She resists love because “the reality [of love] is the absolute annihilation of the woman – the absolute merging of her identity.” Such sentiment is echoed throughout popular literature of the first decades of the twentieth century. In Elizabeth von Arnim’s commercially successful novel The Pastor’s Wife (), the main character, Ingeborg, experiences herself as “engulfed . . . disappearing altogether” upon marriage. The failure of women to sustain their individuality is as central to early modernist narratives as is the didactic quest for it. Narratives of female boredom denote women’s awareness of individualism as a bourgeois patriarchal ideal and their impossible struggle to attain it.                       Modernism is famously preoccupied with time, in particular with the unique experiences of private durée, or psychological time – distinct from chronological time – as that which confirms the individual as such. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, individuals became increasingly identified with the labor they performed and how they “used” their time. Work as the predominant expenditure of one’s time came to define human individuality. Leisure provided an alternative route to individual identity but shared with labor the same fi xation with productive occupation. Where work could not, leisure promoted autonomy and privacy and the development of individuality. Even “modernizing the housewife role by promoting leisure for women,” Wendy Gan observes, “recognized the domestic woman’s modern desire for a measure of independence and an identity apart from domesticity.” A common assumption about individual identity in the early twentieth century is that it can be discerned by how one spends one’s time. For those who failed to “produce themselves” either through work or leisure, boredom was not just an experience, but a judgment meted out to them by others. As Randall comments, “Time is not a neutral category; the ways in which time is marked, divided up, and



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

valued, radically influence the ways in which we are able to experience, use, or enjoy time” or, I would add, oneself. The economic metaphor of time spent is central to the formation of identity, for if one spends one’s time doing “nothing,” how can one represent or be represented as such? This is Rachel Vinrace’s dilemma in Woolf’s The Voyage Out. When the middle-aged mother figure, Helen, wonders “what Rachel did do with herself,” she checks and finds her “sitting in her room doing absolutely nothing.” She is confirmed as a cipher in the novel and Helen, who occupies herself busily doing needlepoint while reading philosophy, takes up her tutelage in order to demonstrate how Rachel can become someone, which may or may not in this context mean someone worthy of masculine attention. The forging of identity through self-production in labor or leisure is the concern of at least one strain of feminism in the early twentieth century. Middle-class feminists also exploited the cultural concern with productive occupation to demonstrate the ways in which women were being deprived of their humanity by their lack of productivity. In Women and Labour, Olive Schreiner argues that middle- and upper-class women have become parasites who seek “by dissipations and amusements to fill up the inordinate blank left by the lack of productive activity.” Schreiner invokes a rhetoric of boredom here, “inordinate blank,” that would have resonated with those who, if they could not recognize it in their own experience, would have seen the number of literary characters who retire to the sofa and become inordinate blanks for entire novels. Schreiner argues that women’s unproductive time must be gainfully occupied in work, or the race will degenerate. Elizabeth Robins argues similarly in a  Fortnightly Review article that a woman in her forties has arrived at “the securest, the least unwise, the serenest, in many ways the best part of her life. What does she do with it? Nothing . . . . This is part of the monstrous waste that goes on in this world.” The argument that women’s unproductive lives were valueless and meaningless – wasted – was pervasive. “Everything in the Englishwomen’s Review, Pall Mall Magazine, The Young Woman, or The Girls’ Realm,” Penny Brown adds, “suggest[s] . . . that to remain at home, especially without proper training, amounted to a life wasted.” Eugenicists advocated professional training for middleclass women as a way of bolstering the race and avoiding degeneration. Invoking evolution presented female entrance into the workforce as part of a necessary historical progression that was not a violent rupture from tradition, but part of a continuous process. Olive Schreiner addressed this line of thinking, saying, “The female labour movement of our day is, in

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its ultimate essence, an endeavour on the part of a section of the race to save itself from inactivity and degeneration.” Countering the notion that women’s lack of labor was a sign of British civilization’s evolutionary success, as social Darwinist Herbert Spencer had claimed, she declares, “If the parasite woman on her couch, loaded with gewgaws, the plaything and amusement of man, be the permanent and final manifestation of female human life on the globe, then that couch is also the death-bed of human evolution.” The woman on the couch is decried by a slew of feminists who see her not as the apotheosis of civilization, but as a signal of its decay. In an article on women’s exercise The Woman’s Signal advocates “The notion that a lovable woman must be able only to lie upon a sofa and speak in feeble tones of her fragile and delicate state of health is neither healthy nor modern.” But the woman on the couch, whether in psychotherapy or incapacitated by boredom, is a staple of early-twentiethcentury narratives, and a symbol of the passive protest that is boredom. From Alice Carteret in Sinclair’s The Three Sisters to Ramage’s wife in H.G. Wells’s Ann Veronica () to the vicar’s wife in D.H. Lawrence’s “The Daughters of the Vicar” () who, “broken by the suppressing of her violent anger and misery and disgust . . . became an invalid and took to her couch,” women can be found on sofas in many early modernist texts. In The Pastor’s Wife, Elizabeth von Arnim demonstrates both the female’s drive toward independence and her simultaneous resignation to patriarchal order in a witty passage about the sofa – and its psychic counterpart, boredom – as retreat of woman: Ingeborg’s mother had found the sofa as other people find salvation. She was not ill. She had simply discovered in it a refuge and a very present help in all the troubles and turmoils of life, and in especial a shield and buckler when it came to dealing with the Bishop. It is not easy for the married, she had found when first casting about for one, to hit on a refuge from each other that shall be honourable to both.

Boredom is the psychic equivalent of the sofa; confined but safe. Why would one choose to confine oneself to a small space, so limited in possibilities? The self absence or evacuation of boredom is the female’s passive form of protest, a retreat that allows her to withdraw from – without threatening – the prevailing order. As a form of protest, boredom does not disturb the social order – it merely expresses indifference to the social order. Important to understanding women’s subordination is also making sense of their participation in that subordination, making sense of



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

women’s submission to boredom. In The Bonds of Love, Jessica Benjamin outlines a theory of masochism that explains how “domination and submission result from a breakdown of the necessary tension between selfassertion and mutual recognition that allows self and other to meet as sovereign equals.” The underlying assumption of object-relations theory is that to be an individual, one must be recognized as such by an other; recognition by an other not only allows the I to take shape, but to transform as an I. Those who experience themselves or are experienced by others as dead and empty, unable to connect to themselves or others, are those for whom the self-other matrix has failed. They have not been recognized. To overcome this, according to Benjamin, the masochist seeks a form of “pure” recognition through submitting to the other’s power, the other’s non-recognition of one as a self. “The masochist gains her identity through the master’s power,” theorizes Benjamin. “Her sacrifice actually creates the master’s power, produces his coherent self, in which she can take refuge. Thus in losing her own self, she is gaining access, however circumscribed, to a more powerful one.” Viewing submission as such reveals it as an extreme process of identity confirmation made necessary through a lack of recognition. The masochist’s desire and agency are not authentic to her, but the desire for self-discovery through the other’s power makes clear the wish as well as the defense. Female boredom as defense mechanism in which there is the simultaneous loss of and search for desire is not mere manifestation of male oppression, but also of what women gain by complying with that oppression. The bored woman experiences both the presence and absence of desire, and it may be the absence that is most freeing. Boredom rejects what is before it, but in its tension it also rejects absolute constraint or emptiness; instead it operates as indifference, which provides a sustaining defense against submission and the necessity of rebellion. While some women were retreating to the sofa in the early twentieth century, others were entering the workforce. It has become a truism of feminist history that British women entered the professions in unprecedented numbers at this time. As explored in Chapter , the picture is more complex. According to Morag Shiach, there is no statistical bump in British women’s employment in the early twentieth century. Women comprised about  percent of the workforce between  and . Although the numbers of women who worked remained steady, the numbers of working married women declined significantly and the fields of work open to women increased. These fields were primarily for young, unmarried women, and included shop work, clerical work, nursing, and

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

teaching. It was not until , with the Sex Disqualification Removal Act, that a number of professions and learned societies became open to women for the first time and marriage ceased to be a legal bar keeping women from work. But rather than showing labor as an entryway into legitimate selfhood and/or productive occupation for women, several modernist texts feature working women as bored – alienated in the Marxist sense. For instance, Pilgrimage’s Miriam Henderson, a middle-class young woman who rejects teaching and governessing in order to work as a dental assistant in London, experiences her work as self-stultifying rather than self-confirming. On a practical level, she is bored by the reiterative, mindless nature of her work. On a spiritual level, there is little nourishing in arranging dental papers in a drawer. Where work as career held out the promise of fulfillment, absorption, vitality, and agency, Richardson’s depictions reveal how Miriam’s tedious daily life in a dental office denies all but sheer will to independence. In the complex relations between labor as a creative and self-creating process and Marxist-viewed labor as a forced or alienated condition, Miriam’s day job reveals her subordinate position in the workforce. Her eventual passion and vocation as a writer confirm her selfhood through labor, but only inasmuch as it is a freely chosen, conscious activity. Lily Briscoe’s linear flourish at the close of To the Lighthouse aside, representations of women freely choosing to engage in conscious, selfdefining activity is rare in modernism. T.S. Eliot’s depiction of the “typist home at teatime” in The Waste Land () strikes a more dominant, if hyperbolic, endorsement of the idea that women as laborers lacked agency, resulting in routinized indifference and boredom. Eliot’s typist is a void, a failed individual, “bored and tired” (l. ), who emblematizes the modern woman as cipher. Nameless, she occupies a small, dirty bedsit that, like her work-identity as typist, suggests repetition without agency or creative will. She comes home to clear dishes from the morning meal and make dinner in the same, claustrophobia-inducing space. Her divan serves as wardrobe during the day and bed at night. Tiresias’s refrain, “I Tiresias have foresuffered all/Enacted on this same bed or divan” (ll. – ), in its repetition of the phrase “I Tiresias” throughout the stanza and the idea that he has seen this before, engages a rhetoric of boredom as repetition, of time without progression. Repetition and monotony characterize this anonymous, un-individualized woman’s cramped existence. Her response to her visitor’s sexual advances is notable for expressing a negative acceptance, boredom as indifference: “unreproved, if undesired”



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

(ll. ). Her experience is defined by lack, repetition, and indifference. Eliot’s portrayal is a broader indictment of mechanical mass culture, but his stereotype reveals important information about women’s entry into the workforce in the early twentieth century. For the typist’s boredom is a paradoxical result of women’s entry into the workforce that was supposed to liberate them. She is a sign of the discontent, indeed the lack of contents, of modern women. Unlike Richardson’s portrait of a woman who struggles unsuccessfully to attain individuality through work and who resists her boredom, Eliot’s typist succumbs to her boredom and inhabits a world devoid of will, a world without a self. Eliot’s portrait of the bored female, herself an inordinate blank, is a gendered characterization that has a specific and pervasive history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Insight into the historically gendered nature of boredom can be found in one of two major works in English to examine the role of boredom in literature: Reinhard Kuhn’s The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature () and Patricia Meyer Spacks’s excellent Boredom: A Literary History of a State of Mind (). Spacks traces boredom’s trajectory from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, revealing the shifting cultural purposes served by the construction of boredom in British literature. In two chapters, Spacks highlights the ways that British fiction about women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is “haunted” by boredom. These novels, Spacks finds, implicitly condemn the bored for their lack of self-discipline. Boredom was a forbidden failing to be avoided by the morally strong woman. Like Kuhn, Spacks avers that boredom is a central theme in the twentieth century, but she does not explore this claim in her book. Kuhn focuses exclusively on the works of men and focuses on ennui as noble suffering; only those with the leisure and education to understand it as such could be said to be afflicted by it. He defines ennui as “a state of emptiness that the soul feels when it is deprived of interest in action, life, and the world (be it this world or another), a condition that is the immediate consequence of the encounter with nothingness, and has as immediate effect a disaffection with reality.” Kuhn reads ennui as an ahistorical phenomenon that can be traced from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth century when “ennui is not one theme among others; it is the dominant theme, and like a persistent obsession, it intrudes upon the work of most contemporary authors.” But if ennui is, according to Kuhn, the dominant theme of twentiethcentury literature, problematically his theory excludes women. Early in his book, Kuhn distinguishes between boredom and ennui and singles

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

out “the typical portrait of the suburbanite” as a form of boredom distinct from ennui – a passage that has garnered some attention from critics. Kuhn’s dismissive description of female boredom is quoted here at length in order to analyze its assumptions: She is tired of the magazine that she is reading or the television show that she is watching and mixes another cocktail for herself. Or perhaps she telephones an equally bored friend and they talk for hours about nothing, or perhaps she drifts into an affair that means as little to her as the television show or the magazine article. Despite its banality such a case presents infinitely more serious problems than the preceding ones. Although basically similar in that it is also caused by a forced inactivity of mind, the results – depression, neuroses, even suicide – are so much more disturbing for the apparent reason that this is a condition that has no foreseeable or inevitable end but death. It could be called a case of extended or timeless ‘désoeuvrement’. It is a problem for the psychologist, and the victim of this malady is a prospective patient for the psychiatrist.

Notable in this passage is the woman’s utter lack of self-reflection, her position as consumer rather than producer of her own desires. This un-individualized female discontent is given neither philosophical nor political legitimacy, but rather is pathologized and relegated to the body. Male ennui is of the soul, ennoblingly individualized; women’s boredom is of the singular, pathologized body, emptied of a self. If woman’s boredom is rooted in her inability to know or access herself, Kuhn’s description of the housewife confirms that even in , the common assumption was that women were incapable of the self-reflection necessary to achieve self-knowledge. In the early twentieth century, just as in the mid-century, the majority of middle- and upper-class women did not work and had neither the talent nor the privilege of consciously choosing their labor. This is critical to understanding modernist representations of women Woolf describes in Night and Day () as members “of a very great profession which has, as yet, no title and very little recognition, although the labor of the mill and factory is, perhaps, no more severe”: they are women who live “at home.” For if, according to Marx, the worker is alienated from the product of his labor but “only feels himself outside his work” and is “at home when he is not working,” then is there no possible interior, no home by which the female can experience herself as not alienated. She is doubly alienated, her home the product of her labor confronting her as “something alien, as a power independent of the producer.” But the situation could be worse. Within the home there were additional threats of boredom and alienation: a woman could be consigned to bed rest.



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom          

The growth of medicine as science and profession in the nineteenth century created an entire industry around women’s pathologized boredom. In Virginia Woolf’s The Years (), teenager Sarah Pargiter is confined to bed rest while she hears the sounds of a party wafting through the windows one summer night in . Her mother comes home and scolds her for being up and chides, “What did the doctor say? Lie straight, lie still.” She has spent the night lying in bed asking, “What’s I?” and reading Antigone, identifying with the heroine’s live burial. Her boredom is a crisis of self – ‘What’s I?’ – an awareness of, at the same time that she detects the lack of, subjectivity. While contemplating that Antigone “was buried alive,” Sarah “laid herself out, under the cold, smooth sheets, and pulled the pillow over her ears.” Woolf’s analogy between the confined patient and Antigone’s live burial makes clear the painful irony that women’s illnesses, which so frequently presented symptomatically through boredom, were in fact treated with more boredom, like being buried alive. Yet the analogy breaks down in revealing ways: where Antigone blatantly defies the law and by doing so is a participant in a communicable and intelligible order, Sarah Pargiter has no access to the laws by which she is governed, no voice with which to respond to them. She is a subject to mysterious laws devised by an overwhelmingly male medical profession and is guilty of maladies over which she has no control. The medical professions described women’s boredom as symptom or problem in neurasthenia, hysteria, melancholia, depression, or simply “nerves.” In the early twentieth century, depression became the favored medical term to replace what doctors and alienists in the nineteenth century had termed melancholia. Under either name, sufferers were characterized by a “sense of overwhelming hopelessness, emptiness, impotence, and uselessness, the incapacity to focus attention or reach decisions, the obsessive thoughts and fears, the diminished self-esteem, the extreme lethargy, and the inability to take interest or pleasure in any aspect of life that makes existence scarcely tolerable.” Closely allied with boredom at the turn of the twentieth century is the vague but oft-diagnosed neurasthenia. From the s to the s, neurasthenia, or nervous prostration, captured the imaginations of the medically minded who worked on the assumption that individuals had only a limited and exhaustible supply of nerve force and that if not husbanded carefully, one would experience complete exhaustion, failure to engage with the world, and inability to work. Originally diagnosed by

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George Beard, an American neurologist, neurasthenia was the supposed result of stress on the brain from urbanization, industrialization, and too much worry. While male sufferers were encouraged to seek new climes and be physically active out of doors, women were prescribed a rest cure that involved remaining in bed and seeing as few people as possible. In the  Autobiography of a Neurasthene, written by a female doctor, the narrator notes that the passivity of women’s lives makes them particularly susceptible to neurasthenia: “This anxious watching and waiting did me no good. But after all what is a woman’s life, – whether wife, mother, or that of a doctor, but watching and waiting . . . . I have watched and waited every blessed minute of my life and I suppose I shall end it all by watching and waiting for death. It is woman’s life.” Female sufferers of neurasthenia classically resigned themselves to the sofa or were shepherded away to convalescent homes for a regimen of sternly enforced boredom. Neurasthenia, half mystery and half medical fact, so intrigued the Western imagination that it spawned a cross-Atlantic school of art. Paintings of women manifesting the physical signs of nervous illness were common fare in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the paintings, women were depicted with vacant, faraway eyes and slouched postures in poses of lassitude, all markers of neurasthenia immediately recognizable to contemporary audiences. Neurasthenic paintings usually depicted women of the upper class, reclining and ruminating in empty interiors, gazing into space with expressions that communicated dreaminess, boredom, and melancholy (Figure ). Such portrayals helped imbue the illness with the cachet of the social elite, as well as to define it as a women’s affliction. Modernist literary authors participate in this representation of bored women of the middle and upper classes, but deromanticize the dreaminess such visual representations convey, instead exposing boredom as a problem and a protest. Neurasthenia as a diagnostic term is last cited by the Oxford English Dictionary on the chronological threshold of the Women’s Liberation Movement. As cited in the OED, the author of a  Abnormal Psychology article writes, “Neurasthenia is observed with such frequency in housewives who are bored and feel neglected by their husbands that it has often been called ‘housewives’ neurosis’.” This is the very problem American writer Betty Friedan described in her era-defining book, The Feminine Mystique (). Friedan characterizes women’s feelings of dissatisfaction, exhaustion, and a lack of selfhood as “the problem that has no name,” leading women to a number of attempts at cure, including marital affairs, household redecorations, tranquilizers, and psychoanalysis. Variously



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

Figure . Thomas Dewing, Lady in White (No. ), c. , oil on canvas,  / ×  / inches, Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of John Gellatly, ...

labeled, the medical profession has for the last  years identified and accepted boredom as a constituent of women’s experience. Further, this experience has repeatedly been materialized and trivialized, as Kuhn’s gloss on the bored suburbanite shows. Women’s experiences of boredom are described as maladjustments to the social real. For instance, in the turn of the twentieth century’s

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most famous literary depiction of a bored woman confined to bed rest, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s  short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator’s pleas of boredom are never taken seriously, most poignantly by the narrator herself. Marianne DeKoven describes “The Yellow Wallpaper” as “a female-signed text fearing what it desires.” This is an important configuration of psychological boredom, a self-suppression of desire and/or aggression out of fear that such feelings are inappropriate. In clear demonstration of the slippage of terms in this period to describe women’s malaise, the narrator is not neurasthenic, but instead her husband, a physician, has diagnosed her with “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency.” Medical historian Janet Oppenheim explains the perceived distinction between hysteria and neurasthenia as one of will. Where neurasthenics were seen to have lost their will, hysterics were seen as overly willful. In a  medical journal treatise on neurasthenia, a Newcastle physician writes: “What we want to secure is a central will, reassured, instructed, strengthened, and set free from worrying trammels to play its proper-part as director-general of the personality.” The neurasthenic lacked agency. In contrast to neurasthenics, hysterics could be depicted as “enervated, reclining, bored bourgeoises” or as middle-class women on strike. In his classic case study of hysteria, “The Case of Fräulein Anna O.,” Joseph Breuer says of his patient: “Her willpower was energetic, tenacious and persistent; sometimes it reached the pitch of an obstinacy.” The hysteric is willful, but her will is repressed, forcing a dissociative split between what she knows or wants and how she is conditioned to behave. In Anna O’s case, her “‘private theatre’ was an inner world inhabited as a refuge from a quotidian enervation and boredom, an inner world living and running in parallel to more conventional forms of consciousness and selfconsciousness.” If the average middle- and upper-class woman’s life at the turn of the twentieth century was boring to her, she could render an entire forbidden and impossible world for herself, but at the cost of a dissociative split, as occurs to several women in May Sinclair’s novels. If a woman’s fantasy or desired world conflicted with her actual life, those desires were split off and dissociated from her conscious self. The hysteric, as theorized by Breuer and Freud, is a manifestation of conflict between freedom and agency on the one hand and perceived social expectations and belonging on the other. Whether the bored female patient was called hysterical, neurasthenic, or depressed, the medical profession understood her affliction in gendered terms. Bored men were agents whereas bored women lacked agency.

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

Women were perceived as the victims of their affliction, and as the psychomedical diagnoses listed earlier make clear, their boredom-related illnesses were anchored in their bodies. Their affliction was material. Medical literature of the late nineteenth century is full of cautionary stories about young women who retired to the sofa, or the grave, as a result of pursuits considered more suitable for men. In his book, Female Education from a Medical Point of View (), Dr. T.S. Clouston describes an educated young woman who suffered torments from trivial thoughts and felt that she was constantly “watching herself.” Her self-consciousness left her no peace: she could not exercise, read, or even think without triggering a headache. Clouston diagnoses the young woman as having “no surplus stock of nerve energy” because she has “used up in schoolwork the energy that ought to have gone to build up her . . . body.” Clouston’s cure for the young woman is to take away her books and send her to the country for air and common pursuits. Clouston confirms that she is recovering when she writes to tell him that she has immersed herself in “feminine pursuits,” like painting, drawing, gardening, and poultry keeping. In another such history, Martha Vicinus tells of a young woman named Winnie Seebohm who entered Newnham, one of the Cambridge colleges open to women in the late nineteenth century, with high hopes of success. Her asthma began to bother her and her loving family insisted that she return home, where her condition worsened. Her doctor ordered a rest cure – no reading, no books, no work, and no activity. A month later, Seebohm was dead. Vicinus reads Seebohm’s illness as an unresolved conflict between independence and education on the one hand and feminine duty and obedience on the other. Prominent doctors such as George Savage, who supervised Virginia Woolf during her early breakdowns, believed that too much thought caused madness in the “weaker sex.” Savage maintained that when an intelligent young woman was permitted to study at home, “the danger of solitary work and want of social friction” together contributed to insanity. From her first breakdown at age fifteen to later years, Woolf ’s diaries record the boredom and irritability she experienced during her periods of “rest.” As Glenny remarks most pertinently, “with intellectual work forbidden, she was cast adrift from the forms of endeavour that made life meaningful for her.” The irony of a disease purportedly brought on by passivity and waiting is that passivity and waiting were its cure. Both Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson were diagnosed as neurasthenics and were cut off from their work at critical points in their lives. Woolf endured multiple rest cures,

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and her diaries are full of references to the boredom and tedium of doing nothing. In a particularly pleading letter to her sister, Vanessa Bell, during a  stay at a nursing home in Burley Park, Twickenham, Woolf writes, “What I mean is that I shall soon have to jump out of a window. The ugliness of the house is almost inexplicable . . . . Then there is all the eating and drinking and being shut up in the dark . . . you know how you would feel if you had stayed in bed alone here for  weeks . . . . I will be very reasonable.” The diagnosis of neurasthenia, though less common, was still being made in the s. In , Dorothy Richardson, plagued by financial pressures that had lead her to take on extra translating work, described her neurasthenia in a letter to a friend: “I am paying now for my ‘four years hard’ under pressure, at translations. I do not yet know how heavily, or for how long. The local medic diagnoses neurasthenia due to prolonged overstrain plus eyestrain. The nervous disorder has created others . . . . At present I can do no sort of mental work. It is all something of a facer.” Just as Sinclair’s and Woolf’s novels do, Richardson’s fiction depicts the neurasthenic breakdown of her main character. Miriam Henderson is diagnosed with neurasthenia after miscarrying a baby conceived with her lover, the thinly veiled H.G. Wells stand-in, Hypo G. Wilson. Miriam retreats to the country where, because of her independence and interest in writing, she is treated as something of an oddity for a woman. Feminists from the mid-nineteenth century onward rebuffed the idea that intellectual work drove women mad, instead claiming that mental and physical idleness was far more dangerous. Speaking to a Schools’ Enquiry Commission in , Dorothea Beale, Head of Cheltenham Ladies College where May Sinclair was a student, argued, “For one girl in the higher middle classes who suffers from overwork, there are, I believe, hundreds whose health suffers from the . . . irritability produced by idleness and frivolity and discontent.” Similarly, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Britain’s first female doctor, wrote in response to an article decrying women’s education in the Fortnightly Review in  that “the break-down of nervous and physical health seems at any rate to be distinctly traceable to want of adequate mental interest and occupation in the years immediately succeeding school life. Thousands of young women, strong and blooming at eighteen, become gradually languid and feeble under the depressing influence of dullness.” Medical explanations for languishing women participate in what Goodstein has called the medicalization of malaise, the displacement of religious, philosophical, or ethical explanations of subjective discontent and skeptical distance by psychological and physiological explanations



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

that localized discontent within individuals and blamed it on their inability to cope with the pace and realities of modernity. Women’s boredom manifests itself as a physical problem in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury British culture, but it becomes a social problem as women become educated on a level with men for the first time. Through education women enter the male representational economy only to learn that they cannot and do not signify. Put another way, they realize their subordinate status through the lens of male thought only after they have been educated in male thought.             In contrast to medical discourses, philosophical and aesthetic discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries define modernity as characterized by nihilism. Nihilism is not a subject-centered material affliction like boredom, but is a definition of existence as foundationless. “Nihilism is this declaration of meaninglessness, a sense of indifference, directionlessness or, at its worst, despair that can flood into all areas of life,” says Simon Critchley. Narratives of nihilism as exemplified in Connie Chatterley’s postwar malaise in which she finds everything in her life “blank and nothing” become important for male authors of female boredom because they enable a different perspective on women’s experiences of emptiness. Nihilism is a metaphysical interpretation of the world as having no definitive purpose, meaning or, ironically enough, interpretation. Where boredom is centered in a subject who experiences herself as meaningless and vacant, especially in relation to her imagination or hope, nihilism – or profound boredom, in Heidegger’s terminology – is experienced when one allows oneself to encounter the lack of cultural selfevidence or meaning that is always already there. In nihilism, space and time are without any legitimating, stable presence. Although nihilism conveys a lack of meaning similar to descriptions of quotidian boredom, melancholia, or any of the other associated psychological disturbances, philosophical accounts of nihilism assume an authentic and universal quality to their assessment of the real that surpasses the material. Below Goodstein reveals the hierarchical nature of perceived boredoms that I would argue should also be seen as gendered: Within this branch of the discourse on boredom, the sociological and medical accounts that were gaining currency were found inadequate insofar as they psychologized the philosophical issues associated with the experience. However, those who wanted to emphasize the reflective significance of boredom did not

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necessarily oppose explaining others’ experiences in this way. One began to distinguish between two different sorts of experiences – in English quite explicitly between (mundane) boredom and (existentialist) ennui – and to contend that the latter was inaccessible to materialist analysis.

In nihilism and ennui, meaninglessness is presented as fact, not as personal failing. Post-Kantian continental philosophy thinks through the problem of a world now devoid of Christian meaning. As Nietzsche asserts the problem in The Will to Power, “The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of ‘aim,’ the concept of ‘unity,’ or the concept of ‘truth.’ Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking . . . the world looks valueless.” In acknowledging the loss of a unified interpretation of existence as the truth, all Western interpretations become subject to skepticism, all meaning suspect. This rejection of meaning and purpose leads to boredom as the discovery of . . . nothing. The nihilist universalizes his skepticism into a totalizing vision of life’s meaninglessness, and nihilistic boredom becomes not just singular, but itself a potential master narrative. Connor Cunningham describes the logic of nihilism “as a sundering of the something, rendering it nothing, and then having the nothing be after all as something.” Because it is concurrent with the body of literature examined in this book, I take Heidegger’s explication of three types of boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (/) as the most relevant investigation into boredom as metaphysical fact. His third type of boredom, profound boredom, is key to understanding not just nihilism as narrative backdrop, but in fact the dissolution of subject and object in the mood of boredom that plays a key role in one of Virginia Woolf’s conceptions of boredom. Heidegger calls boredom the Grundstimmung, or fundamental mood, of modernity, a “lived symptom of modern nihilism.” He asks, “Why do we find no meaning for ourselves anymore, i.e., no essential possibility of being? Is it because an indifference yawns at us out of all things, an indifference whose grounds we do not know?” In “The Concept of Time” (), Heidegger first explicates boredom as lived indifference to the finitude of one’s existence, inauthenticity. He reverses this view in a series of lectures at the University of Freiburg (–), later published as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, in which he articulates three forms of boredom, each progressively stripping away discrete subjectivity



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

and revealing Dasein, being-there as distinct from consciousness or a self, in its profound mystery. In the first kind of boredom, one is bored by something. For instance, one is stuck at a train station and, while waiting, time feels extraordinarily long, the surroundings insufficient to divert one from this “confrontation with time.” In this kind of boredom, what is important is the relation of subject to object: “that which bores, which is boring, is that which holds us in limbo and yet leaves us empty.” The second kind of boredom is a being bored with something in which one experiences the everyday, has no particular consciousness of time, but in retrospect realizes that one had been bored, one was “killing time” with purposeless occupations. As Goodstein notes, this aspect of Heidegger’s boredom “belongs to the long tradition that sees boredom as exposing the truth about the inauthenticity of modern life from the perspective of the superior individual.” This form of boredom is not simply a judgment; it is driven by fear. Heidegger says, “We are seeking to be occupied in any way. Why? Merely so as not to fall into this being left empty that is emerging in boredom.” In this relationship objects take precedence over subjects: “We are also taken by things, if not altogether lost in them, and often even captivated by them.” Interestingly, Heidegger likens captivation to the situation of an animal that behaves within an environment, but never within a world. This, in Agamben’s gloss on Heidegger, “distinguishes the animal’s poverty in world from the world-forming which characterizes man.” Arguably, many representations of women’s boredom in the early twentieth century could be articulated within these terms. Modernist women are delivered over to something that refuses itself, and their boredom is a being-held-in-suspense by the indifferent world. Possibility is refused. In the third form of boredom, Heidegger moves away from the traditional opposition between subject and object. Boredom as the fundamental attunement, or mood, makes apparent the inappropriateness of this distinction. In profound boredom, “we silently know, that it is boring for one.” What is “it”? It is “the title for whatever is indeterminate, unfamiliar.” Here the world as experienced through subjectivity disappears: “It – for one – not for me as me, not for you as you for us as us, but for one. Name, standing, vocation, role, age, and fate as mine and yours disappear.” Relieved of personality, one experiences the emptiness of boredom as the indifference enveloping beings as a whole. This third form of boredom is not caused by anything in particular; rather, one is “thrown” into this boredom, as one is thrown into a mood. “It”, this indifference, “being’s telling refusal,” is disclosed to one. In this form of

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boredom one is aware of the unexploited possibilities of Dasein, and also, like the sublime, of its ungraspability. Heidegger is clear that the emptiness of this experience of boredom is not “nothing, but rather emptiness in the sense of telling refusal, self-withdrawal, thus emptiness as lack, deprivation, need [not].” As discussed in Chapter , Virginia Woolf’s first novel presents a form of profound boredom that similarly functions as site of possibility beyond the being captivated of Heidegger’s second form of boredom that typified women’s dilemma in her time. If modernism is in part characterized by negative revelation – lack of authenticity, lack of desire, exposure of what does not happen – nihilism as negative space leaves room for a positive response or overcoming of the emptiness that is. Where Schopenhauer advocated releasing one from individuality and accepting boredom as philosophical truth, Nietzsche’s seductive logic argued for a self-overcoming of boredom that reshaped identity in the name of power. But Adorno warns in Negative Dialectics: “Acts of overcoming, even that of nihilism, together with the Nietzschean one that was otherwise intended but which still provided fascism with slogans, are always worse than what they overcome.” Inasmuch as modernism was consumed with boredom, it was, on a political level, very much concerned with its overcoming. Such attempts at overcoming, Simon Critchley argues, “are symptomatic of a reactionary modernism whose ontologization of the social and facile positivity lead ineluctably to fascism. In this sense, the vocabulary of nothingness and despair becomes part of a masculinist philosophical jargon of resoluteness, decisiveness and hardness that ends up functioning as an apologia for immoral intolerance and political barbarism.” Even though this is an extreme point wrought of political history, Critchley’s observation bears fruit in thinking through male-authored modernist narratives of women’s boredom. Not fascist, no. But they are remarkably uniform, first in positing a nihilist worldview as the point of narrative conflict for their female protagonists, and then as formulating women’s awakening to their sexual and biological drives as essential to overcoming the nihilist present and creating meaning in their lives. If Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover as dejected and blank woman in a hopeless world who finds new meaning in her sex life with her lover is an archetype of this narrative, it is a latecomer to a series of novels, popular and high-brow, that precede it, as detailed in Chapter . The narrative of sexual awakening is an important manifestation of modernism’s impulse to redress meaninglessness. But nihilism and its overcoming are the male counterparts to another modernism – a female modernism – whose concerns with boredom dwell in the personal as it confronts the public.

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

Modernist women rewrote their boredom not as pathographers, but as self-knowing liberal subjects who, through passivity and negation, registered their refusal to inhabit the spaces offered to them. Female-authored boredom in modernist literature is an inhabiting of indifference, registering the limits of meaning. This may account for their texts’ narrative difficulty and, on occasion, boredom.              ,    ,         The search for will, for subjectivity, for authenticity, for time that does not feel like a series of moments to be filled up but instead crescendos into ecstatic or epiphanic climaxes is paradigmatic of both literary modernism and of boredom. Also paradigmatic of both is doubt, a wary – or weary – skepticism that distances one from the very authenticity whose absence is a source of discontent. Modernist narratives of female boredom register discontent and either passively or actively reject this discontent. As the following chapters show, boredom informs a significant portion of literary modernism’s forms, content, and organizing structures.

 

Overcoming Nihilism: Male-Authored Female Boredom

Poor Connie! As the years drew on it was the fear of nothingness in her life that affected her. Clifford’s mental life and hers gradually began to feel like nothingness. Their marriage, their integrated life based on a habit of intimacy, that he talked about: there were days when it all became utterly blank and nothing. It was words, just so many words. The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.

Early in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, protagonist Connie Chatterley’s life is meaningless: “The only reality was nothingness.” In the twenty pages that follow this chapter’s epigraph, the narrative intones the word “nothing” constantly to describe Connie’s existence at Wragby before she embarks on her affair with the gamekeeper, Mellors. She feels that her husband Clifford makes displays of nothingness, writing is nothing, she feels nothing, and she wants nothing. She concludes: “To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum total of nothingness!” Even her breasts are “without meaning hanging there.” Make no mistake, however: this meaninglessness is a result of what the novel posits as the false expectations imposed on Connie by early-twentieth-century feminist ideals. Introductory passages in the novel, explored later in this chapter, frame Connie as very much the product of first-wave feminism and its push for women’s freedom. Yet as problematic as feminism is in Lawrence’s novel, so, equally, are Connie’s conventional married life and the class expectations associated with it. Each of the conventions, according to the logic of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, perpetuates false consciousness. As hostess of Wragby, Connie, like the women of Virginia Woolf’s novels, play-acts “the hostess men liked so much” with “a soft repose that sufficiently hid what she was really thinking.” She “played this woman so much, it was almost second nature to her,” but she was always waiting “till she could go upstairs and think her own thoughts.” The play-acting of the woman’s role as detailed in 



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

Lawrence and Woolf depicts women as mimics, exposing their subordination without reducing them to it. The ethics and aesthetics of this feminine mimicry partakes of the devaluation of all valuation described by Nietszche as the essence of nihilism. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie’s skepticism about her married life and her inability to exist holistically or continuously with her roles as hostess and wife exemplify a type of nihilism that Lawrence, in a pattern this chapter will identify as common to male authors of the early twentieth century, fought to overcome. There are two factors that distinguish men’s writing about bored women from women’s writing about bored women in the early twentieth century. First, in male-authored novels, women’s boredom is often generalized to a nihilistic worldview that renders human activity suspect and existence senseless. Second, with the exception of Arnold Bennett’s work, male-authored narratives about bored women reverse nihilistic narratives through a revaluation of sexual fecundity and women’s sexual connection with men. In these narratives, women’s feminist independence is relinquished so that they can find meaning in the biological imperatives that determine their lives. Here women are returned to a consistent modernist paradigm described by Rita Felski as one that “understands the human condition as one of alienation from an originary identity.” Women, in this paradigm, represent nature and bodily self-presence, and are deemed “less burdened by this self-conscious sense of existential homelessness than men and hence to be closer to a timeless point of origin.” Female discovery of her sexual nature thus delivers not only women to a presumed nonlinguistic, fundamental truth written in opposition to the emptiness of modern existence; it likewise delivers men. Where these narratives deem the independent, feminist woman’s world meaningless, they reinscribe her life as meaningful when connected directly to her sexual nature, which these narratives privilege as her true meaning and purpose. Where boredom, and most pointedly women’s boredom, is understood as subjective, affective, and even physiological in the early twentieth century, nihilism, in contrast, is philosophical and ahistorical, a negative revelation of the truth. Elizabeth Goodstein’s Experience Without Qualities argues that philosophical and social scientific discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries fail to achieve a reflective perspective on the historical significance of boredom, thereby rendering what she calls a “nihilistic dynamic” by which meaninglessness is totalized into a vision of existence itself. Nihilism as expressed in the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger, its two philosophers contemporary to modernist thought, addresses not just the end of the Judeo-Christian tradition as a totalizing

Overcoming Nihilism

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system informing thought, but with it the end of “those ideals, norms, principles, rules, ends and values that are set above humanity in order to provide human beings with a meaning to life.” Because of its JudeoChristian roots and the perceived death/loss of an informing presence, or god, nihilism recognizes not just meaninglessness, but absence. As Heidegger expresses it in his fourth volume on Nietzsche, “Nihilism is that historical process whereby the dominance of the ‘transcendent’ becomes null and void, so that all being loses worth and meaning.” Thus the Grundstimmung of modernity is boredom, says Heidegger, and this lack or “absence of distress” defines the limits of human possibility. As explored in Chapter , Conor Cunningham describes the logic of nihilism as “a sundering of the something, rendering it nothing, and then having the nothing be after all as something.” Though this may be the narrative logic of modern philosophy, it is also a narrative construct of significant works of modernist literature. The anticlimax, the negative revelation, is in fact the revelation, as this book will show in the novels of May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson. But early modernist and modernist novels did not all follow this pattern, and the novels explored in this chapter are of particular interest for the very distinct – and yet surprisingly uniform – ways they treat bored women. This study did not set out to schematize male and female writers – a practice that seems foolhardy at best and simplistic at worst – but the narrative and technical similarities along gendered lines was so striking that I had to consider the differences between narrative styles and plots and think through potential reasons for them. In male-authored narratives of women’s boredom, women experience frustration with, and dissociation from, themselves and the social order in which they find themselves, as they do in female-authored narratives of women’s boredom. However, their personal experience of meaninglessness is mirrored in the social and natural worlds in which they find themselves. With exceptions, these authors use nihilism not as a genuine philosophical investigation into meaning per se, but rather as a narrative backdrop for their protagonists’ quests for meaning. Female boredom in these texts is mirrored by their worlds as pathetic fallacy. In a representative sample of this literature – Arnold Bennett’s Hilda Lessways (), E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View () and A Passage to India (), H.G. Wells’ Ann Veronica (), D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (), and even in the Edwardian best-seller The Garden of Allah by Robert Hichens () – male authors portray independent female protagonists who seek to fulfill and/or realize themselves, but who



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

experience boredom and alienation along the way. Conflict is constructed in these narratives not by internalized systems of repression, as in the narratives of Sinclair, Woolf, and Richardson. Rather, conflict arises in the confused female protagonists of these novels as they search for individual purpose and meaning in a world they recognize, or perhaps generalize, as emptied of meaning. In a time of dramatic shifts in female roles, the uncertainty and confusion caused by women’s quest for independence is reflected in male-authored narratives seeking to demonstrate that real fulfillment, indeed meaning and purpose, can be found in heterosexual, monogamous sexuality. The authors explored in this chapter are notable because while, with the exception of Hichens, each author was and continues to be highly regarded by the literary establishment, their works have rarely been considered technically innovative along the lines of high modernism. They have, instead, occupied a valued “second tier” of modernists whose more classically realist work continues to be read, taught, and written about with almost the same fervor as the so-called high modernists. Where the female-authored modernist texts explored in this book were spurred by women’s boredom to forge narrative techniques and patterns that could reveal women’s divided consciousness and alienation as well as possibilities for existence beyond subjectivity, male-authored texts of women’s boredom in the realist mode also shaped modernism. They did so through frank textual explorations of women’s sexuality – something women authors of the period did not do – and authored a distinct development of literary modernism that provided a different answer to the problem of women’s boredom. The narratives examined in this chapter are more than just reactions to feminism; they are complex explorations of multiple ideas and for the most part serious considerations of women’s purpose. However, by flattening some of their depth and examining the plot structures and their female protagonists’ transformations within those plots, one can discover structural similarities that further define the difficult task women modernist authors had in representing and challenging ideas about female identities through boredom. Notably, these texts equate femininity with absence and meaninglessness. It is no coincidence that this occurs during women’s push to participate in public culture and experience themselves as independent of their roles as wives and mothers. The unmooring of women from traditionally held roles might have meant existential autonomy to the men and women who sympathized with women’s desire for more, but could equally have been generalized as participating in an

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overall nihilism to those for whom women’s roles had created a necessary order. The novels explored in this chapter present a nihilistic outlook early in their stories in order to set up narrative tension that must be resolved through the action of the plot. Looking at the texts chronologically, the mood of nihilism deepens from the s to the s, so that where earlier novels such as The Garden of Allah and A Room with a View express minor, almost lighthearted concern with nihilism as a backdrop to a woman’s quest for fulfillment, later novels such as Hilda Lessways and Lady Chatterley’s Lover see the independent woman’s quest for selfrealization as inextricably linked to nihilism. The following sections will establish first the nihilism shared by these texts, second the narrative construction of feminist self-realization as problem and solution in terms of plot, and finally the overcoming of nihilism as sexual/self-realization in these male-authored novels of women’s boredom.        Between  and the outbreak of the First World War in , fiction was the most broadly consumed section of the leisure industry. Robert Hichens’s The Garden of Allah, first published in , enjoyed numerous editions, stagings, and three film adaptations in , , and , the final one a Technicolor version starring Marlene Dietrich. As such, this novel had a larger audience than H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, and Arnold Bennett combined, and occupied a prominent place in the popular imaginary for the first four decades of the twentieth century. Even though Hichens’s work falls clearly in the popular fiction camp, it is worthy of notice that Dorothy Richardson admired his work. In a letter to Bryher in , she admitted to wanting to meet him and shake his hand: “He’s been a respectable writer I think & more than a bit of a nartist [sic].” I include The Garden of Allah in this chapter to argue that the highly regarded authors and works of the early twentieth century follow narrative patterns and assumptions more similar to, than different from, the popular fiction of their time, reflecting public tastes and beliefs more consistently than Sinclair’s, Richardson’s, or Woolf’s works did. Like most novels of bored women, The Garden of Allah begins with lack and desire. The protagonist, Domini Enfi lden, finds herself “vaguely pitying England and the people mewed up in it for the winter. Yet how many winters had she spent there, dreaming of liberty

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

and doing dreary things, – things without succor, without meaning, without salvation for brain or soul.” Now that she has traveled to North Africa, she wants “freedom, a wide horizon, the great winds, the great sun, the terrible spaces, the glowing, simmering radiance, the hot entrancing noons and bloomy, purple nights of Africa.” She wants “more than she [can] express, more than she knew. It was there, want aching in her heart.” Domini, an unmarried heiress of thirty-two, goes to North Africa on a quest to understand herself and “the real meaning of life.” The alert reader will notice that her name – the Latin word for Lord or Jesus Christ – hints that this search for meaning may have to take place within. She is self-conscious of being “rather a complicated piece of mechanism than a woman.” Thus, in the first few pages of this long novel, the narrative establishes meaninglessness and boredom as associated with Domini’s gender role. While the two men most prominent in this story lose and then search for God – a keynote of nihilist thought  – Domini is threatened only at the beginning of the narrative by the meaninglessness her independent existence imposes on her. Hichens suggests that by not properly understanding herself as a sexual woman, she has found life meaningless and mechanical. Her problem is her fetish for freedom. Th is fetish, Domini reflects, means that she has been “dead all [her] life.” Conditions of deadness, meaninglessness, blankness, and the unknown set the stage for male-authored narratives about women’s boredom. Women, it becomes clear in Arnold Bennett’s Hilda Lessways, are trapped in meaningless machinery. Early in Hilda Lessways, the eponymous Hilda reflects that her mother “went to bed in the placid expectancy of a very similar day on the morrow, and of an interminable succession of such days.” Typical of representations of boredom, time is figured here as a meaningless expanse. Hilda understands her mother’s existence as a “prison” and sees “not a method of escape, saw not so much as a locked door . . . nothing but blank walls.” In a perfect encapsulation of early modernism’s tropes of female boredom, Hilda experiences the feeling of being trapped in a blank, meaningless existence in which time slows to the point of stillness. In Bennett’s novel, this boredom is specific to women. Their exclusion from public life means that they are dependent on external sources – men – for purpose and motivation. This dependence is exemplified in the following passage describing women waiting in a late-afternoon drawing room: “All six women had the feeling, which comes to most women at a certain moment in each day, that life had, for a time, deteriorated into the purposeless and the futile; and that it waited,

Overcoming Nihilism



as in a trance, until some external masculine event, expected or unforeseen, should renew its virtue and its energy.” If women are seen in this passage as dependent on men to imbue their lives with purpose and meaning, women in Hilda Lessways can also be seen more generally as symbolic of humans in a nihilistic universe. What motivates humans when there is no god, no transcendental or external value from which one can garner “virtue and energy”? This is clearly a question Bennett engages. Hilda’s boredom and sense of entrapment is further compounded by her inability to know her own desire: “Even could she by a miracle break prison, where should she look for the unknown object of her desire, and for what should she look?” Bennett consistently depicts Hilda’s longing for more than her existence affords. The impediment to realizing her desires is that she has no models by which to fashion them. The problem is in part historical: there are no women role models on whom she can pattern a nondomestic existence for herself. As such, the problem becomes ontological: the outside is as blank to her as her inside. Conceptualizing divinity as a fantasy of spacial omnipotence that catalyzes those within the power of that fantasy, one could argue that women are revealed in Hilda Lessways as so spiritually impoverished that they even lack divine substitutes. There are no female idols in the public sphere to be worshipped. Hilda Lessways’ boredom converts to an existential crisis upon the death of her mother and the “sharp realizations of her extreme solitude in the world.” This crisis is crystallized into nihilism when Hilda meets Edward Clayhanger who relieves Hilda by saying that one cannot make oneself believe in God. Hilda “throbs” to the “authenticity” of this statement and is “free” – indeed, reborn. Hilda momentarily believes herself an authentic agent in a free universe, but this feeling is replaced by a creeping awareness of larger, mysterious forces at work over which she feels no control, and which make the meaninglessness of life more ominous to her. She realizes the limits of her understanding. When Sarah Gailey, the spinster sister of her former boss, George Cannon, tries to commit suicide by drowning herself, Hilda hears the ceaseless, cruel play of the water amid the dark jungle of ironwork under the pier, and the soft creeping of the foam-curves behind, and the vague stirrings of the night wind round about – these phenomena combined mysteriously with the immensity of the dome above and with the baffling strangeness of the town, and with the grandeur of the beaten woman by her side; and communicated to Hilda a thrill that was divine in its unexampled poignancy.

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

In this passage Hilda for the first time experiences human vulnerability in a godless universe. Yes, her thrill is “divine,” but it is engendered by an awareness of the absence of divinity, a sublime awareness of the inability to understand being, an encounter with its “telling refusal” as Heidegger would call it. This leads to a nihilistic revelation of individual human lives as themselves tragically fragile, pathetically futile against a broader backdrop of indifference: In imagination she saw all the other bedrooms, dark, forlorn, and inanimate, waiting through long nights and empty days until some human creature as pathetic as themselves should come and feebly vitalize them into a spurious, transient homeliness; and she saw George Cannon’s bedroom – the harsh bedroom of the bachelor who has never had a home, and the bedrooms of those fearsome mummies, the Watchetts, each bed with its grisly face on the pillow in the dark; and the kennels of the unclean servants; and so, descending through the floors, to Sarah Gailey’s bedroom in the very earth, and the sleepless form on that bed, beneath the whole! And the organism of the boarding house seemed absolutely tragic to her, compact of the stuff of sorrow itself!

In the face of such tragic futility, what can one do? As will be discussed later, Bennett resolves Hilda’s crisis by having her discover her sexual urges as inescapably fundamental and vitalizing. He creates for her a direction in the aimless morass, namely sexual aspiration, and as a result she marries George Cannon. Addressing his female character as a sexual being with physical urges and desires is a bold element of Bennett’s naturalism, but it is also limiting, as explored later. E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View begins with a similar existential puzzle in the character of George Emerson, who, his father explains to the female protagonist Lucy Honeychurch, is troubled by the fact that “[t]he things of the universe” will not “fit.” Lucy’s response to Mr. Emerson outlines the distinction the novel makes between authentic existential crisis and ordinary boredom: “Oh, but your son wants employment. Has he no particular hobby? Why, I myself have worries, but I can generally forget them at the piano; and collecting stamps did no end of good for my brother. Perhaps Italy bores him; you ought to try the Alps or the Lakes.” Lucy makes the mistake of assuming that George’s malaise is mere boredom, subjective dissatisfaction with what one has been offered by life. She has yet to learn that George’s malaise is larger, more male: it is a nihilistic view of life that makes all action – indeed all being – meaningless. Only when she witnesses the murder of a Florentine that Lucy is stunned into a similar conclusion. Horrified at what she has witnessed,

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she connects with George, and thereafter, “The whole world seemed pale and void of its original meaning.” Forster deepens his nihilistic theme sixteen years later – and notably after his friendship with, and reading the works of, Virginia Woolf – in A Passage to India, in which two women, Adela Quested and her potential mother-in-law, Mrs. Moore, experience nihilistic terror in their visit to the Marabar Caves. In an anti-Romantic move, Forster makes clear from the beginning of the novel that nature offers no meaning, no richness to experience, only indifference. Life is not good or heroic and nothing more can be read into the landscape than the Darwinian understanding that life persists against the odds. The narrator observes at the novel’s opening: “So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excresence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life.” This mood of indifference translates to Adela’s feelings about her potential husband, Ronny Heaslop. She has no reason to marry him or not to marry him. After she breaks off their relationship, the “melancholy” landscape offers no redemption for her actions. Instead, “[t]rees of a poor quality bordered the road . . . and suggested the countryside was too vast to admit of excellence . . . . There was not enough god to go around.” Ronny and Adela “conversed feebly and felt unimportant.” In this indifferent, nihilistic landscape in which the darkness “wells” out of the “meagre vegetation” and “encircles” Adela and Ronny in a “spurious unity,” Adela ultimately relents and becomes engaged to marry Ronny, quite obviously out of the fear, as Heidegger terms it in his second form of boredom, “of being left empty.” In a conventional marriage plot, a period of engagement typically provides emotional excitement; it is a point in time when hope and desire coalesce. Forster counters this with a description of time’s passing in which the refrain so familiar in female-authored novels of boredom – “nothing happens” – is asserted with force: Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself,” or, “I am horrified,” we are insincere.

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

The slightly satiric, urbane nihilism of the narrator is at odds with the fact of Adela and Ronny’s recent engagement. Adela feels this departure from both narrative and social convention acutely. Where Ronny’s mother, Mrs. Moore, “accepted her own apathy,” Adela fights it in her belief that “the whole stream of events is important and interesting, and as she grew bored she blamed herself severely and compelled her lips to utter enthusiasms.” Adela’s coming to terms with “living at half pressure” is experienced as a crisis in the Marabar Caves where her inability to reconcile with the feeling of being “emptied, valueless” becomes intolerable. If “nothing” is the resounding echo of the Marabar Caves, it is also the refrain used most frequently in Lady Chatterley’s Lover to describe the postwar zeitgeist Connie Chatterley inhabits, as the passage at the beginning of this chapter demonstrates. The women in these novels find themselves in empty and indifferent worlds, bored and aching to create or find meaning and/or themselves. Their awareness of emptiness is in some cases a plot device, creating the necessary tension that can be resolved through fullness (and in some cases, emptiness again); in other cases, the awareness of emptiness prompts genuine metaphysical exploration. These male-authored novels of women’s boredom thus take women’s quest for self-realization seriously, but, as the next section details, depict feminist notions of individualism and independence as an impediment to women’s fulfillment.                                   Early-twentieth-century novels focused on “the woman problem” grapple with the question of how best a woman can come to know herself and achieve her desires beyond the strictures of now-outdated expectations for female behavior. Each of the novels explored in this chapter has at its center a young woman who rebels against what she has been given and makes critical choices about who she will be. The Garden of Allah ’s Domini leaves behind her circumscribed London existence to embark on a spiritual and emotional quest for “the real meaning of life.” Lucy Honeychurch has an inchoate desire to do something “big” and to break against the “august title of the Eternal Woman” in A Room with a View. Hilda Lessways longs for more than a typical woman’s existence. Connie in Lady Chatterley’s Lover assumes she must have “a pure and noble freedom.” In addition, in H.G. Wells’s Ann Veronica, a novel that

Overcoming Nihilism

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I discuss in more detail further in this section, the female protagonist is “wildly discontented and eager for freedom.” Positing these desires in the first pages, the novels present these protagonists’ quests as authentic or false depending on their relationship to feminism. With the exception of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the novels are sympathetic to feminism’s argument that women have been trained to be subservient and in being so deny themselves as individuals. Each novel attempts to show how a woman can come to realize a self, but this self is rarely equated with what it means to be an individual. In fact, rather than embracing feminism as cultural pathway to intellectual freedom of development and will, these novels of women’s boredom suggest that the better route to self-knowledge, and thus the truth, is through woman’s realizing herself as a sexual being – another aspect of female identity denied by Victorian strictures on female behavior. While early-twentieth-century feminists did not place women’s intellectual autonomy and sexual development at odds, these male authors privilege the latter as authentic means for both psychological relief and narrative resolution. Essential to the narrative trajectory of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is Connie Chatterley’s transition from feminist to sensualist. Lawrence places the two concepts in opposition. The novel’s narrator is quick in the first few pages of the novel to establish Connie’s background as rooted in feminist ideals. The narrator mocks those ideals and mimics the smug sense of purpose associated with feminism that might be read as a response to Pilgrimage’s Miriam Henderson’s quest for freedom and selfhood: “For, of course, being a girl, one’s whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl’s life mean? To shake off the old and sordid connections and subjections.” These “sordid connections and subjections” are, in the novel’s conception of feminist thinking, to men. Indeed, Connie’s own mother, who appears to have caught the modernist female disease and dies a “nervous invalid,” had urged her daughters to “fulfill themselves” because she had “some old impression of authority on her own mind.” Imitating the arrogant, hurtful voice of feminism as conceived by Lawrence, the feminismindoctrinated Connie thinks: “The beautiful pure freedom of woman was infinitely more beautiful than any sexual love. The only unfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind women in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing like dogs.” If sex is necessary because men, like children, must be appeased or they will whine, the feminist mindset, according to the narrator, believes “a woman could yield to a man without yielding her

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

inner, free self.” This “modern female insistency,” the narrative indicates, is the locus of the problem. Not only does feminist-individual will destroy; it is, indeed, false consciousness. Individual will, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is exemplified in female orgasm. For Lawrence, there is the right kind of orgasm and the wrong kind of orgasm, the latter of which is indicative of female self-assertion. Mellors describes to Connie the sexual practices of his first wife: “She’d try to lie still and let me work the business . . . . But it was no good . . . . She had to work the thing herself, grind her own coffee . . . . It was a low kind of self-will in her, a raving sort of self-will: like in a woman who drinks.” This self-willed orgasm is the very kind Connie had achieved previously with her lover Michaelis, who had complained, “I’m darned if hanging on waiting for a woman to go off is much of a game for a man” – a speech that “killed something” in Connie. Individualism, manifest in a myriad of ways in Lady Chatterley’s Lover – feminism, capitalism, authorship, the urge to amuse or stimulate oneself – is dismissed by Lawrence as false, corrosive, and preventative of true relations, which are grounded in being rather than knowing, instinct over will. As with Connie Chatterley in the early parts of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, feminist individualism motivates Domini Enfilden in The Garden of Allah – two texts that share striking similarities. Domini’s individualist, feminist beliefs are seen as preventing male-female relations. The narrator states, “The love of man for woman, of woman for man, she thought of as imprisonment, bondage.” With her unparalleled liberty, Domini “fancied that perhaps in the sunny solitude of Beni-Mora, far from the friends and reminiscences of her old life, she might learn to understand herself.” However, Hichens hints at a potential conflict between Domini’s search for herself and her fear of loving commitment with a man: she does not understand herself as “a woman” but only as “a complicated piece of mechanism.” To know herself, then, she must know herself as a sexual woman – something, in the logic of the book, only a man can help her do. In the Edwardian novels A Room with a View, Ann Veronica, and Hilda Lessways, the female protagonists’ quest to know themselves is pitted directly against then-problematic Victorian norms of female behavior. Lucy Honeychurch, Ann Veronica, and Hilda Lessways are each bored with the lives they are expected to lead, and want more, but they cannot articulate for themselves what that might be. These three novels portray feminism as a useful vehicle of self-realization, when not taken to laughable extremes, but ultimately they privilege Darwinian-inflected narratives of a woman’s reproductive sexuality as determining her choices.

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Wells’s Ann Veronica presents a young woman “eager for freedom and life”; impatient, “she did not clearly know for what – to do, to be, to experience . . . . She wanted to know.” Ann Veronica comes from a traditional middle-class home and is raised by a father who considers her his property. She understands that social expectations demand she not experience freedom or realize herself as a person: “Between her and the fair, far prospect of freedom and self-development manoevred Mr. Manning, her aunt and father, neighbors, customs, traditions, forces. They seemed to her that morning to be all armed with nets and prepared to throw them over her directly her movements became in any manner truly free.” Like the famous nets of nationality, religion, and language that Stephen Daedalus acknowledges as preventing him from achieving selfhood in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, so Ann Veronica, several years before, discovers the ideological wrappings of custom and tradition that prevent her from becoming a self-realized individual. However, feminism as counter-ideology allows a different perspective: “She had a feeling as though something had dropped from her eyes, as though she had just discovered herself for the first time – discovered herself as a sleepwalker might do, abruptly among dangers, hindrances, and perplexities, on the verge of a cardinal crisis.” Ann Veronica’s self-discovery is linked to a feminist consciousness of those traditions and institutions that impinge on her independent personhood. She is aware that traditional women must dissociate from their own desires: “The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge.” Her quest in the novel, then, is to free herself from her home, her father’s constricting rules, and to establish herself independently so she can know who she is. Ann Veronica succeeds in her quest insomuch as she moves out and for a time lives by herself. But against her claim “to go free and untrammeled” the narrator urges “there was a case to be made, that after all it was true that a girl does not go alone in the world unchallenged, nor ever has gone freely alone in the world” because of the perpetual lure of her sexuality. Men mistake the independent Ann Veronica for a prostitute and trail her through the streets of London. Housing options are few for a respectable single woman of little means. Her brother Roddy tells her, “the only possible trade for a girl that isn’t sweated is to get hold of a man and make him do it for her.” But how does she do that? By “great disciplines and suppressions and extensive reserves.” The challenge is in making choices for oneself within a system of male-dominated sexuality.

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

Like Ann Veronica, Hilda Lessways rejects the options for self-support available to respectable women. She knows, without trying, that she abhors teaching and wants “she knew not what.” Her desires surpass her options and she becomes deliriously happy when, having no vision of what is possible, she becomes a secretary at a newspaper. She transforms herself into “the blindly devoted subaltern, who could expect none of the ritual homage given to women, who must sit and work and stand and strain and say ‘yes’ and pretend stiffly that she was a sound, serviceable, thick-skinned imitation man among men!” The narrative mocks her situation and her unknowing acceptance of it, but envisions no other alternative. Hilda’s daring, her ability to will herself into new situations, highlights both the lack of real options for her as well as the chance-ruled world in which Hilda exists. When Hilda’s mother dies, she chooses to sell the furniture and her home and to move on. As the narrator notes, “Some girls would not have sold the furniture, would not have dared to sell it, would have accepted the furniture and the house as a solemn charge, and gone on living among those relics, obedient to a tradition. But she had dared! She had willed – and the solid furniture had vanished away! And she was adventurously free!” Her will distinguishes her as less crippled by traditional female behavior and more of an existential agent in her destiny. As compared with Lawrence, who conceives of the will as a human failing, an impediment to fulfillment, Bennett articulates will as fact, neither powerful nor fate-determining. To Hilda, “[t]he faculty of men and women to create their own lives seemed divine, and the conception of it enfevered her.” Again, Hilda’s conception of the “divine” must be understood as existential nihilism – she extols the sublimity of human choice rather than godly decree, all while the narrative itself stresses her lack of real choices and the haphazard, chance-driven pattern by which she lands anywhere. With the death of her mother, she is no longer bored because she allows herself to choose her own destiny. However, like Ann Veronica, her sexuality will ultimately limit her ability to “make experience out of nothing.” I will explain in the following section how Hilda experiences chance and indifference as determining her fate. Finally, A Room with a View posits female self-repression and passiveaggressive behavior as that which must be overcome. In the first few pages, Lucy Honeychurch and her cousin wrangle “under the guise of unselfishness” over whom will have a room with a view at an Italian pensione. These seemingly unselfish repressions, the narrator suggests,

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make it hard for Lucy to know and fulfi ll herself. Likewise, so do expectations for ladylike behavior. Lucy’s crisis of boredom brings these ideas to the fore: Conversation was tedious; she wanted something big, and she believed it would have come to her on the wind-swept platform of an electric tram. This she might not attempt. It was unladylike. Why? Why were most big things unladylike? Charlotte had once explained to her why. It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored. Poems had been written to illustrate this point.

As in so many novels of bored women, the problem of Lucy’s boredom is specifically linked, even if satirically, to social expectations of her as “Woman.” Such conventions predicate her inability to consciously and fully realize her desires and aims. In Lucy’s crisis of boredom, she is for the first time “conscious of her discontent” and, in a familiar refrain, laments, “Nothing ever happens to me.” Just then, and importantly by chance, she witnesses a murder and subsequently bonds with George Emerson over the horror of the event. Later George follows up on this connection by kissing Lucy unexpectedly, an action that causes her cousin to insist they leave Florence. This act of sexual repression remains consistent with Lucy’s inability to know herself. Upon moving home where “nothing ever happened to her,” she becomes engaged to Cecil Vyse and gives up “trying to understand herself, and joined the vast armies of benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words.” The narrator opines of this: “The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters – the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue.” Advocating for self-knowledge, the narrator pokes fun that Lucy “disliked confidences, for they might lead to self-knowledge and to that king of terrors – Light.” For it is Light that Lucy will have by the novel’s end when she stops repressing her desires and allows her attraction to George Emerson to be realized. Forster presents this “direct desire” not only as an overcoming of Lucy’s repressive mandates, but also – and even more importantly – as an antidote to the nihilistic worldview posited at the novel’s beginning. Lucy’s success may be less a story of women’s liberation than a story of carnal transcendence.



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom         ,       ,           :     

The novels examined in this chapter uniformly present women’s sexual self-discovery and heterosexual monogamy as the answer to the nihilistic world in which women’s blankness, lack, and boredom manifest themselves. Where these novels begin in women’s desire for something unknown and present her as bored and dissatisfied by the status quo, they end in women’s fulfilled sexuality. In distinction from novels of the nineteenth century in which women’s sexual liberation led only to murder or suicide, these modernist authors indicate that women’s suppression of sexual desire causes misery or death. The recognition, indeed veneration, of women’s physical sexuality is central to the thematic and plot resolutions of these novels. Only Hilda Lessways suggests that fulfilled sexuality does not entirely solve women’s problem, and may even create further complications. The conclusion that women’s self-realized sexuality solved both women’s boredom and the nihilistic tendencies of early-twentieth-century British culture can be found not just in novels of the period, but in journal and newspaper articles. In a  article on the relations between the sexes in the English Review, for instance, author C. Gasquoine Hartley avers, “countless women are suffering from having no occupation. Their energies of body and mind have become clogged.” To remedy this, she suggests woman, as “instinctive moral anarchist,” can free her sexuality not so that she can assume a greater role in public life, but so that she can “give of herself to man,” because her “regained place in that freer future, whose dawn even now is breaking, can be found only as woman – the bestower of Love and the source of Life.” In a  article on Hedda Gabler as harbinger of modern woman’s boredom and frustration with the narrow definitions of her role as wife, Constance Smedley laments, “every man cherishes the convention that every woman’s secret desire is to be dominated by man, and to find expression of herself through ministering to man; he honestly believes this is the only real happiness possible for woman – certainly her greatest happiness.” Although clearly a gross overgeneralization, Smedley’s lament finds justification in the plot resolutions of many of modernism’s most sexually bold texts. Robert Hichens’s The Garden of Allah is the least complex in its assertion of Domini’s sexuality as that which reinserts her into her proper and meaningful role as female subordinate. Unlike the other novels, The Garden of Allah is a veritable template for the generalized cultural

Overcoming Nihilism

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expectations of women in the early twentieth century. As a contemporaneous reviewer for the Speaker asserted, “the book’s moral plane is so singularly elevating and the heroine’s somewhat irregular attitude is so inspired by altruistically pure motives that the most particular vicaress might put down the book feeling an inward glow of spiritual purification.” Where in the novel’s beginning Domini had been independent and lonely, a mechanical woman, she becomes, by the novel’s end, an ideal/idealized woman. Through her sexual love of Androvsky, Domini is re-sexed and reborn as a passive woman who is fulfilled in her passivity. In one of the more amusingly overwrought constructions of “womanization” in literature, Domini is described in her lovemaking with Androvsky as first becoming passive and then a woman. She, who in their intercourse had played a dominant part . . . now longed to be passive and, forgetting her own power and the strength and force of her nature, to lose herself in the greater strength and force of this man to whom she had given herself . . . there was an eff ulgence of unseen glory that grew in splendour moment by moment. A woman was being born of a woman, woman who knew herself of woman who did not know herself, woman who henceforth would divinely love her womanhood of woman who had often wondered why she had been created woman.

After a few days of love, Domini is “more woman than any other woman who had ever lived” and all because of the “embrace of this fierce manhood.” Once Domini has “fulfilled her divine mission” and experienced carnal love with her husband, “[t]he hostess that lurks in every woman – that housewife-hostess sense which goes hand in hand with the mother sense – was alive in her.” But Domini’s good fortunes are not to last: she comes to learn that her husband Androvsky is actually a Trappist monk who broke his vows in marrying her, and thus, in an act of selfabnegation, she must return him to God, the God she has rediscovered during her desert sojourn. This final lesson of the novel completes Domini’s education into conventional womanhood, for as a woman she must learn to sacrifice herself for others: “She had believed that she had come to Africa for herself, and now God, in the silence, was telling her that this was not so, that He had brought her to Africa to sacrifice herself in the redemption of another . . . . God meant her to put away her selfishness, to rise above it.” The doctrine articulated here is the very kind that Mary Olivier’s mother espouses in May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier: A Life, when she says, “God is grieved every time Mary is self-willed and selfish. He wants her to give up her will.” Where May Sinclair presents this view as the very

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

one that leads to women’s dangerous self-repression, dissociation, and boredom, Hichens presents this form of self-sacrifice as natural and liberating. The Garden of Allah is thus not a New Woman novel, but a novel that proposes a solution for the New Woman in the form of passionate sexuality that allows women to reinhabit traditional gender roles with a difference. H.G. Wells’s Ann Veronica is explicitly a New Woman novel that, with the exception of an antiromantic attitude grounded in evolutionary biology, is surprisingly similar to The Garden of Allah in terms of its thematic and plot outcome. Ann Veronica fiercely wants her independence but discovers herself dependent on men at every turn. Eventually she falls in love with her biology instructor, Capes, and escapes the passivity accorded to women by telling him she loves him. Further, she proposes sex outside of marriage: “I want you. I want you to be my lover.” Ann Veronica is at the center of her being and knowing in her desire for Capes (“a woman’s crowning experience”), and the two embark on a sexual affair, eventually leading to a happy marriage. In her relations with Capes, “the sense of her body was a deep delight” and his touch turns her to “trembling fire.” Formerly an unfulfilled student of biology, she comes alive as a biological being. The emptiness and boredom she feared would come of conventional marriage and gender relations are overcome by Ann Veronica’s direct expression of desire and willingness to skirt convention. Yet biological realities intrude on the liberation narrative with the novel’s bittersweet ending. Happily married and now pregnant, the novel ends with Ann Veronica’s cry: “I have loved love and you, and the glory of you; and the great time is over, and I have to go carefully and bear children, and – take care of my hair – and when I am done with that I shall be an old woman. The petals have fallen – the red petals we loved so.” Self-fulfillment is temporary for women and achieved sexually, according to Wells. Their roles as biological mothers necessitate a short flourishing followed by a longer period of self-denial. Charlotte Perkins Gilman lamented of Ann Veronica in , “She wanted to be human, and tried to be. Her masculine interpreter, seeing no possible interests in the woman’s life except those of sex, dismisses all that passionate outgoing as comparable to the mating impulse of insects.” As Anne Simpson has argued, in presenting Ann Veronica as first and foremost a body, “Wells returns woman to a culturally recognizable form.” In contrast with the other male-authored texts of woman’s boredom, Arnold Bennett’s Hilda Lessways presents woman’s sexuality as a necessary truth but not a liberatory one that can overcome the indifference of

Overcoming Nihilism



a nihilistic universe. Hilda’s sexual life with George Cannon only serves to reinforce his greater scope and freedom and her exclusion from public life as she witnesses his experiences of it. Hilda is prompted to sexual desire shortly after her existential crisis, cited earlier, in which all being appears meaningless, all lives tragic. Seeking to be captivated by an object that can relieve her as subject-to-boredom and being’s indifference, Hilda “began to pity herself because she was not with a man! She dreamed, in her extreme excitation, of belonging absolutely to a man.” If she has glimpsed the emptiness whose grounds she cannot know, she can, in the mode of Heidegger’s second form of boredom, give herself over to something in order to be captured by it (see Chapter ). Giving herself to George Cannon and “being at his disposal,” she can create a “tolerable fate” for herself. She does not love George Cannon, but she wants him, and experiences “painful, shattering ecstasies of bliss, hours unforgettable” that leave her “sated and unsatisfied” in her sexual union with him. Bennett naturalizes female sexual desire without overvaluing it. Rather than leading to answers, her sexual relationship with Cannon leaves her unsatisfied, in large part because, with her new access to her husband’s world, she has become aware of possibilities beyond her grasp and “the large existence of the male made her envious.” Bennett’s novel brings Hilda to the point where Sinclair’s, Richardson’s, and Woolf’s novels of female boredom begin. That is, Hilda enters the male-signifying economy only to realize she does not signify, that no narrative of female independence has been written: She had always dreamt vaguely of an enlarged liberty, of wide interests, and of original activities – such as no woman to her knowledge had ever had. She had always compared the life of men to the life of women, and admitted and resented the inferiority of the latter . . . . She had been in the male world, but not of it . . . . She had had money, freedom, and ambition, and somehow, through ignorance and through lack of imagination or opportunity, had been unable to employ them. She had never known what she wanted. The vision had never been clear.

The narrative is purposefully vague about the reasons for Hilda’s “failure” to realize herself, whether ignorance, lack of imagination, or opportunity. Hilda’s own human limitations may be to blame. But equally, her inferior position as woman is both the prompt for her desire and a reason it cannot be fulfilled. The novel begins in boredom and lack, and so it ends. But like The Garden of Allah and Ann Veronica, Hilda Lessways also ends in biological realism. Hilda Lessways, estranged from her deceitful husband, is pregnant. Her existence is “diverted, narrowed, fundamentally

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

altered” with the knowledge that “[n]ever now could she be enfranchised into the male world.” The question of where human sexuality fits into the whole of human character is one of the significant issues to arise in the New Woman novels in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Male-authored modernist novels of women’s boredom play a central role in bringing women’s sexuality to the fore, naturalizing it, and in most cases celebrating it. In the cases of Forster’s A Room with a View and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, female sexuality is central to self-understanding and to overcoming nihilism. After Lucy Honeychurch kisses George Emerson in an Italian orchard, she revels, “At last . . . I shall understand myself. I shan’t be troubled by things that come out of nothing, and mean I don’t know what.” “The holiness of direct desire,” as it is called later in A Room with a View – in direct contrast with Bennett’s depiction – supplants nihilism by imbuing sexuality and passion with religious-spiritual meaning. Heeding Mr. Emerson’s urging, “You must marry or your life will be wasted,” Lucy Honeychurch marries her love, and as her last name indicates, the union culminates in a satisfying spiritual and physical fulfillment. Lucy overcomes her boredom through passion in which her lover, in an unrestrained endorsement of marital sex, “made her see the whole of everything at once.” Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a New Woman novel that famously presents sexual passion as spiritual solution to the meaninglessness of Connie Chatterley’s existence. In Lawrence’s novel, nihilism is overcome through loss of one’s will and individualism, an attunement to the mystery of being that obviates subject-object relations. This, of course, is an ironic contrast to the feminist works whose efforts were to promote female will and individualism in order for women to realize themselves and achieve equality with men. In Lawrence, Connie Chatterley’s self-strivings are part of the problem. When she begins to give up, or give in, she reaches new depths of being, and the mystery is upon her. At first this is only an intellectual realization. Connie “knew that if she gave herself to the man, it was real. But if she kept herself for herself, it was nothing.” Later in a sexual encounter that functions as a narrative turning point in Connie’s existence, she loses her “old instinct to fight for her freedom” and becomes “inert and heavy” while Mellors’s body is “urgent against her” until they achieve mutual climax. She resists this feeling because it is “the loss of herself to herself,” but this loss represents new life, new depths of being: “In her womb and bowels she was flowing and alive now and vulnerable, and helpless in adoration of him as the most naïve

Overcoming Nihilism

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woman. – It feels like a child, she said to herself; it feels like a child in me.” In closing the novel with Connie’s pregnancy, Lawrence ends his narrative in much the same way that other male-authored New Women novels do – with woman as mother. Lawrence, intending to deindividualize Connie Chatterley, strips her of the particular and, through her sexuality, suggests that she finds true being when “she knew herself touched, the consummation was upon her, and she was gone. She was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman.” Lawrence is clearly working to establish an ontological grounding for his characters as separate from the epistemological individualism of modern society, which he feels atomizes and alienates people. In this way, his novel is the most faithful rendition of the logic of nihilism that renders something nothing and then discovers in that nothing something. But it is hard not to notice the similar, if tortured, construction of womanhood used by popular writer Robert Hichens in describing Domini’s sexual awakening as solution to her boredom: “A woman was being born of a woman, woman who knew herself of woman who did not know herself, woman who henceforth would divinely love her womanhood of woman who had often wondered why she had been created woman.” There is a rigidity of type here that, whether striving after metaphysical truths or biological essentials, circumvents the very real political concerns of women in this period. The narrative patterns of The Garden of Allah, Ann Veronica, A Room with a View, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover are so similar as to present an archetype of male wish fulfillment. Acknowledging female boredom and emptiness, these novels present a dashing image of heterosexual partnership as in itself all that a woman needs to be whole. In doing so, they appear to be directly at odds with the complaints registered by female authors of women’s boredom. As this book shows, feminist modernists May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf established themselves in distinction from these narratives of female boredom through narrative strategies that questioned what it meant to be, and whether it was possible for a woman to be, an individual.

 

May Sinclair, Feminism, and Boredom

Time was not good to you. Time was cruel. Time made you see. Yet somehow they had gone through time. Nights of August and September when you got up before daybreak to listen at her door. Days when you did nothing. Mamma sat upright with her hands folded in her lap. She kept her back to the window: you saw her face darkening in the dusk.

In her three most critically acclaimed novels, The Three Sisters (), Mary Olivier: A Life (), and The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (), May Sinclair focuses on the experience of boredom in women’s lives in order to explore the ways that late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British culture rewarded women for renouncing their desires and their selves, producing, in the process, self-inhibited characters whose lives appear meaningless and empty. It may not seem like a winning formula for a best-selling author to write novel after novel in which “nothing happened. Nothing ever would happen,” characters sit “doing nothing” as their minds “[carry] on, empty, in empty, flying time,” and yet May Sinclair was one of the most respected, intellectually connected, and widely read novelists of the early twentieth century. Between  and , she was considered England’s foremost woman novelist. More than in the works of other writers discussed in this book, women’s boredom is thematically central to May Sinclair’s most acclaimed novels. Although Sinclair knew and maintained friendships with many of the major literary figures of the early twentieth century (Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, Ezra Pound, H.D., Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf, among others), these writers have received significantly more critical and biographical attention. There are, to date, only three monographs written exclusively on May Sinclair’s substantial body of work, which includes twenty-one novels, a novel in verse, numerous short stories, two books on idealist philosophy, a book on the Brontës, and a journal of her brief time assisting an ambulance during the First World 

May Sinclair, Feminism, and Boredom



War. Suzanne Raitt’s excellent May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian () is a welcome contribution to Sinclair scholarship, and contextualizes many of the ideas in her novels, but is, like the other two monographs – Boll’s Miss May Sinclair Novelist and Zegger’s May Sinclair – largely a chronological accounting of her life and work. The effect of such studies is that individual novels and ideas attach themselves more readily to Sinclair’s idiosyncratic personality and concerns, rather than circulate among a broader set of ideas at work within British literature and culture in the early decades of the twentieth century. Bonnie Kime Scott has recently dismissed Sinclair’s work as germane to the nineteenth century and akin to later “middlebrow” writing, joining modernist women only in questioning nationalist and militant values. I disagree. Beginning with the publication of The Three Sisters in , Sinclair’s work shows increasing narrative experiment in ways that align her with other modernists experimenting with narrative perspective, time compressions and ruptures of sequence, elisions, ironies of climax, and epiphanic moments. One of the purposes of this chapter is to challenge Sinclair’s perceived irrelevance to modernism not just by highlighting her narrative experiments, but by identifying a central thematic concern of Sinclair’s – the bored woman – as an idea in circulation within early-twentieth-century British literature. Sinclair’s specific uses of boredom participated in broader political and intellectual movements in feminism and psychology as well as modernist aesthetic innovations. My argument here is not just that Sinclair featured boredom as a problem resulting from women’s conditioning in psychological repression, but that she did so in the cause of feminism. May Sinclair was an early advocate of the burgeoning field of psychology in England and in  she became a benefactor and member of the board of the first clinic in Britain to offer psychoanalytic treatment, the Medico-Psychological Clinic. In addition to her familiarity with the work of Freud, Jung, and Janet, Sinclair, in her own nonfiction writings, strongly praises the work of William McDougall, a pioneer and leading authority of British psychology who wrote a number of best-selling books on psychology in the s and s in which he praises Freud’s work on hysteria and repression. Zegger writes that “Sinclair was sympathetic to psychoanalysis because many of its beliefs were ideas to which she was already committed: the idea of the importance of sex, of the harmful effects of repression, and of the value of self-development or self-realization. She regarded psychoanalysis as an ally in the struggle against Victorian values.” In her broad-ranging biological-psychologicalphilosophical-mystical treatise, A Defence of Idealism (), Sinclair – who

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

declared Eliot’s “The Love Song of T. Alfred Prufrock” a “tragedy of submerged passion” – claims that “psychoanalysis rests on the assumption that we only live sanely and perfectly so far as we live consciously, so far as our psyche lifts us up above its racial memories and maintains the life which is its own – that is to say, so far as we are individuals. The secret of individuality lies in the sublimation to consciousness of the unconscious Will-to-live.” Although Sinclair is often accused by today’s critics of promoting a crude form of Freudian and Jungian thinking, it is important to realize that her contemporaries respected her psychological acumen. At a  P.E.N. congress in New York, John Farrar identified Sinclair as “the great novelist, the greatest psychological analyst in fiction.” The Three Sisters, Mary Olivier, and The Life and Death of Harriett Frean are committed to demonstrating the harmful effects of repression as Sinclair understood it, and in The Three Sisters and Mary Olivier, to examining the struggles of their female protagonists to overcome repression through sublimation, a process Sinclair believed could be consciously willed. Sinclair’s interpretation of sublimation as a consciously willed process creates one of the central paradoxes of her work. In the cause of feminism, she represents female boredom not as a personal deficiency, but as a socially systematic form of violence against women who were unable to access their own desires as a result of their conditioning. In this way Sinclair’s novels create – and participate in – an intimate public sphere of readers who shared the insight and agreed that many women’s lived experience was boring. However at the same time that Sinclair presents boredom as an almost unavoidable fact in women’s lives, her narratives depict women who are strong enough to resist internalizing the repressive forces surrounding them and who consciously choose to sublimate their own drives and energies. Women’s willful sublimation is rewarded with moments of temporal discontinuity in which the self gives way to a quasi-mystical ecstatic vision. The ability to sublimate, explored later in this chapter, requires the strength to assert one’s own individuality, one’s own unique vision, and to reject the social institutions such as family or religion that impinge on that individuality while at the same time not abandoning the responsibilities that these social institutions impose. If this sounds complicated, it is. One of the central contradictions in Sinclair’s thinking is that to escape boredom and the lack of individuality imposed by a patriarchally structured social system, women can sublimate what Sinclair calls their “Life-force” or instinctive, sexual aims and achieve moments of ecstatic vision that are, ironically, an emptying out of one’s self. Championing an individualism free of social institutions when

May Sinclair, Feminism, and Boredom



individualism is a social institution, and basing that individualism on the capacity to self-evacuate, Sinclair attained a position, described in a  review, “at the front rank of living novelists.” How might representing boredom – and the passivity it requires and entails – serve as a form of feminist protest? Sociologists describe boredom as a category of discontent in which entire social groups who have lost or experienced diminished social function feel useless, meaningless. Seán Desmond Healy in Boredom, Self, Culture ascribes to boredom “the loss of a sense of personal meaning, whether in relation to a particular experience or encounter, or to an entire life-situation. This loss might be occasioned by the withdrawal or absence of the meaningful, or the imposition of the unmeaningful.” Middle-class British women in the early twentieth century, better educated as a group than at any point in their history but only marginally integrated into professional or civic life, were left vulnerable to the conscious experience of meaninglessness or emptiness that induces boredom. They cannot be said to have experienced a loss of what they never had – access to value and meaning in their lives beyond their roles as wives and mothers – but they can be said through their education to have entered a signifying economy in which they discovered they had no part, or, to phrase it differently, to have been delivered over to their inessentiality. As a member of the Women Writer’s Suffrage League, Sinclair joined the likes of Olive Schreiner, Evelyn Sharp, Elizabeth Robins, Violet Hunt, and Ivy Compton-Burnett in trying to “forge a new language to correspond to the realities of modernity and to resist inequality . . . that represented truth as it was politically, philosophically, and socially lived.” That women of the early twentieth century were aware of the gap between dominant social values, and their part in them is made clear in Virginia Woolf ’s short story “A Society” (), in which a group of women who have “gone on all these ages supposing that men were equally industrious, and that their works were” equal to the bearing of children suddenly look askance at male production and ask, “But now that we can read, what prevents us from judging the results?” They find the bulk of male civilization laughable, empty, and one character asks, “How can I bring my daughter up to believe in nothing?” Sinclair’s characters exist in this empty world without any of the urbane irony that mitigates Woolf’s observations. In Sinclair’s novels, women are made conscious of their inability to participate in an economy of value except by their subservience: their boredom is a response to the perceived loss of a purposefulness they never had.



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

However, Sinclair’s focus on boredom may serve as more than a protest. It may also show a way of circumventing the constraints the women in her novels experienced. As Laurie Langbauer has suggested: The critique of boredom has been useful in denaturalizing and exposing the ideological, but boredom itself may have a political function. It helps not so much to circumvent the ideological (the old dream of false consciousness) or to embrace its constraints (the fantasy of totalization) but to inhabit it differently through an in-difference to constraints, which do not simply vanish but may become beside the point in those sites where we can for a time ignore them.

Sinclair’s strong protagonists experience their boredom as an “in-difference to constraints” for the brief moments in which they can achieve such indifference. If the lesson of their lives is that “nothing happens,” it is a lesson they continue to confront, challenge, embrace, and inhabit, albeit without comfort.                    One link between women and boredom in the early twentieth century is that active feminists such as Sinclair were emboldened to use boredom as a particular category of complaint to a specifically middle-class audience who would sympathize both with notions of boredom as “waste” of time (a particularly middle-class, productivity-focused concept) and with the idea that women, as would-be individuals, were being held back from achieving their full potential by oppressive patriarchal ideologies. For women, boredom could be presented as a reasonable defense mechanism against having their desires, energies, and talents ridiculed and rejected. Freudian disciple Otto Fenichel wrote that in boredom, “a person . . . is searching for an object, not in order to act upon it with his instinctual impulses, but rather to be helped by it to find an instinctual aim which he lacks.” Sinclair – an avid, if amateur, psychologist writing during that field’s expansion into England – illustrates this idea in her novels. In Mary Olivier, The Three Sisters, and The Life and Death of Harriett Frean, her female protagonists lack both anger and desire, both of which have been repressed and denied at every turn. With no external object or value to help them find an aim, no marriage partner to give conventional shape to their lives, Sinclair’s female protagonists are forced inward upon themselves. Their search for an aim ends in self-referential stasis and the passivity of boredom. As discussed in Chapter , Reinhard Kuhn contrasts ennui to what he calls the average boredom of a suburban housewife who “is tired of the

May Sinclair, Feminism, and Boredom

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magazine that she is reading or the television show that she is watching and mixes another cocktail for herself.” Her boredom, according to Kuhn, is “caused by the forced inactivity of the mind.” Kuhn reifies a classically gendered hierarchy between ennui as an ennobling male protest against prevailing ideologies versus female boredom as the site of abject dissatisfaction. Kuhn’s fascinating example of the housewife who is unsatisfied by the mass-cultural entertainments manufactured for her diversion exposes one of the key aspects of early-twentieth-century female boredom: as consumer rather than producer of the culture in which she finds herself, she is witness to a cultural economy in which she plays primarily a symbolic, passive part. Female boredom, according to the dominant view that Kuhn represents, is exposure of impotence. Representation of such impotence, however, in itself serves a revolutionary function. As Spacks has made clear in her important work on the subject, boredom is at the margins of much eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury women’s fiction and often serves as a register of inadequacy in the social system. May Sinclair’s female protagonists – middle-class women living in unglamorous, rural locales – are not revolutionaries. Their boredom, in its passivity, does not challenge the status quo. It is an escapist behavior that is rarely impeded by negative sanctions. And yet in the detailed, often tedious portrayals of wasted female lives, Sinclair can be seen to be participating in the feminist revolt of early-twentieth-century England. If middle- and upper-class women led lives of “morbid inactivity,” as Sinclair’s fellow inaugural member of the Women Writer’s Suffrage League, Olive Schreiner, argued in Women and Labour, Sinclair, by depicting this morbid inactivity in all of its claustrophobic tedium, gave psychological life and urgency to the problem. Her female protagonists are not feminist heroines, but their empty lives dramatize the painful consequences of the limitations imposed on women who might want to do more than take up the traditionally assigned roles of wives and mothers. This dramatization, moreover, is informed and deepened by the insights of the newly emerging psychological discourse. Beginning with Freud, the modernist discourse of psychoanalysis explains boredom as a defense mechanism against anxious feelings arising out of aggression or desire. The individual, fearing the effects of his or her aggression/desire, represses it. In doing so, he or she experiences the tension of boredom without being aware of the source of the tension for, as Fenichel observes, “Boredom must be a state of instinctual tension in which the instinctual aims are repressed but in which the tension as such is felt.” Understood this way, boredom is a self-inflicted tension,

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

an evacuation of one’s motivations and desires in order to suppress an instinct feared to cause a greater pain. Boredom is thus allied to masochism, a behavior that Freud, observing the behavior of women from the s to the s, linked specifically to the suppression of their aggressiveness “which is prescribed for them constitutionally and imposed on them socially.” Early-twentieth-century women’s socially constituted reluctance to act aggressively engaged them in a series of repressions (as well as masochistic behaviors), which in turn alienated them from themselves, forcing them into the simultaneously self-aware and yet inhibited state that is boredom. Boredom was the safer alternative to voicing desires that went against the patriarchal grain. It was, in the words of a midtwentieth-century psychoanalyst, “a self-administered deprivation.” The women of Sinclair’s novels adopt boredom as a passive form of protest against the stultifying, male-privileged families in which they find themselves. Their boredom is a self-evacuation from desire and power that comes about as the result of complex psychological interactions based on family duties and a learned ethic of others before self. This, of course, is a form of masochism and self-sacrifice that imprisons these women in the mold of that outdated ideal, the Victorian heroine.        ,     ,       ,          :   ’          Female protagonists of early-twentieth-century fiction are predominantly passive, and in being so, their experiences bear marked similarity to early psychoanalytic descriptions of boredom. In the inaugural issue of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association in , psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson describes boredom in a way that also describes a good deal of female behavior in early-twentieth-century texts: The uniqueness of the feeling of being bored seems to depend upon the coexistence of the following components: a state of dissatisfaction and a disinclination to action; a state of longing and an inability to designate what is longed for; a sense of emptiness; a passive, expectant attitude with the hope that the external world will supply the satisfactions; a distorted sense of time in which time seems to stand still.

Boredom as a state of unknown and unfulfilled desire forms a counterpart to the female protagonist of the early-twentieth-century text who desires she knows not what. With early-twentieth-century narratives focusing heavily on psychological quests for self-realization, many routinely begin from a state of

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unknowing that leads to the individual’s quest for personal meaning and fulfillment. This is an implicit antithesis to the self- and culturally alienated state of boredom. For example, early in Virginia Woolf ’s The Voyage Out (), Rachel Vinrace reveals to Mrs. Dalloway, “‘I am lonely . . . I want’ – But she did not know what she wanted, so that she could not finish the sentence.” Hilda Lessways in Arnold Bennett’s novel by that name finds “She was in trouble: the trouble grew daily more and more tragic; and the trouble was that she wanted she knew not what.” In H.G. Wells’s New Woman novel Ann Veronica, the title character “wanted to live. She was vehemently impatient – she did not clearly know for what – to do, to be, to experience . . . . She wanted to know.” Thus in many an early-twentieth-century narrative, desire begins out of a kind of boredom, a desire for desire, without understanding the nature of that desire. This inability to access desire constructs the early-twentieth-century female protagonist as something like a cipher: she is absent even when present, and empty, even to herself. Sinclair’s The Three Sisters is a study of self-repression. In the lonely Yorkshire village of Garth, three sisters, Mary, Gwendolyn, and Alice Cartaret, wait for something, anything that will deliver them from their repressive father, the village vicar, and a life with no expectations. Each of the sisters enacts a different form of repression: “Mary said nothing. She had found out long ago that silence was her strength.” Alice exerts a particularly obstinate form of self-negation, willing herself into hysteria. Elisabeth Bronfen claims that hysteria “broadcast[s] the message of a recognition of lack,” and such a lack is made all too evident in Alice’s public rendering of her hysteria: Alice had not got the pneumonia that had killed John Greatorex. Such happiness, she reflected, was not for her. She had desired it too much. But she was doing very well with her anæmia. Bloodless and slender and inert, she dragged herself about the village.

Sinclair’s amusingly ironic tone here distances her from the passiveaggressive maneuverings of her characters and points out the absurdity of a system that rewards psychological self-damage. When the conventionally good sister Mary tries to help devise a plan to get the town’s only eligible bachelor, Dr. Rowcliffe, to fall in love with Alice in order to cure her hysteria, she passively declares: “[I]t’s no use thinking we can do things.” The more active but nonetheless resigned Gwenda replies, “We haven’t got to do things. That’s his business. We’ve only got to sit tight and play the game.” In the worlds Sinclair’s characters inhabit, active agency

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

is accorded to men, while women must passively hope (and passiveaggressively scheme) to achieve their aims. The idea that women must wait for men to make things happen, and are bored – made waste of – in the process, is central to The Three Sisters. The opening scene of The Three Sisters is a long, drawn-out depiction of the boredom the three sisters endure every evening as they wait for their father, the vicar, to come and say ten o’clock prayers. The three sisters are introduced as “sitting there in the dining-room behind the yellow blind, doing nothing. In the supine, motionless attitudes they seemed to be waiting for something to happen.” Sinclair describes each of the three sisters in gestures of physical aimlessness and repetition that are the outward manifestation of their boredom. For instance Mary darns socks, apparently without end, for sixteen years: “She had learned to darn socks for her own amusement on her eleventh birthday, and she was twentyseven now.” Alice, as she is for most of the novel, is supine: “Alice had spent the whole evening lying on the sofa. And now she raised her hands against her eyes. And now she lowered them and lifted one sleeve of her thin blouse, and turned up the milk-white under surface of her arm and lay staring at it and feeling its smooth texture with her fingers.” The sisters brood, watch “vaguely,” and let out “weary moan[s]” until the Vicar comes to read the prayers. As the brief last paragraph of the chapter explains, “That was all they were waiting for. It was all that could happen. It happened every night at ten o’clock.” Unable to give shape to their own lives, to exert agency, they are dependent on men to shape it for them. This inability to exert agency in their lives leads to a series of narrative pauses and moments of torpor figured in the terms of boredom. Boredom’s narrative pauses and torpor-inducing stasis form a leitmotif in early-twentieth-century fiction about women. Arnold Bennett’s Hilda Lessways (), for instance, depicts a passive moment of irritating expectation that characterizes female boredom arising out of dependence on male agency: “All six women had the feeling, which comes to most women at a certain moment in each day, that life had, for a time, deteriorated into the purposeless and futile; and that it waited, as in a trance, until some external masculine event, expected or unforeseen, should renew its virtue and energy.” As shown in Chapter , many male-authored novels, such as Forster’s Room With a View (), Wells’s Ann Veronica, Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (), and the best-selling  novel by Robert Hichens, The Garden of Allah, show the male as a vehicle to female self-realization, specifically through sexual awakening. Janice H. Harris has observed of Edwardian feminist heroines Lucy Honeychurch, Ann Veronica, and

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Hilda Lessways that “Since none of these modern girls . . . ultimately suppresses her desires, these novels present an optimistic, even dashing image of modern girlhood/womanhood.” But this “dashing image” is dependent on male sexuality. In contrast, Sinclair rejected the idea that women could trust men to help them access their desires. Sinclair’s biographer and critic Suzanne Raitt argues, “Sinclair used her fiction to develop and express her sense of frustration at the idea that the male world was continually seeking to co-opt her for its own purposes.” Her most sympathetic female characters remain single throughout their lives, and find in their passivity a form of self-evacuation that, paradoxically, becomes a kind of self-knowledge, as I show later in the chapter. In Mary Olivier, the protagonist, Mary, is featured in a narrative that is predominantly second-person, but occasionally first or third person. The novel is a künstlerroman, much in the style of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (), and first appeared alongside Joyce’s Ulysses in the January  issue of the Little Review. Tracing the impact of her repressive mother and alcoholic father on Mary’s development from infancy to middle age, Mary has little opportunity to experience desire for “she knows not what” before she learns to repress her desires altogether. She learns to deny her desires when told, as a toddler, that she is naughty for wanting to sit with her mother rather than her father and asserting her will. When disappointed that a cat is given to her brothers and not her, the nursemaid Jenny scolds her and tells her, “Little girls can’t have everything they want.” Her mother complains, “Mary musn’t want what isn’t given her.” When Mary protests, “But I want Sarah,” with a notable emphasis on the I, not on the want, so that the reader is focused on Mary’s assertion of individual desire, Mamma replies, “And that’s selfish and self-willed . . . . God . . . hates selfishness and self-will. God is grieved every time Mary is self-willed and selfish. He wants her to give up her will.” This scene epitomizes Sinclair’s view that women’s oppression and self-sacrifice are perpetuated not only by Christianity but by the victims of that oppression – women themselves. In compensation for not getting the cat, Mary is given a dying lamb, a symbol of Christian self-sacrifice that will come to emblematize Mary’s life. Mary’s male-associated will and desire are symbolically emasculated in a scene that reveals her mother’s continued preference for her brothers’ achievements over Mary’s. After Mary builds a block tower, she asks her mother to look at it, but her mother instead looks out the window at a snowman the boys are building. Mary becomes angry at her mother’s refusal to acknowledge her, her anger noticeably figured as male in its

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

phallic suggestiveness. The scene enacts a self-castration: “Something swelled up, hot and tight, in Mary’s body and in her face. She had a bursting face and a big bursting body. She struck the tower, and it fell down. Her violence made her feel light and small again and happy.” When her mother later is prepared to acknowledge the tower Mary says, “There isn’t any tar. I’ve knocked it down. It was a nashty tar.” It is notable in this scene that Mary adopts the diction of Jenny, the nursemaid, representing her own second-class, or servile, status in the house. Mary acts aggressively and destructively here, but she vents that anger in the least dangerous way: upon herself. These are the seeds of the masochistic behavior characteristic of women who necessarily introvert their anger and suppress their desire as a way to appease those in power. The efforts to suppress that anger lead eventually to habitual dissociation from feelings, and this in turn leads to boredom. As in the female-quest texts discussed previously, the early narrative moment in Mary Olivier when Mary as protagonist gets to assert her desire, or her search for desire, reveals the already-tangled web of self-suppressions that leads to boredom. She asserts not her actual desire, or even her inability to know her desire, as so many female characters in novels of the period did, but a desire to fit in to the familial mold and adhere to its patriarchal, Christian structure. When her mother says, “You want to be spoiled and petted every day,” Mary replies, “No. No. I want – I want –.” The delay highlights her indecision and reluctance to impart her desires. The nursemaid Jenny replies, “She doesn’t know what she wants,” at which Mary says, “Yes. I do. I do . . . . I want to love Papa every day. ‘Cause he gave me my lamb.” The narrative pause in the form of ellipsis suggests that Mary struggles with, perhaps even suppresses, her real desires. Sinclair here reveals the ways in which her characters begin to dissociate from themselves, diminishing themselves and their desires in order to achieve the secondary gains of belonging to the social structure. This dissociation is symbolized in the toy lamb that Mary, in the excitement of anticipating the gift of a real lamb, forgets while it stands “on the chest of drawers in the nursery, looking off into the corners of the room, neglected.” When Mary returns to the toy lamb, the real one having been given to her only when it was sick and dying, “The stiff eyes of the toy lamb stared away over its ears.” The toy lamb is symbolic not only of Mary’s cast-off status in the house, but of the toy creature her mother wants her to become. She too stares away over herself, enacting a process of depersonalization that mirrors the process of boredom in which one dissociates from one’s desire. Mary’s boredom begins at this point in the novel.

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Harriett Frean is a novel dedicated to dramatizing this process of depersonalization. Harriett, attached to her parents and ever-trying to emulate their “beautiful behaviour,” renounces all of her individual desires, including pursuing the man she loves, and who loves her, because he is already engaged to a dear friend. Like Mary, Harriett learns renunciation from her mother. When as a girl she plays with a neighbor, the two girls tussle over Harriett’s favorite doll. Harriett’s mother scolds her, saying, “My darling, you musn’t be selfish. You must do what your little guest wants.” After being punished for not sharing her doll, Harriet takes the doll and “burie[s] her in the bottom drawer.” This burial is the symbolic repression of her desire. Harriett is so successful at repressing and denying her own feelings that she “loses the habit of consulting her own feelings” and becomes an inadequate reader of others’ desires as well. When she and her mother are trying to choose where to move, her mother asks Harriett to make the choice. Harriett, of course, tries to make the choice her mother would want, despite the fact that she would like to live in the other location. Her mother readily assents to Harriett’s choice, but Harriett learns after her mother’s death that it was the wrong choice: her mother had also wanted to live in the other location. Their shared passivity and self-renunciation are so profound that their entire life together is lived in accommodating deception. Harriett’s lack of access to her own desires dooms her to the fate of boredom. She lives out her older years, “spinning out the time,” and “she found that by a system of punctual movements she could give to her existence the reasonable appearance of an aim.” Finally, however, Sinclair reveals the empty boredom at the heart of this experience: “The years passed: the sixty-third, sixty-fourth; sixty-fifth; their monotony mitigated by long spells of torpor and the sheer rapidity of time. Her mind was carried on, empty, in empty, flying time. She had a feeling of dryness and distension in all her being, and a sort of decrepitation in her brain, irritating her to yawning fits.” After a lifetime of dissociating from her feelings and desires, she is dry and empty, the result of living “by habit, by the punctual fulfillment of her [and others’] expectation.” Notably, her emptiness does not offer relief, however, for boredom is always “irritating.” Having repressed her self, Harriett is unable to find meaning in her life; she cannot even find peace of mind. Sinclair further explores repression by using hysterical women as foils to her characters’ search for self-expression. In her study of hysteria, The Knotted Subject, Bronfen describes the late nineteenth century as “the historical moment when, with the birth of the bourgeois family, hysteria

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

bloomed as the language within which the daughter could articulate her discontent.” This confirms Sinclair’s positing of hysteria as in fact a method of communicating desire that is too direct for the repressive families in which it emerges. In The Three Sisters, Gwenda’s sister Alice occasions the family’s move to the barren, claustrophobic north-country town in which the novel is set because she acted in a sexually aggressive way in their previous town and embarrassed her father, the vicar. When her father shames and represses her, she suffers from a “mortal apathy [that] passed for submission.” Like Alice, Mary Olivier’s Aunt Charlotte is a family embarrassment. Perpetually claiming that she is about to be married, she “goes after” every man she sees. Her family cloisters her away and eventually institutionalizes her. Yet Mary and her brother Mark admire her specifically for not repressing her desires: “You’re not madder than I am. We’re all mad. Mad as hatters. You and me and Dank and Roddy and Uncle Victor. Poor Charlotte’s the sanest of the lot, and she’s the only one that’s got shut up.” “Why do you say she’s the sanest?” “Because she knew what she wanted.” “Yes. She knew what she wanted. She spent her whole life trying to get it. She went straight for that one thing. Didn’t care a hang what anybody thought of her.” “So they said poor Charlotte was mad.” “She was only mad because she didn’t get it.”

According to Mark and Mary’s logic, sanity is predicated on knowing what you want and going after it. But direct female expression of desire is so stigmatized in these novels that it must be stifled. In The Three Sisters, Gwenda refuses to admit to herself her own romantic feelings for Steven Rowcliffe: She had refused to acknowledge it not because she had been ashamed of it but because, with the dreadful instance of Alice before her eyes, she had been afraid . . . . He might see in it something morbid and perverted, something horribly like Ally. She went in horror of the taint. Where it should have held its head up defiantly and beautifully, it had been beaten back; it cowered and skulked in the dark places and waited for its hour.

The source of repression in The Three Sisters, as it is in Mary Olivier, is Christianity. Of the vicar it is said, “his profession had committed him to a pose. He had posed for more than thirty years to his parish, to his three wives, to his three children, and to himself, till he had become unconscious of his real thoughts, his real motives, his real likings and dislikings.” The vicar is unknown to himself. He is a product of repression,

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which in turn structures and necessitates the boredom – inhibited aims – that he endures and imposes on his daughters. Unlike the vicar, who knows nothing about himself, Mary Olivier understands her own repression. Here is where Sinclair’s innovative and most self-consciously modernist use of form in Mary Olivier creates a unique rhetoric of boredom as awareness of – at the same time that one loses – subjectivity. Mary Olivier alternates between second and third person, a form that privileges the self as divided. Mary’s bifurcated responses require her to dissociate essential aspects of her character. She is unable to form a unified whole, and yet she is tragically aware of this. This division is readily demonstrated in a particularly moving scene that, in addition to presenting Mary’s oedipal desire for and fears about her mother, depicts Mary’s awareness of the damage done to her by the unloving, all-consuming repressive mother whom she depends on and adores: Mamma was not helpless. She was not gentle. She was not really like a wounded bird. She was powerful and rather cruel. You could only appease her with piles of hemmed sheets and darned stockings. If you didn’t take care she would get hold of you and never rest till she had broken you, or turned and twisted you to her own will. She would say it was God’s will. She would think it was God’s will . . . . Mamma got up and leaned over you and covered you with the rug. Her white face quivered above you in the dusk. Her mouth pushed out to yours, making a small sound like a moan. You heard yourself cry ‘Mamma, Mamma, you are adorable!’ That was you.

The paragraph break and terse phrase, “that was you,” suggests a mixture of surprise and judgment, almost horror, in Mary’s self-recognition. And it is no wonder. For Mary has recognized the truly destructive nature of her mother but is helpless to act on her anger, repressing it in order to declare her mother “adorable.” As a result of this self-alienation, Mary sees herself as playing roles while she nurtures her true, secret self, invisible and unavailable to anyone but her. She recognizes that “[t]here was Mrs. Olivier’s only daughter, proud of her power over the sewing-machine . . . . There was Mark Olivier’s sister, who rejoiced in the movements of her body . . . . And there was Mary Olivier, the little girl of thirteen whom her mother and Aunt Bella whispered about to each other with mysterious references to her age.” But in the end, “[h]er secret happiness had nothing to do with any of these Mary Oliviers.” Her secret happiness is her path toward individuation and she finds this in compensatory moments of ecstatic vision that mark off the boundaries of time as the boredom that otherwise consumes her life.

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom          

Psychologists have linked boredom to “an inordinate desire to eat.” The sociologist Healy calls it “psychic anorexia,” a term that perfectly captures the self-suppressing aspect of boredom, the socially desirable selfpolicing exercised by women in order to make gains within the social structure. I would suggest that boredom as featured in Sinclair’s novels is the hunger that results from the refusal to eat. Because it was risk-laden, if not impossible, for women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to assert their desires without restriction, they necessarily engaged in psychic anorexia – boredom – in order to remain safe. But it left them hungry. When Dr. Rowcliffe first diagnoses Alice in The Three Sisters, he remarks “You’ve been starved,” which, while appropriately blaming her father for the metaphorical starvation he has imposed on her by moving north, is only partly true as she has refused to drink her milk. Mary in Mary Olivier is in perpetual – and because of her interior mental life, sometimes successful – struggle to stave off the boredom she describes as “mental hunger”: And there was no other prospect. As long as she lived in Morfe there would be nothing – apart from her real, secret life there would be nothing – to look forward to but that. If it was not Miss Kendal it would be Miss Louisa or Dorsy or old Mrs. Heron. People talked about dying of boredom who didn’t know that you could really die of it. If only you didn’t keep on wanting somebody – somebody who wasn’t there. If, before it killed you, you could kill the desire to know another mind, a luminous, fiery crystal, to see it turn, shining and flashing. To talk to it, to listen to it, to love the human creature it belonged to. She envied her youth its capacity for day-dreaming, for imagining interminable communions. Brilliant hallucinations of a mental hunger. Better than nothing . . . . If this went on the breaking point must come. Suddenly you would go smash. Smash. Your mind would die in a delirium of hunger.

If boredom represents a way of managing the threat to individuality posed by the social structure, surely boredom is also itself a threat: the threat of personal starvation. When escape from the restrictions of boredom is hoped for, it is often hoped for in the medium of time, time in which something, anything, might happen. In her work on boredom, Spacks quotes from Flora Tristan’s London Journal: A Survey of London Life in the s in a passage that usefully relates the experience of monotony and time in boredom.

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Tristan says, “English women’s lives are unbelievably monotonous, sterile and drab. Time has no meaning for them – the days, months and years bring no change to this oppressive uniformity.” As Tristan figures it, the experience of monotony distorts socially constituted interpretations of time, rendering it “meaningless.” The sensation of monotony is central to boredom, and it is important in Sinclair’s work that she baffles narrative expectations of climax (the idea that something might happen), a specific shaping of plot that allows all of the text’s actions to be judged by the light of one important moment in time. There is no one important moment in Sinclair’s novels. Rather the most important actions occur, or fail to occur, internally, in a series of slow-building, life-shaping perceptions. In its baffling of climax and focus on emptiness, boredom, and failed expectations, Sinclair’s work, like Richardson’s and Woolf’s, is an important precursor of mid-twentieth-century absurdist and existential literature. The refrain “nothing happens,” repeated throughout Mary Olivier and The Three Sisters, as well as in Sinclair’s famous review of Dorothy Richardson’s novels, is key to Sinclair’s idea that the stifling, monotonous circumstances of women provide the truest testing ground for a woman’s ability to assert her individuality, her “will-to-live.” What she commends in Richardson’s novels is specifically their anticlimactic character, and their ability to show the tenacity of a woman’s “want, striving, desire” in its barest, most reduced conditions: In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on . . . . Nothing happens. In Miriam Henderson’s life there is, apparently, nothing to justify living. Everything she ever wanted was either withheld or taken from her. She is reduced to the barest minimum on which it is possible to support the life of the senses and the emotions at all. And yet Miriam is happy. Her inexhaustible passion for life is fed. Nothing happens, and yet everything that really matters is happening . . . . What really matters is a state of mind, the interest or ecstasy with which we close with life.

Sinclair’s use of the term “interest” in the last sentence posits a pyrrhic victory over boredom in the form of finding interest in nothing, the emotional intensity of the mind closed in on itself. Sinclair celebrates the self ’s determination to escape the confines of her impoverished circumstances through a passionate awareness that is in itself transcendent. If The Three Sisters was her first attempt at writing this idea, Mary Olivier, written after Sinclair had read Richardson, is the idea’s fullest expression.

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

To transcend boredom, Mary first has to accept the idea that nothing will happen in her life. In her youth she is shown to be in a constant state of hopeful expectation: “At the end of January she was seven years old. Something was bound to happen when you were seven.” She is consistently defeated in her hopes: “Passion week. It gave you an awful feeling of something going to happen . . . . It was all over. And nothing had happened. Nothing at all.” In late adolescence she still clings to her hope that “happiness [was] hiding behind certain unknown doors. It hid behind the white doors of the ivy house. When you went in something wonderful would happen.” She goes behind those doors to encounter mean-spirited spinsters and sexually aggressive octogenarians. Nothing wonderful there. But if the wrappers of her ideologically charged hope need to be stripped from her ala Ibsen’s Nora Torvald, the stripping occurs early. At twenty-one, Mary thinks: Mamma had finished building the rockery in the garden. You had carried all the stones. There were no more stones to carry. That was all that happened in the year and nine months since Mark had gone. To you nothing happened. Nothing ever would happen. At twenty-one and a half you were old too, and very wise. You had given up expecting things to happen.

Later in life, Mary “[a]lways . . . knew what would happen . . . the movements of the village repeated themselves like the play of a clock-work toy. Always the same figures on the same painted stand, marked with the same pattern of slanting roads.” The internal repetitions, the expressions of monotony, relay the sensation of boredom Mary endures as she accommodates herself to the belief that something happening is “an illusion.” For Mary, something wonderful does happen in the form of her affair with Richard Nicholson and the publication of her volume of poetry. This is in part a reward for having developed a robust intellectual life for herself that does not depend on external stimulation, and in part continuous with the overarching schema of a life of repression, for her intellectual life is, save a brief interlude of a few weeks in her forties when she enjoys London literary life, purely solitary, another aspect of herself she must repress to please her mother and assume the role of a woman in her community. For as wonderful as Richard’s appearance in her life is, in the end Mary renounces him and returns to the life of her inner visions, the only place where she can be truly free. Sinclair’s female protagonists come to accept the hunger and monotony of their existence – their boredom – as their fate, and yet they are relieved of, or perhaps rewarded for, such monotony by experiencing moments of ecstatic vision.

May Sinclair, Feminism, and Boredom

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        :                       Guy Debord suggests that “everyday alienation” – what I am calling boredom – “could be defined as the inability to invent a technique for the liberation of everyday experience.” Sinclair, however, in The Three Sisters and Mary Olivier, did invent a technique for the liberation of everyday experience. It is a technique that Marx and Engels might have attacked for being an “ideational raising of things to a status above the earth” in order to mystify “real impotence.” That is, if the problems these women experience are born of their social and cultural environment, as Sinclair’s novels suggest they are, then Sinclair, unable to find a resolution in the social sphere, posits a utopic, internally driven ecstasy as their only way out. Sinclair, in her own unorthodox, evolutionary influenced psychology, believed that rather than repressing her sexual desires and aggressive energies, a woman could sublimate her “Life-Force” in order to achieve greater and more refined forms of fulfillment, the one that eventually could lead to mystical or artistic visions. A lifelong celibate, she argues in her pamphlet Feminism: What I venture to dispute is the conclusion that for a woman there is only one kind of alternative between frustration and fulfillment of the Life-Force, and that is – hysteria, neurosis and the detestable manifestations of degeneracy. I dispute it without for one moment blinking the frightful possibilities of the celibate and solitary life. For the Life-Force, like any other force when its channel is obstructed, will, of course, seek another; and it will tend to discharge itself along some line of least resistance. With your degenerate the line of least resistance may be the path to perdition. But with the normal, healthy human being, capable of control, may it not be transformed, transmuted, merged with certain increasing energies of the body and the brain . . . . In the artist, the enthusiast, the visionary . . . may it not be transformed and transmuted into still higher and subtler energies?”

Mary and Gwenda are framed as “normal, healthy” women capable, unlike their hysterical relatives, of sublimating their desires. They are strong-minded individuals who consciously reject their nineteenthcentury inheritance in the form of their parents, and instead turn their desires into “higher and subtler energies.” Mary’s rejection of her inheritance is internal and ironic; she is never able to leave her mother, but she nonetheless fully differentiates herself from her mother and is an individual in her own right. When asked by

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

friends of her mother’s who she’s like, Mary responds “I’m most of all like myself” – a response her mother later scolds her for as “affected.” Gwenda enters The Three Sisters ready to battle with her domineering father, and moves from strength to strength, shown most readily in Sinclair’s tropology through Gwenda’s dedication to reading challenging literature and taking brisk walks on the moors (by comparison, Harriett Frean reads only novels from the circulating library that “ended happily and had nothing in it that was unpleasant, or difficult, or demanding in thought”). Both Mary and Gwenda experience genuine love, but they both choose not to marry in order to care, in a self-sacrificing way that is not idealized in these novels, for their family members. Each rejects intimacy, either on a conscious or subconscious level. As Raitt comments, “Sinclair came to see intimacy as the enemy of freedom.” Freedom is framed in Sinclair’s psychology as achieved through sublimation. Through sublimation, Mary and Gwenda are able to achieve a higher intensity of vision that reveals itself in ecstatic moments of communion with nature, a practice of temporal discontinuity in which the self becomes external to itself. Mary’s intellectual and artistic achievements provide one outlet through which she can sublimate her “instinctual aims” and these form a complement to the mystical visions that provide a structural relief to those parts of her life she is unable to wrest away from the conventional, tedious life she lives with her mother and family. When Mary “saw the queer white light for the first time and drew in her breath with a sharp check. She knew that the fields were beautiful.” When she returns home, her mother asks her, “What did you see when you were out with Jenny to-day?” She replies “Nothing.” Her mother presses, “Nothing? And what are you looking at?” Mary replies, “Nothing, Mamma.” Her unwillingness even as a young girl to share her “secret happiness” with her mother shows her instinctive protectiveness of the unique vision that makes her individual. The visions compensate for the rejection and emptiness she experiences at home. Ironically she labels them “nothing.” To her, they are everything, especially by the end of the book. Sinclair’s figuring of these moments is utopic, and is a reminder that the devising of utopias and boredom share a special relation. Both are forms of resigned behavior. As Judith Shklar comments, “Utopia does not call for action. Quite the contrary, it is the work of a resigned consciousness . . . . The author of a utopia plays with perfection because it is impossible and therefore positively invites the passive acceptance of the imperfections of the world as it is.” The bored individual is ultimately passive. Having ingested a social lesson of futility, she is reduced to a state

May Sinclair, Feminism, and Boredom

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of chronic inactivity. Lepenies, in Melancholy and Society, has argued that a specifically bourgeois form of melancholy looked to nature for its outlet because it “permitted introversion to be lived out boundlessly because it was not subject to its [bourgeois society’s] limits.” Mary and Gwenda discover in their visions an inward-dwelling boundlessness that is a relief to their overly prescribed and regulated daily lives, lives whose already formulated social meaning leaves little room for them to find purpose or fulfillment. The turn inward in these visions participates in a broader move in feminist literature of the period to reveal the ways that for women, as Jane Eldredge Miller puts it, the “inner life dominated the outer.” In one of Gwenda’s ecstatic moments in which she transcends routine, social capitulation, and boredom – what Gwenda calls in this passage the “slave woman” – we see Sinclair’s emphasis on the inner life and her insistence, as she repeats throughout her fiction and nonfiction of the s and s, that the dominant experience of life is of nothing happening: She had hours, now and again, when she shook off the slave-woman who held her down. In those hours her inner life moved with the large rhythm of the seasons and was soaked in the dyes of the visible world; and the visible world, passing into her inner life, took on its radiance and intensity. Everything that happened and that was great and significant in its happening, happened there. Outside nothing happened; nothing stood out; nothing moved.

Nothing happens outside, but everything happens within. The world is transfused with emotion and the soul is imprinted with the infinitude of nature. This is the utopic longing of the domestically confined, socially circumscribed female. Unlike Gwenda and Mary, Harriett Frean is imprisoned by her past – her parents – and is consumed by it/them. Unable to sublimate, she can only repress and therefore receives no compensatory vision by which she can individuate. Her boredom is physical. She is unable to stave it off, and when sleep comes as her only form of escape, “she would give herself up to it with an animal pleasure.” Harriett is consigned to the realm of the material whereas the strong but maligned Gwenda and Mary are rewarded with a self-awareness that is spiritual and full. It is important to note, however, that, even though she champions Mary’s artistry, Sinclair does not offer a simple form of alternative, internal liberation. Her protagonists are too passive, too lacking in

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

agency to bring these visions on of their own accord. For Mary, “[i]t had come to her when she was a child in brilliant, clear flashes; it had come again and again in her adolescence, with more brilliant and clear flashes; then, after leaving for twenty-three years, it had come like this – streaming in and out of her till its ebb and flow were the rhythm of her life.” Mary and Gwenda must wait and hope for these moments of revelation. Gwenda becomes deeply concerned when she thinks she will not have the vision again. Mary Olivier ends with Mary’s expression of doubt about revisiting the vision that she calls her “ultimate passion” and whether it means all she has ascribed to it. She confirms it in the novel’s last line – “If it never came again I should remember” – further confining herself to the bounded freedom of the interior life and memory. If Mary and Gwenda’s vision is in part compensation for enduring boredom, it is also marked by a self-evacuation and passivity that is continuous with boredom. In her vision, Gwenda has “no sense of self.” Mary calls her vision “a dying to live,” available only when she gives up “wanting things, wanting people.” Sinclair awards this compensatory vision only to those two strong-minded women who are resilient enough to avoid being consumed entirely by their families and who maintain a separate, if divided, self. Yet to achieve their visions, these women have had to engage in multiple strategies of dissociation, boredom being one, in order to sublimate their aims. Raitt claims that Sinclair’s goal in Mary Olivier “was to imagine the self-conscious liberation of the individual from all the forces that drew her back into the past, the idea of sublimation as a form of self-discipline allowed her to construct the self as, in the end, its own salvation.” Raitt positions this self-salvation as positive, but one might ask, after all of the “dying to live” and dissociations, what kind of self is left to enact salvation? A matter of concern for women seeking to know their role in the new century, the narrator of Woolf’s “An Unwritten Novel” () views this kind of inward-turned self negatively: “When the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? – the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world.” Jean Radford, in her  introduction to Mary Olivier, avers that the novel “may well appear an elaborate rationalization of – yet again – self-denial.” Judith Butler has more recently argued that “[t]here is no ‘I’ that can fully stand apart from the social conditions of its emergence, no ‘I’ that is not implicated in a set of conditioning moral norms, which, being norms, have a social character that exceeds a purely personal or idiosyncratic meaning.” And indeed, if Sinclair did not find

May Sinclair, Feminism, and Boredom

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a solution to the problem of how a woman might be a self in a social context that did not equate femininity with individualism, she did expand the social context by confronting her many readers with bored women. By exploring women’s experiences of emptiness, self-struggle, and failed agency, Sinclair made a complex contribution to early-twentieth-century feminist thought.

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Boredom as Social System in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage

She was a middle-aged woman, she would never be older than she was now. She saw nothing and no one, nor ever would. In all her life she would never be arrested by anything. Nice kind people would call her ‘a charming girl’. . . . ‘Charming girls’ were taught to behave effectively, and lived in a brilliant death, dealing death all round them. Nothing could live in their presence . . . . They had no souls. Yet, in social life, nothing seemed to possess any power but their surface animation.

In , a critic described the fourth installment of Dorothy Richardson’s thirteen-volume novel Pilgrimage as “the longest bore on earth.” In a five and a half page introduction to Caesar Blake’s early study of Pilgrimage, literary critic Leslie Fiedler uses the words “dull,” “dulness,” “boredom,” or “ennui” seventeen times. Richardson wrote in a  letter to a friend, “The voices of my reviewers are now an almost universal groan of ennui. Some of them shriek with rage & disgust at the awful unending greyness.” May Sinclair, at the height of her popularity and literary power, wrote a review of Richardson’s early novels that not only famously labeled Richardson’s narrative style as “stream of consciousness” – a phrase Richardson repudiated – but embraced the novels’ apparent boredom: “Nothing happens. In Miriam Henderson’s life there is, apparently, nothing to justify living . . . . It is just life going on and on.” Given these descriptions, it is remarkable that Pilgrimage gets read at all. But boredom, both the experience of it and its representation, is key to understanding Pilgrimage. Dorothy Richardson’s endless and yet unfinished Pilgrimage, written between  and , approaches boredom first as an inevitable component of a woman’s life and later as a category of critique of the pressures of social convention and that which the protagonist Miriam seeks perpetually to keep at bay. Miriam’s “pilgrimage” is a quest to avoid boredom, the middle-class woman’s life, and instead is a search for self-realization, that which until her time had been the right and privilege of the male, 

Boredom as Social System

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and only rarely the female. Miriam insists on her individuality, her self, and the realization of life and what she calls “the true feeling” – an almost rapturous connection with herself – at all costs. The persistent threat to this quest is the all-consuming nature of conventionality around her constantly threatening to swallow her up, even and especially in those she loves. In choosing an unconventional path, Miriam must remain constantly vigilant against boredom, the symbolic void of the meaningless, purposeless, and self-less life she believed most women lived. As in Sinclair’s work, Miriam experiences boredom as the affective opposite of the thrill of experiencing the free and living self in self-relation, which she experiences in sporadic moments throughout her life. Boredom is the frustration of meaning. Dorothy Richardson’s narrative style, with its use of unassimilated details, delays meaning construction. Sensations and empirical descriptions are presented to the reader without valuation or framework, and the reader is left to determine the importance and structural thread between one situation and another. Where this is frequently the case in modernist texts, Pilgrimage is an extreme case in point. Even James Joyce’s Ulysses, a notoriously challenging text for readers to comprehend, grounds the unframed phenomenological observations of its characters within the confines of one, clearly defined day in one, well-navigated city in a series of analogues to events and characters in one, well-known classical Greek text. Where Joyce provided these normative literary signals, Virginia Woolf lamented in her  review of The Tunnel that Richardson’s novel fails to provide “unity, significance, or design.” Its form and content are intensely personal to its protagonist. To be sure, Pilgrimage’s rhetoric of bildungsroman, representing a questioning and questing consciousness in confrontation with the given world, is familiar. But the novel’s overall form refuses the climactic arc that provides meaning and closure. The reader’s boredom is rooted in his or her inability to open and produce Miriam’s text. Boredom signals this lack of access to meaning. Whatever interest those invested in literary history and scholarship have been able to find in Pilgrimage, they have done so while making little of an obvious aspect of the reading experience: when it is not thrilling – and it certainly can be thrilling – it is boring.    -    ,   -            In Richardson’s Pilgrimage, form and content are one. The oppression in the form of boredom that protagonist Miriam Henderson experiences as

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

a woman who has no social justification – no ready public meaning – for her life outside of the already prescribed forms of domesticity, which she rejects, is simultaneously the reader’s subjection to a plotless, endless, obfuscatory narrative. Richardson places the reader in the same position as Miriam: just as Miriam must struggle to find meaning and interest for herself in a world that readily offers none, so must the reader struggle to find meaning and interest in a novel that refuses to evaluate or prioritize any of the endless details it conveys. Put positively, Jean Radford finds that “Miriam’s being is always Heideggerian: a ‘being-in-the-world’ and in the different worlds through which she passes.” Because Richardson was unwilling to rewrite the dominant terms that gave shape to the lives of the women and men she describes – that is, she resists an overcoming of the already presented world – she instead reiterates those experiences as a sublime and/or stifling flow of perceptions. Confronted with an already shaped culture, Richardson cannot escape the confines of narrative, but she can refuse development and plot, and in doing so mark these qualities as emblematic of a woman’s life in the early decades of the twentieth century. Roland Barthes claims that “[t]he reduction of reading to a consumption is clearly responsible for the ‘boredom’ experienced by many in the face of the modern (‘unreadable’) text, the avant-garde film or painting: to be bored means that one cannot produce the text, open it out, set it going.” Building on the modernist critical legacy, Barthes locates responsibility for boredom, the failure to “find” textual meaning, in the passive, consumptive attitude of the reader who expects to be told what and how to think by the text itself. Meaning cannot be found – consumed – it must be created by the reader in collaboration with the author’s creation. The coproduction of meaning between creator and reader/viewer is core to Richardson’s aesthetic. In her regular column in the film journal Close Up, published by Bryher, H.D., and Kenneth MacPherson in the late s and early s, Richardson declares that the “direct giving of information in a play or novel is the mark of a weak novel or play.” For this reason, Richardson eschews modern theater in which the players act “at instead of with the audience” and prefers the silent film, which “secure[s] collaboration of independence.” The reader’s freedom to discover, intuit, imagine, and interpret based on what the reader “sees” is paramount to Richardson’s method. To this end Radford notes that Pilgrimage “uses physical description, descriptive detail, repeatedly and at great length, not to ensure the ‘reality effect’ but to produce resistance to meaning.” Meaning is apprehended and created by the perceiving subject, not learned by instruction

Boredom as Social System

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or guided by the narrative. As Richardson argues in the case of children’s films, “even the best efforts of the accredited teacher cannot achieve the overwhelming influence of what offers itself without the taint of ulterior motive.” The text’s resistance to meaning mirrors a resistance to readymade narrative forms and life paths available in Richardson’s time, especially as these forms limit the options available for women. If readers are to apprehend a different way of being, they must come to that discovery in collaboration with Richardson. Richardson will not teach. Ironically, Richardson’s aesthetic ideals co-opt boredom as the means to their reader-oriented ends. Accustomed to narrative conventions that organize and prioritize their values, the reader of Pilgrimage must plow through the perceived monotony and unending details to discover what he or she values in the text. Richardson models this method of apprehension in a passage in The Tunnel in which Miriam overhears an older couple, the Orlys, reading to one another in the room next door: The sound of the reading came from the den – a word-mouthing, word-slurring monotonous drawl – thurrah-thurrah-thurrah; thurrah thurrah . . . a single beat, on and on, the words looped and forced into it without any discrimination, the voice dropping uniformly at the end of each sentence . . . thrah . . . . An early Victorian voice, giving reproachful instruction to a child . . . a class of board-school children reciting . . . Miriam sat with her hands tucked between her knees, musing, with her eyes fi xed on the thin sheets of tin and gold . . . extraordinary to read any sort of text like that . . . but there was something in it, something nice and good . . . listening carefully you would get most of the words. It would be better to listen to than a person who read with intelligent modulations as if they had written the thing themselves; like some men read . . . and irritatingly intelligent women . . . who knew they were intelligent. But there ought to be clear . . . enunciation. Not expression – that was like commenting as you read; getting at the person you were reading to . . . who might not want to comment in the same way. Reading, with expression, really hadn’t any expression. How wonderful – of course.

In this passage, occurring early in her fourth volume, Richardson appears to be poking fun at her writing method as well as reviewers’ claims of boredom and monotony while she also explains her aesthetic preferences through Miriam’s realization-in-process. Pilgrimage enunciates but does not express. To express is to force one’s values onto another, to coerce, and these are the values Miriam associates with conventional thinking that merely serves to reinforce existing values, without questioning them or creating meaning for oneself. As much as Richardson departs from the traditional novel in continuing for thirteen volumes, she innovates far less in terms of the sentences

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

and paragraphs she constructs. Her language is not so much unfamiliar as distorted and repetitive. But unlike certain modernists such as Gertrude Stein or Djuna Barnes, Richardson’s sentences are practically Victorian in their adherence to subject-predicate structures and a sensate, physical world in which details serve as a touchstone of experiential authenticity. The language rarely ventures into metaphor: “A metaphor, after all, suggests a verbal equivalence, a reductive relationship between two things: X is Y.” This would be anathema to what Elisabeth Bronfen sees as one of the seminal claims of the text – that “different worlds ought not to be reduced to values which must be made compatible, but should rather be grasped side by side in their incompatibility.” A key aspect of Richardson’s rhetorical strategy is to obscure the subjects of her sentences, in part to create an intimacy between the reader and Miriam’s thoughts, in part, like boredom, to trouble the boundaries between subject and object, inside and outside. Miriam is shown repeatedly in dialectic relation with the spaces she inhabits. Witness, for example, a brief passage from Interim in which Miriam struggles with the distance between personal and social meaning as represented in the room in which she plays the piano: The last chord of the nocturne brought the room sharply back. It was unchanged; lifeless and unmoved; nothing had passed to it from the little circle where she sat enclosed . . . . Her heart swelled and tears rose in her eyes. The room was old and experienced, full like her inmost mind of the unchanging past. Nothing in her life had any meaning for it. It waited impassively for the passing to and fro of people who would leave no impression. She had exposed herself and it meant nothing in the room . . . . I am no longer a person.

Here, as throughout the text, Richardson relies on the pronoun “it” – used four times in this brief passage – to blur distinctions between the room and Miriam’s consciousness. Subjects in Richardson’s sentences are purposefully indistinct because Miriam’s affective experience is both subjective and objective: the public, structural element signified by the room conditions Miriam’s private emotional experiences and vice versa. If the room does not respond to her playing, she cannot exist. The pronoun “it” enables Richardson to collapse boundaries between self and other throughout Pilgrimage and to suggest how boredom and the fear of meaninglessness do the same. In the following passage from The Tunnel, Miriam fights against the deadening of affect and loss of meaning associated with conventionality. The language is disorienting because the subject is unclear, but that is the very point:

Boredom as Social System

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[S]he looked across at the early morning distance, misty black and faint misty green . . . . Something had happened to it. It was not beautiful or anything. It was not anything. . . . That was the punishment . . . . The landscape mind noted the fact. There was dismay in it. Staring at the landscape she felt the lifelessness of her face; as if something had brushed across it and swept the life away, leaving her only sight. She could never feel any more. Behind her fi xed eyes, something new seemed moving forward with a strange indifference. Suddenly the landscape unrolled. The rim of the horizon was no longer the edge of the world. She lost sight of it in the rolling out of the landscape in her mind, out and out, in a light easy stretch, showing towns and open country and towns again, seas and continents on and on; empty and still. Nothing. Everywhere in the world, nothing. She drifted back to herself and clung, bracing herself. She was somebody . . . . Her strained nerves relaxed. In a moment she would be inside it, being carried back into her own world. She felt eagerly towards it. Heartsease was there. She would be able to breathe again. But not in the same way; unless she could forget. There were other eyes looking at it. They were inside her; not caring for the things she had cared for, dragging her away from them.

One might wonder what “it” is. To know what it is is to provide an orientation to the passage, to know whether the drama is internal or external. The ambiguity is, of course, the point, for inside and outside are porous to Miriam; seeing nothing in the landscape indicates the deadening of feeling, the apathy she consistently fears. To understand that Miriam is waiting for a train, “it” being a train, however, opens up interpretation to plot at the material level, something the text persistently evades. Miriam’s apathetic panic, her fear of meaninglessness, is simultaneously a fear of other’s meanings encroaching on the private meanings she struggles throughout the text to achieve. In this way, the drama of obscurity is central to the narrative strategy of the text: the female as individual is inaccessible to interpretations based on commonly used narrative conventions. Her meaning is hers. In the early volumes, Miriam occasionally embraces conventional narrative patterns as ways of escaping her circumscribed life. For instance, in Pointed Roofs, Miriam has a romantic rescue fantasy not dissimilar from the one Gerty McDowell experiences in the Naussica episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses: One afternoon, far away, but coming towards her as if in answer to her question, was the figure of a man, walking quickly. For a moment her heart cried out to him. If he would come straight on and, understanding, would walk into her life and she could face things knowing that he was there, the light would come back and would stay until the end and there would be other lives, on and on.

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

She stood transfi xed, trembling. He grew more and more distinct and she saw a handbag and the outline of a bowler hat; a North London clerk burying home to tea. With bent head she turned away and dragged her shamed heavy limbs rapidly towards home.

Notably, Miriam’s fantasy is destroyed by conventionality itself, her own class prejudices in combination with the very banality of her chosen rescuer. Though she might like to be rescued by an all-understanding male who knows and accepts her, surely he too must be an individual, not one of the masses subject to conventional thought. Her shame comes in falling for a plot she knew already to be false. She must slink away because she knows that conventional narrative forms, like the women’s smiles she continues to identify as points of deception, are masks covering a different reality, a reality she continuously struggles to apprehend. Miriam experiences herself in the early volumes as having no choice within given conventions. Fearing her poverty, she bemoans, “The only way to feel quite secure at night would be to marry . . . how awful . . . either you marry and are never alone or you risk being alone and afraid . . . how tiresome, one thing or the other . . . no choice.” The “greyness” that is Pilgrimage poses a threat to the narrative in its inability to envision or invent a satisfactory story for itself. As the novel’s central consciousness, Miriam rejects ready-made plotlines for herself: she does not want to marry, nor is she content to teach in a girls’ school, or to live as a governess in the country. These already tired narratives do not satisfy her, but they do offer escape from her predicament as a human who must sustain herself. While still hemmed in by conventions, she experiences repeated claustrophobia and ennui, her “sense of her duties close . . . in on her.” By now the reader will recognize that Richardson uses ellipses as a persistent feature in Pilgrimage. These ellipses serve multiple purposes: they suggest the passage of time and points of mental or physical transition, they provide a pause during which the reader is enticed into imaginative collaboration with the text, and representationally they show Miriam’s mind at work. The ellipses are critical to showing the liminality of perception: “what can never quite be known, but never quite not be known, by” Miriam. As Jean Frantz Blackall has argued in the case of Edith Wharton’s writings, ellipses “render the effect of a mind at work. And characteristically, when her focus shifts from social or public behavior to inner, subjective and reflective, material, ellipses proliferate.” In the previous passage, the reader can see how boredom is produced out of Miriam’s inability to contemplate her own ideological constitution, linked to her status as woman. When living in London, Miriam visits

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the British Library only to discover, as Virginia Woolf did after her in A Room of One’s Own, centuries of misogyny written down in books. She realizes, “Education would always mean coming in contact with all that [misogyny]” and thinks, “If one could only burn all the volumes; stop the publication of them. But it was all the books, all the literature in the world, right back to Juvenal.” “Life is poisoned, for women,” she concludes, “at the very source.” The only way around such a predicament is to “avoid the plot,” conventionality. “What was the plot for?” Miriam asks, “There’s a word . . . coercion, that’s the word. Better any sort of free life.” Thus Richardson’s feminist agenda as linked to boredom is clear: like ready-made plots, conventional behavior prevents women from creating meaning for themselves and results in a hollowing experience, boredom. Implicitly, Pilgrimage ’s so-called plot is free. It does not coerce; it invites the reader to find his or her place in it. If the reader is bored, it is a reflection that “most people prefer to see everything in groups, collectively. They never lose themselves in strangeness and wake changed.”                :                     Thematically, Richardson’s Pilgrimage approaches boredom first as an inevitable component of a woman’s life and later as a critique of the conventions that circumscribe women’s lives, those that Miriam seeks to avoid. Miriam’s pilgrimage is a quest to circumvent boredom and instead achieve self-realization, a concept that until the turn of the twentieth century had been the right and privilege of the male. Here Richardson’s novel diverges thematically from Sinclair’s Mary Olivier and Woolf’s The Voyage Out, whose relationships to female self-realization were quite different. Where Sinclair could only create a female ‘I’ entirely apart from the temporal and social conditions of its emergence, Woolf questioned the value of individualism altogether. In open agon, Richardson insists on Miriam’s individuality, and the novel is an exercise in continuous and instantaneous self-awareness as individual freedom and self-assertion. Dorothy Richardson’s friend and patron, Winifred Bryher, remarked of Pilgrimage: “There is no better English social history of the years between  and .” Concurrent with suffragist feminism in England, Pilgrimage ’s narrative registers boredom as a private ramification of women’s lack of access to public culture. Where suffragists and legalreform feminists argued for the public rights of women, Richardson joined

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

literary feminists in registering boredom and vacuity as the private result of women’s lack of participation in public culture, and wrote against it. Sarah Grand argued in a  article, “The Case of the Modern Spinster,” that a woman’s “sphere is a sphere of idleness, or, at best, of futile pursuits.” As elaborated in Chapter , progressive and liberal journals and magazines of the period are filled with articles complaining about middle- and upperclass women’s enforced inactivity. They attack not just that inactivity, but the perceived results of that inactivity – women’s frivolity. As a teenager in the early volumes of Pilgrimage, Miriam Henderson does not analyze the causes of women’s behavior, but vehemently repudiates that behavior, asserting that she “loathed” women just as her father did and associating herself as more male than female. Later as a teacher in a North London school for girls, she comes to understand the role of education in shaping women’s expectations of themselves, and registers that “[s]omething in the way they were brought up made English women so awful – with their smiles,” and that “girls schools were horrid, bound to be horrid, sly, mean, somehow tricky and poisonous.” Over the course of Pilgrimage, Miriam comes to the conclusion that women are encouraged to be deceitful in order to perpetuate the patriarchal order in which men are encouraged to have thoughts and desires that are set into relief by women’s suppression of theirs. Women’s constant suppression leads to self-alienation, a state akin to psychoanalytic descriptions of boredom in which one has a desire or aim but, because it is unacceptable or creates conflict, represses it and makes it unavailable to one’s consciousness. Boredom in feminist modernist fiction is shown to mask female anger and aggression. Miriam recognizes female anger as in fact frustration at having to deny their desires: ‘Ragbags, bundles of pretence,’ she thought, as she confronted the women. They glanced up with cunning eyes. They looked small and cringing. She rushed on, sweeping them aside . . . . Who had made them so small and cheated and for all their smiles so angry? What was it they wanted? What was it women wanted that always made them so angry?

Clearly aligning repression of desire with anger, Miriam identifies common female behavior with passive-aggressive deception and denial. Boredom – one manifestation of repressed anger – is the result of having limited pathways of desire for women. But as is shown also in May Sinclair’s and Virginia Woolf’s texts, rage is unacceptable behavior in females of the early twentieth century, and so, repressed, it becomes boredom.

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Miriam experiences boredom as routine to conventional behavior. Registering her boredom one night at a dinner party at the Corrie’s house, then-governess Miriam feels she is ready to pretend she was interested in them so that the voice might go on; pretending to be interested when he stopped. That was feminine worldliness, pretending to be interested so that the pleasant things might go on. Masculine worldliness was refusing to be interested so that it might go on doing things. Feminine worldliness then meant perpetual hard work and cheating and pretence at the door of a hidden garden, a lovely hidden garden. Masculine worldliness meant never being really there; always talking about things that had happened or making plans for things that might happen. There was nothing that could happen that was not in some way the same as anything else. Nobody was ever quite there, realizing.

In this passage, the words “pretending,” “interested,” and “go on” are each repeated hypnotically as though Miriam is put into a trance by the exercise of listening to this man talk. Indeed she is. For if she must pretend interest, by implication she is bored, and it is this very bored state she describes as “feminine worldliness.” Equally, however, Miriam understands that to operate from either a masculine or a feminine position is to repress something, to deaden possibility. Her understanding of the falsehoods perpetuated by their rigidified gender roles gives rise to the final statement: “There was nothing that could happen that was not in some way the same as anything else.” This is boredom in its most intense form, a sense of impending monotony and the “radical doubt of the possibility of purposive action and of the existence of true volition.” In psychological terms, this doubt derives in part from “the inability to desire or to have desire fulfilled.” The recognition of this lack, the yawning gap between self and desire, which is actively revealed in boredom, forms the backbone of feminist critiques in the early twentieth century. Having experienced the self-suppression required of conventional patriarchy, Miriam generalizes that “[n]early all women were like that, living in a gloom where there were no thoughts,” and reaches the definitive conclusion that “there was nothing for women in marriage and children. Because they had no thoughts.” Indeed, in the eighth volume of Pilgrimage, The Trap, she calls marriage “tragedy.” She observes that married women disappear into their husbands, losing any trace of themselves. Over time, she registers “the mild restrained self-effacing watchfulness of women.” The conventional women she knows are “strained and defaced, all masked watchfulness, cut off from themselves.” Miriam refuses not to have a self, and the continuous documentary exercise of Pilgrimage is a technê of self through sheer will to awareness.

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

Self-alienation, or dissociation, was a critical component of women’s conventional behavior at the turn of the twentieth century. Without it, the conservative Spectator magazine could not have observed in : “However tired a man may be, he is always bored by doing nothing. Now the ordinary woman is very well pleased without any positive pleasures.” The emptiness of women’s experience is registered here not as just the norm, but as a positive norm. Pilgrimage rejects this image and instead asserts Miriam’s quest for personal fulfillment as directly at odds with normative expectations of female behavior. Penny Brown, in noting the ways in which May Sinclair’s protagonist Mary Olivier is similar to Miriam Henderson – “they are both intellectually and mystically inclined and resentful of the limitations of gender and stereotyping” – also registers the fundamental difference between them: Miriam “does not irremediably internalize social attitudes but learns to identify, attack and defy them.” Because Pilgrimage rejected formal and social conventionality and patriarchal social arrangements, its reviews were often antagonistic. Richardson lamented reviews of her novel The Trap in a  letter to her friend P. Beaumont Wadsworth: “My Trap press: Brickbats & vitriol, & here & there a more understanding appreciation than I’ve yet had. I understand the bewilderment & – seeing that they lack imagination – the Boredom of most men in a world of which they know nothing. But their Fury is a little puzzling.” Patricia Meyer Spacks explains, however, that male fury at the expression of female boredom is not in fact puzzling: “[A] fearful fantasy hovers around the image of the bored woman . . . . To reject as uninteresting what conventional life has to offer . . . constitutes a psychic act of profound hostility.” Miriam Henderson is hostile to conventional life because she sees in the deceitful, bored women around her a suppressed anger and lack of self she seeks to avoid by striving for a fuller realization of herself and her aims. She does not want to be caught in the “ways of doing and being that drive away solitude, the marvelous quiet sense of life at first hand.” Framing Miriam’s boredom as a rejection of conventionality confirms Laurie Langbauer’s claim that “literary critics interested in boredom have treated it as an apotopaic response: they see it as the way the individual subject denies or manages the threat to his individuality from encompassing systems that swamp it.” There is no question that Miriam’s boredom is an individualist’s defense against the threat of engulfment by conventionality; this is a central modernist plot, and Pilgrimage engages it. She fiercely rejects conventional women as threatening to her very being: “I will never

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again be at the mercy of such women or at all in the places where they are. That means keeping free of all groups. In groups sooner or later one of them appears, dead and sightless and bringing blindness and death . . . . I run away from them because I must. They kill me.” Unlike female protagonists in novels prior to Pilgrimage who experience their individuality as in conflict with their need to conform, Miriam experiences her individuality as an end in itself. She fears conformity as a kind of death. Where May Sinclair in The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, Mary Olivier, and The Three Sisters and Virginia Woolf in The Voyage Out chose to represent their female protagonists as trapped in literal death or the death-in-life otherwise known as boredom, Richardson portrays her character’s vigilance to avoid that death. Miriam’s ability to register herself as an individual with purposes at odds with her environment, and her willingness to pursue that individualism despite costs to her physical and emotional comfort, as well as that of the readers, reflects a new belief in selfhood that was central to the development of feminism in the early twentieth century.        ,          ,                       The concept of self-realization became so banalized in the late twentieth century, it is difficult to understand how charged it was in the early twentieth century, particularly for women. Indeed, Sowon Park has noted that modernist “bildungsromanae, memoirs, biographies and autobiographies” are “often overshadowed by studies of those narratives of the same period that foreground the instability of the ‘I,’ made by feminist postmodernists eager to sanction poststructural ideas of unstable subjectivities.” Yet to do so is to overlook the very obvious fact that “women writers not only fought to achieve unified subject positions in contemporary and historical dialogues, but also enacted them socio-politically.” Becoming an individual was a serious project of the early twentieth century. Intellectual journals of the period consistently advocate “[s]elf-realisation in place of self-suppression” and note that there is “very little practical individualism in even the most individualistic of modern societies.” Women’s suffrage in particular regards the vote as an important vehicle toward self-realization. As expressed in the Fortnightly Review, “women will never find their full scope or their wrongs redressed until they can command a voice in the country’s affairs. The vote alone, it seems, will give them a proper status in the world.” Acknowledging that lack of



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

access to, and participation in, public culture prevents women from realizing themselves forges an important link between individualism and boredom. That is, if one has no public voice, one must repress oneself, resulting in boredom. Boredom presumes a self and a will, however, and so partakes of the historical moment that deeply values self-realization, a process with which the modernist discourse of psychoanalysis is continuous. Boredom springs from an increasing sense of what one author in a  article in The English Review described as “the growing rights of personality”: When women obtain it [the vote] we shall be obliged to recognise, as they are beginning to recognise now, that their happiness, like our own, lies, if anywhere, in the realization of the self, and not in self-suppression, self-abnegation, or any of the other dismal virtues we have imposed on them for our own comfort. The assertion of self, the fulfillment of function, is the final object of life. It may not bring happiness, but without it happiness is impossible, and for women, as for men, the methods of exercising it are infinitely varied.

To claim that the assertion of self is the final object of life is a radical break from dominant Christian tradition. As The New Age proclaimed in , “Everybody knows that the whole tone of British ethics, if not the very basis of ethics itself, has required self-abnegation of the person.” Thus Miriam Henderson’s “pilgrimage” toward herself – the modern site of the holy – needs to be understood as what it in fact is: both of its time and, in being so, revolutionary. The term “pilgrimage” implies an excursion to a place already deemed sacred. This is Miriam’s essential self, the self she celebrates when she says, “I am back now where I was before I started trying to do things like other people. I left home to get here. None of those things can touch me here.” Spatially, “here” is the room she rents in Mrs. Bailey’s house in London, but this room also represents self-consciousness, awareness of herself as an individual: “Twenty-one and only one room to hold the richly renewed consciousness, and a living to earn, but the self that was with her in the room was the untouched tireless self of her seventeenth year and all the earlier time.” This is the self she recognizes and celebrates in moments of shocking discovery: “It’s me, me; this is me being alive.” For Miriam, advancing toward herself is at the same time a return to the self. Important in these moments is the three-dimensional awareness of time – not time as linear process, but rather as spatial entity into which one can enter. Miriam’s celebrated self exists as an ever-available presence-in-time that that can only be encountered in solitude, save in Dawn’s Left Hand during her love affair with the wholly sympathetic

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

Amabel. In Pointed Roofs, “She became aware of a curious buoyancy rising within her. It was so strange that she stood still for a moment on the stair. For a second, life seemed to cease in her and the staircase to be swept from under her feet . . . . ‘I’m alive.’. . . It was as if something had struck her, struck right through her impalpable body, sweeping it away, leaving her there shouting silently without it. I’m alive . . . . I’m alive.” In The Tunnel, Miriam links her true self to freedom: “If you are free, you are alive. To-day, because I am free I am the same person I was when I was there, but much stronger and happier because I know it. As long as I can sometimes feel like this nothing has mattered. Life is a chain of happy moments that cannot die.” Miriam secures her freedom by introducing discontinuity into time’s continuity. The disconnected moments by which she connects to her self place her outside time as another marker of conventional meaning, as somehow continuous with boredom. Miriam perceives her self as threatened by conventionality, and understands her choices schismatically: “What was life? Either playing a part all the time in order to be amongst people in the warm, or standing alone with the strange true real feeling.” The schism Miriam sees as guiding her actions positions her as either independent or dependent, with no grey area in between. Adam Phillips describes boredom in children as being comprised of the tension between these two subject positions: “In simple terms the child always has two concurrent, overlapping projects: the project of self-sufficiency in which use of, and need for, the other is interpreted, by the child, as a concession; and a project of mutuality that owns up to a dependence. In the banal crisis of boredom, the conflict between the two projects is once again renewed.” Phillips’ articulation of boredom suggests why its representation is critical to modernist women’s fiction. In arguing for a role in public life, women were asserting themselves as self-sufficient and realized individuals, but to gain access to public life they needed to own up to their dependence on men to grant them independence. In psychosocial terms, women inhabited the position of children. The boredom that runs rife through the period is both an evasion of and a defense mechanism against this difficult reality, a reality made clearer to girls as they increasingly attended schools like Miriam Henderson’s that conveyed the novel sensation that “they mattered.” Having confirmed that the “school had done something to her. It had not gone against the things she found in herself,” Miriam sets out on a quest for self-realization, largely defined by the obstacles to it, including boredom. To experience herself, her own desire, Miriam has to avoid



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

the deadening power of conventional expectations for women. She has to learn to quiet the internalized voice of conventionality – “I am some sort of bad, unsimple woman” – and instead come to hear her own voice more clearly and more consistently. Miriam’s early demonstrations of selfhood are typically rebellious. For instance, as a governess at the Corrie’s, she makes a bold statement by being the only woman to smoke at a dinner party: “Miriam discharged a double stream of smoke violently through her nostrils – breaking out at last a public defiance of the freemasonry of women. ‘I suppose I’m a new woman – I’ve said I am now, anyhow,’ she reflected, wondering in the background of her determination how she would reconcile the role with her work as a children’s governess.” Miriam’s dilemma in stressing her independence, as shown by her query here, is that it rarely accords with the options available to her. She encounters few role models and has to forge her own place in a social world organized along gendered lines. In Deadlock, Miriam’s would-be lover Shatov complains that she is “too individualistic,” but, as Miriam explains in Revolving Lights, “Men, and the women who imitate them, bleat about women finding their truest fulfillment in self-sacrifice,” whereas “the male art” of self-realization is a certainty men have “from the beginning.” “To be alive,” she says, “and to know it, makes a selfless life impossible.” As the novel nears its end in The Trap, Miriam vows again, “I must create my life. Life is creation. Self and circumstances the raw material.” But she will need to do so by supporting herself. In the nineteenth century, work became a defining vehicle of self-realization for men, but the challenges for women were daunting.               In her book Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, –, Morag Schiach argues that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, work comes to be conceived as the defining aspect of human individuality in Britain. The general language of professionalism in the modernist era was one of liberalism, individualism, and merit. Notably, these concepts were gendered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the attributes of gentlemen (the formal routes to a liberal classical education were closed to women). Individualist ideals could, however, be exploited by women to argue for participation in the professions and the public sphere generally. The triumphalist narrative of female achievement in the twentieth century maintains that women entered the workforce in the early twentieth

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century in unprecedented numbers. Data contradicts this. Morag Schiach points out that the numbers of working women remained fairly steady between  and , about  percent for most of the period. What did change, Schiach details, was that participation of married women declined significantly while the types of jobs women could have expanded. One commentary on the  census returns boasted of married women that “[t]he great bulk of women are fortunately, in this country, free at all ages to devote their attention to the care of their households.” In the early twentieth century, young, single women occupied a larger portion of the female workforce, and jobs were redistributed from the industrial to the tertiary sector of the economy. Louise Tilly and Joan Scott point out, however, that, “[a]lthough single middle-class women were drawn into these jobs for the first time, they represented a minority of the female work force. The vast majority of working women – in white collar as in manufacturing jobs – came from the working class.” Where the First World War presented a unique opportunity for women, drawing . million women workers into the British economy, the s, according to historian Gail Braybon, witnessed a backlash against working women, and where the press had anticipated changes around the conceptions of women’s status, attitudes changed very little. These facts suggest that even though conditions changed for working women, expectations for female behavior did not. “New categories of women’s work presented no threat to established ‘male’ professions and institutions,” Ann Ardis has commented. “They simply supplemented existing public services; they provided support service for professions and institutions controlled by men.” While work was coming to define individual middle-class males and affording them pathways to self-development and spiritual distinction, middle-class females continued to experience, alongside the working class, limited options in the workplace, especially if they were married. In the first half of Pilgrimage, work represents alienation in the Marxist sense. Miriam’s estrangement from the product of her labor is alienation not just from the product of her labor, but from herself. She struggles with this threat to herself in the terms of boredom. Later in the novel, as Miriam escapes the confines of women’s labor by engaging in intellectual labor, work provides pathways to self-realization and the pleasures of vocation. Feminists of the period argued vociferously for women’s right to work, and, within the bourgeois-liberal framework of human rights, argued specifically in terms of work’s ability to develop individuals. Olive Schreiner complains in Women and Labour that “whatever the result of the changes



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

of modern civilization may be with regard to the male, he certainly cannot complain that they have as a whole robbed him of his fields of labour, diminished his share of conduct of life, or reduced him to a condition of morbid inactivity.” Further she argues, “We demand . . . that in this new world we also shall have our share of honoured and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labour of the children of women . . . . This is our ‘WOMAN’S RIGHT!’” As does Schreiner, St. Clair Stobart articulates the problem in evolutionary terms, viewing women’s desire for work as a sign of evolution rather than degeneration: “[W]omen are only in the position of those daring spirits amongst the old Crustacea who first determined to cast off their encumbering shells, and seek their own livelihood in the deep waters, rather than die of starvation clinging to rocks which the tide had forever left.” Suffragist and actress Elizabeth Robins, although more interested in collective identities than individualism, defends work as the occupation of interest and joy – boredom’s opposites – and argues that “it is mere thoughtless sentimentality to wish to legislate for all women at all times of their lives, as though the Madonna picture represented the static, the only possible aspect of the adult woman.” Where feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Women and Economics () and Olive Schreiner swathed their rhetoric of women’s rights in evolutionary terms, and therefore mingled claims for individuality with racial and group claims, Dora Marsden argued that women had to see themselves as individuals in order to develop at all: “The New Freewoman is not for the advancement of Woman, but for the empowering of individuals – men and women; it is not to set women ‘free’ but to demonstrate the fact that ‘freeing’ is the individual’s affair and must be done first-hand.” Self-development was thus implicitly and overtly linked to women’s work. Miriam Henderson must overcome her class prejudices as well as gendered stereotypes of appropriate work in order to develop the full independence she needs to become an individual. She recalls local girls she knew who were to be “‘independent,’ trained and certificated” and she envied them, but her middle-class sensibilities belittle this independence when she agrees with her sister that the girls were “‘sharp’ and ‘knowing.’” To avoid the class associations of secretarial work, she works as a teacher and a governess – fully socially accepted roles for a young, middle-class woman. Miriam’s teaching jobs do not offer her opportunities for self-realization, but enforce the role-playing she associates with women’s suppression. She sees her jobs as dead ends, jobs where she is to be “shut up away from the

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grown-up things, the sunlit world, and the people who were enjoying it.” She feels trapped emotionally as well as financially: “She would have to go on being a resident governess, keeping ten pounds a year for dress and paying over the rest of her salary.” Miriam begins to break free upon the decision to live alone in London and work as a dental assistant for  a week. But this job reinforces what her boss calls “the Christian virtues” predominantly associated with women’s boredom, namely “Resignation.” As Anita Levy has observed, Richardson “joins Sarah Grand, Lucy Jackson and other female writers of popular fiction in depicting the world of work as occasionally lonely, sometimes tedious, and always difficult.” Miriam struggles with the elements of work that force self-suppression rather than self-realization. She asks herself, “could God approve of this kind of thing? . . . was it right to spend life cleaning instruments? . . . the blank moment again, of gazing about in vain for an alternative . . . all work has drudgery.” Having tried to resign herself to this work that affords her an independent if impoverished life in London, she nevertheless endures stretches of boredom on a daily basis. Richardson shows her “drowsily and automatically . . . rolling tin and gold” while thinking abstractly of city scenes. Later that day, “a horrible torpor possessed her” and she mentally examines a gray wall repeatedly, symbolizing the impediments to self-realization formed by her work. Just as the wall emblematizes her interior state, so the room embodies the boredom that engulfs her on the job: Her empty room glanced with a strange confused sadness; the clearing up upstairs was not quite done; but she could not go upstairs again yet. Threefifteen; the afternoon had turned; her clock was a little slow, too. The warm, quiet, empty den was waiting for the tea-tray. Clearing the remnants from her table, she sat down again. The heavy stillness of the house closed in . . . . She opened the drawer of stationery . . . . With comatose meticulousness she put the whole drawer in order, replenishing it from a drawer of reserve packets, until it was so full that nothing could slide. She surveyed the result with satisfaction; and shut the drawer. She would tidy one drawer every afternoon . . . . She sat for a while inertly, and presently lazily roused herself with the idea of going upstairs.

Miriam’s boredom in this scene is not a nihilist encounter with emptiness; rather, it is situational boredom, brought on by menial, repetitive tasks and the generally low expectations turn-of-the-century British patriarchy had for women. This passage uses thematic elements typical of boredom in feminist modernist fiction: claustrophobia, the slowing or stoppage of time, and repetition. These elements are also common



Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

to a strain of post-Marxist nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought that framed work not as a vehicle for self-development, but as an agent of alienation. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche frames boredom as the psychic expression of mechanical conformity: “What is the task of any high-school education system?” – To turn man into a machine. – “By what means?” – He must learn to be bored. To a great many – and, as Marx would argue, especially the working class in which working women were grouped almost exclusively – work was alienation and boredom. As discussed in Chapter , where Marxist alienation accounts for the male worker who can only feel himself outside of work, it does not account for female worker whose home life functioned as much a product of her labor as her work life. For this woman there was no “outside” to production that could function as her inside, interior life; she was doubly alienated. For Miriam, boredom also signifies potential. If this job bores her, empties her of her contents, then there is more to Miriam – fullness, yet to be discovered. Representing boredom at work functions to highlight the depths whose discovery is necessary to the interiority that accompanies the bildungsroman form and self-realization. Miriam puts up with this work for years, but becomes increasingly frustrated with its lack of development. Upon a return from the holidays, she finds herself “back in the smell of iodoform for another year; knowing that the holidays had changed nothing; that there was nothing in life that could fulfill their promises, nothing but the circling pressing details” that promise to “fill her days and leave her for her share only tired evenings.” No longer situational boredom, the everyday tedium of her job has translated into a general deadening of possibility (“everything would be dead again”) and nihilistic boredom in which the “world is emptied of its significance.” This feeling becomes intensified for Miriam over time and, coupled with a miscarried pregnancy resulting from her affair with Hypo Wilson, her claustrophobia is translated by her friend Dr. Densley into a nervous breakdown. Miriam’s “neurasthenia” reinforces the idea that women have limited capacity for work and are best off doing nothing. As The Spectator argued in , “we believe more women break down from doing unnecessary work than ever break down from seeking unnecessary distraction.” Having been diagnosed with neurasthenia herself, Richardson knew of the rest cure firsthand. Devised by Silas Weir Mitchell and endorsed throughout North America and Western Europe, the rest cure grew out of the belief that modernity, with its industrialization and “overcivilization,” as

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J.H. Kellog described it, had caused a degeneracy of the will. For women, diagnoses of neurasthenia “grew from the concept that the mental and physical work associated with new social, educational, and occupational roles for women led to depletion of nerve force.” Elizabeth Goodstein argues that at the turn of the century, “neurasthenia and even insanity would begin to compete with bored withdrawal as signs of spiritual distinction. Thus a sense of boredom as a ‘philosophical’ experience often persisted even among those who advocated a psychological interpretation of ennui as a nervous ailment.” With these available meanings, Miriam’s neurasthenia can be seen to operate at a variety of levels. Medically, it records the institutionalized patriarchal response to her independence, whether in work or choosing to have a sexual affair outside of marriage. After all, it is Densley, the doctor who had proposed to her, who diagnoses her and tells her to rest. Miriam views his diagnosis as “borrowed dogma as to the evils, for women, of intellectual pursuits,” and while she registers “the deranging and dehumanizing of women by uncritical acceptance of masculine systems of thought,” she simultaneously realizes that she can use these very conventional beliefs about women to her advantage to quit her job and begin her life as a writer. Playing her proper role, Miriam asks Densley what he would prescribe for her and then “waited guiltily; breathlessly watching this unconscious assistant who was to put the weight of an opinion in which she could not quite believe at the service of a scheme that could not be realized and that yet was sending through her wave upon wave of healing joy.” Miriam uses the medical beliefs about the dangers for women of intellectual work to achieve the spiritual distinction, indeed the freedom, she longs for. Here Miriam adapts conventional beliefs for her own uses. Miriam’s “breakdown” functions as a potential moment for redevelopment and release. Martha Vicinus has noted that “women of intelligence and ambition broke down under the combined pressures of family opposition, social expectations, and a lack of clear personal goals,” and that illness was a common female “retreat into the self in order to gain the courage and ego strength to break out permanently” or not at all. Representationally, using Goodstein’s thesis, Miriam’s neurasthenia is further confirmation of her spiritual distinction, her depth that insists on discovering its fulfillment. As a bored, and then as a neurasthenic, woman, she can reject the preformed roles available to her, including finally her work for Dr. Hancock inasmuch as it has failed to develop her self. Through this she can achieve the final break she needs to become a wholly realized individual. The neurasthenia shapes her identity in

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

relation to the social fabric by which she can construct herself as a writer. She can withdraw under the cover of conventionality, just as the bored woman may do in order to find a space that defends her from without while providing a space in which to inhabit indifference. Recovery from her breakdown and the independent life Miriam lives after lead her to her final pronouncement: “Fully to recognize, one must be alone. Away in the furthest reaches of one’s being.” There is an irony here that where boredom can be read as a form of withdrawal, so can Miriam’s form of self-realization. But there are important distinctions. First, in boredom, one is not present to oneself, and this is the source of tension. Bored withdrawal is retreat from self and others. In contrast, Miriam’s journey to the furthest reaches of her being is a self-encounter that permits others as long as they allow her to maintain her individuality: “[O]ne can richly be, even with others, provided they have no claim.” Miriam has found that the only way to experience her own desire is by ensuring others have no claim on her – an extraordinarily difficult subject position to achieve, and a prescription for women that eschewed conventional marriage and motherhood as “womanly tragedy, the loss of the self in the procession of unfamiliar unwanted things. In the company of a partner already immersed in his own familiar life.” Miriam’s romantic friend, Amabel, disappears into such a marriage with Miriam’s former suitor Shatov and serves as a foil for her own more difficult and solitary strivings.            :      ’       Pilgrimage is the long, detailed account of Miriam Henderson’s fierce determination to be an individual in order to stave off the loss of self and vacuity she sees as the necessary concomitant for women of marriage and life circumscribed by conventional thought. Boredom to her is entry into social life, which is gendered male. But on the other side of social life lies what she calls “the true feeling.” This “true feeling,” like Mary Olivier’s “brilliant flashes” or the momentary radiance of Gwenda’s inner world in May Sinclair’s novels, or Virginia Woolf’s “moments of being,” reveal an important strand in their work relating not to boredom, but an opposite affect: transcendent wonder and self-connection. Sinclair, Woolf, and Richardson each feature their protagonists in moments of dreamlike excitement and profound wonder in contact with “pattern,” “inner feeling,” or “the true feeling.” In combining boredom and astonishment, these modernist texts are akin to – but distinct from – literary works

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by Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett that Sianne Ngai has categorized as creating “stuplimity,” a mixture of stupefaction and the sublime generated when one confronts the “limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as a totality, as does Kant’s mathematical sublime, yet not through an encounter with the infinite but with the finite bits and scraps of material in repetition” (). Rather, in these feminist modernist texts, there is an auratic presence that makes itself known to the characters in Sinclair, Woolf, and Richardson’s novels, one that not only denies limitation and absence, but affirms exhilarating wonder – boredom’s opposite – as a vital presence. Importantly, Miriam Henderson, Mary Olivier, and Rachel Vinrace must move away from human relationships and their sexual identities to achieve these moments. The self is revealed as solitary and static, unable to emerge successfully from the self-other dialectic. Recognition, as discussed in Chapter , so desired in order for women to concretize their selves as such, is shown in these works to be a form of death. This is because, in Judith Butler’s words, “the terms by which recognition operates may seek to fix and capture us, they run the risk of arresting desire, and putting an end to life.” But the result does not produce vital options. The texts emphasize being over becoming and temporal discontinuity over continuity. This allows their characters to be open to the present and to expand time perceived positively, without exerting their will, but it does not allow them to operate as individuals within existing social terms. The leitmotif of Pilgrimage is the series of ecstatic moments of selfrealization in which Miriam encounters what she thinks of as her true self, reuniting with itself, in time: “If you are free, you are alive. To-day, because I am free I am the same person I was when I was there, but much stronger and happier because I know it. As long as I can sometimes feel like this nothing has mattered. Life is a chain of happy moments that cannot die.” These moments come again and again, reaffirming Miriam’s self-presence, her “endless inward singing,” the opposite of the absence of self experienced in boredom. Just as in May Sinclair’s and Virginia Woolf’s texts, Pilgrimage grapples with boredom in order to invest the process of living, and the interior lives of women, with an affective attachment to joy in self-presence and awareness of being. As thrilling as this may be, it leaves untouched the question of whether a woman can be an individual within the social real, and leaves unquestioned the value of the individual as a whole. Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, takes up these questions.

 

Boredom and Individualism in Virginia Woolf ’s The Voyage Out

Aimless, trivial, meaningless, oh no – what she had seen at tea made it impossible for her to believe that. The little jokes, the chatter, the inanities of the afternoon had shriveled before her eyes. Underneath the likings and spites, the comings together and partings, great things were happening – terrible things because they were so great. Her sense of safety was shaken, as if beneath twigs and dead leaves she had seen the movement of a snake. It seemed to her that a moment’s respite was allowed, a moment’s make-believe, and then again the profound and reasonless law asserted itself, moulding them all to its own liking, making and destroying.

Launching her writing career after her father’s death in , Virginia Woolf became a public woman of letters just months after the Women’s Social and Political Union formed and as feminists took to the streets, newspapers, and parliament in the cause of women’s political and social freedom. The literary works of Woolf’s feminist modernist peers May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson present women’s lack of selfhood as a fact that must be overcome, but the determined individuals they create cannot exist in genuine and prolonged social relation with others. Their selves are closely guarded secrets; their success is by definition marginal. The Voyage Out takes up the question of whether a woman can be a selfdetermining individual within the conventions and institutions of patriarchal society and, through Rachel Vinrace’s failure, seems to answer with a resounding “no.” But The Voyage Out is a fascinating exploration of this question, in particular through its textual use of boredom. Woolf uses the diffuse mood of boredom as a vehicle by which to express doubt not only about a young woman’s ability to access any meaning or individual purpose, but, more broadly, to question individualism and the systems of knowing by which humans understand purpose and meaning. The Voyage Out can be a disturbing book, precisely because it undermines narrative traditions in which meaning is embedded and replaces them with yawning gaps, shifts in perspective, odd and jarring images, 

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and a lack of narrative closure, all of which threaten meaning itself. There is a persistent, inhuman element in the novel that makes it more than a feminist protest novel. At the time of its publication critics called it a “bewildering” novel that left the reader unsure “of the meaning of it all.” As Woolf’s contemporary Allan Monkhouse has noted, the reader detects in the novel, like a bored woman herself, a “certain insolence of withdrawal from a world condemned as ponderous or meaningless.” Portrayed diff usely, Rachel Vinrace is the apparent center of this uncertain world. Like so many women featured in literature in the early twentieth century, Rachel Vinrace is silent, vague, and more of an absence than a presence. She has failed the qualifications of post-Cartesian selfhood in which access to the truth is defined within knowledge. Rachel knows nothing; she thinks and feels, but she is an outsider to a system that produces knowing individuals. Yet where Rachel Vinrace might be pigeonholed as another bored woman of limited possibilities – and she is that – she also escapes those possibilities through her curious illness and death at the end of the novel. Here The Voyage Out distinguishes itself as a far more interesting, far more experimental novel than at first it might appear. The Voyage Out refuses to privilege the individual as source of meaning and organizing principle either of knowledge or of the novel as form. Rachel is a featured person in the story, but importantly and notably, the novel begins and ends in others’ stories, as if to remind the reader that no one person is so remarkable as to inform what is knowable and significant. In Woolf’s first attempt, the novel becomes a form by which to posit an openness to being outside of, or beyond, the individual – a form she would master in her later works. In The Voyage Out, there are multiple boredoms. On one level, Woolf protests, alongside May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson, women’s difficulty in achieving meaning in the male-formed world and presents boredom, often quite humorously, as a side effect of this confrontation. On another level, however, Woolf presents boredom much in the way that Martin Heidegger described profound boredom in his –  lectures on the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, as an indeterminate mood that undoes all interest and possibility and in which time becomes an empty, yawning expanse. Th is form of boredom is an unmooring of all meaning-making possibilities in which time functions much like space does in making relative, and therefore irrelevant, all human action. Woolf ’s focus on the disclosure of being, just as Heidegger’s, eschews an instrumental view of life and living; boredom as a being made open to that which is closed to us, “the indiff erence

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

enveloping beings as a whole,” is the inverse of the positivist, capitalist form of boredom as lack of aim presented by early-twentieth-century feminists. The Voyage Out, written and rewritten repeatedly between  and , is concerned not just with the political representation of the bored woman as a failed individual, but in representing boredom as fruitful attunement to a way of being and accessing existence in terms other than positivist individualism. The Voyage Out presents knowing as necessary to the modern subject formation of the individual, and demonstrates how knowing subjects reduce other subjects to objects simply as a by-product of that knowing. But the novel presents individual existences of subjects and objects only to supplant them with boredom. Boredom unravels subjects as separate from objects and leaves one empty simply because it presents one with being that cannot be known, the indifference of time and being itself.   ’                  Woolf was no stranger to boredom. Her own earliest diaries, recorded at age fifteen after a breakdown following her mother’s death, observe over and over again the “dull,” “uninteresting,” and “melancholy” existence she led as she endured a partial version of the rest cure so often prescribed to “neurasthenic” women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Woolf defined boredom and its more prolonged form, depression, as symptomatic of the stifled young women of her time. In her diary of  she remarked of her sister Vanessa’s good friend Margery “Snow” Snowden: “Snow to lunch, rather depressed, in body & mind, like all these vagrant & mildly discontented young women – not enough enthusiasm to carry them through with a swing, & so their existence seems to drag, & lack point rather.” In her memoir The Edwardian Lady, Woolf’s childhood friend Susan Grosvenor, later known as Lady Tweedsmuir, reinforced the idea that young women of the Edwardian period were living muted lives. She explains, “The girls of my generation were supposed to marry and marry well . . . . They were supposed to fill up their time with a little painting, a little reading, some music, to stay about in country houses, and generally play a sort of waiting game until the right (or wrong) man came along.” These women were painfully aware of their own suppression, as Lady Tweedsmuir relates: “Many of my contemporaries who had been brought up in the strictest sect of young ladyhood rebelled against their enforced idleness and complained to their friends. My cousin, Hilda Lyttleton said bitterly to me one day, ‘I want to do

Boredom and Individualism

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something better than rush up and down Oxford Street hunting for beastly pieces of tulle.’” “Enforced idleness” was a generational plague, observed and rebelled against by Woolf and her contemporaries. Conspicuously, “enforced” idleness implies a social system that rewards idleness, whereas boredom is perceived as an internal state, enforced from within. Boredom hovers between individual and collective experience; the discreet entity of one’s self is pierced (bored), and there is no longer an impregnable barrier between what is outside and what is inside. Woolf exploits this unique construction of boredom to develop her narrative style.                    Boredom’s slippage between individual and social, or group, experiences is mirrored in modernist understandings of human experience. For if early twentieth century Britain inherited individualist systems of politics, society, economics, and epistemology premised on the idea that rights derive from the individual’s innate being and that, in a classically gendered formulation “man” is “free of community restriction,” it also entered an age in which sociology and the psychology of crowds had registered as organizing principles of truth and power. Michael Tratner has convincingly shown that dismantling the individual during the modernist era was “not merely an intellectual, aesthetic, or psychological revelation, but a central feature of political debates, a topic of election speeches, a basis of policy, and commonplace of newspaper and magazine articles.” Inasmuch as modernist literature may focus on its characters’ solipsistic thoughts, those individuals always form part of larger wholes: Clarrisa Dalloway’s and Leopold Bloom’s June days are shared with wide cross-sections of the societies in which they live. Woolf asks the reader of “A Sketch of the Past” to “[c]onsider what immense forces society brings to play upon each of us, how that society changes from decade to decade; and also from class to class.” Modernist texts expose the formation of the social subject, revealing individuals’ thoughts as part of larger social patterns premised on commercial or collective entities such as gender, class, or nationality. From an individualist point of view, Enlightenment ideals of individualism that value self-generated meaning over meaning derived from larger metaphysical or social frameworks (e.g., man’s reason before God’s law) put a heavy burden on the individual to achieve purpose. Momentary lapses of such achievement are experienced as boredom. From the sociological point of view, boredom is a failure of the social structure to address

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

the needs of subgroups within the collective. Feminists who addressed female waste and boredom could easily point to women’s mass exclusion from the public sphere as a structural cause of their disaffection. But in The Voyage Out, boredom functions not merely as outside or inside, but as the often failed and mysterious point of contact between the two. Theorized by the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis in the first few decades of the twentieth century, individual boredom was understood as a self-administered deprivation of the thoughts and fantasies that lead to satisfaction, “a state of longing and an inability to designate what is longed for.” Psychoanalysis, premised, like the bildungsroman, on the conflict created between personal desire and collective demands, sets the stage for the drama of boredom as both individual and collective in Woolf’s first novel. The condition of longing for one knows not what describes Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out. Attempting to define herself in confidence to Clarissa Dalloway, Rachel says, “‘I am lonely . . . I want – ’ She did not know what she wanted, so that she could not finish the sentence.” If boredom is a desire for a desire, then Rachel’s quest for self-realization is the quest to overcome boredom and know her desire. But what prevents Rachel from knowing it? Her own desires are inaccessible to her. Later in the novel, when Rachel angrily complains to Helen, “I tell you, Helen, the world’s bad. It’s an agony, living, wanting –,” it is most significant that, in a repeated pattern of dashes that intimate either self-censorship or searching for an answer, her desire forces silence, a pause. She cannot articulate it. Because she has no place as an individual in the social system in which she lives, her desires must remain unspoken. But it is more than that they are unspoken: they are unexplored, unrealized, somewhat poignantly, by Rachel herself. Rachel’s lack of social agency is part of a pattern in Woolf’s novels. Almost every one of Woolf’s novels features a scene in which a woman is made to socialize with a man, to encourage his talk, while, uninterested in what he says, she sits and tries to think of something else. For example, in The Years, Maggie thinks to herself as she listens to an elderly uncle: “To smile, to bend, to make believe you’re amused when you’re bored, how painful it is.” In The Voyage Out, the narrator notes, “Each of the ladies, being after the fashion of their sex, highly trained in promoting men’s talk without listening to it, could think – about the education of children, about the use of fog sirens in an opera – without betraying herself.” In Night and Day, Mary Datchett “was accustomed to find young men very ready to talk about themselves, and had come to listen to them as one listens to children, without any thought of herself.” Mrs. Ramsay

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heaves a great sigh in To The Lighthouse before embarking on a trip into town with the “insufferable bore” Mr. Tansley who “went on talking, about settlements, and teaching, and working men . . . till she gathered that he had got back entire self confidence.” Boredom born of capitulation to male privilege is featured as an – almost – unavoidable fact of women’s lives in Woolf’s novels. Lily Briscoe forms a remarkable exception to this rule at the Ramsay’s dinner party in To The Lighthouse. Aware that Charles Tansley is looking for a woman to solicit his opinion, she remembers his remark that women cannot paint or write and wonders why she should bother to help him. She muses: There is a code of behaviour, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behooves the woman, whatever her own occupation might be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there smiling.

These representations, even Lily Briscoe’s aggressive smiling, betray the anger beneath boredom and its representation. Just as it does in Sinclair’s and Richardson’s work, this strain of female boredom in Woolf’s work protests rigid gender roles. Her gentle satire reduces not the women she exposes as mimics performing the roles of ideal women, but the roles they must play, and the men who expect them to be identical to their performances. But feminist revolt in The Voyage Out is attenuated because individualism is under suspicion in this novel. Despite the growing influence of new disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, and sociology, which demonstrated that social forces permeate and construct private thoughts and private relationships, individualism was a significant cultural formation of the Edwardian and modernist periods. In her book, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant Garde, Christine Froula argues that Virginia Woolf, along with those associated with the Bloomsbury Group including John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Sigmund Freud, sustained the Kantian Enlightenment tradition by privileging the free, rational individual as the proponent of civilized values. The cultivation of oneself as an individual was an important part of what it meant to be modern. Individualism received considerable attention from little magazines, namely Wyndham Lewis’s Blast, A.R. Orage’s The New Age, and Dora Marsden’s The Freewoman, The New Freewoman,

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

and The Egoist. Feminists relied on the discourse of individual rights to redefine women and the feminine in such a way that promised them greater self-determination and, as such, greater determination of public life. Liberal reforming feminists “insisted on a woman’s right over her own person and property, and on women’s equality with men in the social sphere via education, increased employment opportunities, and political enfranchisement.” While suffragists and feminists used individualism as justification for women’s participation in public life, various literary figures encouraged individualism as its own end. Dora Marsden began her editorial career advocating individualism as a means of female empowerment, and eventually as an anarchist ideal. Called the “Max Stirner of feminism” by feminist advocate Floyd Dell, Marsden participated in the popularization, and perhaps distortion, of Stirner’s individualist ideas. Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own () was translated from German into English in , and between  and , forty-nine editions of the work appeared. Michael Levenson claims Marsden’s “principal and overriding concern” in the New Freewoman “was to trumpet Stirnerian egoism . . . ‘will,’ ‘life,’ and ‘self’ were celebrated as healthy, because egoistic, notions.” In the earlier incarnation of the journal, The Freewoman: A Weekly Feminist Review (–), Marsden argued that most women “By habit of thought, by form of activity, and largely by preference . . . round off the personality of some other individual, rather than create or cultivate their own,” and that if a woman “is an individual, she is free, and will act like those who are free.” Importantly in terms of the relationship between individualism and boredom, Marsden later identifies individualism with desire, boredom’s opposite: “The centre of the Universe lies in the desire of the individual, and the Universe for the individual has no meaning apart from their satisfactions, a means to an end.” In Marsden’s means-end feminism, the individual must be a desiring, self-directed force of will. To postpone desire, or submerge one’s own desires, is a failure and enforces servitude to others. Marsden argues, “When the main thing for women is not what men want but what they want” women will have succeeded; but women’s desires have been suppressed for so long “inhibition has become its own reward.” If to be an individual means knowing and expressing one’s own desire, boredom baffles individualism. Contemporary psychoanalyst Adam Phillips observes this loss of self in his clinical work with children. Phillips explains that children experience boredom as an identity crisis in which a child’s project of self-sufficiency is pitted against acknowledgment of dependence. In boredom, the child does not know who he is

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and waits, as it were, “for himself.” For women of the early twentieth century, knowing one’s own desire, and thus oneself, was a demand that went against one’s training as a woman. The ideal of the self-sacrificing, self-effacing female rewarded women’s early dissociation from desire and punished female expressions of preference. But the increased representation of bored women in early-twentieth-century literature reveals a collective awareness that such desire was missing.                                  T H E V O Y A G E O U T Woolf explores the ways that women can or cannot exist as individuals in her portrayal of Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out. Opening the novel with a warning of the difficulties of individualism, the narrator announces, “In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand.” At first glance, London is depicted as a social machine where individuality is punished. On further inspection, however, the conflict is located not between individual and group, but between social classes. The upper-middle-class Ambroses are dawdling along the busy streets of London followed by “small, agitated figures” who “had appointments to keep and drew a weekly salary, so that there was some reason for the unfriendly stare which was bestowed upon Mr. Ambrose’s height and upon Mrs. Ambrose’s cloak.” Helen Ambrose, we learn shortly after, “knew how to read the people who were passing her; there were the rich who were running to and from each others’ houses at this hour; there were the bigoted workers driving in a straight line to their offices; there were the poor who were unhappy and rightly malignant.” London is a place of social types, not individuals. That the characters are embarking on a voyage away from this stultifying system suggests that perhaps a freer way of life will be possible. Yet life on the ship appears further confirmation that social types prevail. Rachel Vinrace – the heroine whose individuality is in question in this deconstructed bildungsroman – is to be treated as a type, the naive young woman, rather than as an individual. Woolf reminds the reader that Rachel is on “her father’s ship,” and her father, in introducing the party to the Dalloways, lists the ship’s inhabitants as “my brother-in-law, Ambrose, the scholar (I daresay you’ve heard his name), his wife, my old friend Pepper, a very quiet fellow . . . And that’s all.” That her own father does not include Rachel in the list suggests not just her insignificance

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

to him, but figures her presence as a kind of absence. If she is present to him, it is as a possession, like the goats he transports to South America. She has been educated into her lack of presence by her father who opines in Louise DeSalvo’s compiled version of earlier drafts of The Voyage Out, Melymbrosia, that “[a]ction alone justifying talk, it followed that women should be silent, for they seldom do anything.” This masculine opinion alienates women from action, self-expression, or self-acknowledgment – necessary constituents of individualism and traditionally the foundations for good plot making. But here Woolf may be insisting on a form of narrative truth. She notes the preponderance of experiences like Rachel’s for young women in her diary on July , , in a passage titled “Thoughts Upon Social Success”: I feel rather strange, & inclined to be absent minded. I look round the room, see nobody there I know, & forget what one says next . . . . I can only comfort myself when I think of our social peculiarities by reflecting that we have this in common with the women of the world – we are equally at home everywhere – (not at all, that is to say) & we are confined to no one set in particular. This explains why it is usual for us to come into a room, & after shaking hands with our hostess, sit silent all the rest of the evening. We always seem to be outsiders where everybody else is intimate.

Woolf’s notion that women are nowhere at home in the world, along with her use of the word “vagrant” to describe “Snow” and young women of her time in the preceding diary entry, conveys an awareness of women’s lack of ownership and place in society. If they are bored, it is because they are partly aware of their own desire, but also of the necessity to deny it in order to be a “social success.” In portraying Rachel Vinrace, Woolf generalizes the experience of a young woman in society as one of alienation, both from society and from herself. Removed from representational terms of value, denied self-presence, Rachel is unable to signify, or to want, even herself. The lack of a female economy of desire creates a frustration leading to rage. Claire Kahane contends that boredom – or, in Woolf’s terms, “melancholy lethargy” – signifies repressed anger in The Voyage Out: “Melancholy lethargy, a symptom of repressed rage, replaces action in a kind of self-castration that leaves loss and emptiness at [The Voyage Out ’s] very center.” Desire and anger having been repressed; only a feeling of emptiness remains. This emptiness is intended to mimic the alienated, diffuse state of Rachel’s consciousness. Here is where boredom functions as the subject’s resistance to the knowledge of its ideological constitution. The uncertainty or sense of suppressed meaning portrayed in the novel marks the limits of Rachel’s capacity to comprehend her status.

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“Woman of action” Helen Ambrose judges Rachel’s generalness, her “lack of colour and definite outline,” as the reason she will be bored on their voyage. Looking at Rachel, Helen commits Rachel to a type: “Women of her own age usually boring her, she supposed that girls would be worse . . . how clear it was that Rachel would be vacillating, emotional, and when you said something to her it would make no more lasting impression than the stroke of a stick upon the water. There was nothing to take hold of in girls – nothing hard, permanent, satisfactory.” Here, as throughout the novel, male-identified Helen invokes boredom as the mark of subjective self-satisfaction, an individual distinction. She is associated with a Romantic tradition of boredom that exposes others’ inauthenticity in order to mark her individuality as superior. Helen also emblematizes the knowing individual’s tendency to reduce subjects to objects. Women and girls will bore her because they do not register as meaningful, nor participate as subjects, in the male systems of thought Helen not only identifies with, but perpetuates in her strange devotion to her petulant husband. Indeed, Helen’s individual agency is suspect from the moment we see her leaving London. She is unhappy for much of the novel, her frequent boredom attesting to it. Significantly, the novel opens with Helen’s emotional trauma, not Rachel’s, upon leaving her children; much of the novel’s repressed action can be said to flow from Helen’s attempts to master her rage, rage repressed into boredom. She surmises quickly that “she would be considerably bored” on the voyage, and after dinner on the first night of the voyage, her husband Ridley points out, “We bored you so that you left” – a fact she does not deny. When Clarissa Dalloway cheerily offers in the manner of her class, “I’ve never met a bore yet!” Helen acerbically counters, “And I should say the world was full of them!” While Helen’s boredom functions here as a mode of self-distinction and marks her as an individual unafraid to counter Clarissa’s drawing-room manners, it barely contains her anger. Helen is a compromised individual. Bohemian Helen behaves conventionally in terms of catering to her husband’s needs and desires, a fact Terrence Hewet notes when he ruminates, “[S]he who was all truth to others was not true to her husband, was not true to her friends if they came in conflict with her husband.” And where Helen is compromised in her marriage, she compensates in her relationship with Rachel. For as Grace Carter Smith argued in The Freewoman in , to be happy, women needed to see themselves as successful and frequently realized this desire by wielding influence, “the indelible impression of [herself] on [her] surroundings, whatever they may be, as a power.” In

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

her need to assert herself, Helen adopts Rachel as a substitute child, but she repeatedly appeals to the fact that she wants Rachel to be educated by a man. There are few authentic ways in which Helen is self-determining, and yet Helen problematically takes on responsibility for Rachel’s quest to become an individual. In earlier drafts of The Voyage Out, begun in , Woolf takes seriously the quest of Rachel to become an individual, and purportedly free. When Helen encourages her in Melymbrosia, “Now’s your chance then. Your chance of being a person, I mean,” Rachel replies straightforwardly, “I can be myself in spite of you, in spite of the Dalloways, in spite of William Pepper, and my father, and Darwin?” To this Helen replies, somewhat doubtingly, “You can; but I don’t say you will.” The quest is doubtful, but it is still a serious quest. By the time Woolf made her final changes to the published version of The Voyage Out in , the same passage is defined by skeptical humor about Rachel’s ability to become an individual. When Helen says, “So now you can go ahead and be a person on your own account,” Rachel has a “vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind . . . and she became profoundly excited at the thought of living.” The hyperbolic language of this passage, coupled with the fact that sea and air must constantly merge with other things – a notion Woolf exploits in The Waves – signals a lack of authenticity, a false vision. How can the one exist apart from the whole? Equally telling is Rachel’s stuttering response: “‘I can be m-m-myself,’ she stammered, ‘in spite of you and in spite of the Dalloways, and Mr. Pepper, and Father, and my Aunts, in spite of these?’” To which Helen replies “gravely”: “In spite of everyone.” That Rachel is unable to say “myself” in one singular utterance, and must ask the question rather than assert it, signals the unlikelihood that she will achieve her individuality, and makes the quest to do so pathetically comic. That Helen avers “gravely” suggests that this quest for individualism is itself a dead end, an idea that Rachel’s death at the end of the novel confirms. The impossibility of female individualism is at the heart of the novel’s boredom and anger, both in terms of the novel’s narrative form and its characters. For when Richard Dalloway asks of Rachel, “What are your interests and occupations? I should imagine that you were a person with very strong interests,” Rachel’s stunned response is simply, “You see, I am a woman,” as if to be a woman and to have interests and occupations are mutually exclusive. This is partly confirmed in Rachel’s occupations. When Helen wonders “what Rachel did do with herself,” she checks and finds her “sitting

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in her room doing absolutely nothing.” In post-Enlightenment culture that values productivity and discourse as the product of knowing that creates individuals as such, Rachel’s idleness, coupled with her nonlinguistic expression through music, makes her a cipher. But this cipher exists as a type. The day after the hotel dance, Hewet wonders what Rachel could be doing and imagines her “[l]ying on a sofa and looking at a ceiling, perhaps. He could imagine her doing that, and Helen in an armchair, with her hands on the arm of it, so – looking ahead of her, with her great big eyes.” Hewet imagines the women – as types – in the popular portrait style of the turn of the century in which neurasthenic women were painted staring vacantly into empty interiors. To him they are empty and idle, containers waiting to be filled with meaning. For Rachel’s vacuity, the novel faults “[t]he way she had been educated, joined to a fine natural indolence,” but reminds us that her education is part of the social system: “for she had been educated as the majority of well-to-do girls in the last part of the nineteenth century were educated.” Notably, the narrator dates the quality of women’s education to the time of Queen Elizabeth, a pre-Enlightenment era before individualism became an ideal. Here Woolf reveals the fallacy of the individualist argument: Rachel is unable to be an individual because she has not been trained to be one. But if one can be trained to be one, if systems create individuals, are there in fact individuals? Individuals are simply those that belong to privileged groups, primarily consisting of educated men. Tellingly, the most pointed observations of Rachel’s vagueness and lack of self-definition occur in Melymbrosia. In that version of the story, Hirst wonders aloud of Rachel, “I mean does she reason – does she feel. She seems to me hopelessly vague.” Earlier, Hirst had said to Rachel, “I should think it quite possible that you have a mind, but it is doubtful if you can think honestly because of your sex you see.” Melymbrosia goes a step toward imagining an alternative when it ventures, “Her dreams began to include a new dream, about saying what one thought, and getting it answered” But the revisions Woolf made to The Voyage Out betray an insecurity or inability to posit the likelihood of female self-assertion, and therefore individualism. As critics such as Louise DeSalvo, Diana L. Swanson, Mark Wollaeger, and Marianne DeKoven have suggested, Woolf’s revisions to earlier drafts of The Voyage Out indicate that Woolf censored her own outspokenness, perhaps fearing, as DeKoven has argued was common of female modernists, “punishment for [her] dangerous desire for revision.” Such revisions created a text in which “nothing really ‘happens’ on the level of action but a sporadically disgorged rhetoric of rage suggests havoc

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

being wreaked elsewhere.” It is a boring text that enacts its own boredom in the form of its repressions. In Santa Marina, Rachel, in her quest for individuality, is compared to the women she meets at the hotel. Most obviously, Rachel is contrasted with Susan Warrington, who becomes engaged to Arthur Venning. Quickly it is noted that “Susan . . . had no self, and counted neither one way nor the other.” Mrs. Thornton’s long life and many children “seemed to have rubbed away the marks of individuality.” Terence addresses his concerns about women’s lack of individuality when he poses to Rachel: “I’ve often walked along the streets where people live all in a row, and one house is exactly like another house, and wondered what on earth the women were doing inside,’ he mused. ‘Doesn’t it make your blood boil? he asked suddenly turning upon her. ‘I’m sure if I were a woman I’d blow someone’s brains out.’” Terence focuses in this passage on the lack of individuality in which women dwell. That Woolf found in the image of women in row houses an apt metaphor for women’s lack of individuality and attendant boredom is clear in her use of the image more than twenty years later in an unusual passage from The Years in which an anonymous lower-class woman is shown peering out of her row house in utter boredom: The smoke blowing through Peter Street had condensed, between the narrowness of the houses, into a fine grey veil . . . . Nothing whatever was happening; a few children were playing in the street, two cats turned something over in the gutter with their paws. Yet a woman leaning out of the windows searched this way, that way, up and down the street as if she was raking every cranny for something to feed on. Her eyes, rapacious, greedy, like the eyes of a bird of prey, were also sulky and sleepy, as if they had nothing to feed their hunger upon. Nothing happened – nothing whatever. Still she gazed up and down with her indolent dissatisfied stare.

Here the poverty of the scene is connected to the poverty of woman’s interior life, and boredom, as it often is, is likened to rapacious hunger. Conspicuously, the environment offers her nothing, and yet she continues to look outward to relieve her suffering. In The Voyage Out, it is made clear that social conventions prevent women from achieving individuality, and Terence observes, “All the most individual and humane of his friends were bachelors and spinsters.” Here, as throughout The Voyage Out, individuals are themselves types. Rachel’s inability to find herself in the already provided forms of a woman’s life leads to an existential crisis of boredom in which she seeks “she knew not what” in order to provide relief from the vague discomfort of her identity-less, meaningless condition.

Boredom and Individualism

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                             More than just a feminist protest novel, The Voyage Out is characterized by an aloof, inhuman element that persistently diverts attention away from Rachel’s story into mysterious, elliptical descriptions and perspective shifts. There is something ominous, unresponsive, and unknowable underlying the novel. That something may be boredom as dehumanization and the erasure of meaning as such. Woolf presents Rachel’s central crisis of boredom on a Sunday, “the mute black ghost or penitent spirit of the busy weekday.” If time and history are markers of meaning that in their knowability and predictability shape the possibilities of human action, it is significant that in boredom time and history lose this capacity. When time becomes long, it no longer promises order and meaning, it no longer promises that the future will come. On the particular Sunday in question, adhering to the English tradition has managed to “slow down the hours, dull the incidents, lengthen the meals, and make even the servants and page-boys wear a look of boredom and propriety.” Rachel attends church where she falls into an angry state of disillusion and renounces both priest and followers. After this she experiences defamiliarization – she sees all with fresh eyes as though the contexts that have given them meaning have been erased. So, for instance, from the hotel in town she looks up at the villa where she has been staying with the Ambroses and observes that the “familiar view” had “a certain unfamiliar distinction.” Wandering around the hotel, she is invited to visit, in succession, the rooms of Mrs. Flushing, the nouveau-riche would-be artist of “half-realised idea[s]”; Evelyn Murgatroyd, the young woman who longs for male adventures and to actually do something; and Ms. Allen, the spinster scholar whose self-deprivations are symbolized by the unopened bottle of crème de menthe named Oliver she has carried without drinking for twenty-six years. Between visits, Rachel lingers in the hallways with an “unformed restless desire in her mind” and is “absorbed by her restlessness.” She looks to each new person whom she visits to relieve the “mystery which burdened her.” But no visit is satisfying, and when Miss Allen and the elderly Mrs. Paley fail to understand what the other is saying in a hotel passageway, Rachel slips away, symbolically, to a cul de sac, for “[t]his misunderstanding, which involved a complete block in the passage, seemed to her unbearable.” Restless and bored, Rachel is at an impasse in her search for meaning. Crying, she looks out of the window with “eyes that would have seen nothing even had they not been dazed by

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

tears.” In the ultimate moment of defamiliarization, boredom produces a vision of how much she dislikes all that has gone before her, not just in the day, but in their entirety – “all things were wrong, all people were stupid.” Here boredom functions as a valuation and rejection of the given world, what Heidegger calls in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics an attunement to the emptiness of being that is not nothing, but rather a refusal of life’s mystery to reveal itself, which leaves the one who is bored aware only of lack. Panicked by this boredom, which she experiences as emptiness and need, Rachel turns inward toward herself as the source of meaning: “For the time, her own body was the source of all the life in the world, which tried to burst forth here – there – and was repressed now by Mr. Bax, now by Evelyn, now by the imposition of ponderous stupidity – the weight of the entire world.” This conclusion leads her into a trancelike boredom, a “melancholy lethargy,” in which she sees “vaguely” people in the garden whom she represents “as aimless masses of matter, floating hither and thither, without aim except to impede her. What were they doing, those other people in the world?” The other is a mystery. Collective life impedes her quest to become an individual. The vagueness and aimlessness of people, the pointlessness of existence, oppresses Rachel who searches to find her own meaning. That boredom often masks anger is underscored when narrator states, “The force of her rage was beginning to spend itself.” When Rachel believes she sees Terence below, she is “roused . . . from her melancholy lethargy” and appears to find in him a potential source of meaning and purpose. Here we can see an analogy to Heidegger’s second form of boredom, described in Chapter . To avoid the emerging form of being-left-empty induced by her boredom, Rachel will attempt to be taken – lost or captivated – by an object outside of herself. Woolf reveals this pattern as common to women. Rachel will exercise her choice as an individual in choosing Terence as the object by which to be taken. This will, of course, spell the end of her individualism. Given the pitfalls of love for a woman who would be an individual, the scene in the jungle in which Terence and Rachel confess their love to each other is emblematic in that it depicts the death of the “I.” Walking through the trees, the landscape itself bespeaks the alienation of boredom and their displacement from meaning: “[T]he noises of the ordinary world were replaced by those creaking and sighing sounds which suggest to the traveller in a forest that he is walking at the bottom of the sea” and both are “unable to frame any thoughts.” The unlikelihood of the analogy of forest to sea bottom is jarring and, in being so, fitting to the process of the unmooring of meaning. For who might possibly know

Boredom and Individualism

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what walking on the bottom of the sea sounds like? Meanwhile wild animals cry randomly in the background. The trees and creepers close in on them, sunlight comes through only in gaps, and profound silence weighs on them. The source of narrative authority shifts between the human and the nonhuman, and being, which is not known, is as prevalent as the lovers. This is not the setting of clichéd romance, nor a promising site of possibility. It is, in the vein of Heidegger’s profound boredom, the diminishment of individual existence against the backdrop of existence itself and the horizon of time on which existence rests. Terence begins by asking if she is frightened, and Rachel says, “I like it” and repeats the phrase – an interesting self-echo, and the last assertion of personal preference she will make. Terence, in a move that counters the traditional personal confession of love, says, “We love each other,” subsuming Rachel’s feelings and desires into “we.” In her echoing of his phrase she foregoes her own voice. Being, that which is nonhuman, asserts its presence aside the lovers: “The silence was then broken by their voices which joined in tones of strange unfamiliar sound which formed no words.” Rachel, in response both to the loss of self predicated on her merging with Terence and to “the persistent churning of the water” that competes with her individualist apprehension of existence, can only murmur, “Terrible – terrible.” Terence becomes intensely preoccupied with time, looking at his watch and complaining, “We’re so late – so late – so horribly late.” His fi xation on clock time suggests a conventional rather than personal sense of passing time, a desire to rejoin convention and social institutions after their personal and joint unraveling that pierces their subjectivity and is the experience of boredom. When they become lost on their way back to the boat, the novel’s language alludes not to Rachel’s biblical namesake but to Ruth :, stating, “Rachel followed him, stopping where he stopped, turning where he turned, ignorant of the way, ignorant of why he stopped or why he turned.” In becoming engaged to Terence she has shattered her chance at individuality, but at the same time alternative ways of being have been opened up to her. Rachel’s failure to individuate is made abundantly clear when Terence, who had until their engagement appeared to approach all women as individuals, now writes about women as a generic category, a type: “Women – under the heading Women I’ve written: ‘Not really vainer than men. Lack of self-confidence at the base of most serious faults. Dislike of own sex traditional, or founded on fact? Every woman not so

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

much a rake at heart, as an optimist, because they don’t think.’ What do you say Rachel? . . . .” Rachel said nothing.

Rachel’s silence corroborates the loss of a possible voice, as does the fact that, at Terence’s behest, she begins to write thank-you notes that “bore a considerable likeness to those she had condemned.” When Rachel notes that “[i]t was strange, considering how very different these people were, that they used almost the same sentences when they wrote to congratulate her upon her engagement,” Woolf underscores how social institutions themselves are at odds with individualism. Rachel’s illness and death refuse the lack of individualism that marriage offers and at the same time confirm it. Just before she comes down with her headache, Rachel has a moment of revelation, in the hotel, that is the opposite of boredom, a moment in which meaning and purpose are confirmed in a way that negates the possibility of individual identity and affirms life as impersonal pattern, existence as encompassing but not predicated on individuals. This comes about in part through the use of the pronoun “one,” a pronoun Christine Froula locates as being used by Woolf first in A Room of One’s Own, but is quite clearly used earlier in The Voyage Out in critique of individualism and as a way of proposing alternative access to truth and being. Rachel sits feeling herself “amazingly secure” and thinks: That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living . . . and in that pattern lay satisfaction and meaning.

Importantly, Rachel realizes existence itself: “[L]ife was independent of her, and independent of everything else.” This insight allows Rachel to conceive that “she was independent of [Terence]; she was independent of everything else,” and “love” had allowed her to feel this “independence.” In Woolf’s mature reflection on her teenage years in Moments of Being, she uses the rhetoric of boredom to describe what she calls “nonbeing”: “Non-being made up a great proportion of our time in London. The walks – twice every day in Kensington Gardens – were so monotonous. Speaking for myself, non-being lay thick over those years.” Woolf clearly describes the affect of boredom as the opposite of the peak

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experiences she calls “moments of being” in which pattern and meaning are revealed. Notably, neither moments of being nor nonbeing are dependent on the individual to achieve them. Rather, just as they do in Sinclair’s and Richardson’s work, moments of “being” or revelation arrive “for no reason that I know about,” claims Woolf, and “they seemed dominant; myself passive.” The self in-moment-of-being in Woolf is not the achieved, individual self apart from others of Richardson and Sinclair, but is instead a decidedly impersonal being apprehending impersonal being. So where The Voyage Out appears to promise Rachel’s quest to become an individual, near the end it turns away from a political, feminist sense of individualism and the freedom that Dora Marsden saw as attached to it, and turns instead to an independence that is connected to impersonality, akin to the state Heidegger calls being-in-the world in which consciousness is not cut off from objects and the subject/object divide does not exist. At this moment Rachel finds herself “detached and disinterested” and ready to accept anything in life. Rachel has a “moment of being” in which pattern is revealed, and importantly this experience has nothing to do with individual agency, will, or desire. Neither is it Sinclair’s sublimated achievement. It simply happens and is boredom’s opposite. Building on Heidegger’s work, Jean-Luc Nancy’s explanation of subjectless freedom speaks to this transporting experience, which Richardson and Sinclair clearly attempted, and which Woolf seems to have captured: Freedom is a transcendental experience or the transcendental of experience, the transcendental that is experience. What ‘I experiment with for myself’ is in no way a power I could withhold, or a capacity I could get in touch with in myself. Instead I experiment that I am in the experience of myself – this intensity of (un)founded no-thingness – I experiment that the withdrawal of essence is an affirmation of my existence and that it is only on the ‘foundation’ of this affirmation that I can know myself to be the subject of my representations, and give flesh to my singular being in the world.

Here the withdrawal of essence is seen not as erasure, but as a privileged form of access to being that elides the subject as a willing “I”. This is important in understanding Woolf ’s project in her depiction of Rachel’s revelation. Rachel’s vision of the world as “so large, so hospitable” renders a form of love that is “not the love of man for woman, of Terence for Rachel,” because, pointedly, “they had ceased to be little separate bodies; they had ceased to struggle and desire one another.” Rachel’s vision supersedes subject-object relations and with it the politics of individualism; it is awareness of being, that “life was independent of her, and independent of everything else.”

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Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom

Rachel’s illness is a continuation of this detachment, but it is not a continuation of disinterest. In her sickbed she becomes “completely cut off, and unable to communicate with the rest of the world, isolated alone with her body.” She is detached, but very much bothered by Terence’s attempts to “bring them back to their old relationship.” She turns her back to him repeatedly and does “not wish to remember” their past life. Terence is thrown into “sordid misery and profound boredom” by her mute refusal of that past life, leading to the existential panic that “[n]othing mattered.” Rachel lapses into boredom as the unraveling of familiar meaning: “For long spaces of time she would merely lie conscious of her body floating on top of the bed and her mind driven to some remote corner of her body, or escaped and gone flitting around the room. All sights were something of an effort, but the sight of Terence was the greatest effort because he forced her to join mind to body in the desire to remember something.” In this passage time no longer functions to order meaning. Duration is measured spatially, not temporally, and history has been erased. Rachel, whose vision of unity has surpassed the living politics of her time as exemplified by Terence’s insistence on conventions, experiences a literal Cartesian split, mind separated from body. What had seemed significant is no longer so in boredom. Even Terence “did not mind if she died” just as “long as the succession of these hard and dreary days was broken.” Upon her death, however, he reinvests her sickness with meaning, reinterpreting her death as symbolic of “their complete union.” The reader is left to believe that Rachel’s death functions as a metaphor for the experience of women in marriage – a conclusion supported by many critics of the novel. For instance, in a  article, Christine Froula suggests that “Rachel’s death represents not only the power of female initiation structures to overwhelm female desire when it ventures to imagine a different future, but also the difficulties that Woolf confronted in her first attempt to imagine an alternative to the female initiation plot.” Mark Wollaeger observes that Rachel “begins to die as soon as she is drawn into the marriage plot.” Similarly, June Cummins argues that Rachel, “[b]y refusing to participate in the institutional structures of patriarchy and imperialism . . . chooses the only route of resistance available to her: a very passive resistance.” While The Voyage Out forwards a materialist, feminist critique of the impediments before women’s experience of individualism and the boredom that accompanies their enforced “vagueness,” it simultaneously suggests, through boredom as an unraveling of self and knowledge, that

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individualism is a false promise, distracting one from existence as a whole. Thus the novel ends not with Rachel’s death, but with an additional two chapters. Directly after Rachel’s death, the narrative proceeds with a lengthy description of the cycle of night into day. Much like a miniature experiment with what Woolf later attempted in the “Time Passes” episode of To the Lighthouse in which “darkness” and “nothingness” prevail, Rachel’s individual death is dwarfed by the larger, impersonal forces of time and nature: “During these hours the silence was not broken, and the only movement was caused by the movement of trees and branches which stirred slightly, and then the shadows that lay across the white spaces of the land moved too.” Life continues on and, through free indirect discourse, the narrative darts in and out of character’s minds. And while it might have been a tidy ending to witness Evelyn Murgatroyd’s refusal of a marriage offer after which she asks the seemingly profound question, “What did matter then? What was the meaning of it all?” the novel persists. The Voyage Out refuses to be just a marriage-plot novel and it eschews individual agency and knowledge as the bedrock of its form. Persisting another ten pages, the narrative describes a ferocious rainstorm that diminishes the humans and then follows several of the novel’s minor characters as they end their day. Like Rachel’s previous vision, St. John Hirst sits in the drawing room of the hotel and observes that “the voices seemed to draw together from different parts of the room, and to combine themselves into a pattern before his eyes,” while Mrs. Flushing examines the earth from the window and exclaims, “Splendid! Splendid!” Ending the novel congenially with sleep a few paragraphs later, Woolf rejects boredom as ultimate meaning, but rather uses it as a vehicle of unraveling both the individual and the social in order to expose unknown and unrealized possibilities. This is not a pointing toward known possibilities, but rather a pointing out of possibility as such, a piercing or boring through the veil of what we think we know to what might not be known but nevertheless exists.

Conclusion

Boredom was not solely a female phenomenon in British modernism. One might argue that J. Alfred Prufrock was bored, Stephen Daedalus and Leopold Bloom were bored, The Good Soldier ’s John Dowell was bored, Philip Carey in Of Human Bondage was bored, and so on. But the boredom of these characters does not set their plots into motion, does not function as an antagonist, and does not present a crisis of boredom that must be resolved through the plot. This is not the case with women’s boredom. In many early modernist and modernist texts, women’s boredom is the impetus, antagonist, and climax. By focusing on women’s articulations and experiences of boredom, I have brought to the fore a consistent component not only of women’s experiences in the early twentieth century, but of modernist writing. Representations of bored women did not only structure plot, but also compelled Sinclair, Richardson, and Woolf to devise new ways of showing protagonist inaction through formal innovations in sentence structure, representations of silence and time elapses, and narrative perspective. Equally important, novels about bored women by male modernists reversed Victorian representations of women through their portrayals of female desire and frank sexuality. Startling in light of this account is the degree to which little changed for women over the course of the twentieth century. In , American Betty Friedan wrote what appeared to be a pathbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique, in which she described the modern woman’s deep discontent, her experience of emptiness and boredom, as “the problem that has no name.” The concerns Friedan chronicles are much the same as those explored by literary modernists featured in this book, right down to the curious lack of vocabulary through which to articulate women’s experience of a lack in, and being on the outside of, agentic subjectivity – what I have been calling boredom in this book. The Feminine Mystique, a perennial best-seller in England, surveys the problems of women who complain, “I feel as if I don’t exist,” “I have no personality,” “there’s nothing to 

Conclusion



look forward to,” and “I just don’t feel alive.” Fifty years after modernists began to articulate women’s boredom, the problem remained. It persisted into the s: in the first book written exclusively on boredom and literature in , Reinhard Kuhn dismissed women’s boredom as “a problem for the psychologist.” It is possible it exists to this day. Given the persistence of women’s boredom as both trivialized and lionized fact, it is curious that feminist literary criticism has not directly addressed boredom as a core constituent of women’s modernism. Rather, boredom – or the absences and silences surrounding it – has featured as a source of anxiety for feminist critics. In her  introduction to Women of the Left Bank, Shari Benstock worried that feminist criticism was mired in practices that always arrive at the same conclusions: that the patriarchy represses woman, entraps her, subjects her to its self-reinforcing images; that in the patriarchy woman exists under erasure, absent, dispossessed of identity. Such readings suggest that woman either apes patriarchal forms (in order to assure a special dispensation for herself under its law) or exists in re action against the forms of patriarchal repression.

Erasure, absence, and dispossession of identity are the conditions that give rise to modernist women’s expositions of boredom. Anxiously, Benstock hopes to find in the differences within gender “an alternative reading to woman’s predetermined plot.” Similarly, in Bonnie Kime Scott’s introduction to her  anthology, The Gender of Modernism, she shies away from feminist criticism’s preoccupation with “malady and violence,” arguing that “Elaine Showalter (A Literature of Their Own) has seen Virginia Woolf as a writer in psychological retreat, and sex war is a dominant scenario in Gilbert and Gubar’s No Man’s Land. Th is anthology is assembled in the belief that, in relation to gender, modernism has a great deal of unassessed vitality in form and content, with its own intricate and varied theory.” The word “vitality” is key here. Rather than look directly at the absences, silences, and boredom that played an important role in modernist women’s writing, Kime Scott focuses on “vitality.” Putting aside the modernist impulse in all literary criticism to “make it new,” there is a strong note of anxiety in feminist criticism that women’s writing not be interpreted as simply a response to patriarchy, that its own narrative be “vital.” As such, Rita Felski ’s The Gender of Modernity () begins with a critique of the “long-standing tradition of writing that reads modernity as an Oedipal revolt against the tyranny of authority, drawing on metaphors of contestation and struggle



Conclusion

grounded in an ideal of competitive masculinity,” but argues – and I agree – that “[i]f women’s interests cannot be unproblematically aligned with dominant conceptions of the modern, neither can they simply be placed outside of them.” Modernist women’s writing was both a reaction to, and in collaboration with, other narratives of modernity written by men. Boredom was a shared phenomenon, and bored women were clearly a material as well as a psychological fact of the modernist landscape. Thus, whether feminist critics want them to or not, modernist women’s narratives of women’s boredom do revolt against the authority of tradition, they do register a very real “sex war” that was occurring during the years they were written, and they do acknowledge woman’s erasure, absence, and dispossession under patriarchy through her discomfited awareness of her lack rendered through boredom. The very obvious political content of this revolt has perhaps rendered it secondary to aesthetic concerns, as modernism’s dominant narrative has privileged the aesthetic at the expense of the political, and in doing so has relegated a good deal of interesting fiction produced in the period to the margins. Marianne DeKoven accounts for this fact in her  history of modernist feminist criticism by recalling that early feminist criticism had first to establish the importance of female modernist writers, and once that was accomplished, to address the “contradictory presence of the feminine … in the writing of male Modernists.” Only later could a more broad approach such as her own arise in which she gauges the aesthetic implications of women’s political changes in modernist literature. But if the political has reemerged as a fruitful critical arena, there are those who are no longer interested in discussing gender. In the introduction to her  anthology Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections, Bonnie Kime Scott has noted, disapprovingly, a trend of former feminist critics such as Susan Stanford Friedman and Mary Poovey to go “beyond gender.” Instead, Kime Scott appeals to those who might study “a long, nonlinear history of gender, rather than leave it somewhere behind in the s.” My study would appear to pick up on the work of s modernist feminist criticism in order to point out what seems to have been overlooked, but it has taken another current in critical thought – affect studies – to connect the so-called private emotions to a role in public life. Most recently, Lauren Berlant has called twentieth-century American women’s sentimental culture “juxtapolitical” to connote that “like most mass-mediated nondominant communities … [it] thrives in proximity to the political, occasionally crossing over in political alliance, even

Conclusion



more occasionally doing some politics, but most often not, acting as a critical chorus that sees the expression of emotional response and conceptual recalibration as achievement enough.” This book has argued that boredom and the literature of boredom functioned similarly in the twentieth century for British women. Representations of boredom registered women’s feelings of alienation and their desire for reciprocity with the world; they not only created a sense of shared experience, but also revealed a shared purpose. For, once women had succeeded in rebelling against their manifest lack – their lack of political position and rights as so-called individuals – they still articulated their experience as empty. Boredom in the early twentieth century revealed the fissures of subjectivity and the limits to a woman’s capacity to be an individual. That it has not been recognized as such may speak to our continued ambivalence about the individual as the vehicle by which experience should be ordered. Boredom, the hollow at the center of that which we wish were whole, still makes us anxious.

Notes

     In Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), Paul Sheehan enriches Ian Watt’s classic account of the novel as interwoven with “notions of individualism and innovation” and selfcultivation ().  Robert Hichens, The Garden of Allah, .  E.M. Forster, A Room With a View, .  H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica, .  D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, .  Billington-Greig, “The Rebellion of Woman,” The Contemporary Review (July ): .  

                           

 Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint (Durham: Duke University Press, ) viii.  The most significant scholarly studies on modern boredom since  are Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani, Essays on Boredom and Modernity (Amsterdam: Rodopi, ); Elizabeth Goodstein, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ); Seán Desmond Healy, Boredom, Self, Culture (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, ); Reinhard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society. Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ); Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).  Dalle Pezze and Salzani, “The Delicate Monster: Modernity and Boredom,” in Essays on Boredom and Modernity (Amsterdam: Rodopi, ) . Horror loci, translated as “fear of place,” is a Latin Christian term used to describe “a restless dissatisfaction that drives Monks from their cells to annoy and harass (and to pass on the infection to?) others” (Peter Toohey, Melancholy, 



                  

Notes to pages – Love, and Time: Boundaries of the Self in Ancient Literature [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ] . Taedium vitae, weariness with life, is found throughout ancient Roman writings. In her  history, Taedium Vitae in Roman Sepulchral Inscriptions (Press of the New Era), Clara Louise Thompson notes that “In the later years of the Republic signs begin to appear of a growing discontent and restlessness among the Romans, a consciousness of existence, taedium vitae ” (p. ). Acedia is discussed on page . Melancholy, originating in Middle English around , is the ill temper and sullenness thought to have been produced by an excess of black bile. Ennui, coined in old French and incorporated into English in the late seventeenth century, is a feeling of mental weariness and lack of interest in present surroundings. The association between spleen and melancholy is derived from classical Greek humorism, and English use of the word “spleen” to indicate melancholy was common from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Toohey, . Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Ed. Frédéric Gros. Trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, ) . Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) . I use here Jonathan Flatley’s helpful distinction in Aff ective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ) –. Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ) , . Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (New York: Harcourt, ) . Ibid., , , , . Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ) . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom. Trans. John Irons (London: Reaktion Books, ) . Foucault, . Sowon S. Park, “Political Activism and Women’s Modernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers. Ed. Maren Tova Linett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) . Olive Schreiner, Women and Labour (London: Virago, ), . Berlant, ix. Wolf Lepenies, . Mina Loy, “Feminist Manifesto,” in Gender in Modernism. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Champagne-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ) . Joseph Ackland, “Elementary Education and the Decay of Literature” The Nineteenth Century . (March ): .

Notes to pages –



 Ada Leverson, The Little Ottleys (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., ) , .  Leverson, .  Victoria Cross, Life’s Shop Window (London: T. Werner Laurie, ) .  Cross, .  Cross, .  Park, .  Billington-Greig, .  Billington-Greig, .  Mona Caird, “The Lot of Women” Westminster Review (July ): –.  Otto Fenichel, “On the Psychology of Boredom” in The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel. First Series. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, ) .  Fenichel, .  Fenichel, .  Ralph Greenson, “On Boredom.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, . (January ): .  Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from –  (New York: Columbia University Press, ) .  Goodstein, .  John Stuart Mill, On the Subjection of Woman (New York: Prometheus Books, ) .  Vernon Lee, “The Economic Dependence of Women,” The North American Review,  (): .  Robins, Elizabeth. The Convert (London: Methuen, ) .  Beard, .  Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., ) .  Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, .  Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love (New York: Pantheon, ) .  Benjamin, .  Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ) .  Adam Phillips, “On Being Bored,” .  Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, ) . Butler says, “Hegel was the one who linked desire to recognition, providing the formulation that was recast by Hyppolite as the desire to desire … the desire to be, the desire to persist in one’s own doing … is fulfilled only through the desire to be recognized.”  Qtd. in Charles T. Hallinan, “A Feminist Disciple of Nietzsche” Current Opinion (January ): .  Caird, .  D’Ercole and Waxenberg,   Katherine Cecil Thurston, Max (London: Hutchinson & Co., ) .  Thurston, .  Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Pastor’s Wife (London: J. M. Dent, ) .



Notes to pages –

 See Bryony Randall, pp. –, Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space – (; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ).  Wendy Gan, “Leisure in the Domestic Novel between the Wars.” Women: A Cultural Review, . (): .  Randall, .  Woolf, The Voyage Out, .  Schreiner, .  “Shall Women Work?” The Fortnightly Review, DXXI (May , ): –.  Penny Brown, The Poison at the Source: The Female Novel of Self-Development in the Early Twentieth Century (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, ) .  Schreiner, .  Schreiner, –.  Lucy Delap, Maria DiCenzo and Leila Ryan, eds. Feminism and the Periodical Press, –. Vol.  (New York: Routledge, ) n.p.  D.H. Lawrence, “The Vicar’s Daughter,” in The Complete Short Stories, Vol. I (London: Heinemann, ) –.  French novelist Colette recalls in her  autobiography, Mes Apprentisages, that when her first husband, Willy, declared her writings of no use, “I returned to the divan, to my cat, my books.” Qtd. in Shari Benstock The Women of the Left Bank (Austin: University of Texas Press, ) .  Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Pastor’s Wife (London: J. M. Dent, ) .  Benjamin, .  Ibid., , .  Schiach, –, .  Schiach, .  Reinhard Kuhn. The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ) .  Ibid., .  See Goodstein, –, and Patrice Petro, “Historical Ennui, Feminist Boredom.” In The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event. Ed. Vivian Sobchackm (New York: Routledge, ) xx.  Ibid., .  Woolf, Night and Day, .  Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of . Trans. Martin Milligan (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, ) , .  Virginia Woolf, The Years (New York: Harcourt, ) .  Ibid., , .  Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, ) .  In her book, Modernism, Women, Compulsion: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), Jennifer L. Fleissner argues that “cures for neurasthenia often placed the recalcitrant individual in a hyperbolically gendered situation, whether the Gilmanesque “rest cure” for women or rugged physical activity in the great outdoors for men” ().

Notes to pages –



 Margaret Cleaves, M.D., Autobiography of a Neurasthene: As Told by One of Them and Recorded by Dr. Margaret A. Cleaves (Boston: R.G. Badger, ) –.  See Williams et al., Women on the Verge: The Culture of Neurasthenia in Nineteenth-Century America.  Betty Freidan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., ) .  Marianne DeKoven, Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ) .  Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Eds. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: Norton, ) .  Oppenheim, .  David Drummond, “Neurasthenia: Its Nature and Treatment,” BMJ (July , ) .  Muriel Dimen and Adrienne Harris, eds., Storms in Her Head: Freud and the Construction of Hysteria (New York: Other Press, ) .  Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria. Trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, ) .  Muriel and Dimen, .  See Chapter .  Qtd. in Oppenheim,   Oppenheim, .  Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ) .  Qtd. in Allie Glenny, Ravenous Identity: Eating and Eating Distress in the Life and Works of Virginia Woolf (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ) .  Glenny, .  Virginia Woolf, Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ) .  Dorothy Richardson, Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson. Ed. Gloria G. Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ) .  Raitt, Suzanne, May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ) .  Elizabeth Garret Anderson, “Sex in Mind and Education: A Reply,” Fortnightly Review, n.s.  (): .  Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (New York: Verso, ).  D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (New York: Bantam, ) .  Goodstein, .  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, ) .  Conor Cunningham, A Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Diff erence of Theology (London: Routledge, ) xiii.

               

Notes to pages – Goodstein, . Heidegger, . Ibid., . Goodstein, . Heidegger, . Ibid, . Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, ) . Heidegger, . Ibid, –. Ibid, . Ibid., . Ibid., . See Goodstein, . Qtd. in Critchley, Simon. Very Little … Almost Nothing. nd ed. (New York: Routledge, ) . Critchley, .                         :     -               

             

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. []. (New York: Bantam, ) . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ellen Mortensen, The Feminine and Nihilism: Luce Irigaray with Nietzsche and Heidegger (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, ) . Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ) . Elizabeth Goodstein, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, ) . Simon Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing. nd ed. (New York: Routledge, ) . Qtd. in Mortensen, . Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ) Part One. Conor Cunningham, A Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Diff erence of Theology (London: Routledge, ) xiii. Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell, David Trotter, eds., Edwardian Fiction: an Oxford Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ) xv. Claud Cockburn, Bestseller: The Books That Everyone Read, – (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, ) . Dorothy Richardson, Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson. Ed. Gloria G. Fromm. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ) .

Notes to pages –                                        



Robert Hichens, The Garden of Allah,  Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Critchley calls nihilism “a thinking through the death of God in terms of the problem of finitude” (). Hichens, . Ibid., . Arnold Bennett, Hilda Lessways (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., ) . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., –. Ibid., –. Ibid., –. Ibid., –. E.M. Forster, A Room with a View. []. (New York: Bantam, ) . Ibid., . Ibid., . Woolf wrote in a June  letter: “I always feel that nobody, except perhaps Morgan Forster, lays hold of the thing I have done.” Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, – (New York: Mariner Books, ) . E.M. Forster, A Passage to India. []. (New York: Harcourt Brace, ) . Ibid., . Ibid., . Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ) . Ibid., . Ibid. Ibid., . Ibid., . Hichens, . Forster, A Room with a View, –. Bennett, –. Lawrence, . H. G. Wells, Ann Veronica. []. (London: Ernest Benn, ) . Ibid. Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Hichens, .

                                     

Notes to pages – Ibid. Wells, . Wells, . Wells, . Wells, . Wells, . Wells, . Wells, . Bennett, , . Bennett, –. Bennett, –. Bennett, . Bennett, . Forster, A Room with a View, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Janice Harris, “Lawrence and the Edwardian Feminists.” In The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence. Michael Squires & Keith Cushman, eds. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ) . C. Gasquoine Hartley, “The Sexes Again,” English Review (September ) , . Constance Smedley, “The Hedda Gabler of To-Day,” Fortnightly Review . (July ) . “Fiction,” Speaker (December ) . Hichens, –. Hichens, . Hichens, . Hichens, . May Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life (New York: New York Review of Books, ) . Wells, . Ibid., . Ibid., , . Ibid., . Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, “Comment and Review – Review of H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica,” Forerunner (January ) . Anne B. Simpson, “Architects of the Erotic: H. G. Wells’s ‘New Woman’.” In Seeing Double: Revisioning Edwardian and Modernist Literature. Carola M. Kaplan & Anne B. Simpson, eds. (New York: St. Martin’s Press ) . Bennett, . Ibid., . Ibid., .

Notes to pages –



   

Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press) .  Forster, A Room with a View, .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Lawrence, .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Hichens, .  

          ,        ,        

 May Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life (New York: New York Review of Books, ) .  May Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life, .  May Sinclair, The Three Sisters (Garden City: The Dial Press, ) .  May Sinclair, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (London: Virago, ) .  Hrisey Dimitrakis Zegger, May Sinclair (Boston: Twayne Publishers, ) .  This account of Sinclair’s work is based in large part on the introduction to Suzanne Raitt’s May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ) –. Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf mention Sinclair occasionally in their letters, and not always flatteringly. Sinclair appears to have been a running joke between Richardson and her good friend Brhyer, with whom she shares in a  letter: “I dreamed last night that I saw someone shoot May S. & heard her last words. They were the explanation of a tremendous drama that had made up the rest of the little dream.” In , she delights, “You will be amused to hear that M. [ay] S. [inclair] freezes even H.G. [Wells].” Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson. Ed. Gloria G. Fromm. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ) , .  Bonnie Kime Scott, “Transforming the Novel,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers. Ed. Maren Tova Linett. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) .  In a passage that demonstrates how Sinclair’s concerns with the lives of women raised in restrictive, conventional families might have dovetailed with her interest in psychology, McDougall summarizes Freud’s new ideas by saying, “[I]t seems (and this is the essential novelty in Freud’s teaching) that many natures, especially perhaps women brought up in a conventional manner, react in a different way to their temptations; they are so horrified at the first dim awareness of the nature of their temptation that they never frankly recognize it, never bring it out into the light in order to confront it in open



     

 

   

  

Notes to pages – conflict. The tendency is apt then to be repressed and yet to live and work in the mind in a subterraneous fashion.” William McDougall, Psychology, The Study of Behaviour (London: Thornton Butterworth, ) . Zegger, May Sinclair, . May Sinclair, “‘Prufrock and Other Observations’: A Criticism,” in The Gender of Modernism. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ) . May Sinclair, A Defence of Idealism (London: Macmillan & Co, ) . Theophilus E. M. Boll, Miss May Sinclair: Novelist (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, ), . Gertrude Atherton, “May Sinclair’s Biographical Novel,” New York Times (September , ) . See Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society. Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), and Seán Desmond Healy, Boredom, Self, Culture (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, ). Healy, Boredom, Self, Culture, . Giorgio Agamben, in The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, ), refers to Heidegger’s profound boredom as the point of intersection between man and animal in which “men and peoples” are “delivered over, so to speak, to their inessentiality and their inactivity – who grope everywhere, and at the cost of gross falsifications, for an inheritance and a task, an inheritance as task ” (). Sowon S. Park, “Political Activism and Women’s Modernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism Women’s Writing. Ed. Tova Maren Linett. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) . Virginia Woolf, “A Society,” in Monday or Tuesday (London: Hesperides Press, ) . Ibid., –. In Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), Luce Irigaray describes the entry of the little girl into the oedipal phase as characterizing Freud’s description of melancholia while in fact melancholy is unavailable to her: “The economy of female narcissism and the frailty of the girl’s or woman’s ego make it impossible for the melancholic syndrome to establish a firm and dominant foundation …. It is not that she lacks some ‘master signifier’ or that none is imposed on her, but rather that access to a signifying economy, to the coining of signifiers, is difficult or even impossible for her because she remains an outsider, herself (a) subject to their norms” (). Laurie Langbauer, “The City, the Everyday, and Boredom: The Case of Sherlock Holmes,” Diff erences : (): . Otto Fenichel, “On the Psychology of Boredom,” in The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel, First Series (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, ) . Ibid., .

Notes to pages –



 The gendered bifurcation between boredom and ennui has been written about by Patrice Petro in “Historical Ennui, Feminist Boredom,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event. Ed. Vivian Sobchackm. (New York: Routledge, ) –, and Julia Schiesari, who writes in The Gendering of Melancholia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ): “The great melancholic of yesteryear would have been a tortured but creative male genius, but the stereotypically depressed person of today is an unhappy and unproductive woman” ().  Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ) , .  Schreiner says, “[W]hatever the result of the changes of modern civilisation may be with regard to the male, he certainly cannot complain that they have as a whole robbed him of his fields of labour, diminished his share of the conduct of life, or reduced him to a condition of morbid inactivity.” Olive Schreiner, Women and Labour (London: Virago, ) .  The Women Writer’s Suffrage League was “formed in  by Cicely Hamilton with Elizabeth Robins elected the first president; members included Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Evelyn Sharp, Violet Hunt, May Sinclair, Alice Meynell, and Ivy Compton-Burnett. The organization brought together ‘professional’ women writers – meaning any writer who had sold a text – to support the cause with the method ‘proper to writers – the use of the pen.’ The members of the WWSL contributed to suffrage periodicals like Votes for Women, Common Cause, and The Vote, wrote letters to newspapers, and published fiction, plays, burlesques, manifestoes, oratory, autobiographies, diaries, histories, poems, sketches, polemical essays, and songs.” Mary Chapman and Barbara Green, “Suffrage and Spectacle,” in Gender in Modernism. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. (Champagne-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ) .  Fenichel, “On the Psychology of Boredom,” .  Sigmund Freud, “Femininity,” in Freud on Women: A Reader. Ed. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. (New York: W.W. Norton, ) –.  Ralph Greenson, “On Boredom,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, : (January ): .  Greenson, “On Boredom,” .  Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (New York: Harcourt Brace, ) .  Arnold Bennett, Hilda Lessways (New York: E. P. Dutton, ) .  H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica (London: Ernest Benn, ) .  The Three Sisters, .  Elisabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ) xii.  The Three Sisters, .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Ibid., , , , .



Notes to pages –

 Arnold Bennett, Hilda Lessways (New York: E. P. Dutton, ) .  Janice Harris, “Lawrence and the Edwardian Feminists,” in The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence. Eds. Michael Squires & Keith Cushman. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ) .  Raitt, May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian, .  Mary Olivier: A Life, .  Ibid., –.  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, , .  Zegger, .  The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, , .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Bronfen, xiv.  The Three Sisters, .  Mary Olivier: A Life, –.  The Three Sisters, .  As James Miracky has noted in Regenerating the Novel: Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair, and Lawrence (New York: Routledge, ): “Beginning with its festering presence in the vicar, repression is represented as the cause of much of the novel’s action and despair” (–).  The Three Sisters, .  Mary Olivier: A Life, .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Kuhn, . In “On Boredom,” Greenson says: “The emptiness in boredom is in the first place due to the repression of the forbidden instinctual aims and objects along with the inhibition of the imagination. However, there seem to be additional determinants for this empty feeling. Emptiness represents hunger….Most bored persons resort to oral activities. The bored individual’s feeling of emptiness is similar to the experience of the child waiting hungrily for the breast. The aim and object, sucking, breast and mother, are repressed, however, and only the feeling of emptiness remains” ().  Healy, Boredom, Self, Culture, .  The Three Sisters, .  Mary Olivier: A Life, .  Spacks, Boredom, .  Sinclair, A Defence of Idealism, –.  Ibid.  Sinclair, “The Novels of Dorothy Richardson,” in The Gender of Modernism. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), , .

Notes to pages –         

           

 



Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life, . Ibid., , . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Guy Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Alterations of Everyday Life,” in Situationist International Anthology. Ed. Ken Knabb. (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, ) . Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, . Raitt questions whether or not Sinclair may have had a sexual affair, or even a baby, but is unable to find any evidence to support such claims. Certainly Sinclair claimed celibacy and valued her lack of intimacy with others. See Raitt’s introduction to May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian, –. Sinclair, Feminism (London: The Women Writer’s Suffrage League, ) –. Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life, . Sinclair, The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, . Raitt, May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian, . Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life, . Ibid., . Judith Shklar, “Foreword” to Melancholy and Society by Wolf Lepenies, viii. Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, . Jane Eldredge Miller, Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism, and the Edwardian Novel, . Sinclair, The Three Sisters, –. Sinclair, The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, . Why Sinclair would write such a castigating and negative view of the repressed, single woman in her third and last novel on the subject is up for debate. From a biographical perspective, Zegger speculates that Sinclair’s attitude toward self-sacrifice changed after witnessing the First World War and “the part this ideal had played in glorifying a war that no longer seemed so glorious” (May Sinclair, ). Raitt says: “[W]e can speculate that as Sinclair felt herself weakening [from the onset of Parkinson’s disease] she started to think differently about the past” (May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian, ). Sinclair notably sets Harriett Frean some twenty years earlier than Mary Olivier, suggesting a more positive progression in terms of a woman’s ability to escape the strictures of her culture. From a critical perspective, Raitt notes that in comparing Mary Olivier to Harriett Frean, the latter’s novel implicitly judges her as intellectually lazy and thus at the mercy of her unconscious: “The novel indicts Harriett for a kind of mental decadence which means that she cannot move out of the past into the future” (May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian, ). Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life, . Ibid., .



Notes to pages –

Sinclair, The Three Sisters, . Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life, , . Raitt, May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian, . Virginia Woolf, “An Unwritten Novel” in Monday or Tuesday (London: Hesperus Press, ), .  Quoted in Raitt, .  Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, ) .    

                                           ’ P I L G R I M A G E  Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage : The Tunnel, Interim (New York: Popular Library, ) –.  Gloria G. Fromm, ed., Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ) . Cited hereafter as Windows on Modernism.  Kristin Bluemel, Experimenting on the Borders of Modernism: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ) .  Windows on Modernism, .  May Sinclair, “The Novels of Dorothy Richardson,” in The Gender of Modernism. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ) , .  Virginia Woolf, “Review of The Tunnel by Dorothy Richardson,” Times Literary Supplement (February , ).  Jean Radford, “Race and Ethnicity in White Women’s Modernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers. Ed Maren Tova Linett. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) .  Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. (New York: Hill and Wang, ) .  Richardson, “Continuous Performance,” Close Up . (September ): .  Richardson, “Continuous Performance,” Close Up . (July ): .  Richardson, “Continuous Performance,” Close Up . (August ): .  Jean Radford, Dorothy Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ) .  Richardson, “Films for Children,” Close Up . (August ): .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Lynette Felber, “A Manifesto for Feminine Modernism: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage,” in Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism. Ed Lisa Rado. (New York: Garland, ) .  Elisabeth Bronfen, Dorothy Richardson’s Art of Memory: Space, Identity, Text. Trans. Victoria Appelbe. (New York: Manchester University Press, ) .  This idea is explored further in Bronfen, chapter .  Richardson, Pilgrimage : Deadlock, Revolving Lights, The Trap (New York: Popular Library, ) .

Notes to pages –



 Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage : Pointed Roofs, Backwater, Honeycomb (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, ) .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Radford, –.  Jean Frantz Blackall, “Edith Wharton’s Art of Ellipses,” Journal of Narrative Technique . (Spring ): .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Ibid., .  Ibid.,  (emphasis in the original).  Richardson, Pilgrimage : Oberland, Dawn’s Left Hand, Clear Horizon, Dimple Hill, March Moonlight (New York: Popular Library, ): .  In an August  letter to Bryher just after the publication of Between the Acts, five months after Woolf committed suicide, Richardson comments, “What upsets me, I think, in V. Woolf is a sort of, I mean the kind of disillusionment that somewhere in each book approaches paralysis. Movement ceases, of mind & spirit. Less than usual in this last book, which in certain directions, particularly in the significant matter of what people draw from just being together, reveals the ripening of a perception that in The Voyage Out had not begun to dawn.” Windows on Modernism, .  Winifred Bryher, The Heart to Artemis. []. (Ashfield: Paris Press, ) .  Sarah Grand, “The Case of the Modern Spinster,” .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Ibid., –.  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Seán Desmond Healy, Boredom, Self, Culture (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, ) .  Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ) x.  Richardson, Pilgrimage , , .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  “Women and Happiness,” The Spectator (January  ): –.  Penny Brown, The Poison at the Source: The Female Novel of Self-Development in the Early Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ) –.  Windows on Modernism, .  Spacks, .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Laurie Langbauer, Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction –  (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ) .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .



Notes to pages –

 Sowon S. Park, “Political Activism and Women’s Modernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers. Ed. Tova Maren Linett. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) .  Henry W. Nevinson, “Women’s Vote and Men,” The English Review . (November ): .  “Mr. Strachey, Society and the Individual,” The New Age . (August , ): .  Tweedie, E. Alec. “Women and Work,” The Fortnightly Review  (June , ): .  Nevinson, .  “Mr. Strachey, Society and the Individual,” .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Ibid., .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Ibid., .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  In Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault claims, “[T]he individual must assure his own freedom with regard to everything around him, is all assured by this exercise of introducing discontinuity into continuous movements, into connected instants. The law of instantaneous perception is an exercise of freedom that guarantees for the subject that he will always be stronger than each element of reality presented to him” (–).  Ibid., .  Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ) .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Ibid., , .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Purvis & Holton, , n.   Morag Shiach, Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, – (New York: Cambridge University Press, ) .  Quoted in Elizabeth Roberts, Women’s Work, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) .  Morag Shiach, Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, – (New York: Cambridge University Press, ) .  Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, ) .  Gail Braybon, “Women and the War,” in The First World War in British History, Ed. Stephen Constantine, Maurice W. Kirby, and Mary B. Rose. (London: Edward Arnold, ) , .

Notes to pages –



 Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, ) .  Schreiner, , .  Mrs. St. Clair Stobart, “The Eternal Womanly,” The Fortnightly Review  (July , ): .  Robins, .  Dora Marsden, The New Freewoman (July , ): .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , –.  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Anita Levy, “Gendered Labor, the Woman Writer and Dorothy Richardson,” Novel (Fall ): .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Quoted in Schiach, .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Ibid.  Reinhard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ) .  “Women and Happiness,” The Spectator (January , ): .  J.H. Kellogg, .  Williams, .  Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ) .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , , .  Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ) .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Ibid.  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, ) .  Richardson, Pilgrimage , .  Ibid., .                                         ’ T H E V O Y A G E O U T    

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (New York: Harcourt Brace, ) . Morning Post (April , ) ; Times Literary Supplement (April , ) . Manchester Guardian (April , ) . Although I agree with Lawrence that “[i]n defining silence, particularly women’s silence, as an enlightened ‘presence’ and not just an absence in





 

  

   

  

Notes to pages – the conventional sense of ‘lack’ or ‘emptiness’ in life and narration, Woolf displaces the ‘speaking subject’ and speech or dialogue in the novel” (), I continue to regard the “presence” of Rachel in the novel as one of absence. As discussed in Chapter , in The Hermeneutics of the Subject (Ed. Frédéric Gros. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, ), Michel Foucault claims: “The Cartesian approach refers to knowledge of the self, as a form of consciousness at least. What’s more, by putting the self-evidence of the subject’s own existence at the very source of access to being, this knowledge of oneself (no longer in the form of the test of self-evidence, but in the form of the impossibility of doubting my existence as subject) made the ‘know yourself’ into a fundamental means of access to the truth” (). Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ) . Heidi Storl makes the argument that “[a] clarification of the presuppositions underlying the modern understanding of human being and doing served as a focal point for Heidegger and Woolf’s respective writings. While Heidegger unearthed and examined the metaphysical roots of being, Woolf illustrated the nature and implications of being” () in “Heidegger in Woolf’s Clothing,” Philosophy and Literature . (October ): –. Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals and Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. (London: Pimlico, ) , , . Ibid., . Even though Woolf and Grosvenor were longtime friends, when Woolf wrote to Violet Dickinson in November  that Grosvenor was to marry the novelist John Buchan, she described her through her brother-in-law Jack Hill’s point of view as “pretty and flaxen and brainless” (Congenial Spirits ). Susan Charlotte (Grosvenor) Buchan Tweedsmuir. The Edwardian Lady (London: Duckworth, ) –. Ibid., . Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ) . Sociology became an academic discipline in Europe in , when Emile Durkheim established the first department of sociology at the University of Bourdeaux and published his Rules of the Sociological Method. Two years later he coined the term anomie. The London School of Economics established the first British sociological department in . Gustave Le Bon published The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind in . In Britain, prominent psychologist William MacDougal published The Group Mind in . Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ) . Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ) . Ralph Greenson, “On Boredom,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association . (January ): .

Notes to pages –        

                 



Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, . Ibid., . Virginia Woolf, The Years (New York: Harcourt, ) . Woolf, The Voyage Out, . Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (New York: Harcourt, ) . Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ) . Woolf, To the Lighthouse, . Erica L. Johnson in “Contours of Travel and Exile in The Voyage Out,” Journal of Narrative Theory . (Winter ) notes that Woolf anticipates critics of Western feminism’s reliance on individualism: “Gayatri Spivak criticizes the European woman’s achievement of her individualism at the expense of the colonial woman in ‘Three Women’s Texts,’ and Rosemary Marangoly George argues that ‘the modern individual (European) woman was first and foremost an imperialist.’ Similarly Chandra Talpade Mohanty that ‘the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions’ profits from a representation of third world women as a homogenized group of oppressed victims” (). See Tratner, chapter . Christine Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, ) chapter . Lynn Pykett, Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Edward Arnold, ) . Floyd Dell, Women as World Builders. []. (Westport: Hyperion, ) . Michael Levenson, A Geneaology of Modernism: A Study of Literary Doctrine, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) . Ibid., . Dora Marsden, “Bondwomen,” The Freewoman . (November , ): . Dora Marsden, “The Lean Kind,” The New Freewoman . (June , ): . Dora Marsden, “Views and Comments,” The New Freewoman . (August , ): . Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ) . Woolf, The Voyage Out, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Virginia Woolf, Melymbrosia. Ed. Louise DeSalvo. (San Francisco: Cleis Press, ) . Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice, . Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ) .



Notes to pages –

 Claire Kahane, “‘The Woman with a Knife and the Chicken without a Head’: Fantasms of Rage and Emptiness,” in Psychoanalysis/Feminisms. Ed. Peter L. Rudnytsky and Andrew M. Gordon. (Albany: State University of New York Press, ) –; .  Woolf, The Voyage Out, , .  Ibid., .  Ibid., , .  Ibid., .  In a diary entry dated June , , Woolf remarked of drawing-room behavior that “if you talk it must be at least to express pleasure at something; better still if you can, say something amusing: seriousness is just as much out of place here as an old serge skirt. For two or three hours a number of people have resolved to show only their silken side to one another” ().  Woolf, The Voyage Out, .  Grace Carter Smith, “Women as Sexualists,” The Freewoman (August , ): .  Woolf, The Voyage Out, .  Woolf, Melymbrosia, .  Woolf, The Voyage Out, .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  See Zachary Ross, Amanda Glessman, and Katherine Williams, Women on the Verge: Neurasthenia in Nineteenth-Century Art (Stanford: Iris and B. Cantor Center for the Arts, Stanford University, ).  Woolf, The Voyage Out, .  Woolf, Melymbrosia, .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Louise A. DeSalvo argues in Virginia Woolf ’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, ) that “the changes Woolf made throughout the novel’s long history were the result of her uncertainty about what that vestment of fiction should look like and how much that vestment of fiction should disguise, which relates to why Woolf slipped into insanity each time she completed the novel. In one sense, the price that Woolf had to pay for masquerading her experiences as fiction was the price of self-annihilation” (). In “‘My Boldness Terrifies Me’: Sexual Abuse and Female Subjectivity in The Voyage Out,” Twentieth Century Literature . (Winter ): –, Diana L. Swanson calls The Voyage Out a hysterical text that “enacts even as it tells how sexual abuse is a major obstacle to the development of the female subject, to the achievement of agency in discourse and society” (). Mark Wollaeger in “The Woolfs in the Jungle: Intertextuality, Sexuality, and the Emergence of Female Modernism in The Voyage Out, The Village in the Jungle, and Heart of Darkness,” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly . (): –, says, “Woolf in effect

Notes to pages –

                       

  



censored herself by censoring Rachel, who becomes less and less forthright and outspokenly feminist, and by recasting moments that revealed too much of her own inner life. But it is a fundamental irony that in moderating Rachel’s voice Woolf began to fi nd her own” (). In Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), Marianne DeKoven claims: “The empowered maternal to which this novel has opened a passage is both the only source of happiness, harmony and authentic language – the new text – and also, at the same time, violent, exploitative, betraying, and hopelessly alienated” (). DeKoven, . Kahane, . Woolf, The Voyage Out, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Virginia Woolf, The Years (New York: Harcourt, ) –. Woolf, The Voyage Out, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Heidegger, The Fundamental Concept of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, . Woolf, The Voyage Out, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Heidegger, . Woolf, The Voyage Out, . Heidegger, . Heidegger also theorizes: “Boredom is the entrancement of the temporal horizon, an entrancement which lets the moment of vision belonging to temporality vanish. In thus letting it vanish, boredom impels entranced Dasein into the moment of vision as the properly authentic possibility of its existence, an existence only possible in the midst of beings as a whole, and within the horizon of entrancement, their telling refusal of themselves as a whole” (). Woolf, The Voyage Out, . In a letter to Vanessa dated August , , Woolf wrote, “I’m thinking a good deal, at intervals, about marriage. My quarrel with it is that the pace is so slow, when you are two people” (Congenial Spirits ). Woolf, The Voyage Out, .



Notes to pages –

 Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Heidegger says, “The temporal entrancement that becomes manifest in this ‘it is boring for one’ can be ruptured only through time. Only if the temporal entrancement is ruptured do beings as a whole no longer refuse themselves, i.e., only then do they give up their own possibilities, make themselves graspable for each specific Dasein and give this Dasein itself the possibility of existing in the midst of beings in one particular respect, in one particular possibility in each case” ().  Ibid., . Ruth :: “And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave them, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”  Woolf, The Voyage Out, .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  In chapter  of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde, Froula traces Woolf’s movement from draft to final copy of A Room of One’s Own and sees Woolf revise her final project to privilege the term “one” over “I.” Noting that “one posits common ground … although to appeal to assent is not to produce it,” and that the use of “one” risks acquiescing into alienation and abnegating claim upon social responsibility, she still argues that “Room’s ‘one,’ then, subsumes feminism within the Enlightenment struggle for the rights and freedoms of all” (, ).  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Woolf, Moments of Being, .  Ibid., , .  Woolf, The Voyage Out, .  Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom. Trans. Bridget McDonald. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, ) –.  Woolf, The Voyage Out, .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Ibid., , .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Christine Froula, “Out of the Chrysalis: Female Initiation and Female Authority in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature . (Spring ): .

Notes to pages –



 Wollaeger, .  June Cummins, “Death and the Maiden Voyage: Mapping the Junction of Feminism and Postcolonial Theory in The Voyage Out,” in Virginia Woolf: Texts and Contexts (New York: Pace University Press, ) .  In “Time Passes,” “the profusion of darkness” overtakes the landscape, and “somebody groaned, or somebody laughed as if sharing a joke with nothingness” while “[n]othing stirred in the drawing room” (). Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ).  Woolf, The Voyage Out, .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .        Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, ) .  Friedan, , , .  Reinhard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ) .  What are we to make of the focus on women and depression of the s and s? Medicalized as depression and treated with antidepressants, this contemporary adaptation of women’s boredom is a popular topic on the Self-Help shelves of bookstores and in academic presses. Current titles that suggest this phenomenon include: Dana Jack, Silencing the Self: Women and Depression (New York: HarperCollins, ); Jennifer James, Women and the Blues: Passions that Hurt, Passions That Heal (New York: HarperCollins, ), especially chapter , “I’m Bored.”; Janet Stoppard and Linda McMullen, Situating Sadness: Women and Depression in Social Context (New York: New York University Press, ). Although no longer an urgent focal point of literary narratives, it is still a persistent topic. The female protagonists of Anita Brookner’s novels are frequently isolated and grounded in an experience of boredom. Contemporary novelist Rachel Cusk, publicly castigated after writing an exploration of motherhood that did not embrace the role, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (), has written several literary novels – most notably Arlington Park (), a book that critics have related to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway – that are suffused with women’s boredom.  Shari Bentsock, Women of the Left Bank (Austin: University of Texas Press, ) .  Ibid., .  Bonnie Kime Scott, “Introduction,” in The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ) .  Felski, , .  Marianne DeKoven, “Gender and Modernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Ed. Michael Levenson. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) .



Notes to pages –

 Bonnie Kime Scott, “Introduction: A Retro-spective on Gender in Modernism,” in Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ) –.  Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint (Durham: Duke University Press, ) x.

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Index

acedia , ,  Adorno, Theodor,  affect, ,  Agamben, Giorgio,  agency, vii, viii, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  alienation, , , , , , ,  Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett,  anger, , ,  anomie, ,  anorexia,  Ardis, Ann,  Armstrong, Nancy,  Autobiography of a Neurasthene, 

Breuer, Josef,  Bronfen, Elisabeth, , ,  Brown, Penny, ,  Bryher, Winifred, , , ,  Butler, Judith, , ,  Caird, Mona, ,  “The Case of Fräulein Anna O.”,  Cassian,  Close Up,  Clouston, T.S.,  The Convert,  Critchley, Simon, , , , , ,  Cross, Victoria,  Cummins, June,  Cunningham, Conor, , 

Barnes, Djuna,  Barthes, Roland,  Beale, Dorothea,  Beard, George,  Beard, Mary Ritter,  Beckett, Samuel, ,  bed rest, x, , ,  Benjamin, Jessica, ,  Bennett, Arnold, xi, ,  Hilda Lessways, , , , ,  Benstock, Shari,  Berlant, Lauren, ,  bildungsroman, viii, ix, , , ,  Billington-Greig, Teresa, x,  Blackall, Jean Frantz,  Blast,  Bleak House,  boredom as affect,  as defense mechanism,  definition of, vii, x, – as emotion,  as protest,  rhetorics of, , ,  Boredom: A Literary History of a State of Mind,  Braybon, Gail, 

Debord, Guy,  degeneration, ,  DeKoven, Marianne, , , ,  The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature,  Dell, Floyd,  depression, ,  DeSalvo, Louise, , ,  Descartes, René,  desire, vii, ix, x, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  dissociation, , , , , ,  Doolittle, Hilda, ,  durée,  Durkheim, Emile, ,  education, women’s, , , ,  The Egoist, ,  Eliot, T.S.,  “The Love Song of T. Alfred Prufrock”,  ellipses, , 





Index

employment, women’s, , – emptiness, , , , ,  ennui, , , , , ,  Experience Without Qualities, 

Kahane, Claire,  Kant, Immanuel,  Kime Scott, Bonnie, , ,  Kuhn, Reinhard, , 

Farrar, John,  Felski, Rita, ,  The Feminine Mystique,  feminism, , , , , , , , , ,  Fenichel, Otto, , ,  Fiedler, Leslie,  Forster, E.M., xi A Passage to India , ,  A Room with a View, , , ,  Foucault, Michel, , , ,  The Freewoman, ,  Freud, Sigmund, ,  Friedan, Betty, ,  Froula, Christine, , , ,  The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, , , , , 

labor, xii, ,  Langbauer, Laurie, ,  Laurence, Patricia Ondek,  Lawrence, D.H., xi “The Daughters of the Vicar”,  Lady Chatterley’s Lover, , , , , , ,  Le Bon, Gustave,  Lee, Vernon,  leisure,  Lepenies, Wolf, ,  Levenson, Michael,  Leverson, Ada,  Life’s Shop Window,  Little Review,  Love’s Shadow,  Loy, Mina, 

Gan, Wendy,  Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, , , ,  Giving an Account of Oneself,  Glenny, Allie,  Goodstein, Elizabeth, , , , , , , , , , , ,  Grand, Sarah, ,  Greenson, Ralph, ,  Grosvenor, Susan, 

MacPherson, Kenneth,  Madame Bovary,  Magic Mountain,  Mansfield, Katherine,  Married Women’s Property Acts,  Marsden, Dora, , , , ,  Marx, Karl, , ,  masochism,  Max,  McDougall, William, , ,  meaning, , ,  melancholy, , , ,  Merton, Robert,  Mill, John Stuart,  Miller, Jane Eldredge,  mimicry,  Mitchell, Silas Weir,  Monkhouse, Allan,  monotony, 

Harris, Janice H.,  Hartley, Gasquoine C.,  Healy, Séan Desmond, ,  Heidegger, Martin, , , –, , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , ,  Hichens, Robert, xi The Garden of Allah, , ,  horror loci, , ,  The Hunger,  hysteria, , , , , , , ,  indifference, ix, xi, , , , , , , , , , , , ,  individual. See individualism individualism, viii, ix, xii, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  intimate public, ,  Irigaray, Luce, ,  Johnson, Erica L.,  Joyce, James, , , 

Nancy, Jean-Luc,  Negative Dialectics,  neurasthenia, , , , , , , , ,  The New Age, ,  The New Freewoman, ,  New Woman, ,  Ngai, Sianne,  Nietzsche, Friedrich, , , , , , , , , , ,  nihilism, xi, , , , , , , –,  nothing,  Oppenheim, Janet, 

Index orgasm,  Park, Sowon, ,  The Pastor’s Wife, ,  Phillips, Adam, , ,  Poovey, Mary,  Pound, Ezra,  productivity,  psychoanalysis, , , , , ,  psychology,  Quicksand , 



spleen, ,  Stanford Friedman, Susan,  Stein, Gertrude, ,  Stirner, Max,  Stobart, St. Clair,  Storl, Heidi,  Studies in Hysteria ,  subject. See self subjectivity, viii, , , , , , , , ,  sublimation, xii, ,  Swanson, Diana L., , 

Radford, Jean,  Raitt, Suzanne, , , ,  Randall, Bryony,  recognition, , ,  repression, xi, , , , , , , , , ,  Richardson, Dorothy, vii, viii, ix, xii, , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  Pilgrimage, xii, , , –, , , , , ,  Robins, Elizabeth, , , , 

taedium vitae, , ,  Tenterhooks,  Thurston, Katherine,  Tilly, Louise,  time, , , , , ,  Tratner, Michael,  Tweedsmuir, Lady. See Susan Grosvenor

Savage, George,  Schiach, Morag,  Schreiner, Olive, , ,  Women and Labour,  Scott, Joan,  self, ix, xii, , , ,  selfhood. See self self-realization, x, xi, , , , , – Sex Disqualification Removal Act,  sexual desire, ix sexuality, xi, xiii, , , – Shiach, Morag,  Shklar, Judith,  Simpson, Anne,  Sinclair, May, xi, , , –, , , , ,  A Defence of Idealism,  “Feminism”,  The Life and Death of Harriett Frean, ,  Mary Olivier A Life, , – The Three Sisters, , , –, , ,  Smedley, Constance,  Smith, Grace Carter,  Spacks, Patricia Meyer, , ,  Spectator, , 

Wadsworth, P. Beaumont,  The Waste Land , ,  Wells, H.G., xi, ,  Ann Veronica , , , , ,  will, v, x, xi, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  The Will to Power,  Wollaeger, Mark, , ,  Women and Labour,  The Women Writer’s Suff rage League, ,  Woolf, Virginia, ix, , , , , , , ,  Melymbrosia , , ,  Moments of Being,  Night and Day, , ,  A Room of One’s Own, ,  “A Sketch of the Past”,  “A Society”,  To the Lighthouse, , ,  The Voyage Out, xii, , , , – The Waves,  The Years, , , 

Ulysses, ,  utopia, ,  Vicinus, Martha, , ,  von Arnim, Elizabeth, , 

“The Yellow Wallpaper”,  Zegger, Hrisey Dimitrakis, 