Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought of Exchange 2018935776, 9780198778585

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RETURNING THE GIFT

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Returning the Gift Modernism and the Thought of Exchange R E B E C C A C O L E S WO RT H Y

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3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Rebecca Colesworthy 2018 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935776 ISBN 978–0–19–877858–5 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgments The roots of this book run deep and have been nourished by more gifts than I can hope to reciprocate here—though that’s no excuse not to try. Tamar Katz and the late Robert Scholes sealed my fate as a lover of modernism during my undergraduate years at Brown University. If I entered graduate school knowing what I wanted to study, little else in these pages would have been conceivable without the exceptional intellectual community I found at Cornell University. Thanks above all to my committee members—Douglas Mao, Tracy McNulty, Molly Hite, Ellis Hanson, and Natalie Melas. The generosity of Doug’s feedback, guidance, and support over the years has been nothing short of saintly. The time and care he put into every exchange not only shaped my thoughts about gifts but also served as an example of the thoughtfulness that this book is in so many ways about. Tracy consistently prompted me to articulate the stakes of this project and to imagine that I actually could; perhaps most importantly, though, she encouraged me to plow forward at a time when it seemed most impossible and most imperative. My scholarly debts to Molly are catalogued in these pages; I hope she knows the depth of my personal debts, too. Ellis agreed to come on as co-chair at the eleventh hour and my only regret is not having roped him in sooner. Natalie was an ideal early interlocutor and her questions have continued to serve as a guide. For their friendship and intellectual sustenance, throughout graduate school and well beyond, I owe very heartfelt thanks to Audrey Wasser, Rob Lehman, and Aaron Hodges. Conversations with Alexis Briley, Shanna Carlson, John Hicks, Charity Ketz, Douglas McQueen-Thomson, Fernanda Negrete, Sarah Pickle, and Sonam Singh, as well as my peers in the Psychoanalysis Reading Group, Theory Reading Group, and Modernist Reading Group, fueled my thinking about this project and most everything. Alan Young-Bryant and his gift for bringing people together were often on my mind as I sat down to write. A postdoctoral position at the Draper Master’s Program at New York University was indispensable in helping me to turn this into a truly interdisciplinary project. Thanks especially to Amber Musser for her early support and enduring enthusiasm. My thanks go, too, to Maia Ramnath, Nina Hien, Georgia Lowe, Larissa Kyzer, and Robert Dimit; to my amazing students, whose engagement was a constant reminder of what drew me to scholarly work in the first place; and to Ann Pellegrini for generously inviting me to present some of the material here at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Many of the revisions and additions to this book were completed while I was an independent scholar working outside academia. Above all, I am incredibly grateful to Peter Nicholls at NYU for his institutional sponsorship, mentorship, and camaraderie throughout this period—not to mention his help devising the book’s title. At the Harlem Children’s Zone, special thanks go to Anne Williams-Isom, Mindy Miller, and Debbie Kim for giving me the precious gift of time when I most needed it.

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vi Acknowledgments I am also hugely thankful for the many friends, in and beyond New York City, who enabled this book’s completion, often by giving me a welcome break from writing it: Megan Lynch, Vanessa Bohns, Paul Foster Johnson, Jennifer Dudeff Klein, Dana Crosby McNamee, Sara Shumway, David Solomon, Sally Tamarkin, and Catherine Zimmer. A big hug and salute must also go to my extended family from the National Council for Research on Women: Linda Basch, Gwen Beetham, Lybra Clemons, Liz Horton, Lotti Silber, and the much-missed Mariam Chamberlain. In  my new home in Albany, I have been lucky to benefit from the late-stage reinforcements of Josh Tallent, Tara Needham, and Josh Bartlett. At Oxford University Press, I am grateful to Jacqueline Norton for her interest in and shepherding of the project, to Aimee Wright for her editorial assistance, and to the wonderful production and marketing teams. The insightful feedback of two anonymous readers gave me the push I needed to expand the book’s scope, further clarify its argument, and create a finished product much closer in kind to the thing I had always hoped it would be. While this book is largely about gifts with conditions, I could write a whole separate one about the unconditional love and support my family has given me during the long process of its creation. Thanks foremost to my Mom: you inspired me to return to this book and enabled me to stick with it in more ways than you know. You’re the best. To my Dad: without your encouragement and your sensitivity to the travails of scholarship I never could have finished it. And to Scott: thank you for your patience, your pep talks, your unwavering faith in me, your willingness to make coffee for me in the morning and to eat dinner with me far too late at night—for everything. At long last I can return the gift. Bound though it may be to fall short, this book is dedicated, with my love, to you. Chapter 2 is a revised and expanded version of my essay, “‘The Perfect Hostess’: Mrs. Dalloway, Gift Exchange, and the End of Laissez-Faire.” Modernist Cultures 9.2 (2014): 158–85. Copyright © Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Chapter 3 is a revised and expanded version of my essay, “Jean Rhys and the Fiction of Failed Reciprocity.” Journal of Modern Literature 37.2 (Winter 2014): 92–108. Copyright © Indiana University Press, 2014.

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Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations

v ix

Introduction

1

1. Marcel Mauss and the Turn to the Gift

21

2. Virginia Woolf and the Limits of Feminine Hospitality

63

3. Jean Rhys and the Fiction of Failed Reciprocity

106

4. Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Literary Genius

147

5. H.D. and the Promise of Queer Kinship

198

Coda: For New York 1941 from London 1941 Bibliography Index

242 249 263

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Abbreviations ALMM Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997). CD CF CSS EA ESK

G GHA GT

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1961). Virginia Woolf, “Character in Fiction,” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1988). Jean Rhys, The Collected Short Stories (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992). Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1993). Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, ed. Rodney Needham (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969). Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America, or The Relation of Human Nature to Human Mind (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

HWIW Gertrude Stein, How Writing Is Written, Volume II of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1974). I

Gertrude Stein, Ida A Novel, ed. Logan Esdale (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). IL Virginia Woolf, “Introductory Letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies,” The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5, ed. Stuart N. Clarke (Boston, MA, and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). IWMM Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge, 1987). LA

Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1985).

MD MM

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1953). Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss: A Biography, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

NTV H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1982). TG H.D., The Gift: The Complete Text, ed. Jane Augustine (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998). TTF H.D., Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions, 1974).

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Introduction What is a gift? Since the publication of Marcel Mauss’s classic 1925 Essai sur le don, few questions seem to have provoked as much certainty or as little consensus as this one. Across disciplines and fields, definitions abound. Some are grounded in culturally specific practices, from the Melanesian “Kula Ring” to American rituals of Christmas shopping. Others, however, are presented as a “general theory” that transcends historical and geographic boundaries. Depending on whom one consults, the gift may be an act of pure expenditure, a form of social contract, a cover for economic interest, a gesture of mutual recognition, or an expression of artistic creativity, among other things—if, of course, it is considered a “thing” at all. Or, indeed, if it even is. For some, the very existence of the gift is uncertain. Economists tell us that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, while philosophers wonder if the gift can ever escape oikonomia, the law (nomos) that underwrites the circular exchange of goods and dictates their eventual return home (oikos). The gift may be time or energy. It may be a spirit, a symbol, or a system of relation. What is for some an extension of the donor is for others a reflection of the recipient. But whatever a gift is and however we define it, we tend to think that we know what it is. We assume that when you or I say “gift” we are talking about the same thing—that what we mean is a given. This phenomenon is likely familiar to scholars in modernist studies, particularly in the wake of the emergence of the “new modernist studies,” with its prevailing ethos of expansion—including temporal expansion back into the nineteenth century and forward into the era after World War II, spatial expansion into geographic areas beyond Western Europe and the United States, vertical expansion into popular media and mass culture, and horizontal expansion into disciplines other than literature and the visual arts.1 Now ten years since its christening and another ten to twenty years since its putative birth, the new modernist studies is no longer quite so new. Nevertheless, the expansiveness for which the “new” of its title was always meant, however loosely, to stand still very much prevails, demanding that we, as scholars of modernism, repeatedly rewrite the terms of our engagement. We continue to presume a shared object of study, and yet this object is endlessly subject 1  On the “expansive tendency” of modernist studies since “on or about 1999,” see Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123.3 (May 2008): 737. For my part, I have always read Mao and Walkowitz’s account of the new modernist studies as a descriptive overview of changes in the field—changes to some degree shared with Anglo-American literary studies more generally—rather than a prescriptive call for new directions and approaches. I have taken the liberty of adding horizontal expansion to their list of temporal, spatial, and vertical varieties.

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2

Returning the Gift

to reinvention as the criteria for what exactly constitutes modernism shifts not simply to accommodate new cultural artifacts and materials but also in order to bring new perspectives to bear on old—that is, already canonical and previously examined—ones. Far more than a mere symptom of the demands of the academic marketplace—though it is in part that—this problem of constant reinvention is one that we, as students and critics of modernism, have inherited from modernists themselves in their highly self-conscious and strategic efforts “to create their own audiences, to explain what they were doing, and to durably transform the taste of the common reader.”2 And, in this respect, it may be argued that the question of what characterizes modernism necessarily continues to be constitutive of its study. The premise of this book is that these two questions—of what a gift is and of what modernism is—are deeply interrelated. Focusing on a series of works by Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. from roughly 1925 to 1945, Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought of Exchange argues that the question of the gift—of what a gift is, what it means, what it does, what it could be, and even what it should be—was central to their aesthetic projects and, moreover, that focusing on their treatment of this question brings into fuller and finer relief the social dimensions of these projects. To be clear from the start: there is not one “gift” at stake in this study or in modernism more broadly. How Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. conceptualize the gift varies with their politics, personal backgrounds, and historical contexts and is inseparable from their particular formal styles and techniques. Yet it remains the case that, across their writing, figures and narratives of gift-giving—of hospitality, sympathy, charity, reciprocity, genius, and kinship— consistently serve as vehicles for representing modern social life and reimagining the possibilities for social engagement and relations under the conditions of the capitalist present. Foremost among the relations they imagine is that of their texts to their readers. In adopting rhetoric and motifs of gift-giving, these writers in effect allegorize their address to their audiences and plot the conditions of their writing’s reception. They all, in other words, cast their writing as a gift, although what this means—the nature of the gift each writer gives—is not a foregone conclusion but rather is dictated by their respective works. Not only were Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. thinking about the gift and making it a centerpiece of their aesthetics but they also were doing so at a moment when, following the First World War, the gift was undergoing a theoretical revival across disciplines and in different national contexts. While Mauss is typically credited with ushering in this revival, he was hardly alone.3 In his intellectual history of the gift’s “return” as an object of systematic study in the early twentieth century, Harry Liebersohn suggests that the “crisis of World War I, with its breakdown of elementary 2  Jean-Michel Rabaté, introduction to A Handbook of Modernism Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 2. 3  Mark Osteen’s introduction to the interdisciplinary anthology The Question of the Gift is fairly representative of the credit routinely given to Mauss. There he declares that the latter’s “landmark 1925 anthropological study-cum-historical romance Essai sur le don prompted scholars from a variety of disciplines to reopen the question of the gift.” Osteen, “Introduction: Questions of the Gift,” in The Question of the Gift Essays across Disciplines, ed. Mark Osteen (London: Routledge, 2002), 1.

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Introduction

3

civilities within and across state borders . . . provoked a quest for new forms of solidarity.”4 For Mauss, this quest led to the identification of an alternative form of reciprocity in so-called archaic societies, where “exchanges and contracts take place in the form of presents.”5 Far from being unique to archaic societies (his primary example of which is Polynesia), such exchanges also exist for Mauss in Western capitalist societies and appear to be returning in a new form, on a large scale, with the rise of the nascent welfare state. We find a kindred quest for international solidarity in the economist John Maynard Keynes’s critique of the “Carthaginian Peace” of the Versailles Treaty. In his 1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes argues that the “structure and civilization” of the countries rocked by the “European Civil War” are “essentially one.”6 Because both the victors and their German and Austrian foes are bound by “hidden psychic and economic bonds,” it is in the interest of the former to resist imposing harsh reparations on the latter.7 We will return to Keynes in our discussion of his fellow Bloomsberry, Virginia Woolf, in Chapter 2. There, while acknowledging the occasional conceptual parallels between, and shared material context of, Maussian sociology and Keynesian consumerism, I will nevertheless insist on the limitations of economic theory—even the theory of so generous an economist as Keynes—as a framework for interpreting the gift of Woolf’s writing and modernist writing about the gift more broadly. For others, the concern with the gift to which World War I helped to give rise took a somewhat different form. We might recall, for example, Sigmund Freud’s parallel between the traumatic neuroses suffered by veterans and the child’s game of fort/da in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. For Freud, both phenomena manifest a compulsion to repeat that is “more primitive” than the pleasure principle, which, as a “principle of constancy,” is a fundamentally economic principle.8 If the status of the repetition compulsion, or death drive, as a gift is relatively implicit in Freud’s 1920 text, it becomes quite explicitly so in Georges Bataille’s anti-utilitarian notion of expenditure as an “illogical and irresistible impulse to reject material or moral goods.”9 While Bataille and his colleagues in the Collège de Sociologie were indebted to both Freud’s and Mauss’s work (and especially to Mauss’s uncle and mentor Émile Durkheim’s notion of the sacred), there remains an important tension between the Freudian quest for an aneconomic, instinctual beyond and the Maussian quest for solidarity. Particularly as it has been taken up in recent queer 4 Harry Liebersohn, The Return of the Gift: European History of a Global Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 167. 5  Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 3. Hereafter cited in the text as G. 6  John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920), 5. 7 Ibid. 8  Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961), 17, 6. 9  Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr., ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 128.

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4

Returning the Gift

theory, the gift of the death drive and of negative affect in general serves not to solidify social bonds but rather to disrupt them.10 At the same time, the argument might be made that, in retaliating against and registering the shortcomings of traditional social norms, such affect—of which Rhys’s fiction has plenty—might serve as a call to rethink the foundations of the social. We find an especially powerful call of this kind in a 1924 study of the gift from across the Atlantic—W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America. Published twenty years after his far more widely known The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois’s text offers a sweeping revaluation of, and homage to, the contributions of African Americans. In using the language of the gift to demand more just and democratic forms of recognition and inclusion, it exemplifies a third variety of postwar quest—a quest not for solidarity or unconscious motives but rather for more equitable social, political, and economic organization. Du Bois’s text paves the way for “real democracy” by countering the violent mistreatment of black lives as “great black wastes of hereditary idiots.”11 Black contributions—of labor, thought, culture, and military service, including service in the recent World War—are, for Du Bois, gifts, but they are not free gifts, or at least they ought not to be. For the fact is that their gifts have always had profound spiritual and economic importance even if their value has been “forgotten or slurred over” and their contributions uncompensated.12 Thus, of the black “gift of labor,” including the coerced labor of slaves, Du Bois observes that, “whether given willingly or not, it was given and America profited by the gift” in ways he then takes care to calculate.13 While Keynes’s, Freud’s, and Du Bois’s works offer but three examples of postwar thinking about the gift, they begin to point to the polysemy of the language of the gift and its seemingly inexhaustible mutability as a concept, as well as its simul­ taneous development in different disciplinary and national contexts. The question of the gift was not just “in the air” during this period, but was at the heart of a wide range of disciplines, including sociology (Mauss, Bataille, and the Collège de Sociologie), economics (Keynes), psychoanalysis (Freud), anthropology (Bronislaw Malinowski), philosophy (Martin Heidegger), political theory (Carl Schmitt), and, as I will argue here, literature, particularly, but certainly not exclusively, modernist writing by women. These discourses took shape in relation to a number of historical phenomena—the devastation and disillusionment wrought by World War I, international debt and reparations, rising unemployment rates and eventually the Great Depression, as well as the spread of socialism, movements for workers’, women’s, and civil rights, the birth of the welfare state, and, finally, the descent into World War II. In this context, questions of gift-giving—of how much to give, to whom, and by what means—were not just some abstract theoretical bauble but

10  I am thinking, for example, of Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in Is the Rectum a Grave and Other Essays (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 3–30, and Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004). 11  W. E. B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (Garden City Park, NY: Square One, 2009), 3. 12  Ibid. 26. 13 Ibid.

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Introduction

5

centerpieces of public debates and practical efforts to institute social, political, and economic changes. For as many starting points as thinking about the gift therefore has and as many directions as it may go, I begin, as so many have, with Mauss—not because what he had to say was radically new and unique. As we will see in Chapter 1, his intellectual debts were extensive and are well catalogued in his epic notes to the Essai sur le don. Rather, in his essay, typically translated into English as The Gift, Mauss has the distinction of crystallizing a problem: namely, that gifts and exchanges are supposed to be antithetical; indeed, their separation is built into and sustained by Western legal and economic systems. And yet, their separation simply does not hold up in everyday experience. From quotidian gestures of kindness and the feelings of indebtedness they inspire to national phenomena such as the growth of an “entire movement” in support of unemployment insurance in Britain—the social facts testify, on the contrary, to the practical and conceptual mixture of gifts and exchanges in the modern age (G 67). That we ultimately see traces of this mixture in the otherwise disparate works by Keynes, Freud, and Du Bois noted above further testifies to the significance and relevance of Mauss’s essay not simply as an ethnography of archaic societies but also, and more importantly for my purposes here, as an ethnography of modern market societies. Mauss’s The Gift, I argue, exemplifies a distinctively modernist oscillation between defiant critique of capitalist modernity and optimistic investment in its possibilities, unearthing the potential for alternative social forms within its morass of ideological and structural contradictions. In The Gift, this potential derives from modern capitalism’s paradoxical dependence on gift economies that it works tirelessly to discount and conceal. For its part, the writing of Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. shares Mauss’s sense that modern life is in fact characterized by a mixture of categories that are supposed to be separate—gifts and exchanges, generosity and interest, freedom and obligation, persons and things—sometimes to their immense dismay. Stein in particular, I argue, reacts quite negatively to the mixture of gifts and exchanges promised by the welfare state in her critique of the Roosevelt administration’s treatment of money (the proper medium of political economy) as if it were a free gift (the proper medium of art) under the New Deal. Though it has only recently gained significant attention from critics, Stein’s conservatism will be highly recognizable to anyone even casually versed in right-wing anxieties about government over-generosity. In the U.S. context, for example, we might recall the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, reportedly blaming his loss to Barack Obama on the latter’s “gifts” to minorities (in the form of health care) and young people (in the form of student loan interest forgiveness).14 What Stein’s own anxiety about government gifts nevertheless belies is a certainty about the separation of gifts and exchanges breaking down in the present, albeit in ways she considered untoward and unsavory on both artistic and political grounds. Her 1941 Ida A Novel then responds to this breakdown by presenting itself as a free gift in its own right, one that, while free, 14 See Maeve Reston, “Romney attributes loss to ‘gifts’ Obama gave minorities,” L.A. Times, November 15, 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/nov/15/nation/la-na-romney-donors-20121115.

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Returning the Gift

serves a social function in nominally giving every reader a much-needed “rest” from the Depression-era business of U.S. politics. In juxtaposing the work of Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. with that of writers in other fields, my objective here is to create a dialogue between literature and theory and, in the process, between what might very loosely be characterized as feminine and masculine conceptions of the gift. I make ample use of the work of Mauss and other male theorists to illuminate the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of writings by Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. Yet I also want to insist that their writings, in turn, make valuable contributions to a much broader interdisciplinary debate about the gift. Woolf ’s, Rhys’s, Stein’s, and H.D.’s concepts of the gift vary in significant ways. Thus, in calling these concepts “feminine,” I mean neither to negate the heterogeneity of their thought, nor to oversimplify or misrepresent the often complex gender identifications at play in both their lives and their writing. Rather, I above all mean to register the fact that these women writers all imagine forms of giftgiving capable of accommodating women as subjects—that is, as mutual participants in exchange, and not, as Mauss and his male contemporaries might have it, as a medium of exchange between men. Gift theory has tended either to identify woman with the gift itself or to fetishize feminine generosity for its nominally exceptional status with respect to the market, its place outside commerce and, by extension, civil society. In so doing, this theory has reinforced a patriarchal ideology of separate spheres and, with it, a sexual division of labor. By contrast, Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. cast women as actors in public life—as donors and recipients of gifts that bear transformative social potential. Yet it is not just the status of women in particular that is at stake here. Not only do these writers focus attention on women’s social roles as subjects, but they also expose the myriad differences within and between subjects that are occluded and negated by notions and practices of sexual division. In the writing of Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D., the excessive desires and gestures that so often get feminized by male theorists in the early social sciences are not unique to women but turn out to be typical of subjectivity in general. No doubt the most notorious among these theorists is also “the most indebted” of Mauss’s heirs—Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose claim that woman is “the supreme gift” and that her exchange between men is the archetypal form of reciprocity in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (in French, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté) has long earned him criticism by feminists for universalizing what are in fact Eurocentric gender and sexual norms.15 But Mauss is hardly innocent: in taking the agonistic potlatch as his ethnographic point of departure, his notion of reciprocity is also one that focuses on “big men,” whose practices of exchange serve to establish the rank and relation of identification-based masculine “groups”—a term that Mauss equally applies to archaic clans and to the French school of sociology he helped to institutionalize after Durkheim’s death. Published in 1925 and 1949 15  Mary Douglas, foreword to The Gift by Marcel Mauss, xv; Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, ed. Rodney Needham (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969), 65. Hereafter cited in the text as ESK.

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Introduction

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respectively, Mauss’s The Gift and Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures serve as bookends to the central period considered here—though it bears acknowledging that our frame of reference will also exceed these bounds. Our reading of Jean Rhys in Chapter 3, for example, will position her work in a tradition of writing about contract and charity that stretches from Charles Baudelaire’s petits poèmes en prose to Jacques Derrida’s reading of Baudelairean charity in one petit poème in particular, “La fausse monnaie,” and recent feminist critiques of the modern “contract-versus-charity opposition.” In thus branching outward while repeatedly circling back to Mauss and Lévi-Strauss in the following chapters, my point is not to uphold these two particular big men either as theoretical standard-bearers or as straw men. Rather, I mean to underscore the contemporaneity of developments in literature and other fields and to trace a literary counter-genealogy of writing about the gift—one that starts with Woolf ’s publication of Mrs. Dalloway the same year as Mauss’s essay and concludes with H.D.’s writing of her memoir, The Gift, in London during World War II at the same time as Lévi-Strauss, then a refugee in New York City, was conducting research in the public library on marriage rules for what would become the founding text of structural anthropology. Thus, my title, Returning the Gift, has multiple connotations. Above all, it riffs on Mauss’s own use of rhetoric of “return” to describe the postwar resurgence of more generous forms of exchange, and on the widespread critical assertion of the gift’s “return” as an object of intellectual inquiry and political contestation in the twentieth century. Yet it is also intended to register the extent to which the work of Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. does not simply benefit from juxtaposition with theories of the gift from other fields but also in effect returns the favor, both by reimagining the interplay of gender and the gift and by casting the gift as a uniquely literary phenomenon. They are all, I argue, turning and re-turning the gift in both tropological and epistemological senses of the term “turn.” They develop figures and avatars of the gift that revamp foregoing fictions of feminine generosity—from the hospitality of Woolf ’s imperfect Angel in the Dalloway House to the charity of Rhys’s down-and-out grue in Paris and London. But we can also see these writers reflecting on the gift in a philosophical mode, speculating on what it means to give, on the unexpected twists and turns a gift might take, and turning gifts over in order, as Woolf might say, “to bring out their more obscure angles and relationships.”16 We can see them drawing on the resources of fiction, thinking with and through different stylistic devices—Woolf ’s repetition and the luxuriousness of her prose, Rhys’s linguistic efficiency and careful cross-cutting of perspectives, Stein’s elision of grammatical markers of time and relation, and H.D.’s pseudo-historical projections of childhood—in order to reveal otherwise hidden or devalued patterns of relation and lay the literary groundwork for new relations. I hasten to add that, in suggesting that Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. to some degree echo Mauss and participate in the postwar intellectual turn to the gift, I do not mean to suggest that they read Mauss or that, in writing about the gift, they 16  Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1994), 483.

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were directly influenced by developments in the social sciences, particularly studies of “primitive” societies. Lines of influence from the social sciences can of course be traced: Woolf, for example, was friends with, and drew inspiration from, the work of the Cambridge Ritualist Jane Ellen Harrison and H.D. was penning her tribute to Freud, “Writing on the Wall,” as she finished work on The Gift (not to mention communing with the dead in spiritualist table-tapping sessions). My point is that these particular nodes of interdisciplinary connection are not the key to making sense of the various gifts at play in their writing—at least not insofar as these nodes of connection suggest a mutual fascination with “the primitive” or nostalgia for the past. As we will further see in Chapter 1, Mauss was openly critical of the primitivism of peers such as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who insisted on a strict distinction between “primitive” and “civilized” mentalities. Yet he was also troubled by what he took to be mischaracterizations of the similarities between them on narrow economic grounds and, more specifically, the turn by some scholars to “societies that we lump together somewhat awkwardly as primitive or inferior” in order to find evidence of man’s fundamentally calculating nature and of a proto-capitalist barter economy (G 5). By contrast, Mauss avers in his essay’s opening pages that “there has never existed . . . anything that might resemble what is called a ‘natural’ economy” (G 5). The forms of economic organization that we find among groups in Polynesia, Melanesia, and the Pacific Northwest are not less sophisticated than the “forms of contract and sale that may be said to be modern (Semitic, Hellenic, Hellenistic, and Roman)” (G 4). Rather, they are “different from ours”—but not entirely. Much of Mauss’s point is that the socialistic tenets of these societies continue to underwrite our own, though it is also crucial to underscore that this socialism is never pure in his view but is always shot through with, and inseparable from, interestedness and even, as we will see, individualism. In the context of his critique of primitivism, Mauss’s use of the term archaïque to describe these societies sets him apart from other scholars. Still, it risks participating in the same temporal logic, “distancing those who are observed from the Time of the observer” by relegating the observed to an archaic past.17 In other words, Mauss would still seem to make what Johannes Fabian characterizes as a routine move of anthropological discourse, at least historically—that is, to draw a distinction “between the West and the Rest” on the basis of their temporal difference—and to do so even as he affirms their shared underlying structure and the past’s persistence in the present.18 Given the temporal dimensions of Mauss’s argument and especially his and later scholars’ primary ethnographic focus on peoples in the periphery and nonWestern, non-capitalist societies, the intersection of modernist literature and neo-Maussian theories of the gift is typically framed in terms of their mutual atavism, anti-capitalism, or both. This framework, however, fails to account for the extent to which Mauss and modernist writers were thinking about the gift in response to contemporary crises and changes within metropolitan market society—and, in the 17  Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 25. 18  Ibid. 28.

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case of Mauss and Woolf, to changes in England in particular. As we will see in Chapter 1, Mauss greatly admired the British cooperative movement, as well as the socialist reformism of Virginia and Leonard Woolf ’s friends, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Like the theories imaginatively sketched by Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D., his own theory of the gift is tied to and even rooted in postwar political concerns. In outlining these concerns and situating each writer’s works—including those of Mauss and Lévi-Strauss—within their sociohistorical context, part of my objective here is to expand and revise our historical and theoretical framework for conceptualizing the intersection between Anglo-American modernist literature and notions of the gift from other fields and other countries. My approach is transnational and to some degree reinforces recent moves to align modernist politics and style with cosmopolitanism.19 Three of my four focal literary authors were living and writing abroad—the Caribbean-born Rhys and the American-born Stein and H.D. having all migrated to Paris or London and, in Rhys’s case, to both Paris and London. Though she was the sole lifelong inhabitant of her home country, the British-born Woolf was arguably the most outspoken of the four in her criticism of nationalism and the affective and psychological pull of national identification. (To be sure, Rhys’s heroines are comparably critical, but they struggle to find a receptive audience, instead enacting their frustration with punitive social norms in ways that others promptly recode as proof of their moral failings.) Nevertheless, the nation does loom, if not always largely, then still quite noticeably here. Its force is felt most strongly in my reading of Stein’s aesthetics and politics in Chapter 4, where I suggest that the “everybody” she dreamed of ­representing and even helping with her writing was a patently American collective body. If questions of nationality thus come into play, it is in no small part because of these writers’ immense self-reflexivity about the material and ideological ­conditions of their literary production. Stein again is a case in point, positing a link between national history and literary form in her lecture “What is English Literature.” Woolf does the same in “Character in Fiction” when she suggests that her impressions of an imagined encounter in a train car between a “Mr. Smith” and a “Mrs. Brown” would be rendered completely differently by English, French, and Russian writers—though in so doing she also paradoxically implies that, while produced by an English writer, her own version has escaped the traditional constraints of Englishness. My approach is also materialist insofar as I take care throughout to consider the sociohistorical links and formal resemblances between the gifts of my writers and the many currencies that mediate life in market society—including money, contracts, symbolic thought, seemingly empty chatter, and, in the case of H.D. in particular, the telegraph and the telephone. Returning the Gift is, among other things, a study about the “mediation of experience” in the modern age and even modernist writers’

19  See, for example, Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Rebecca Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

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embrace of the “mediated life” in an era of ever-growing mass culture.20 It therefore joins other recent studies in seeking to bridge the “great divide” between modernism and mass culture. But whereas other studies—after making the requisite nod to Andreas Huyssen’s 1986 study, After the Great Divide—tend to focus on either the relationship between literature and information and communication technologies or the relationship between literature and visual media such as the photograph or film, I mean to put an accent on the influential role of economic media in shaping thinking about the gift. Even when we turn in Chapter  5 to H.D.’s invocation of the telegraph and the telephone to model an ideal of queer kinship, I want to stress the role these technologies play as instruments of exchange, of give and take between what she figures as “receiving centres.” Following Mary Poovey, we might call these various media, from money to the telephone, “genres of the credit economy”— an economy in which, I argue, symbols and things (or, as James Joyce might have it, “word” and “world”) may “converge in disorienting ways.”21 Yet, as we will see, they might also diverge in disorienting ways. Indeed, if, for Mark Goble, modernism demonstrates a “faith in communication,” then I want to suggest that such faith—its utopian optimism about the social potential of literature—goes hand in hand with a profound anxiety about the risk of its failure—about the gift turning into poison or, what may be better or worse depending on the perspective, turning into nothing at all.22 This anxiety is indissociable from the structure of exchange and the alienation this structure introduces. But it is also linked here to my writers’ self-consciousness about gender inequality and the tendency of women’s gifts in particular to fall into the wrong hands or on deaf ears—if, that is, they are ever actually given. The writing of Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. serves as a chronicle of feminine gifts that have either gone unreciprocated or been lost altogether. And yet, if exchange for these writers is shadowed by danger and uncertainty, it also seems at times to hold, as H.D. puts it, a “promise” of more egalitarian social forms—or, if not always a promise, then at least, from a more materialist perspective, a degree of inevitability that renders exchange necessary to think with. My subtitle, Modernism and the Thought of Exchange, is intended to capture what I take to be these four writers’ investment in thinking with exchange—in thinking in ways that are conceptually coextensive with, and materially grounded in, market society. Contra other scholars of modernism and the gift, I would even go so far as to entertain the claim, given fullest expression by John Xiros Cooper, that modernism is the culture of market society—but only with a major revision. 20  Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 29. I borrow the term “mediated life” from the title of Mark Goble’s Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 21 Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Recalling the confusion of “word” and “world” in Ulysses, Michael North traces what has become the “inevitable mediation of experience” in our own time back to this early twentieth-century moment, “when the world and the word were beginning to converge in disorienting ways,” not simply for Joyce but for the “public at large” (North, Reading 1922, 29). 22 Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 3.

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In making this claim, Cooper defines market society as “this new kind of social order that arises when a society is organized around the activities of economic exchange.”23 For Cooper, contra Mauss, economic exchange—that is, capitalist exchange—is the only kind of exchange. There is no market but the capitalist market. The universalization of this market has “transformed thought itself,” above all by instituting an ethos of nihilism that, in emptying the “fixed values of the past” and degrading all inherent or use value into exchange value, is not really much of an ethos at all.24 But while the market has, over hundreds of years, made us think differently, he also suggests that we cannot actually think it. The total pervasiveness of exchange escapes us: “Most of us still think the market is simply a  way of organizing economic life, when, in fact, it has utterly transformed the fundamental forms of our existence”—or what I would suggest we might think of as the “society” in market society.25 From a sociological and anthropological perspective, however, the problem is not that society cannot think the market so much as the fact that the market cannot think society. In other words, the econ­ omistic ideology that mediates our conception of the market—the notion, like Cooper’s, that there is only one form of exchange and it is capitalist—prevents us from seeing the range of exchanges that in fact make up capitalist society and on which capitalism depends for its survival. Modernism, in my reading, takes responsibility for thinking this society, not simply in the mode of a reaction formation against nihilism or an attachment to past values, as Cooper suggests, but also and more centrally here by working to recognize and bring into relief all those values that capitalism needs, and even helps to generate, but which it systemically denies in its nominal embrace of nihilism. Modernism, from this angle, is not melancholic or nostalgic but rather demystifying. It does not mourn the supposed loss of meaning in the modern world but rather exposes the excess of meaning to which the logic of exchange gives way in unhinging symbol and thing. Exchange turns every thing into a potential symbol—or even a gift, a thing with significance in excess of its commercial value. Put somewhat differently, language of the gift is the means by which (some of ) the social dimensions of exchange, dimensions that are otherwise outlawed or obscured by economic ideology, become thinkable. While inseparable from capitalist society, the phrase “thought of exchange” in my subtitle is not limited to capitalist exchange. Furthermore, while I mean for this language of “thought” to connote the theoretical concerns and contributions of modernist literature, it also registers my writers’ innovation in the novel form to capture and explore modern consciousness—from Woolf ’s creation of a new “code of manners” to communicate the myriad impressions that make up “human character” in Mrs. Dalloway to Stein’s idealistic portrait of a “human mind” that can never quite fully abstract itself from the caprices of “human nature.” While there is, therefore, a phenomenological dimension of this study, I will not be drawing on phenomenological discussions of the gift and “givenness” per se such as we find in 23 John Xiros Cooper, Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 8. 24  Ibid. 13, 7. 25  Ibid. 11.

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Returning the Gift

the work of Heidegger or Jean-Luc Marion. It would not be unjustified to draw connections between the projects of my focal writers and phenomenologies of the gift—for example, when I discuss gratitude in Stein’s Ida A Novel. In his introduction to Stein’s primary novel of gratitude—A Novel of Thank You, written in 1925 but published posthumously—Steven Meyer points out that, like Heidegger, Stein was interested in the “relation between ‘thinking’ and ‘giving thanks.’ ”26 In looking at the role of giving thanks (and its occasional avoidance) in Ida, I take a more sociological route, instead referring to Georg Simmel’s reflections on gratitude. Crucially, however, the turn to sociology does not constitute a turn away from phenomenology. The sociology of figures such as Simmel and Mauss is also concerned with phenomenology; indeed, the latter even characterizes sociology as a phenomenology. In a January 1924 talk presented to the Societé de Psychologie, of which he was then the president, Mauss proudly declares that, after forty years, “our sciences”—psychology and sociology—“have become phenomenologies,” the first focusing on the “realm of consciousness” (i.e., individual consciousness), while the latter, his primary field, fixes its theoretical and empirical gaze on the “realm of collective consciousness.”27 While I venture well beyond sociology (and into ­philosophy via the work of Derrida), sociology nevertheless serves as a fitting umbrella term for the theoretical terrain covered here. This is in part because I begin and end with Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, the latter of whom identifies himself as a “comparative sociologist” in the preface to the first edition of The Elementary Structures (ESK xxv). More importantly, sociology maintains a degree of centrality here because of its trademark concern, at least in Mauss’s work, with discerning the “share of the social in thought.”28 In the Essai sur le don, this share translates not as we might worry it would into a crowd psychology à la Gustave Le Bon’s “popular mind” or Freud’s Massenpsychologie. It is true that, as the twentieth century wore on, Durkheim and his French sociological heirs would at times be stigmatized for the apparent resemblance between their interest in collective experiences of “effervescence” and the atavistic threat of fascism.29 But in Mauss’s The Gift, this focus on the share of the social in thought above all translates, in a much broader epistemo­ logical and ethical vein, into thoughtfulness about oneself in relation to others—a thoughtfulness that the writing of Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. also manifests and works to foster in its readers. Ultimately, and hopefully with the proper thoughtfulness on my part and without being too imperialistic in my reach, I mean to further the horizontal expansion 26  Meyer also goes on to suggest that, “Whereas Heidegger insists on the etymological connections between ‘think’ and ‘thank,’ Stein concentrates on the significance the words possess in relation to each other when they are placed in close proximity.” See Steven Meyer, “The New Novel: A Novel of Thank You and the Characterization of Thought,” introduction to A Novel of Thank You by Gertrude Stein (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1994), xxxiii. 27  Marcel Mauss, “Real and Practical Relations between Psychology and Sociology” in Sociology and Psychology: Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 3. 28  Quoted in Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss: A Biography, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 217. Hereafter cited in the text as MM. 29  See Michèle Richman, Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the Collège de Sociologie (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 16, 120–3.

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of modernist studies into other disciplines, as well as its vertical expansion to deal with different media of exchange—from Woolf ’s shillings and Rhys’s cheques to Stein’s taxes and H.D.’s telephone cords. While Returning the Gift therefore participates in the new modernist studies, it also aims to complicate the historicist and, in some cases, economistic bent of recent criticism by working to wed historical and theoretical approaches. Stephen Ross sharply observes that “theory’s challenge to predominant notions of the literary, canon formation, disciplinary formations, high and low culture, progress, civilization, and imperialism helped make the new modernist studies possible,” and yet “theory has been forgotten” in the field.30 When theory is remembered it is often lumped into the same historically blind formalist categories that it once helped to displace. While addressing literary studies in general and not just modernist studies, Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee’s brief explanation of the growth of “new economic criticism” in the early 1990s rather neatly exemplifies this trick of disavowal. Among the reasons they identify for its growth, the first is the fact that “the critical pendulum has decidedly swung back toward historicist methods and away from deconstruction, semiotics, and the other formalist approaches that prevailed in the 1970s and early 1980s.”31 These “formalisms” are then opposed not only to historicism but also to interdisciplinarity, of which the new economic criticism constitutes one variety: “Historicist and culturally aware literary critics have therefore sought new approaches derived from the methods and texts of other fields, one of which is economics.”32 I leave to the side the question of whether semiotics or deconstruction can fairly be called ahistoricist. The notion that they are culturally unaware does strike me, however, as an especially hard claim to sell. Of what are critics of symbolic systems aware if not culture? Bracketing this question, too, it bears recalling that neither semiotics nor deconstruction was born in literary studies. Rather, both have always been, to use Osteen and Woodmansee’s phrasing, “derived from the methods and texts of other fields.” In his indispensable account of the literary critical implications of semiotics, Jonathan Culler traces semiotics’ main insights to “the work of Marx, Durkheim, and Freud, who insisted on the primacy of social facts.”33 Its roots can therefore be found in political economy, sociology, psychoanalysis, and no doubt other fields, too. (Nietzsche and, by extension, philosophy, are conspicuously absent from Culler’s list.) The impact of semiotics and, indeed, of theory more broadly has been comparably expansive—helping to establish new, fundamentally interdisciplinary “disciplines” (e.g., cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, critical race and ethnic studies) while also seriously unsettling older, more institutionally established ones (e.g., literary studies, history, philosophy). Certainly the new economic criticism 30  Stephen Ross, “Introduction: The missing link,” in Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate, ed. Stephen Ross (New York: Routledge, 2009), 1. 31  Osteen and Woodmansee, “Taking Account of the New Economic Criticism: An Historical Introduction,” in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (London: Routledge, 1999), 3–4. 32  Ibid. 4. 33 Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 25–6.

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and related approaches provide useful tools for historicizing and interpreting the interdisciplinarity that has always underwritten and informed theory. One thinks, for example, of the dazzling ends to which such criticism is put in Jean Joseph-Goux’s analysis of the homology between money and the linguistic sign in Ferdinand de Saussure’s work, to which we will return in our reading of Stein. Still, it hardly seems accurate to characterize the recent historicist turn to other disciplines in and beyond modernist studies as a radical break with previous theoretical approaches, even if, practically speaking, “theory has been marginalized” along the way.34 Returning the Gift contravenes what I take to be false antitheses between histor­icism and theory and between historicism and formalism by resituating both modernism and theory within an interdisciplinary framework—a framework sensitive to historical and formal details and to processes of disciplinary self-definition and institutionalization, as well as to the ways in which rigid disciplinary distinctions break down, and are sometimes strategically broken down, as in Mauss’s own rather grand theoretical and political claims for sociology. Moreover, while owing a debt to the economic turn in literary studies and the new economic criticism, Returning the Gift also aims to expose the limitations of modern economics as a discursive lens for interpreting modernist literature. By instead taking sociology as my point of departure, I hope to get traction on some old yet persistent tensions in modernist studies, particularly those between modernism and the market and between modernism’s elitist and democratic impulses. As we will see in Chapter 1, the language of the gift tends to straddle these tensions, consistently connoting uniqueness and universality, literary fictions and social facts, in both its literary and its sociological usages. Finally, before offering a brief overview of the chapters to come, it bears saying an additional word about the motivation behind, and the significance of, my focus on literary texts by four Anglo-American women. First, it should be clear that Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. were not alone in thinking about the gift in the field of literature. Male writers, too, were turning to the gift in order reflect on the possible forms the social might take in the modern age—perhaps most spectacularly in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), a text that to some degree emblematizes the dual treatment of women as objects of exchange and as excess incarnate, especially in leaving Molly Bloom in the pooh, as it were. Molly’s traits—from the luxury of being served breakfast in bed (which Clarissa Dalloway shares) to her climactic “yes” (echoed by both Stein’s Ida and H.D. in her memoir)—will often be riffed upon and revised here. In the process, they are revealed to be what they arguably are in Joyce’s hands as well: manifestations of an excess that is caught up in circuits of exchange and to which men, too, are prone—perhaps Joyce most of all in his virtuoso performance in the “Penelope” chapter. We see a further preoccupation with the gift in E. M. Forster’s fiction, from his narrative of wayward inheritance and epigraphic imperative to “only connect” in Howards End (1910) to his reflections on the possibilities for friendship across power asymmetries and lines of difference in A Passage to India (1924) and Two 34  Ross, “Introduction: the missing link,” 1.

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Cheers for Democracy (1951). We see it in Dowell’s concern with “doing justice” to the less than likable players in Ford Madox Ford’s tale of passion, The Good Soldier (1915), as well as in Ford’s 1905 urban ethnography, The Soul of London; in the latter, Ford, like Simmel in the “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” published two years earlier in 1903, ponders the hindrance inevitably placed on our “innate altruism” by the sheer number of people in the metropolis.35 Concern with the gift also comes into relief in different yet ultimately related ways in early modernist aesthetic statements, such as Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction” (1884) and Joseph Conrad’s preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), both of which we will consider in Chapter 1. What should be clear from the publication dates of these examples is that, in literature, as in the social sciences, the question of the gift did not suddenly emerge ex nihilo following World War I, though the war and its aftermath did bring this question to the fore in new, historically specific ways. Rather, as my nod to James and Conrad begins to suggest, notions of the gift—and, specifically, of art as a gift—were central to literary modernism’s disciplinary self-definition. While the list of male writers to whom we might turn to consider modernism’s various gifts is therefore quite substantial, it is important to recall that modern literature by men—and by Anglo-American men in particular—has already been central to twentieth-century gift theory, including the work of a striking number of French theorists. Mauss set an example by referencing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1884 essay “Gifts” in the conclusion to his essay. Derrida—who provocatively suggests in the foreword to one of his most sustained studies of the gift, Given Time, that the “problematic of the gift” has informed his work “more or less constantly”—turns a deconstructive eye not only on Baudelaire but also on Anglo-American figures such as Joyce and Edgar Allan Poe.36 So, too, does Jacques Lacan in seminars on Poe and Joyce. Even more noteworthy, though, is the appearance of T. S. Eliot in  Lacan’s 1953 paper, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” which cites “The Hollow Men,” and concludes, as Eliot concludes The Waste Land, with a reference to the teachings of the Upanishad. Eliot famously altered the sequence of the teachings in The Waste Land in order, as Glenn Willmott notes, “to place the gift first,” writing Datta [give], then Dayadhvam [sympathize], and finally Damyata [control].37 Lacan maintains the original sequence—Damyata, Datta, Dayadhvam—but while he puts the gift second, he also continues to give the gift priority in treating the Upanishad, and implicitly Eliot’s poem, as evidence of the primordial function of the “gift of speech.”38 Lastly, Lewis Hyde, surely the most influential theorist of the gift for contemporary Anglo-American 35  Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (New York: Penguin, 1946), 42, and The Soul of London (London: Everyman, 1995), 43. 36  Jacques Derrida, foreword to Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), ix, n1. 37  Glenn Willmott, Modernist Goods: Primitivism, the Market, and the Gift (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 177–9. 38  Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 103–4.

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writers, identifies the lives and works of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound as prime examples of the “commerce of the creative spirit,” and does so, astonishingly, while also claiming that such commerce “remains a mark of the female gender” in modern capitalist nations.39 Against this backdrop, the founding question of this study is: What happens to the gift when we look at writing by women? As we might hope, and as I intend to demonstrate in the chapters that follow, the answer is far from uniform—though it consistently leads us somewhere other than the bucolic countryside, colonial periphery, or ancient past. H.D., it is true, often joined male modernists such as  Eliot and Joyce in looking backward to find a firmer foundation for art and ­civilization than modernity seemed to offer. Yet what we find in her World War II memoir, as in the works of Woolf, Rhys, and Stein, is wishful investment in the very metropolises that worried Ford and Simmel. London, Paris, and even Washington, D.C., in Ida become centers—we might even say capitals—of the gift. In fostering unlikely connections and stretching the bounds of altruism in strange and surprising ways, these urban centers play home to expansive webs of give and take—to imperceptible systems of social relation that insistently make their presence known, colonizing minds and bodies despite the supposed hold of egoism on our time and attention. At the same time, the mere fact that the writers here are women does not mean that they are politically progressive or automatically admirable from a feminist ­perspective. My objective is not to valorize their viewpoints. I do mean, however, to counter the priority given to literary works by men in gift theory. Whether right or wrong, whether good or bad, what women had to say about the gift during this period is deserving of our attention precisely because women had traditionally been confused with gifts—and in some respects still are. As these writers knew only too well, both in theory and in practice, women have a long history of being treated as precious yet expendable objects without receiving recognition or recompense for the gifts they bear as subjects. If not in ways that we may always like or with which we need agree, shifting our focus from men to women does also shift the theory. Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. open a space for conceptualizing feminine subjectivity—without, however, resorting to essentialist notions of feminine or maternal “gifts,” such as we sometimes find in theories of écriture féminine. On the contrary, what we find here is a move to undermine inherited myths of feminine generosity by demonstrating that traits of the gift typically ascribed to femininity—above all, the quality of excess—are in fact shared among different subjects, subjects who may be socially differentiated along not only lines of gender and sexuality but also lines of class, race, religion, and nationality. Thus, while the politics of Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. may be constrained by both sociohistorical circumstances and personal biases, their thinking about the gift bears, at least in theory, on the interests and concerns of more than just women.

39  Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 2007), 185, 41.

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The first chapter reframes the historical and conceptual intersection between Anglo-American modernist literature and theories of the gift from other fields. I begin by returning to Mauss’s Essai in order to situate his turn to the gift with respect to his socialism and investment in institutionalizing French sociology after the war, as well as to draw out his own modernism. Focusing on his prescriptive and, in my view, distinctively modernist call for a “new morality” that would blend individualism and communism, I argue that what links his vision of the gift with the writing of Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. is not their shared fascination with primitive or pre-capitalist societies but rather their shared investment in reimagining social possibilities within market society. More specifically, their writing, like Mauss’s essay, is concerned with bringing into relief and even working to sustain the “society” in market society in the wake of the destabilization of the myth of the free market by war and its aftermath. Turning to literary and aesthetic usages of the language of the gift to define ­literary value, as well as the concrete historical connections between Mauss and Woolf via their mutual engagement with British socialism, I argue that if there is a line of influence to be traced it is not one of the (French) social sciences on (British) culture but rather the other way around. In defining the gift as a total social phenomenon, uniquely observable by sociology, Mauss not only draws inspiration from British politics but also appropriates a concept with a rich literary prehistory—one that he all but entirely suppresses in The Gift but which reveals modernist literature’s own sociological bent. Ultimately, Mauss’s admiration for Beatrice and Sidney Webbs’ work in particular helps to establish the fundamental difference between his conception of the gift and the conceptions of the writers here, particularly Woolf ’s. For Mauss, the Webbs’ nationalist vision of a socialist commonwealth seems to have served as a model of the “group morality” he championed in hailing the gift’s return. By contrast, for Woolf, as a friend of the Webbs but also a strong critic of their vision, the gift was a means of thinking beyond the identificationbased group and its troubling diminution of differences. Drawing on a number of Woolf ’s essays to chart the connections she draws between the gift and fiction, I argue finally that Woolf casts literature as the proper home of the gift in the modern age, one that she took to be uniquely suited to accommodating the kind of epistemological and ethical mixture Mauss celebrates. The following four chapters are each organized around an individual author and read a central text—Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Rhys’s After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Stein’s Ida A Novel (1941), and H.D.’s The Gift (written from 1940 to 1944 and published in full posthumously in 1998)—in the context her nonfiction, relevant theoretical writings, and contemporary sociohistorical changes. We begin with Woolf, whose Mrs. Dalloway was published the same year as Mauss’s Essai in 1925 and who not only shares a material context with Mauss but also comes closest to thinking about the gift in terms that resemble his own emphasis on mixture. Capitalizing on the much-discussed connection between Woolf and John Maynard Keynes by way of the Bloomsbury Group, I take care here to distinguish between the relevance of economic history to Woolf ’s aesthetic project and the limits of ­economic theory for interpreting this project. I find a productive alternative to this

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theory in Lévi-Strauss’s translation of the Maussian gift into a theory of symbolic thought. Mrs. Dalloway, I argue, represents modern experience as an experience of gift exchange that we represent to ourselves by way of symbolic thought, which figures here as the thought form of modern capitalism and the privileged means for realizing the balance of egoism and altruism that Mauss, Keynes, and Woolf were all seeking during this period. Drawing on Woolf ’s comparison of the writer and the hostess in “Character in Fiction,” I argue that the key to the possibility of this balance in Mrs. Dalloway is the figure of the hostess—a figure that owes a debt to nineteenth-century domestic fiction but which Woolf also transforms in suggesting that the hostess’s ethical value derives not from her purity but rather from her impurity, her imperfections. Clarissa’s impurity and thus her own ethical potential are fleetingly put on display in her failed communion with the unknown Septimus at her party. The reader is then left to compensate for this failure by tracking the polymorphous play of one symbol in particular throughout the novel—the thriceused “diamond,” which comes to signify Clarissa’s paradoxical relationship to the social system Woolf set out to criticize in writing Mrs. Dalloway. Like Woolf, Rhys was extraordinarily sensitive to the traditional identification of woman with the gift and even gives the feminine subject a certain representative status. For Rhys, however, it is the poor woman who assumes a broader exemplarity in an era marked by mass unemployment—a woman who, despite her economic lack, paradoxically figures the excess or waste of what she calls “organized society.” Chapter 3 juxtaposes Rhys’s second novel, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, with her autobiographical reflections on the experience of financial and emotional dependence, as well as recent feminist critiques of the gendered opposition of (feminine) charity and (masculine) contract. Rhys’s novel in effect undermines this opposition by exposing the dependence of everybody in Mackenzie on a gift that, unlike either charity or contracts, fosters the feeling of a social bond. In so doing, Rhys also offers a gendered revision of the economy of begging and almsgiving portrayed in Baudelaire’s “Counterfeit Money” and later analyzed by Derrida. (As Rhys’s reference to Émile Zola’s Nana in Voyage in the Dark suggests, Rhys was well versed in French literary tradition and early in her career translated the French novella Perversité, though Ford, her patron and lover, got the credit.) After Leaving Mr Mackenzie works, I argue, to bring into relief the role that its heroine, Julia, already plays within the economy of the novel not simply as a beggar—that is, as a symbolic figure à la Baudelaire’s poor man—but as a feminine subject and donor in her own right on whom others depend. In exposing the symbolic debt thus owed to Julia, Rhys’s novel ultimately insists that greater reciprocity across lines of difference is possible in the world of her fiction despite the repeated failure of her heroines—and, for many years, her fiction—to garner a sympathetic return in recognition. In turning to Gertrude Stein’s writings from the 1930s in Chapter 4, we encounter a rather different treatment of the gift—one tied to her mixed feelings about her newfound popularity after The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas became a bestseller in 1933, on the one hand, and, on the other, what she took to be F.D.R.’s egregious over-expenditure of public money and decision to take the U.S. dollar off the gold standard the same year. It was a period when Stein suddenly had to worry about

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the authenticity of her gift as a self-proclaimed literary genius, and when the U.S. government, in virtualizing value and institutionalizing public assistance programs, appeared to be appropriating the unique authority of the genius to “give.” I mean “give” here in both aesthetic and philanthropic senses of the term: for Stein, the genius “gives” insofar as she creates something ex nihilo but also insofar as she helps other people to become better versions of themselves, above all by forcing them to think. Stein responds to the perceived infringement of politics on art in her aesthetic, popular, and more or less philosophical writings by establishing what essentially amounts to a system of oppositions: masterpieces versus government, human mind versus human nature, entity versus identity—all of which correspond, I argue, to an economistic opposition between gift and exchange. She responds, in other words, by trying to reinstitute the very opposition that Mauss argued social democracy would help to break down. Taking a cue from Stein’s preoccupation with money, I draw on theoretical accounts of the money economy as a symbolic economy in order to argue that money occupies a highly paradoxical position within this system of binaries: as a medium of exchange that can appear to be a free gift—particularly to the Roosevelt administration—money at once necessitates the opposition of gift and exchange and yet constantly threatens to undercut it. In this broader historical and theoretical context, Ida A Novel reads as a New Deal Künstlerroman, allegorizing both the importance and the difficulty for the artist of keeping gift and exchange separate in the modern money economy. Not only does her heroine Ida’s penchant for granting favors for other people while living in Washington, D.C., end up serving a political function, thus giving her generosity an odd resemblance to the welfare state Stein reviled, but the text also suggests that Ida’s gift—and, indeed, Stein’s own genius—would be unthinkable without money as its material and conceptual ground. The last chapter turns to H.D.—a writer whose well-known atavistic attachment to mythical methods might suggest her misplacement in this study even as her foregrounding of the question of the gift would seem to render her inclusion inevitable. Reading against the grain of H.D.’s nostalgia and taking distance from earlier feminist readings of her work, I interpret her memoir, The Gift, as a cautionary tale, one that plunges into personal memory and a heavily fictionalized version of early American history not to fetishize what she finds there but rather to make sense of the current crisis. World War II, she suggests, is the culmination of a series of failed gift exchanges—a catastrophe to which, impossible though it may seem, her present kinship with Bryher, and potentially with the reader, promises to provide a solution. In offering their intimacy as a kind of model for large-scale social transformation, The Gift, I argue, realizes a logic that H.D. began to sketch as early as her 1919 aesthetic treatise, Notes on Thought and Vision; there she posits homoeroticism as the ground of not only artistic creation but also Western culture writ large. Positioning The Gift and Notes alongside anthropological, feminist, and queer critiques of kinship theory, I argue that, by investing her own homoerotic gift with socially redemptive power, H.D. offers a queer alternative to the heteronormative models of kinship found in the work of Freud and Lévi-Strauss, and, more than any of the other writers here, commingles aesthetic and anthropological conceptions of

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the gift. H.D.’s gift is at once a personal endowment and, as Mauss might have it, a total social phenomenon, binding members of a single social group as well as the peoples of seemingly far-flung historical periods and places. But while H.D. is the most ambitious of these writers in her utopianism, she is also the most anxious about the potential loss and failure of her gift, hence her decision to relegate The Gift to the archive. Still, The Gift does hold out some hope for a receiver—a hope that H.D. figures via references to communication technologies, particularly the telephone. Noting the entanglement of the telephone’s invention with spiritualism, I conclude by arguing that, in being posthumously published, The Gift in effect reads as a telephone call to the reader for peace from the beyond. Having begun by reading Mauss’s Essai sur le don and Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway as analogous, if divergent, responses to postwar market society, I end by turning to Lévi-Strauss’s “New York post-et préfiguratif, ” a short essay he wrote in the 1980s that looks back on his experience as a refugee in New York in 1941—that is, the period during which H.D. was working on The Gift in London. While H.D.’s The Gift explicitly recounts the dissolution of a peace agreement between European settlers and indigenous populations, Lévi-Strauss’s text also represents a failed intercultural exchange of sorts. The essay concludes with his memory of sitting near a traditionally dressed Native American in the New York Public Library who was taking notes with a Parker pen. Recalling that the difference between primitive and civilized peoples for Lévi-Strauss is that the former are “without writing,” I argue that this moment in the library, at a time when Lévi-Strauss was conducting research for The Elementary Structures of Kinship, might be interpreted as a missed opportunity. It is a moment when, like Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D., the anthropologist might have imagined that writing rather than woman is the “supreme gift” and yet failed to do so. If there is a difference between these writers and thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss, it is not simply that the former make room for the thought of women as subjects, but also that they work to account for the unavoidable risk of such failures, particularly when it comes to the gift of women’s writing.

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1 Marcel Mauss and the Turn to the Gift This chapter reframes the intersection of modernist literature and twentieth-century theories of the gift from other fields by demonstrating Mauss’s own modernism in his Essai sur le don and situating the essay in its postwar European context. While largely overlooked by scholars of modernism, the importance of this context— namely, Mauss’s socialism and involvement with cooperatives, his commitment to institutionalizing French sociology, and his interest in contemporary developments in law and economics—has been increasingly acknowledged by scholars in the social sciences. The anthropologists Arjun Appadurai and David Graeber, for example, both follow Marshall Sahlins in arguing that gifts were of primary interest to Mauss because they appeared to constitute a primitive form of our modern social contract. Their respective conclusions about what its status as such tells us, however, about either the nature of primitive contract or the fate of the gift in modern market society could not be more different. In his fairly sanguine reading of the Essai, Graeber argues that the Maussian gift and the primitive contract it embodies are fundamentally communistic in nature. In other words, gift exchange is a form of primitive communism in the sense of “an open-ended agreement in which each party commits itself to maintaining the life of the other” (hence Graeber’s invocation of the nineteenth-century French socialist Louis Blanc’s slogan: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”).1 To Mauss’s eyes, capitalist forms of contract paled by comparison, especially the wage labor relation, which fell shamefully short of fully repaying what Mauss took to be the worker’s gift of not simply his labor but also his life. The Gift was Mauss’s attempt in the midst of growing socialist, cooperative, and labor movements to determine why he was not alone in his assessment, to understand why entire masses of people seemed to agree that the worker’s alienation and the commercialization of social relations were so morally offensive. In identifying the gift as the primitive analogue of the social contract, “Mauss was not trying,” Graeber argues, “to describe how the logic of the marketplace, with its strict distinctions between persons and things, interest and altruism, freedom and obligation, had become the common sense of modern societies. Above all, he was trying to explain 1  David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 162, 218. See also David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2012), especially 94–102, where Graeber argues that “communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible” (96).

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the degree to which it had failed to do so”—the degree to which societies continued to abide by another ethos of exchange despite the nominal rule of commerce.2 Appadurai similarly argues that Mauss’s analysis of the gift was driven by his interest in the “moral force” behind the modern contract. But whereas Graeber finds this force to be lacking—while the morality of communism continues to inspire, the logic of the marketplace fails to hold up—Appadurai suggests that the force driving the gift’s circulation continues to exert itself in the technologies and instruments of contemporary finance. Writing in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Appadurai is most interested in Mauss’s discussion of the North American potlatch—an agonistic exchange in which the donor’s status rides on his ability to out-spend and crush his rival in a spectacular consumption or destruction of wealth. The ethos or “spirit” of the potlatch, Appadurai argues, can still be found in the speculative games that hedge funders play—specifically, the short sell. Both the Native American chief and the short seller abide by “the ethos of the destructively large wager,” effectively “betting on failure,” on the likelihood that one’s opponent— whether another clan, company, or even national economy—will lose big.3 Thus, for Appadurai, as for Graeber, failure comes into play, but in Appadurai’s case the social contract is actually predicated on, and animated by, the promise of future failures, of mutual destruction across time. Failure is the modern contract’s moral force, the tie that binds. The key point for Appadurai is that in both the short sell and the potlatch honor and credit are linked: one accrues honor not by hoarding wealth but rather by bearing high risks of loss, by extending an uncertain line of credit in the hopes of high returns.4 2 Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 162. 3  Arjun Appadurai, “The Ghost in the Financial Machine,” Public Culture 23.3 (2011): 535. In his introduction to the anthology, The Social Life of Things, Appadurai similarly critiques what he takes to be the “exaggeration and reification of the contrast between gift and commodity” (Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 11). 4 In The Gift, Mauss suggests that “the gift necessarily entails the notion of credit” insofar as it entails a “time limit” by which it must be repaid (G 36). In a 2010 review article in the Annual Review of Anthropology, Gustav Peebles calls The Gift “anthropology’s foundational text on credit and debt” (Gustav Peebles, “The Anthropology of Credit and Debt,” in Annual Review of Anthropology 39 [2010]: 225–40). And certainly a number of scholars—in not only anthropology but also literary studies, although not so much in modernist studies—have taken Mauss’s claim to imply that the reverse is also true: that the lending of credit under capitalism necessarily entails a notion of the gift—that is, of a moral bond between parties. See, for example, James Carrier, Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700 (London: Routledge, 1995), and Margot Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Annie McClanahan offers a helpful summary of this critical trajectory: “By training economic actors to read and evaluate the credibility of those around them, these scholars claim, credit served to humanize an economic system otherwise experienced as vast and alienating” (McClanahan, “The Living Indebted: Student Militancy and the Financialization of Debt,” Qui parle 20.1 [Fall/Winter 2011]: 61). The financial crisis helped to usher in a spate of studies addressing the “shadow side” of this economic system—that is, debt and its negative moralization. See Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (Toronto: Anansi, 2008); Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2012); Richard Dienst, The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good (London: Verso, 2011); and David Graeber, Debt. Intriguingly, we find little discussion of gifts in these studies—even Graeber’s. And where the gift does make an appearance, it is more competitive than communistic. The scant mention of gift relations is

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The disparity between Graeber’s and Appadurai’s readings provides a preliminary indication of the disparity among different takes on Mauss’s essay and the gift’s concomitant polymorphism as a concept. My own reading of Mauss’s The Gift hews more closely to Graeber’s insofar as I tend to agree that Mauss draws inspiration from the modern failure of familiar ideological divisions—above all, the failure of the division between gift and exchange and the nominal purging of sociality, morality, and politics from the marketplace. In Western societies, Mauss repeatedly underscores, we “draw a strong distinction between obligations and services that are not given free, on the one hand”—between acts that are constrained, whether by self-interest or contractual obligation—“and gifts, on the other” (G 47). And yet, for Mauss, this and related distinctions simply do not hold. Individuals, the utilitarians tell us, are supposed to be rational, calculating, and self-interested. As the sole home of reciprocity, the capitalist marketplace is supposed to function fairly and equitably of its own accord, its good graces magically trickling down, like manna, to sustain the less fortunate and promote the common good. Things— whether given freely as gifts or exchanged as commodities—are supposed to be alienable and their circulation certain, as Simon Jarvis puts it, “to leave our essence as persons untouched.”5 But none of these presuppositions and rules actually measure up to lived experience and what Mauss took to be the indisputable social facts of modern life. Some of these facts—specifically, World War I and widespread European unemployment in the 1920s—were devastating. Others—such as the cooperative movement and the rise of new labor policies and social welfare initiatives as Mauss was writing The Gift—pointed to a seismic and salubrious shift in social consciousness. Whatever their valence, though, all these facts promised, and helped to further institute, a renewal of man’s “sense of awareness of himself . . . [and] of others”—of his growing sensitivity to the “social reality” that, whether or not he knew it, had long shaped his sentiments and compelled his actions (G 70). While my own focus will be on Mauss’s optimistic ethnography of the postwar present in The Gift’s conclusion, I should stress up front that I do not take a strictly rosy view of the Maussian gift. Though it can at times be a vehicle of communistic mutuality, as Graeber suggests, it can also be otherwise, as Appadurai’s comparison of the agonistic potlatch and the hedge funder’s destructive quest for honor reminds us. In the chapters that follow, the thought that Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. give to gifts can take grim turns—for example, in Mrs. Dalloway’s attunement to the not-so-benevolent imperialism of the British state at home and abroad; in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie’s focus on the humiliating bonds forged by supposedly impersonal financial transactions; in Ida’s account of its heroine’s hauntingly sparse dreams about a basic human hunger for money and recognition; and in H.D.’s memoir’s chilling figuration of the air raids during World War II as a festive party. especially striking given the varying investments of these writers in positing socioeconomic alternatives to the uneven, exploitative creditor–debtor dyad. It is as if, for these writers, at least in these particular texts, theories of the gift hold no promise in our current conjuncture, as if the gift is doomed to complicity. As we will see, however, in Mauss’s study, the agonistic, hierarchical creditor–debtor relation is just one face of the gift. 5  Simon Jarvis, “The Gift in Theory,” Dionysus 27 (Dec. 1999): 205.

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These troubling details are all part of the social reality of the gift for these writers. Throughout their writing, we find an anticipatory echo of Molloy’s memorable assessment of the aggressive tactics of Salvation Army workers in Samuel Beckett’s novel: “Against the charitable gesture there is no defence.”6 Neither is this to suggest, however, that either the gift at stake in Mauss’s essay or the different gifts at stake in this study ought solely to be viewed cynically as means of symbolic and even material gain, though they may occasionally be that, at least in part. The notion that gifts are, in the final instance, interested is likely most familiar to literary critics via Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the role of symbolic capital in the field of cultural production and aesthetic taste—a field that, in his analysis, shares fundamental features with the gift economies studied by social ­scientists. For Bourdieu, both the gift and the cultivation of taste aim at a return in symbolic capital—that is, in prestige or “distinction.” Nevertheless, distinction is not strictly speaking interested. Rather, as Alain Caillé puts it, distinction is best understood as “recognized disinterestedness.”7 Bourdieu allows for disinterest in his studies of cultural production and gift exchange, but it is always fleeting and fictional, a necessary yet strategic formal conceit that, via its recognition in the eyes of others, paves the way for the acquisition initially of symbolic capital and eventually of economic capital. From this perspective, the social recognition of disinterestedness—for example, when a donor is thanked or when a writer receives a prestigious award for her work—is always an act of misrecognition, or méconnaissance, which at once advances and hides the true acquisitive aims of exchange.8 Bourdieu’s theory of distinction has significantly shaped critical thinking about literary canon formation both in and beyond modernist studies—explicitly so in studies such as John Guillory’s Cultural Capital and more implicitly in Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism, to which I return in our reading of H.D. in Chapter 5. His theory, however, cannot account for the thinking about the gift that takes place within the literary texts here. The logic of misrecognition—of a disinterestedness that is always a veil for, or step on the way to, interestedness— cannot explain the ways that Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. were thinking about gifts in their writing or, for that matter, were thinking about their writing as a gift. 6  Samuel Beckett, Molloy, trans. Patrick Bowles in collaboration with Samuel Beckett, Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 24. Molloy first appeared in French in 1951 and in English in 1955. 7  Alain Caillé, “The Double Inconceivability of the Pure Gift,” trans. Constantin Boundas and Susan Dyrkton. Angelaki 6.2 (Aug. 2001): 25. 8  Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). According to Bourdieu, “the operation of gift exchange presupposes (individual and collective) misrecognition (méconnaissance) of the reality of the objective ‘mechanism’ of the exchange”; this “mechanism” is reciprocity—that is, the observed fact that gifts must be given, received, and reciprocated (5–6). Bourdieu’s argument is that, in practice, participants do not behave as if reciprocity is inevitable or obliged but rather, via the strategic manipulation of time and the interval between a gift and its counter-gift, they uphold “the collectively maintained and approved self-deception” that the gifts are disinterested and irreversible: “It is all a question of style, which means in this case timing and choice of occasion, for the same act—giving, giving in return, offering one’s services, paying a visit, etc.—can have completely different meanings at different times” (6). This “selfdeception” about disinterestedness conceals, but only partially, “the truth of . . . exchanges”—the fact that they are a bid for prestige (6).

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If there is a keynote of Mauss’s essay that my authors also register, albeit in varying styles and contexts and to differing ends, it is mixture: a shared sense, sometimes welcome and sometimes resisted, that seemingly antithetical impulses and social phenomena—generosity and interest, freedom and obligation, persons and things— in fact intermingle: “Everything holds together, everything is mixed up together” (G 46). The mingling of persons, things, gestures, symbols, and lives—“This is precisely what contract and exchange are” in archaic societies, according to Mauss (G 20). Yet this is also what contract and exchange are increasingly becoming in modern capitalist societies at the time of The Gift’s publication in 1925—a mixture. Indeed, Mauss will even go so far as to claim that we ought to mix up all those “concepts of law and economics” we have long kept separate and which, he provocatively suggests, it even “pleases us to contrast: liberty and obligation; liberality, generosity, and luxury, as against savings, interest, and utility—it would be good to put them into the melting pot once more” (G 73). In moments such as this, we begin to catch a glimpse of Mauss’s own modernism—of his recognition of the present as a moment of crisis and his concomitant valorization of the new. One of the fundamental claims of The Gift is that we have reached a “crisis in our own law and economic organization”—that is, in those institutions that not only give moderns a shared framework for understanding the world but also have given us pleasure, at least up until now and presumably under pressure of the utilitarian greatest happiness principle (G 4). If modernism in literature and the arts is often conceived as responding to and fomenting a crisis in representation, then for Mauss this crisis extends to law and economics and necessarily reorients our thinking about the relationship between the individual and the social more broadly.9 Indeed, it is as if not simply our heightened social consciousness but also sociology itself were born from this crisis. Thus, far from marking a catastrophe, this crisis bears the promise of a “salutary revolution,” one that Mauss repeatedly characterizes as a “return” to the mores of archaic society but which he nevertheless suggests might entail the creation of a “new morality”—a distinctively modern and perhaps even pleasurable mix of what are in the end only seemingly antithetical impulses and phenomena (G 68–9). M O D E R N I S T S O C I O L O G Y: D I S C I P L I N A RY F O R M AT I O N S Here we might pause to ask: why Mauss? Does modernist studies—and particularly the new modernist studies—truly need yet another father figure at this relatively late date and particularly when focusing on writing by women?

9  In this vein, Pericles Lewis defines modernism as “an artistic and literary response to a widespread sense that the ways of knowing and representing the world developed in the Renaissance, but going back in many ways to the Ancient Greeks, distorted the actual experience of reality, of art, and of literature. This crisis,” he further suggests “involved both the content and form of representation” (Lewis, preface to The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], xviii).

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Yes and no. Yes, I absolutely mean to make an argument for Mauss’s value (if I may use that term) for modernist studies. But, no, insofar as, in putting his work on par and in tension with modernist writing by women I also mean to level the interdisciplinary and, in this case, gendered playing field between literature and the social sciences. In other words, I do not mean to hold Mauss up as the key to literary modernism or to suggest that the social sciences have greater authority in theorizing the nature of gift-giving or proving the gift’s existence because of their empiricism. Yet nor do I mean, on the other hand, to privilege literature as the key to sociology or to make a claim about the latter’s fundamental literariness, although I will attend to some of the “literary” aspects of The Gift—specifically, Mauss’s rhetoric of mixture, his prescriptive flourishes, and his unconventional usage of familiar terms, particularly “the gift” or le don. On the contrary, I above all mean to treat literature and sociology as equal contributors to a much broader conversation about gifts, even if they were not neces­s­arily directly addressing one another. This book is not a study of Mauss’s influence on my authors, none of whom, to my knowledge, read his work or even necessarily knew him by name, though there are concrete connections to be drawn between Mauss and Woolf, as we will see later in this chapter. As Marc Manganaro has stressed with respect to literature and anthropology during this period, so I mean to claim that modernist writing by women and Maussian sociology constitute “equally legitimate manifestations of culture,” each of which is “integrally tied to the capitalist schema”—and each of which, I will further argue, casts itself as having a special purchase on the topic of gifts for reasons both disciplinary and historical.10 A handful of recent studies have helped to flesh out the institutional and polit­i­ cal reasons for Mauss’s own turn to the gift: namely, Marcel Fournier’s biography of Mauss (published in French in 1994 and in abridged form in English in 2006); Harry Liebersohn’s 2011 intellectual history of the gift’s re-emergence as an object of systematic reflection in the early twentieth century, The Return of the Gift: European History of a Global Idea; and, most recently, a new English translation of Mauss’s essay by the anthropologist Jane I. Guyer, which came out in 2016, as this study was in its final stages, and which includes some of the texts alongside which the Essai was originally published in L’Année Sociologique. Although Guyer’s 10  Marc Manganaro, “Textual Play, Power, and Cultural Critique: An Orientation to Modernist Anthropology,” in Modernist Anthropology, ed. Marc Manganaro (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 7. Elsewhere, Manganaro further suggests that “historically anthropologists and literary artists were grappling with the same or similar challenges, crises, and opportunities, though often coming to different conclusions and in differing genres.” Marc Manganaro, “Modernist Studies and Anthropology: Reflections on the Past, Present, and Possible Futures,” in Disciplining Modernism, ed. Pamela L. Caughie (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 213. Where Manganaro and I differ is in his focus on primitivism—or what he calls “an ethic and/or practice of salvage”—as the primary material and conceptual link between these different fields (ibid.). After the Great War, he argues, anthropology sought to salvage “ ‘primitive’ cultures” while literature sought to salvage “ ‘Culture’ (with a capital ‘C’)” (ibid.). One implication is that these two “cultures”—primitive culture and high culture—are intimately related if not one and the same for modernist writers. Perry Meisel suggests a similar parallel when he argues that one of the myths maintained by modernist British writers is that “one can be more advanced by being more primitive.” Perry Meisel, The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 2.

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translation makes for a smoother read than its 1990 predecessor by W. D. Halls, I primarily cite the latter here due to the limited gift of time. Still, I do draw on Guyer’s introduction and her “expanded” edition in order to establish The Gift’s position within a broader dialogue about the role and status of sociology after World War I. The war claimed the lives of a number of Mauss’s students, collaborators, and friends, as well as his cousin André, Durkheim’s son, in December 1915 (MM 174–84). The loss for Durkheim was devastating; his health suffered and, in the summer of 1917, he died, the primary cause, according to many close to him, being grief. For his part, Mauss volunteered for the duration of the war, becoming attached as an interpreter first to a British infantry division and later to an Australian one. (A philologist and polyglot, he knew English and German, among other languages.) Once the war was over, with many Durkheimians and Durkheim himself gone, Mauss returned his sights to sociology, expressing concern about the lack of French institutions devoted to the social sciences in his writings: “We have no museum of ethnography in France worthy of the name; we have no laboratories dedicated specifically to the study of indigenous peoples; sociology does not exist here.”11 Among Durkheim’s disciples, Mauss in particular felt it his duty to defend and preserve his uncle’s thought and to put sociology in the service of the public good. As Fournier notes, sociology, in Mauss’s view, bore directly on questions of politics and ethics—a notion that ruffled the feathers of his colleagues in  philosophy who, perhaps feeling its introduction into the curriculum of the normal schools to be an infringement on their territory, cautioned against the ­deleterious effects that establishing sociology as a “foundation for ethics” would have on students (MM 217). Yet the period following the war was also one of tremendous productivity, as the sheer breadth of the volume of L’Année sociologique in which Mauss’s essay was published begins to attest. Founded by Durkheim in 1898, L’Année sociologique ceased publication in 1912. Nearly one thousand pages in length, the first issue after the war appeared in 1925. It included two “original reports,” both written by Mauss: an “in memoriam” for Durkheim and members of the Durkheim school who had died since the journal’s 1912 issue and the Essai sur le don. Guyer’s new edition includes both and, as an additional gift to readers, restores the essay to its original format with Mauss’s notes, which run about the length of the main text, at the foot of the page—a move that not only relieves the reader of endless pageturning but also, and more importantly, makes the depth of Mauss’s intellectual debts and his study’s participation in a much broader yet highly specialized conversation even more readily apparent. Mauss himself suggests that common readers need not even bother looking at the notes, the fifth of which includes no reference or citation information but simply announces, “The notes are only indispensable to specialists” (G 85, n5). The bulk of the 1925 volume of L’Année was devoted to reviews of works published from July 1923 to July 1924 in a variety of fields, including anthropology, 11  Marcel Mauss, “L’état actuel des sciences anthropologiques en France,” quoted in MM 215.

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legal studies, philosophy, economics, religious studies, and linguistics. Liebersohn aptly suggests that, while these reviews, many of which were written by Mauss, mark an effort to distinguish the French school of sociology from other schools, they also register the interdisciplinarity at the heart of sociology as a discipline ­concerned with the social in all its manifestations—legal, philosophical, political, economic, and so on. During these early years, Liebersohn notes, sociology was “a more ­comprehensive category” than it is now.12 And, for Mauss in particular, the best way to advance sociology was to create connections between disciplines. “Sociology, psychology, and physiology,” he declared in a 1923 address to the Société de Psychologie, “everything must be combined” (quoted in MM 240). Mauss’s various institutional affiliations exemplify the kind of combination for which he called. He served as President of the Societé de Psychologie from 1923 to 1926, and, in 1925, he co-founded the Institut d’Ethnologie at the University of Paris with Paul Rivet (an assistant in the anthropology lab at the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle) and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (the most famous of the three, especially for his work on “primitive mentality,” with which Mauss openly disagreed). It was a period marked in the social sciences no less than in literature and the arts by not only institutionbreaking but also institution-building. Like the myriad artistic movements and manifestos seeking to “make it new” in other fields, the naming of the institute, according to Fournier, “allowed the institution to differentiate itself from organiz­ a­tions and groups already identified with anthropology and ethnography”—that is, the disciplines that would come to bear Mauss’s legacy (MM 235). Though Mauss never conducted fieldwork himself, he has been called “the father of French ethnography” and The Gift is now considered “required reading for any anthropology student” (MM 1). In its initial publication, however, The Gift was very much framed as a gift of and to sociology. In addition to including a eulogy for Durkheim, the father of French sociology, and his collaborators, the 1925 volume of L’Année was also dedicated to “The Memory of My Master Émile Durkheim” and included a photo of Durkheim as the frontispiece.13 Mauss’s occupation of different institutional posts during his lifetime and his varied disciplinary fates thereafter might be taken as an index of just how inadequate and even anachronistic the language of “interdisciplinarity” can be in discussing a period during which the boundaries of disciplines as we now know them—including literature—were being strategically drawn and redrawn. Yet to some degree, Mauss’s oscillation between making specific claims for sociology and seeking to “combine” sociology with other disciplines is symptomatic of his particular understanding of his main object of study—that is, the social and, more specifically in the context of his essay, the gift. In archaic societies, gift exchanges are “ ‘total’ social phenomena,” in which “all kinds of institutions are given expression at one and the 12 Harry Liebersohn, The Return of the Gift: European History of a Global Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 144. 13  Jane L. Guyer, “The Gift that Keeps on Giving,” translator’s introduction to The Gift by Marcel Mauss, ed. Jane I. Guyer (Chicago, IL: HAU Books, 2016), 7. See Liebersohn, The Return of the Gift, 140–51, for his reading of The Gift in its original context as a gift of the living to the dead and a gift from Mauss to his contemporaries.

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same time”—religious, moral, legal, political, economic, familial, and beyond (G 3). In openly proclaiming that “nothing is more urgent or more fruitful” for modern Western societies than studying these facts, while also offering itself as a gift of and to the fledgling field of French sociology, The Gift inevitably overflows even as it sets institutional boundaries (G 80). “THIS NEW MORALITY”: A MODERN MIXTURE O F G I F T A N D E XC H A N G E In his introduction to the The Gift, Mauss lays out a twofold objective: first, to “describe the phenomena of exchange and contract” in archaic societies and, in so doing, to demonstrate that these societies “are not, as has been claimed, devoid of economic markets” but rather have a “system of exchange [that] is different from ours” (G 4). Second, he intends to show that this system still functions in modern Western societies though it does so in ways that are “hidden, below the surface” (G 4). This dual argument culminates in a series of unabashedly prescriptive conclusions both about what sociology ought to do (study total social facts) and, more embarrassingly for later social scientists, about what society ought to do (take a lesson in mingling interest and generosity from our archaic forebears). With respect to the first of his objectives, Mauss insists from the start that “the market is a human phenomenon that, in our view, is not foreign to any known society” and “existed before the institution of traders and before their main invention—money proper” (G 4). Thus, money-based exchange of commodities is not the only form of exchange but in fact is preceded by the exchange of gifts— gifts that, “in theory . . . are voluntary, [although] in reality they are given and reciprocated obligatorily” (G 3). The gap between “theory” and “reality” here helps to explain Bourdieu’s treatment of disinterest as an initial, illusory stage on the way to the realization of interest. Crucially, though, while Mauss will go so far as to describe the gesture of generosity that may accompany the giving of a gift as “a polite fiction, formalism, and social deceit,” this fiction remains an essential component of the exchange (G 3). The underlying reality of obligation and interest does not cancel out or dispel the fiction of generosity. It does, however, raise the question of whether the term “gift,” which, for Mauss’s Western audience, tends to mean free gift, can fairly be applied to the societies he describes. In his conclusion, Mauss famously underscores the inadequacy of the language he has used throughout his Essai sur le don, including le don, his titular topic: “The terms that we have used—present and gift [present, cadeau, don]—are not themselves entirely exact.”14 The term “interest,” or intérêt, too, is inexact. Though Mauss has claimed that gift exchange serves an “economic interest [intérêt économique]” since 14  G 72–3. Mauss’s original French reads: “Les termes que nous avons employés : present, cadeau, don, ne son pas eux-mêmes tout à fait exacts.” Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1968), 267.

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his introduction, he nevertheless suggests in his conclusion that his use of this term is anachronistic: “The very word ‘interest’ is itself recent [Le mot même d’intérêt est récent].”15 Originally derived from a Latin accounting term, thanks to the “victory of rationalism and mercantilism,” which effectively raised “the notions of profit and the individual . . . to the level of principles,” it now signifies “the notion of individual interest” (G 76). As inappropriate as terms such as intérêt and don may therefore be, they are also all that we, as twentieth-century Western (and, specifically French) observers, have. In approaching societies different from our own, we must depend on those same “concepts of law and economics that it pleases us to contrast”— oppositions such as those of gift versus exchange, generosity versus interest, freedom versus obligation, persons versus things, and so on (G 73). Mauss, as we have seen, responds to this conceptual and linguistic constraint by characterizing archaic gift exchange as a mixture of both this and that. It is “both disinterested and obligatory at the same time [désintéressée et obligatoire en même temps].”16 In other moments, Mauss will take the opposite approach, registering gift exchange’s difference by negatively characterizing it as neither this nor that. Thus he will claim that the “complex notion” behind the economic acts observed among Trobriand Islanders by Bronislaw Malinowski in his 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific is “neither that of the free, purely gratuitous rendering of total services, nor that of production and exchange purely interested in what is useful. It is a sort of hybrid that flourished”—neither a purely free gift, nor a purely interested exchange, but rather a free gift and an interested exchange at the same time (G 73). The interest at stake in gift exchange, however, is not interest in our individualistic sense of self-interest. In archaic societies “it is not individuals but collectivities” that engage in exchange, which means that the interest served is primarily that of the group (G 5). The “interest attached to the things exchanged” is a reflection of the fact that people in these societies “are constantly enmeshed with one another, [and] feel that they are everything to one another” (G 33). Interest is none other than the spirit of the gift that compels its return. It is “because the thing itself ­possesses a soul, is of the soul,” that the recipient feels obliged to reciprocate and “clearly and logically realizes” that he must, in due time, “offer an equivalent to replace it” (G 12–13). The exchange of gifts, therefore, is not only a means of accruing symbolic capital or prestige but also, and more importantly for Mauss, a means of establishing and reinforcing “mutual ties and alliance” (G 33). And here we reach Mauss’s central insight into the difference between gift exchange and capitalist exchange: what distinguishes gift exchange is its capacity to create social bonds, as well as its presupposition that such bonds already exist. Subgroups in archaic societies exchange gifts in order to forge bonds because they already feel themselves to be bound to one another—to be “mixed up together” (G 46). 15  G 3, 76. I have modified Halls’s translation of intérêt économique as “economic self-interest” (rather than “economic interest”) on page 3. For the original French, see Mauss, Essai sur le don, 147, 271. 16  Marcel Mauss, Essay on the Gift: The Form and Sense of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Jane L. Guyer (Chicago, IL: HAU Books, 2016), 108. The Halls translation omits “at the same time,” though the simultaneity of these different impulses is, I think, pivotal to Mauss’s conceptualization of the gift as a mixture (see G 33). For the original French, see Mauss, Essai sur le don, 194.

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Moreover, Mauss argues that this feeling of mixture survives in modern Western societies. Despite the fact that our morality aims to keep gifts and exchanges ­separate—to purify the gift of its power and the concomitant pull of other people on the recipient—“our lives themselves are still permeated with this same atmosphere of the gift, where obligation and liberty intermingle” (G 65). Not only does this atmosphere continue to permeate our lives but it is also becoming considerably stronger in the postwar period. Indeed, if Mauss initially suggests that the system of exchange we find in other societies is simply, as we noted, “different from ours,” then he ultimately suggests that this is no longer necessarily the case. In his con­ clusion, Mauss triumphantly declares of French and other Western European societies that “we are returning to a group morality”: “The themes of the gift, of the freedom and the obligation inherent in the gift, of generosity and self-interest that are linked in giving, are reappearing . . . as a dominant motif too long forgotten” (G 68). And in this respect, modern market societies are beginning to look quite a bit like archaic market societies. Its transformation can be seen in a host of new social reform movements and social welfare initiatives in his native France, Germany, Belgium, and, most notably for our purposes here, Britain. I will discuss the influence of British politics and culture on Mauss’s ethnography of the postwar present later in this chapter. For the moment, I want to focus on the language that he uses to ­characterize the present and the theoretical ramifications of this characterization. As many have noted, Mauss’s stance with respect to the gift’s return is both descriptive and prescriptive. Not only are we already returning but “we can and must return to archaic society and to elements in it” (G 69). Individualism is still (to use Raymond Williams’s term) the cultural dominant. Drawing one of many implicit, quasi-psychoanalytic connections between social structures and psychic structures, Mauss will suggest, “Society . . . is indeed wanting to look after the individual,” but its desire to do so is far from homogeneous, for “the mental state in which it does so is one in which are curiously intermingled a perception of the rights of the individual and other purer sentiments: charity, social service, and solidarity” (G 68). Social democracy and the rise of what would come to be known as the welfare state correspond to a shift in social consciousness. More precisely, these social phenomena mark the making conscious of formerly unconscious desires— desires that are not only collectively held but which are also desires for greater collectivity. We now act in the service of self-interest and generosity, to promote the good of ourselves and of the group, thanks to an increase in what Mauss elsewhere referred to as “the share of the social in thought” (quoted in MM 217). To be sure, individualism is also an index of this share—an index of the fact that, as Mauss further underscored, “man thinks in common with others in society” (quoted in MM 217). The idea that man is a calculating animal who acts (or at least ought to act) freely and rationally is also collectively held and even carries a libidinal charge: society wants to care for the individual. This idea, moreover, is rooted in legal definitions of personhood and reinforced by various social institutions and material practices. Yet “the share of the social in thought” is not just a measure of the thoughts one shares with others. It is also a measure of one’s thoughts about others—of the “fleeting moment when society, or men, become sentimentally aware of themselves

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and of their situation in relation to others” (G 80). In the wake of such awareness, each of society’s members knows he “must act by taking into account his own interests and those of society and its subgroups” (G 70). It is this mode of thought— this ethos of self-reflexivity and sensitivity to the fact of coexistence and its impli­ cations for action—that is returning and which indeed ought to return in Mauss’s eyes. While Mauss uses an atavistic rhetoric of “return” to describe the psychological and material changes he sees, he also casts the increased investment in the common good as (again to cite Williams) an emergent rather than a residual phenomenon. In a distinctively modernist gesture, Mauss rewrites the gift’s return as an inno­vative act of creation, explicitly looking forward to and calling for a new morality that would be a mixture of individualism and communism: There must be more good faith, more sensitivity, more generosity in contracts dealing with the hiring of services, the letting of houses, the sale of vital foodstuffs. And it will indeed be necessary to limit the rewards of speculation and interest. However, the individual must work. He should be forced to rely upon himself rather than upon others. On the other hand, he must defend his interests, both personally and as a member of a group. Over-generosity, or communism, would be as harmful to himself and to society as the egoism of our contemporaries and the individualism of our laws . . . The life of the monk, and the life of the Shylock are both equally to be shunned. This new morality will surely consist of a good but moderate blend of reality and the ideal.  (G 69)

Insofar as the ethos of gift exchange is always characterized in Mauss’s essay as a mixture of conventionally opposed concepts, we might justifiably ask just how “new” this new morality is. In a recent interview, Graeber argues that, for Mauss, “individualism and communism, rather than being in any way contradictory, are mutually reinforcing of each other and always there.”17 By contrast, I think it worth preserving a sense of contradiction—if one not entirely interrogated by Mauss. This is essentially Derrida’s complaint: “Mauss does not worry enough about this incompatibility between gift and exchange.”18 Without going entirely in the other direction and arguing with Graeber that they are totally compatible, I do nevertheless want to follow his lead by interpreting individualism and communism in the above passage as historically specific permutations of the different impulses and ideas that have always been “linked in giving” for Mauss. From this perspective, the “new morality” that Mauss imagines on the horizon is not an archaic form that has returned but rather a uniquely modern mixture of very old phenomena. At the same time, it might be argued that Mauss’s concept of gift exchange is always, in a sense, modern—even when applied to archaic societies. For if gift exchange is a mixture of gifts and exchanges, then it is so for us—Westerners who presuppose their separation, not the archaic societies that nominally originated the praxis.

17  David Graeber, “Finance Is Just another Word for Other People’s Debts: An Interview with David Graeber,” by Hannah Chadeayne Appel, Radical History Review 118 (Winter 2014): 170. 18 Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 37.

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Not only is The Gift a product of Mauss’s interest in modernity, as Graeber and Appadurai argue, but the gift of its title is itself a product of modernity. In stressing Mauss’s application of Western concepts to non-Western cultures, I echo a range of recent critics who have argued that The Gift reflects an ethnocentric bias on Mauss’s part, most immediately the deconstructive critic Rodolphe Gasché. Gasché argues that Mauss’s figuration of non-Western gift exchange as a mixture of concepts that we tend to oppose, while troubling, is also necessary in the context of Mauss’s larger archaeological argument—that is, his claim that gift exchange constitutes the “hidden essence of Western culture . . . its arché.”19 In Gasché’s ­reading, Mauss’s recommendation that we throw our legal and economic concepts into the melting pot, or creuset, is not a continuation of, but rather a temporary deviation from, his metaphor of mixture. Throwing our concepts into the crueset, Gasché argues, would mean crossing them out and having to confront the “radical otherness” of different forms of social organization—a gesture that Mauss ulti­mately refuses.20 Contra Gasché, John Frow insists that Mauss’s translation of other cultures into Western terms does not mark a denial of their otherness, for “any attempt to think cultural otherness necessarily and by definition translates it; otherwise it is unthinkable.”21 But Gasché is not alone in taking Mauss and his contemporaries to task. As we will further see in Chapter 2, feminist anthropologists such as Annette Weiner and Marilyn Strathern have challenged the patriarchal bent of The Gift, countering its near exclusive focus on reciprocity among “big men” and offering alternative frameworks for conceptualizing gender and the nature of gift-giving in non-Western societies.22 In calling attention to Mauss’s reliance on modern concepts and terms, my own objective is not to cast suspicion on his ethnographic work or to suggest that we must seek the true or pure gift elsewhere. The latter is essentially the move that Lewis Hyde makes in developing a theory of the gift applicable to modern literature in his study of creativity and the artist in the modern world. Hyde is quite explicit about his lack of concern with “the negative side of gift exchange”—that is, gifts that oppressively oblige, manipulate, humiliate, or hierarchize.23 Unsurprisingly, then, Mauss’s focus on the potlatch for much of his study limits the helpfulness of his work for Hyde. Attributing the rivalrous nature of the potlatch to the negative 19 Rodolphe Gasché, “Heliocentric Exchange,” in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, ed. Alan D. Schrift (New York: Routledge, 1997), 103. 20 Ibid. 21  John Frow, “Gift and Commodity,” in Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 111. 22  Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1992), and Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1988). The anthropologist C. A. Gregory also points to Mauss’s ethnocentrism, but in a less critical vein, arguing that Mauss’s approach to archaic economies draws on the tradition of political economy (as opposed to modern economics): “The twentieth-century anthropological approach to the economy founded by [Lewis H.] Morgan, Mauss, and Lévi-Strauss . . . expands and develops the historical and comparative tradition of nineteenth-century political economy. The theory of commodities developed by the latter is compatible with the theory of gifts developed by the former.” See C. A. Gregory, Gifts and Commodities, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: HAU Books, 2015), 226. 23 Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 2007), xxii.

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influence of European capitalism, he instead returns to Mauss’s source—Franz Boas’s studies of the Kwakiutl people of the Pacific Northwest—in hopes of finding in it “the smudged image of earlier gift exchange.”24 For me, by contrast, it is precisely the smudges that mar Mauss’s essay—his openly political and moral aims, his sensitivity to the limitations of his native tongue, his mixed feelings about cap­ italist modernity—that help to establish The Gift’s relevance here. In other words, it is precisely because gift exchange never appears as a pure archaic phenomenon, but is instead a messy modern mixture that has yet to be fully realized, that his sociology dovetails with modern literature. At the same time, we need not put so much pressure on Mauss’s conceptual framework in order to draw a connection between his modernism in sociology and the modernism of his contemporaries in the field of literature. We need not go so far as to insist that the gift Mauss identified in other cultures was never more than a projection of his own modern moment in order to appreciate the modernity of this moment. What matters most for the purposes of this study and the comparison I want to draw between sociology and literature is the fact that, to Mauss’s eyes, the morality at stake in social democracy is decidedly “new.” And it is so for two reasons: both because it corresponds to a historically novel mix of self-sacrifice (“the life of the monk”) and an ethos of self-interest (“the life of the Shylock”), and because it corresponds to a newfound cognizance of the long-standing coexistence of gift exchange and commercial exchange in market society. To Mauss’s eyes, social democracy is, among other things, a sign that the multifarious phenomena that have always been “linked in giving” are now bubbling up to the surface and assuming a new form in relation to the individualism that is supposed to drive commercial exchange. The morality of gift exchange at stake in this strange new brew of social forms is not an archaic ethos of the gift that has persisted within and against market society—some pure, primitive communism or “group morality” that has returned. Rather, the morality he spots in social democracy is the ethos of modern market society. Or at least it will be in the wake of what Mauss takes to be  modern market society’s contemporary evolution into a modernized system of gift exchange, one that combines elements of communism and individualism and includes commercial exchange, while ultimately exceeding it. B E YO N D P R I M I T I V I S M : T H E G I F T O F MODERN MARKET SOCIETY Whether or not Mauss is right—whether or not social democracy is a form of gift exchange—his analysis of European society in terms of the intermingling of gifts and exchanges enables us to reframe the conceptual and historical crossover between Anglo-American literary modernism and theories of the gift from other fields and

24  Ibid. 39.

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national contexts.25 Their intersection tends to be framed in terms of their shared “interest in the ‘primitive,’ ” no doubt most famously in Hyde’s study—though not always as explicitly as we saw in his quest for smudge-free examples of the gift.26 Hyde’s well-known argument about art is both ontological and historical: “a work of art is a gift,” he claims, but modern works of art “exist simultaneously in two ‘economies,’ a market economy and a gift economy.”27 Glenn Willmott argues that Hyde’s “dualistic” treatment of these two economies is itself primitivist and runs against the grain of Mauss’s study, as well as later anthropology.28 Nevertheless, Hyde’s The Gift has significantly shaped thinking about the gift in literary studies and, in the context of modernist studies, has informed substantial readings of a number of individual writers, including two of my authors here, Woolf and H.D.29 Thus, his study continues to have a force with which I will reckon here. More immediately noteworthy, however, is Willmott’s own analysis of modernist gift economies. While he takes aim at Hyde’s primitivism, Willmott continues to draw a connection between literary modernism and anthropological theories of the gift on the basis of not only their anti-capitalism but also their shared fascination with the primitive—albeit a distinctively modern form of the primitive. For his part, Willmott aims to displace a dualism of primitive gift and modern market by instead aligning ideas and praxes of gift-giving with “aboriginal modernity”—a form of modernity that is coextensive with, without being reducible to, “imperialist modernity.” As he puts it, “The tribal is the modern.”30 In making 25  For Mary Douglas, in her foreword to Mauss’s essay, the verdict is clear: Mauss was “really jumping the gun” in taking his theory “straight from its context in full-blown gift economies” and using it “to underpin social democracy.” Douglas, “Foreword: No free gifts,” in The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies by Marcel Mauss (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1990), xv. She is hardly alone in her assessment. As Graeber notes, “It is commonplace to dismiss Mauss’ political conclusions at the end of ‘The Gift’ as weak, inconsistent, not the same power or brilliance of the rest of the essay” (Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 163). But the grounds on which scholars dismiss Mauss’s conclusions vary. Whereas Douglas’s critique is largely sociohistorical, Godbout and Caillé’s critique is more structural. For the latter, “the state system” and “the system of the gift” are not complementary: “State involvement always tends to transform a disinterested act into unpaid work.” Jacques T. Godbout with Alaine Caillé, The World of the Gift, trans. Donald Winkler (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 59. 26  This phrase comes from Kathryn Simpson’s study of gift economies in Woolf ’s writing; she ­suggests that, while it “is not clear whether Woolf knew of Mauss’ work . . . the general interest in the ‘primitive’ in modernist circles is clearly an influence in her writing.” Kathryn Simpson, Gifts, Markets and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 4. 27 Hyde, The Gift, xvi. 28  Glenn Willmott, Modernist Goods: Primitivism, the Market, and the Gift (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 229. 29  On Woolf, see Simpson, Gifts, Markets, and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf; on H.D., see Adalaide Morris, “A Relay of Power and of Peace: H.D. and the Spirit of the Gift,” Contemporary Literature 27.4 (1986): 493–524. I return to both of their works in the chapters that follow. Notably, Hyde changed the subtitle of his book from Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property to Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World for the book’s twenty-fifth anniversary edition, published in 2007—presumably due to its positive reception among contemporary creative writers in particular. Though in his new preface, Hyde notes having found a wide-ranging audience in many disciplines and fields—from the “craft community” to “spiritual communities” and beyond—the book itself bears blurbs from such literary luminaries as Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Lethem (Hyde, The Gift, xii–xiii). 30 Willmott, Modernist Goods, 12.

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this argument, Willmott draws on Johannes Fabian’s important critique of the way anthropologists relate to, and construct, their object of study.31 Fabian argues that, by representing aboriginal populations as belonging to a distant “past,” beyond and before our modern Western “present,” anthropology has tended to reinforce an imperialist narrative of historical progress. According to this narrative, modernity is not an historical period but a stage of development from which aboriginal peoples, as peoples of the past, are, by definition, excluded. While Willmott, like Fabian, insists that aboriginal and imperial populations are coeval, his concept of aboriginal modernity retains a temporal valence. After all, aboriginal modernity opens up the possibility of “resistance to capitalist values and their imperialist media” only insofar as it corresponds to “all those forms of social life and memory that have been categorized as ‘past.’ ”32 Crucially, however, these aboriginal heritages are not found solely in realms external to the West but also exist within it—most notably for his purposes, in the enclaves and works of Anglo-American modernist writers. To further conceptualize the relationship between modernism and aboriginal modernity, Willmott invokes an anthropological distinction between three different kinds of institutional spaces—the house, the market, and the state—or what he calls the “triangular combinatoire of House, Market, and State.”33 The house is the institutional domain of aboriginal modernity. It is the space of gifts (inalienable detachables) and goods (inalienable keepsakes), and constitutes the privileged site of modernism. By contrast, the market is the space of commodities (i.e., alienable detachables) and commercial exchange. Insofar as the house, the market, and the state all derive from an earlier period, they are all part of our heritage as moderns. The house is not old and the market is not new—but the latter is newly dominant in the wake of the market’s rise over the house and the state in the modern period. For its part, the house persists under the hegemony of the market—kept alive in part by modernist writers who “turned literature into a radical expression of the persistence, the possibilities, and the powers of the House” even as its powers are “dwindling.”34 Thus, the gift to which the modernist house is home still figures as a primitive thing of the past, an archaic inheritance on the verge of extinction under the pressure of the market. My intention here is to wedge a gap between a modernist fascination with the gift, on the one hand, and a modernist fascination with the primitive, on the other. In the chapters that follow, I trace an alternative genealogy of thinking about the 31  Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 32 Willmott, Modernist Goods, 6, 13. 33  Especially important for Willmott’s distinction between the house and the market is C. A. Gregory, Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997). Like Gregory’s earlier Gifts and Commodities, Savage Money focuses on Papua New Guinea, but in the latter Gregory is especially concerned with accounting for the “chaos brought about by imperialism” and the concomitant “contradictions that arise between goods and commodities” among indigenous populations (50, 122). While Willmott follows Gregory in capitalizing House, Market, and State throughout his text, I have opted to use lowercase lettering in summarizing his argument for the sake of consistency with my own practice of referring to “the market” and “market society,” except where quoting Willmott directly. 34 Willmott, Modernist Goods, 19, 20.

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gift in the modern period—one that can account for what I take to be modernist women writers’ investment in the perceived personal and social possibilities afforded by the newly dominant market. The gifts my authors conceive are not vestiges of a pre-capitalist or primitive past. Rather, they are rooted in and even modeled on the various symbolic media of exchange that flow through the metropolitan marketplace and make for fundamentally paradoxical forms of social life. Money, contracts, telegraph messages, telephone calls, the empty chatter that accompanies quotidian commercial exchanges, the signifiers that drift through public space and float in and out of thought—they all become charged sites and sources of the kinds of mixture that Mauss associated with the gift. What Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. share with Mauss is not an anti-capitalist interest in the primitive but rather an interest in the social under capitalism. They all demonstrate a sometimes optimistic, sometimes suspicious, yet always curious attentiveness and even attachment to what Elizabeth Outka refers to as “modernity’s promise of exchange.”35 In focusing on modernist representations of modern life as a complex mixture of gifts and exchanges, this study, like Outka’s, identifies modernism with a kind of “search for a sustained contradiction.”36 For Outka, such contradiction is realized in the form of the “commodified authentic,” or what she will also call “noncommercial commerce”—that is, the commercial packaging and sale of noncommercial values, namely authenticity.37 Gift exchange, too, might be considered a form of noncommercial commerce, a sustained contradiction between two apparently antithetical terms. Where Outka and I differ, however, is in our thinking about the nature of the contradiction between the noncommercial and the commercial. As in so many studies of the difference between gift exchange and commercial exchange, the difference between the noncommercial and the commercial for Outka is fundamentally temporal. The value of authenticity derives in part from modernist “nostalgia for a precommercial and authentic past.”38 For me, by contrast, what is at stake in the residual tension between gift and exchange is not a tension between a pure, authentic past and an impure, inauthentic present. Rather, what is at stake is a tension between two different conceptions of the social and, even more precisely, a tension between the presence of a conception of the social and the absence of such a conception. In wrestling with the lived ­convergence of gifts and exchanges in their writing, Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. give form to the “society” in modern market society—to forms of social organization that the discourse of modern economics in particular has typically cordoned off from the market proper as if the economy and society were separable. Their separation is part of what Karl Polanyi famously referred to as “the great transformation,” 35  Elizabeth Outka, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8. 36  Ibid. 4. 37 Ibid. 38  Ibid. 147. For one example of a temporal distinction between gift and exchange outside modernist studies, see Hildegard Hoeller’s From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012). Hoeller explains, “I call the book From Gift to Commodity because both in twentieth-century gift theory and in the nineteenthcentury works discussed here the gift, even as it exists or is thinkable within the market, is often conceived of as coming before the market and then colliding with it” (13).

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which Timothy Mitchell helpfully sums up as the process whereby “the economy emerged as an institutional sphere separate from the rest of society in the nineteenth century.”39 Underlying their separation, Polanyi argues, is the unprecedented assumption that the economy is a self-regulating system directed only by market prices without any external interference. While society is thus assumed to be a sphere outside the economy, it is in fact “embedded in the economic system,” enabling the market to “function according to its own laws.”40 As we might say of our own market society in the twenty-first century: deregulation is itself a form of regulation. In other words, the market cannot function freely without a broader institutional apparatus that supports its “free” functioning. Despite its nominal status as a self-contained system, the market needs society and, with it, the political sphere to function. And yet, modern economics, in seeking to account for the laws of the market, disavows the paradoxical structural link between the economic and the social. Graeber’s statement of this problem in phenomenological terms is especially suggestive: “In the end,” he writes, “most economic theory relies on trying to make anything that smacks of ‘society’ disappear.”41 The work of Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. in turn suggests that while “society” may be made to disappear from sight, it does not disappear from experience. Like the “unseen part of us” that Clarissa imagines permeating the world, it is felt, sensed, conceptualized, lived.42 These writers give the lie to the fiction of the free self-regulating market even when, as in Stein’s work, they mean on the contrary to sell this fiction. As we noted in the introduction, Stein was a public critic of government intervention and worried extensively about the overly generous behavior of the Roosevelt administration and the effects of the U.S. going off the gold standard. And yet, despite what I take to be her best-laid plans, her writing from the 1930s attests to a lived mixture of concepts and phenomena she insisted ought to be separate—liberty and organiz­ation, masterpieces and government, mind and nature, and, I will argue, gifts and exchanges. That Stein responded to the Great Depression and the New Deal policies engineered to counter it by developing a series of strict oppositions is telling. Mitchell argues that Polanyi’s dating of the great transformation was off by a hundred years. It was only in the 1930s and 1940s, as “systems of monetary representation and the forms of social order and collective identity dependent upon them” started to collapse, that “the notion of the economy as a coherent structure came into circulation.”43 Given our discussion of Mauss, it stands to argue that notions of both the economy and the gift as coherent structures emerged during this period— a moment marked paradoxically by incoherence, not in the sense of a perceived lack of meaning or values but rather, I would argue, in the sense of everything 39  Timothy Mitchell, “Economists and the Economy in the Twentieth Century,” in The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others, ed. George Steinmetz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 127. 40  Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001), 60. 41 Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 9. 42 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1953), 153. Hereafter cited in the text as MD. 43  Timothy Mitchell, “Fixing the Economy,” Cultural Studies 12.1 (1998): 88.

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having too many meanings and values, of being both this and that, one and the other, at the same time. If this sense of excess and the overflow of traditional boundaries constituted a crisis in Stein’s eyes, for the other writers here it offered an auspicious index of new social possibilities—and especially new social possibil­ ities for women. In arguing that these four writers were invested in exchange and its promise of equivalence, I join the many scholars now taking distance from the earlier and largely but not exclusively Marxist commonplace that every variety of modernism was hostile to the market.44 In so doing, however, I do not mean to wear down modernism’s critical edge. I would suggest that the writers here are all critical of modern capitalism in the post-Kantian sense of critique: that is, they engage in what Molly Hite helpfully characterizes as “the exploration of the conditions and limits of a dominant framework of thinking and feeling.”45 And, I would add, they do so at a moment when a dominant utilitarian framework had been drastically destabilized by World War I, subsequent unemployment and economic depression, the monetary crisis noted by Mitchell, and, ultimately, the rise of fascism and World War II. In waging critiques of their contexts and imagining forms of hospitality, sympathy, reciprocity, friendship, and kinship made uniquely possible by modern capitalism, they cannot quite be characterized as either proponents or opponents of the market. Rather, like Mauss, they all manifest a mix of optimistic investment in the egalitarian potential of the present and wary critique of a widespread discursive failure to account for the myriad gifts that make up market society.46 Whether Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D.—or Mauss for that matter—are right, on either theoretical or ethical grounds, is not my primary concern. What I mean to suggest, 44  Perry Anderson memorably describes the market, “as an organizational principle of culture and society,” being “detested by every species of modernism.” Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (New York: Verso, 1992), 35. Jameson nods to Anderson in claiming that “the deepest and most fundamental feature shared by all the modernisms is . . . their hostility to the market itself.” Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 304–5. 45  Molly Hite, “Tonal Cues and Uncertain Values: Affect and Ethics in Mrs. Dalloway,” NARRATIVE 18.3 (Oct. 2010): 263. 46 In The Predicament of Culture, James Clifford similarly classifies Mauss’s work as more “modernist than modern” on the basis of its dual orientation toward cultural order. Along with his contemporaries in the Collège de Sociologie—a collective of French intellectuals that commingled artistic and scientific approaches—Mauss exemplifies what Clifford calls “ethnographic surrealism.” Ethnographic surrealism “tak[es] as its problem—and opportunity—the fragmentation and juxtaposition of cultural values” in seeking to account for, and foster alternatives to, everyday cultural realities. See James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 117. In his foreword to an anthology of ­writings by the Collège, Denis Hollier also stresses the interplay between the arts and the social sciences in French intellectual life during this period, calling the Collège “theory’s novelistic side.” See Denis Hollier, “Foreword: Collage,” The College of Sociology (1937–39), trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), viii. Finally, in her contribution to Marc Manganaro’s anthology on modernist anthropology, Michèle Richman further characterizes the Collège’s modernism in terms of a dual pattern—namely, an oscillation between “critique of modern economic and religious individualism,” on the one hand, and, on the other, a rejection of the “regressive turn to unreason” such a critique can entail. Michèle Richman, “Anthropology and Modernism in France: From Durkheim to the Collège de sociologie,” in Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text, ed. Marc Manganaro (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 187.

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above all, is that tropes and narratives of giving are central means by which all of these modernist writers—including Mauss—give form to the experience of sociality. In so doing, they make competing claims both over the nature of gifts and over the role of their respective fields of literature and sociology in sustaining social life. Before addressing the relationship between literary and sociological concepts and usages of the gift in greater detail, it bears pausing briefly to stress a crucial point. In using the term “modern market society” to describe the British, French, and American contexts in and about which Mauss and my authors were writing, I do not mean to imply that the indigenous peoples Mauss studied from afar did not have markets. Mauss himself, as we have seen, insisted that they did, albeit of a different kind. Nor do I mean to suggest that they were not, or are not, modern or coeval with the West. Imperfect though the term “modern market society” may be, I use it here to register my focus on metropolitan centers characterized by the dominance of the capitalist market. Moreover, in focusing on these centers, I do not mean to discount the role of imperial conquest and encounters with indigenous peoples in fostering the return of the gift more generally as an object of study across disciplines in the twentieth century. Though Mauss did not venture into the field himself, his own turn to the gift clearly never would have occurred without the accounts of predecessors and colleagues such as Malinowski who made firsthand use of the access to other cultures afforded by imperial expansion and colonization. In his efforts to institutionalize French sociology, Mauss even argued for the usefulness of ethnography in developing “humane, easy, and productive colonial practices” (quoted in MM 166). His co-founding of the Institut d’Ethnologie in 1925, the year The Gift was published, represented an especially symbiotic marriage of scientific and imperial objectives, in his view. Fournier notes that the institute always aimed to inform policy and to provide assistance in the French colonies by training administrators, missionaries, and others who were “in a position to make good ethnographic observations” (MM 237). Mauss’s own complicity with the French civilizing mission seems to have stemmed from his commitment to building a durable national infrastructure to support sociological study and preventing further destruction of indigenous institutions. While it may therefore have been self-conscious, it was also unapologetically self-serving.47 Imperialism is very much on the scene in the chapters that follow as part of both the context and the content of modernist writing about the gift. At times its mark is quite explicit—as in Mrs. Dalloway’s references to British rule in India and H.D.’s apocryphal representation of the displacement of Native Americans by European settlers. At other times, its mark is more implicit—as in all four writers’ 47  In this vein, Fuyuki Karasawa has argued that Mauss and the Durkheim school’s relationship to empire was characterized by a constitutive paradox: while their work undermined some of imperialism’s ideological tenets—such as the mapping of a narrative of historical progress onto different geographic spaces and the concomitant ranking of societies as more and less civilized—it also never contested, but rather took for granted and in fact systematically benefited from, the spread of empire. Fuyuki Kurasawa, “The Durkheimian School and Colonialism: Exploring the Constitutive Paradox,” in Sociology and Empire: The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline, ed. George Steinmetz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 188–209.

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suspicion of the motives that drive giving and insistence on a continuum between the gift, capitalist commerce, and international war. In each case, though, imperialism is constitutive of the material and intellectual grounds of modernism’s gifts. M O D E R N I S M ’ S G I F T S : L I T E R A RY F I C T I O N S , S O C I A L FA C T S , A N D F E M A L E P RO P E RT I E S Studies of the gift tend to stick to some version of the same narrative: while fascination with gifts and giving is as old as Western civilization itself, Mauss’s Essai sur le don helps to usher in a widespread return to the gift in the twentieth century—the implication being that, before Mauss’s essay, the gift had dropped out of philosophi­cal and, perhaps, practical favor.48 Of course, the Maussian gift was not created ex nihilo but drew on foregoing and contemporary scholarship in a number of fields, including sociology, anthropology, law, comparative religious studies, and Classics. Liebersohn emphasizes the influence of three social scientists in particular on Mauss’s essay: Boas, Malinowski, and Richard Thurnwald—each of whom helped to pave the way for The Gift by troubling a presumed distinction between primitive gift economies and modern market economies.49 But while Liebersohn takes care to situate The Gift in the context of a much broader intellectual history, he also reinforces a familiar narrative of the gift’s return. During the century leading up to Mauss’s essay, Liebershon argues, “there was a striking poverty of systematic reflection on gift exchange”—especially among sociological thinkers.50 He “looks in vain through the sociological theories of the nineteenth century,” only to find that sustained discussion of gift exchange “almost disappears” during this period.51 But are sociological theories the only site of systematic reflection? Is sociology the only discipline that can think sociologically? In beginning to answer this question, it bears recalling that sociological theories of the gift were not the only thing that supposedly disappeared in the nineteenth century. As we saw earlier in this chapter, Polanyi and Graeber have argued that modern economics made society itself disappear. Of course, like gift exchange, 48  Mark Osteen begins the introduction to his 2002 interdisciplinary anthology on the gift by declaring, “The nature of gifts and gift giving has intrigued thinkers since the beginning of Western civilization,” before noting the ways that Mauss helped to “reopen the question of the gift.” Mark Osteen, “Introduction: Questions of the Gift,” in The Question of the Gift Essays across Disciplines, ed. Mark Osteen (London: Routledge, 2002), 1. Godbout and Caillé note that Aristotle was already wrestling with the fundamental tensions between freedom and constraint at the heart of Mauss’s theory, in effect asking 2,500 years earlier, “how do we cultivate spontaneity?” (Godbout with Caillé, The World of the Gift, 101). On the relationship between Classical and later social scientific treatments of the gift, see also Marcel Hénaff, The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy, trans. Jean-Louis Morhange (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 49  Liebersohn summarizes the influence of each thus: “Boas debunked the notion that potlatches involved only exchange of gifts and argued that essential to the potlatch was a loan; Thurnwald argued that reciprocity was a function of all societies from the tribal to the modern; Malinowski pointed out that kula voyages were occasions for gimwali or trade alongside the gift exchanges of the kula ring” (The Return of the Gift, 169). 50 Liebersohn, The Return of the Gift, 3. 51 Ibid.

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society disappeared only in theory, not in practice: the economy needs society, even if economics refuses to acknowledge its dependence. So, too, for Liebersohn the reciprocal exchange of gifts persists, whether or not it is a centerpiece of sociological theory. But we might further ask: what becomes of sociological theory if society itself disappears? If society exists but is forced to go by a different name, then might the theorization of society take place under the cover of a different ­discipline? What other kinds of theories might have inherited society—and, by the same token, gift exchange—as their object? Where did social thought go? I want to suggest that systematic reflection on the gift did not disappear in the nineteenth century but rather took partial refuge in the fields of literature and the arts.52 Indeed, in using the language of the gift, le don, to describe the beliefs, practices, and structures of whole societies, Mauss in effect appropriated a term with a rich rhetorical and conceptual prehistory in aesthetics—a prehistory that Mauss at once mines and all but entirely suppresses in the Essai. While Mauss makes clear that gift exchanges, as total social phenomena, include aesthetic phenomena, he intentionally and explicitly excludes aesthetics from his discussion, remarking on more than one occasion that gift exchange has “an important aesthetic aspect that we have deliberately omitted from this study” (G 79). Now, this is not entirely true. He touches in passing on artistic objects and rituals, as well as the sense of respect and social connection incited by exchange. He also opens his introduction with a long excerpt from a Scandinavian poem and mentions Pindar in a note. And, perhaps most notably for my purposes, he makes two Anglophone literary references in his conclusion: to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1844 essay, “Gifts,” and to Bernard Mandeville’s 1714 Fable of the Bees, a proclamation in verse of the “public benefits” of “private vices.” These literary references are not, so to speak, purely literary: Emerson’s essay is nonfiction and Mandeville’s legacy is primarily in moral philosophy and political economy. In the case of each, Mauss in effect puts literature in the service of ­sociology. Emerson’s essay is supposedly exemplary of the survival of the ethos of gift exchange in our own modern Western societies and Mandeville’s fable is supposedly exemplary of the “triumph of the notion of individual interest” in the eighteenth century (G 76). Even more precisely, Emerson’s essay is an indication for Mauss that we are “still in the field of Germanic morality,” with the latter’s ­telltale theme of the “fatal gift” (G 65, 63). In German, as has oft been noted, the word gift also means poison. While Emerson takes care to stress that gifts should be “beautiful, not useful,” thus relegating them to an aesthetic sphere apart from the demands of utility, he also registers the gift’s poisonousness and the revenge for which it implicitly calls: “We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is 52  In her recent study of patronage, philanthropy, and nineteenth-century American literature, Francesca Sawaya also takes issue with Liebersohn’s claim, insisting that gift-giving practices were “very much on the minds of intellectuals” during this period. Francesca Sawaya, The Difficult Art of Giving (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 192, n13. While Sawaya’s focus on the relationship of philanthropy and patronage to corporate capitalism has occasional parallels with my discussion here, her book, unlike this one, “is not about the anthropologically inflected term . . . the ‘gift’ ” (6).

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in some danger of being bitten,” especially when we feel our “independence is invaded.”53 With this claim, we are not so far afield from Mandeville’s argument as Mauss perhaps intends. Mandeville, however, assures us that maintaining our independence and pursuing our private interests will benefit the public good. If for Emerson the gift may turn to poison, then for Mandeville our most poisonous indulgences may bear the greatest gifts. Liebersohn lightly chides Mauss for mistaking “the theoretical model for the social reality” when he identifies Mandeville’s fable with individualism’s triumph.54 Yet it is precisely this mistake on Mauss’s part that makes his reference to Mandeville so significant for us. Mandeville’s model is not just theoretical; as a fable in verse, it is also literary, a fiction. Its fictiveness, however, does not diminish its importance in Mauss’s eyes. Rather, like the fiction of generosity that frames the gesture of giving in archaic societies, the fiction of individual interest is crucial to the functioning of market society. It is to this fiction that Mandeville’s fable attests. Even if it cannot truthfully be taken as the cause of the transition to market society, his fable provides a trustworthy index of social reality. So, too, does Emerson’s essay—perhaps especially in its acknowledgment of a tension between gift-giving and an individualistic ideal of independence. The references to both Emerson and Mandeville serve, for Mauss, as social facts—as representatives of more general social phenomena. And, arguably, it is for this reason—because literature has the value of a social fact for Mauss—that his sociology must purge aesthetics from its purview even as he offers literature as evidence of total social phenomena. While aesthetics ultimately plays a supporting role in The Gift, Mauss never reflects on what we might think of as aesthetic notions of the gift—in French or otherwise. We may recall that le don, like its English counterpart, can signify not just a thing given but also a natural endowment or talent. This omission on Mauss’s part is somewhat surprising given his attention to etymology and his self-reflexivity about the inexactness of his terms in describing other social systems. Don, I hasten to add and as we noted earlier, is not the only term for gift that Mauss uses; he also uses cadeau, présent, and a fourth term—prestation. But don is the term that appears in his title and, as Guyer notes, it is used with greater frequency as the essay progresses. Notably, don, unlike these other terms, has a “spiritual etymology”; it is associated with “the ‘givens’ of a divine creation,” invoking a “world that has already been given”—a world that everywhere affirms the presence of, and is continuously constituted by, an original creative force.55 While Guyer surmises that the English “gift” does not imply quite the same world-making, providential power of creativity, nineteenth-century English literature tells a different story. Not only do creative writers in English during this period claim precisely this kind of power for themselves and their writing, but they do so by using the language of the gift.

53  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Gifts,” in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, ed. Alan D. Schrift (New York: Routledge, 1997), 27, 26. 54 Liebersohn, The Return of the Gift, 166. 55  See Guyer, “The Gift that Keeps on Giving,” 19, 14, 17.

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Mauss’s The Gift in effect adopts a term that had become a privileged vehicle for designating aesthetic and, more specifically, literary value—first, in the context of Romanticism, and later in the context of early modernist efforts by novelists such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad to secure the sort of distinction for fiction that the Romantics had secured for poetry. The efforts of James and Conrad are especially noteworthy given my own focus on fiction and the breadth of their influence—including their influence on at least two of the authors in this study, Woolf and Stein; their influence on later theories of the novel; and also, at least in the case of Conrad, their influence on later theories of the gift. James’s 1884 essay, “The Art of Fiction,” and Conrad’s 1897 preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” wed the value of fiction to the value of the gift, laying claim to the notion of the gift for literature even as their texts reveal the tenuousness of the distinction between the gift of literature and the don of sociology—between the gift as literary fiction and the gift as social fact. Mary Poovey notes the role of James’s essay in particular in her account of the emergence of a distinctly literary form of value in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on Guillory’s Bourdieuian critique of the literary canon—a critique that owes a partial, if implicit, debt to the Maussian notion of the gift and symbolic exchange56—Poovey traces the ways in which nineteenth-century writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge worked to establish a Romantic model of literary value defined in terms of “organic unity, linguistic connotation, and textual autonomy.”57 For Poovey, James’s essay then exemplifies the difficulty that modern novelists had claiming a Romantic model of value for literary forms other than poetry. In her reading, this transvaluation depends on the very distinction that interests me here—that is, the distinction between fact and fiction. What most interests me, however, is James’s use of the language of the gift to describe both the unique value of fiction and the facts from which this value is differentiated. James avers that the novelist writes “from experience,” experience being tantamount to “a cluster of gifts”—namely, “[the] power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it.”58 For James, as for Mauss, the language of the gift proves to be somewhat imprecise: “this cluster of gifts may almost be said to 56  Guillory does mention Mauss once—not in reference to the gift but in reference to Bourdieu’s use of Mauss’s notion of “habitus”: “ ‘a system of durable, transposable dispositions’ where disposition is defined as ‘a way of being, a habitual state (especially of the body).’ ” John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 112. 57 Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 287. This definition of literary value, she argues, helped to distinguish literature as a genre from two other genres: monetary genres (e.g., coinage, paper money) and writing about the market (e.g., account books, economic theory). Like Poovey, we will later look at the ways such generic distinctions are not only instituted but also blur and break down—for example, in our discussion of the way Stein likens money to masterpieces. 58  Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in Walter Besant and Henry James, The Art of Fiction (Boston, MA: Algonquin Press, 1900), 65, https://archive.org/details/cu31924027192941. Also quoted in Poovey, The Genres of the Credit Economy, 330.

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constitute experience.”59 The “gift” of fiction, like the don of sociology, brings us close to, yet inevitably falls short of, the totality of experience. This experience is also, in a sense, social insofar as the writer’s success and the value of his work depend on his ability to share his gifts with his audience, to give his experience to us. While fiction is therefore conceived as a kind of gift, so, too, notably, are the facts on which it is built. “We must,” James writes, “grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.”60 Poovey argues that, by discounting the donnée from our criticism, James “obliterated the distinction between fiction and fact—or, more precisely, he rendered the facts that counted their crafted versions.”61 I would add that, in using the language of the gift to describe both facts and fiction, he makes the only gifts that count their crafted versions. What matters are not the artist’s données but his dons. While James’s recourse to the French donnée is but one of a number of such instances in the essay and a thoroughly unsurprising gesture from such a Francophile, it remains striking in an essay that is in part about the gifts the novelist has to give. Indeed, it is as if James had to resort to the French term in order to separate facts and fiction and distinguish a novel’s subject matter (donnée) from the proper object of literary criticism (gifts). For as soon as we translate the French donnée into the English “given” we discover how extremely unstable the line between the writer’s subject, his given, and what he makes of it with his “cluster of gifts” truly is. If both are gifts, so to speak, then where does the artist’s given end and what he gives to us begin? How are we, the readers, supposed to differentiate between givens and gifts, facts and fictions? The answer, of course, is that we cannot—not definitively. James himself suggests as much when he compares the “story and the novel, the idea and the form,” to a needle and thread and declares “the data of the novel” inseparable from the novel as an “organic whole.”62 Bracketing the question of the full implications of this claim, I would simply stress that, in following the movement of the language of the gift across disciplines, we can trace an implicit debate between literature and the social sciences over their respective claims to and definitions of the gift. What is for Mauss an exemplar of a total social fact and thus the object of sociology is for James the source of fiction’s value and thus ought to be the object of literary criticism. At the same time, in looking at Mauss’s and James’s essays, what stand out are not their differences so much as their similarities. In each case, when we speak of “the gift,” we are speaking, however inexactly, of “life, in general.” This is not to suggest that the fiction writer and the sociologist relate to life in general on the same grounds or via the same methods, but rather to register the gift’s invocation across disciplines to represent a totality of experience even as it is used to demarcate disciplinary boundaries and partition the analysis of that experience.63 Put quite simply, the language of the gift was central to both literary and social scientific projects during this period. 59  James, “The Art of Fiction,” 65–6, emphasis added. 60  Ibid. 71. 61 Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy, 330–1. 62  James, “The Art of Fiction,” 77, 76. 63  Simon Jarvis has written about the role of disciplinary separation in shaping recent philosophical discussion of the gift, particularly in the work of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion. This discussion, he argues, has brought to the fore the extent to which the “needs of . . . professional identities” are

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It is perhaps because this point is so self-evident that it has not been an object of greater reflection in literary studies. Hyde in particular, it seems to me, capitalizes on modern literature’s shared vocabulary with the social sciences without fully ­conceptualizing the roots and implications of their crossover or asking whether or not they are necessarily writing about the same “gift.” Thus, he opens The Gift with a passage from another modernist literary manifesto, Joseph Conrad’s preface to his 1897 novella The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: “The artist appeals to that part of our being . . . which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring.”64 In drawing on anthropology to develop a theory of artistic gifts, Hyde surmises that anthropology has been the primary home of work on gift exchange “because gift exchange tends to be an economy of small groups.”65 That may be, but the relative smallness of artistic groups—that is, groups consisting of authors such as Conrad and their readers—cannot account for the largeness of the claims that texts such as Conrad’s preface make for art. Immediately following the passage cited by Hyde, it becomes clear, if it was not already, that art’s appeal is universal; the artist speaks to “the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts” and “which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity.”66 How, then, are we to reconcile the uniqueness of the artist and his “group” with the universality of his address, his singular gift with our shared gift? I would argue that this is exactly what the language of the gift does in Conrad’s preface and in the context of modern aesthetics more broadly: it conjoins the unique and the universal by naming those capacities that distinguish both the ­artist and his addressee (the Jamesian “cluster of gifts” and the Conradian “part of our being” that endures) and the foundation of their mutual solidarity with all humanity (the feel of “life, in general,” that the successful novelist captures and conveys to “innumerable hearts”). The gift is radically—and, as Derrida might have it, impossibly—both personal and impersonal at the same time. Taking a cue from Susan Hegeman’s revisionist intellectual history of the concept of culture in the U.S. during the first half of the twentieth century, I want to suggest that Mauss’s Essai sur le don does not mark a break from the gift’s aesthetic prehistory but rather formalizes a gesture toward generality at the heart of the modernist aesthetics of Conrad, James, and the writers considered in the following chapters. Hegeman troubles the standard narrative of a “deep division” between literary and anthropological concepts of culture in the early twentieth century.67 Boas is typically cast as the hero of this narrative—countering an elitist, Arnoldian view of culture as “the best which has been thought and said” with a more democratic, mistaken for “features of the concepts of objects into which they are to enquire.” See Jarvis, “Problems in the Phenomenology of the Gift,” Angelaki 6.2 (Aug. 2001): 67. 64  Quoted in Hyde, The Gift, xv. 65 Hyde, The Gift, xxi. 66  Joseph Conrad, preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” in Joseph Conrad on Fiction, ed. Walter F. Wright (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 161. 67  Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 14.

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holistic view of culture as a given group of people’s entire way of life. By contrast, Hegeman argues that anthropological and aesthetic usages of “culture” were not in fact antithetical for the modernist intellectuals and writers with whom they are associated. What we have come to classify as an aesthetic usage never actually precluded gestures of description and intercultural comparison, while what we have come to classify as an anthropological usage never precluded “cultural evaluation and judgments of taste.”68 The division between them, she argues, is a product of ideological and institutional developments that took place at a later moment, after World War II, including the growth of area studies and a highbrow repudiation of mass culture by critics such as Clement Greenberg. For Fredric Jameson, the deep division instituted by “late” modernist critics such as Greenberg is not just a division between two different usages of ­“culture” but also a division between two usages of “the aesthetic”—between “the aesthetic” as high art and “the aesthetic in its widest sense,” as not only art but also its context, the vast realm of culture that mediates everyday life.69 The ideology of aesthetic autonomy is thus “achieved by a radical dissociation within the aesthetic itself: by the radical disjunction and separation of literature and art from culture.”70 The problem is that this dissociation obscures the utopianism of the actual practitioners of modernism—their conviction that art has “a genuine function to redeem and transfigure a fallen society.”71 Art can only perform this redemptive function if we assume the existence of some space of mediation between art and everyday life—a space we tend to call “culture.” The ideology of aesthetic autonomy negates this space. For Jameson, however, modernism, which turns out to be semi-autonomous, always took for granted a certain slippage between “culture” as art and “culture” as the context that modernism dreams of transforming. In the case of the concept of the gift, we do find some competition, if not a deep division per se, between literary and sociological usages—between “gift” as literary fiction and “gift” as total social fact. Or, rather, what we find, in the literary manifestos of James and Conrad and the sociological manifesto of Mauss, are attempts on the part of literature and sociology to claim every usage for itself—to subsume sociology to literature, on the one hand, and to subsume literature to sociology, on the other. Each writer creates divisions by insisting on the specific value of his field but only in order to overcome them by maintaining that his field is uniquely gifted with the authority to overcome them. In using the language of the gift to describe a total social fact, Mauss in particular not only riffed upon a slippage between literary and sociological usages that was already operative within literature; he also, however inadvertently, lit upon the master trope of modernist utopianism—on a, if not the, central means by which modernist writers figured the power of their art to transfigure a fallen society. 68  Ibid. 6. 69 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 177. 70  Ibid. 176. 71  Ibid. 178.

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Insofar as this utopianism can still be found in works of the 1930s and 1940s by Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D., a distinction between high or classical modernism and late modernism is not especially useful for my purposes. Tyrus Miller, on whose concept of late modernism Jameson draws, distinguishes between them on the ground of high modernism’s “focus on the problem of mastering a chaotic modernity by means of formal techniques” and late modernism’s “growing skept­icism about modernist sensibility and craft as means of managing the turbulent forces of the day.”72 Both traits are in evidence to varying degrees in the chapters that follow. It is perhaps fair to say, as Miller does, that modernist works from this later period intensify “latent strains” within the work of its forebears.73 But while I would ­certainly maintain that the modernist investment in form was always shadowed by skepticism, I am reticent to chalk up the skepticism of Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. to the increased formidability of the “forces of the day.” If anything, these forces figure as the cause of their utopianism—not because the forces themselves are obviously good. The mass unemployment that provides the context for Rhys’s After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and the air raids that continually threaten death and destruction during the Blitz in H.D.’s The Gift are not exactly bearers of hope. Even phenomena that might seem promising from a progressive perspective, such as the New Deal, seemed catastrophic to the conservative Stein. What these and other disparate phenomena have in common is that they all seem to signal or entail a crisis in a traditional distinction between gift and exchange in the context of their writing. While the apparent mixture of gift and exchange seems disastrous to Stein’s eyes, she nevertheless joins the other writers here in turning this crisis into an occasion to assert the utopian potential of the gift of art—albeit a potential that hinges in her writing on the gift’s abstraction from exchange. While Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. therefore follow writers such as James and Conrad in identifying literature as a gift, their work also offers a series of ­gendered counterpoints to the ideas of their male contemporaries in and beyond literature. The fact that, in Conrad’s text, universality is masculine is hardly insignificant. For Conrad, as for Mauss, “all humanity” is all male, though this detail, too, is passed over in Hyde’s The Gift when he claims that laboring with gifts is a “mark of the female gender.”74 It is a striking claim in a study that chooses the lives and works of two men—Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound—as its prime examples of the gift of artistic labor in the modern age. It is tempting to read the disparity between their masculinity and the gift’s femininity as an index of Hyde’s sensitivity to a gap between sex and gender—and to a degree it is. Nevertheless, it is hard not to feel that the mark of the female gender is most nobly borne by men in Hyde’s view. For example, while he cites Emily Post’s Etiquette as proof of the gift’s femininity, when he turns in passing to Mrs. Dalloway—a novel about a middle-class woman planning a party that was published just three years after the initial 1922 edition of Post’s guide—Hyde identifies Peter Walsh as the figure of the gift’s tragic 72  Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 17, 20. 73  Ibid. 19. 74 Hyde, The Gift, 141.

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fate under imperial capitalism and not the novel’s titular hostess.75 Such surprising gestures notwithstanding, Hyde’s feminization of the gift is clearly meant to affirm the worth of the many forms of affective, social, and cultural work that women have long performed outside the purview and pay of the market. Yet, as Mark Osteen points out, in identifying the gift as a female property, Hyde also resists confronting “the degree to which females are or have been the property of males”—perhaps, I would add, because more often than not he is interested in writing by males.76 Willmott similarly notes that Hyde’s primitivist dualism of gift and market is also patriarchal. Not only are gifts feminine in Hyde’s view but they are “irrational, libidinal, and unrestrained”—all those characteristics traditionally associated with the primitive—while the circulation of masculine commodities is “calculated, reasoned, and controlled.”77 While Willmott is certainly right to trouble Hyde’s association of femininity with the primitive, he, too, feminizes gift economies in ways that are ultimately troubling. Drawing on the work of the feminist anthropologist Annette Weiner, who, contra Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, reserves a “direct and intrinsic political role for women,” even in “House-dominated societies ruled mostly by male chiefs,” Willmott suggests that the aboriginal house is “articulated, not exclusively but intrinsically, by women’s heritage.”78 But in the context of Willmott’s own focus on market-dominated societies, the gendering of the house has the unfortunate effect of recalling a Western ideology of separate spheres and Hyde’s own feminization of affective and socially reproductive labor via his references to Emily Post’s Etiquette. My concern with these readings is that they tend to apply anthropological concepts of the gift and the house to modern literature without fully addressing the fact that these concepts have a patriarchal prehistory in market society. Or, if critics do address this prehistory then they improbably decide that the sexual division of spheres and labor is a good thing, thus going against the grain of many contemporary feminisms and, more importantly, the gender politics of many modernist writers— but why? My suspicion is that deeply entrenched assumptions about modernist antipathy to the market and the widespread persistence of Romantic ideals of ­noncommercial literary value combine to facilitate a reversal of values that can make anything and everything nonmarket seem good whatever its actual history. Willmott attributes this reversal to modernists themselves, suggesting that “[modernism’s] 75  “In the empires of usury,” Hyde writes of Woolf ’s novel, “the sentimentality of the man with the soft heart calls to us because it speaks of what has been lost” (Hyde, The Gift, 182). On Post’s Etiquette, see Hyde, The Gift, 132–4. 76  Osteen, “Introduction: Questions of the Gift,” 19. Still, Osteen draws on Hyde’s study in his comprehensive reading of the economies at play in Joyce’s Ulysses. While critical of Joyce’s representation of women as objects of exchange between men, Osteen also echoes Hyde’s feminization of the gift in arguing that the “Penelope” chapter replaces such male economies with “a female economy implicated in the infinite circulation of gift exchange.” Molly’s monologue “reveals [that] some surplus always escapes the ledger”—and not just any surplus apparently but a feminine surplus. See Mark Osteen, The Economy of Ulysses: Making Both Ends Meet (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 421. 77 Willmott, Modernist Goods, 230. On the identification of woman with the primitive in early sociology, see Rita Felski, “On Nostalgia: The Prehistoric Woman,” in The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 35–60. 78  Ibid. 17.

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value, as a heritage for us in subsequent decades, is inseparable from its attempts to reverse appropriately” market and nonmarket modes, to privilege the latter over the former.79 But the reversal belongs, at least in part, to us, as critics for whom the thought of a space beyond capitalism is all too irresistible. The thought of a specifi­cally feminine noncommercial beyond may even be especially appealing given the tendency of some modernist thinkers to draw negative associations between women and commerce. Certainly the ideal of a feminine house would seem to offer a welcome alternative to the mythical threat of “mass culture as woman,” to use Andreas Huyssen’s phrase.80 From this perspective, the appeal of anthropology would then derive from its promise to supply empirical proof of such an alternative—evidence of an “outside to the market” in the form of feminized domestic space.81 Without dismissing the existence of alternatives to the market, I want to insist that modernist writing by women significantly complicates the identification of such alternatives with the institutional space of the house. The problem with their identification is that the anthropological house looks a lot like the Victorian house that women were increasingly fighting to leave in the wake of World War I and which writers such as Woolf and Rhys were quite strategically writing against. The fictions of femininity at which Woolf and Rhys took aim were hardly consistent: for ­example, Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House, whom Woolf kills off in “Professions for Women,” is pure and benevolent, while the Madwoman in Jane Eyre’s Attic, whom Rhys gives new life, is overly emotional and animalistic. Yet both fictions cast women as being like a gift—the “essence of the gift” being, by some accounts, “superfluity itself.”82 Like gifts, women are supposed to be excessive, extrinsic to the culture at large—or, as Jameson might have it, to the aesthetic in the widest sense. In other words, they are supposed to occupy a position homologous to that 79 Glenn Willmott, “Modernism, Economics, Anthropology,” in Disciplining Modernism, ed. Pamela L. Caughie (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 199. 80  Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 44–62. Notably, Hyde follows the example of late modernist ideologists of aesthetic autonomy when, in the opening pages of his study, he feminizes mass culture by identifying drugstore romance novels marketed to women as the antithesis of the gift of art (Hyde, The Gift, xv–xvi). 81  Willmott, “Modernism, Economics, Anthropology,” 199. 82  Osteen, “Introduction,” 26. Derrida similarly refers to “a certain essential excess of the gift”—a paradoxical formulation to which we will return in our discussion of Rhys in Chapter 3. See Derrida, Given Time, 10. While critical of patriarchal representations of women in Western culture, the French feminists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray nevertheless essentialize feminine excessiveness in ways that, in the eyes of Anglo-American feminist audiences, have seemed to be complicit with a patriarchal bias. In the case of Cixous, I actually think the story is much more complicated, especially given her debt to deconstruction and psychoanalysis. Still, I bracket their work here, above all because, in my reading, their theories do not line up with the theories of Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D., and, even where some lines of connection may be drawn, I am reticent to reduce modernist writing about the gift to a mere anticipation of a later theoretical moment, as can so often happen with modernist writing in general. Part of the interest and value of these authors’ writing about the gift derives from the fact that it was contemporaneous with that of thinkers in other fields—men like Mauss and Lévi-Strauss whom Cixous and Irigaray would later come to critique. See Hélène Cixous, “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays,” in The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 63–132, and Luce Irigaray, “Commodities among Themselves,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 192–7.

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of the modernist work of art, which raises a difficult question for the writers here: How are women to assert their gifts without reinforcing pernicious fictions of feminine gifts? Indeed, can one? It remains an open question in the chapters that follow, as Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. wrestle with the gift’s literary legacy as a double for both woman and the work of art. In various ways, these writers are all self-conscious heirs to, and interlocutors with, Western cultural traditions that have figured women as “gifts” (i.e., objects of exchange) whose own “gifts” (i.e., creative powers as subjects) have not counted for much outside the private house. As a result, the utopian gifts they imagine tend to assume a feminine cast—but they do so, crucially, for historical reasons rather than structural or essentialist ones. In drawing out these reasons, I argue that modernism ultimately offers a far more complex picture of the relationship between gender, the gift, and literature in the modern age than has thus far been appreciated. While the writers here reserve a unique role for literature as a gift and even for women as its donor, they do so at a moment when, as they are keenly aware, the confinement of both gifts and women to the house is no longer a given. Part of the value of their writing for us, these many years later, is the range of ways it registers and responds to these historical shifts, establishing frameworks for conceptualizing the significance of gifts in and of modern market society. In so doing, they also provocatively suggest that the gift’s confinement was never in fact a given. The excess ascribed to women and gifts has always overflowed the boundaries of the house, permeating the spaces and subjects that make up the nominally masculine world of the market in ways their writing works to make newly visible. M A P P I N G I N F LU E N C E : M AU S S ’ S P O S T WA R P O L I T I C S In the space that remains of this chapter, we will look more closely at the historical ground of the intersection between Maussian sociology and Anglo-American literature, particularly the work of Virginia Woolf, in order both to further flesh out the social and political context of Mauss’s essay and to start outlining the difference that gender makes in the discourses of Woolf and the other writers here. Of these writers, Woolf is, to my knowledge, the only one with relatively direct connections to Mauss. As Simpson notes, Woolf ’s friend, the Cambridge Ritualist, Jane Ellen Harrison, had read and praised earlier works that Mauss co-wrote with Durkheim and Henri Hubert. Whether or not Woolf was familiar with Mauss’s work in particular (and she appears not to have been), Simpson justifiably suggests that she would have been “aware of developments in anthropology and the newly emerging area of ethnography.”83 For his part, Mauss had both professional and personal ties to British anthropologists, including Malinowski, James Frazer, and Charles and 83 Simpson, Gifts, Markets and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf, 4. On Harrison’s influence on Woolf, see also Jane Marcus’s reading of The Years, in which she suggests, “The ‘modern’ is as indebted to anthropology as the Victorian is to history.” Jane Marcus, “The Years as Götterdämmerung, Greek Play, and Domestic Novel,” in Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 36.

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Brenda Seligman—Charles being Malinowski’s teacher and later his colleague at the London School of Economics. Virginia and Leonard also knew the Seligmans. Brenda even makes an appearance in Woolf ’s diary when she reports sitting next to Mrs. Seligman at a dinner party in an entry from July 1922.84 Nevertheless, I want to suggest that the definitive ground of intersection between Mauss and Woolf is not British anthropology but rather British social movements. Indeed, if there is a line of influence to be traced here it is not that of anthropology on Woolf but that of British social movements on Mauss. Mauss was an active and committed socialist throughout his career and was especially invested and involved in the French cooperative movement. In 1900, he co-founded a cooperative, La Boulangerie, and was proud to write for Humanité, the first socialist newspaper to include a section on cooperatives (MM 110–12, 124–7). Though he had always identified as a socialist, after the war he became increasingly invested in reconciling the aims of sociology and socialism.85 But for a French socialist, Mauss drew inspiration from unusual sources. A critic of Bolshevism, Mauss was, according to Fournier, “one of the rare French socialist militants who was an Anglophile” (MM 198). Moreover, if he was “militant” in his devotion to socialism, he was also fairly moderate in his approach to its institutionalization. What most attracted him to different British social movements was their reformism, their pursuit of a “social democratic middle course between the extremes of capitalism and communism.”86 In his conclusion to The Gift, Mauss makes just a few references to Britain, but they are peculiar enough to index his familiarity with the British sociopolitical scene. He makes allusion to the importance of British “Friendly Societies” and, somewhat more vaguely, identifies “English-speaking countries” as places where “the rich [are coming] back to considering themselves . . . as the financial guardians of their fellow citizens” (G 68–9). Most significantly, however, he calls attention to the growth of an “entire movement . . . in favour of insurance against unemployment” (G 67). Britain faced consistently high rates of unemployment throughout the 1920s, which Mauss characterizes as a “time of terrible, long drawn-out unemployment affecting millions of workers” (G 67).87 Although millions is a high estimate for just Britain in 1925, Mauss’s sentiment stands as a sign of his appreciation of the move on the part of various industries to organize and provide unemployment insurance, thereby easing the financial burden on the state. Even more striking is the care Mauss takes to acknowledge individual actors— “distinguished economists and captains of industry such as Mr Pybus and 84  See Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1978), 180–1. 85  On Mauss’s socialism, especially after World War I, see MM 189–214; Liebersohn, The Return of the Gift, 158–63; and Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 151–63. 86 Liebersohn, The Return of the Gift, 140. 87  Unemployment rates rose sharply after the war due to difficulty integrating members of the armed services back into the labor force, then declined from about 15 percent to about 10 percent, though these rates were still high compared to the years before the war. With the onslaught of economic depression at the end of the 1920s, the number doubled from 1,276,000 in 1929 to 2,813,000 by 1932. See Duncan Gallie, “The Labour Force,” in Twentieth-Century British Social Trends, ed. A. H. Halsey with Joseph Webb (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 313–14.

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Sir Lynden Macassey [who] are urging that firms themselves, through their corporate associations, should organize their unemployment funds and themselves make such s­ acrifices” (G 68). His mention of Pybus and Macassey is obscure, to say the least, particularly for a French sociologist. He also neglects to include a reference to any specific document or event, which is jarring in a text famous for acknowledging its debts in endnotes as long as the main essay. Of the two figures, Macassey is the more readily traceable. Initially trained as an engineer, he worked in industrial law, serving as an arbitrator for the Board of Trade and a member of cabinet committees on labor and women in industry during World War I.88 It seems likely that in calling attention to a British “movement” for firm-based and industry-based unemployment, Mauss in part had in mind Macassey’s 1922 book, Labour Policy— False and True; A Study in Economic History and Industrial Economics. For Macassey, the “true” policy ought to be rooted in the psychology of the worker, put the good of the community before that of political parties or specific industries, and foster the “right relationship between employers and employed,” in part by calling on individual firms and industries to provide unemployment benefits.89 Also trained as an engineer, Sir Percy John Pybus became managing director of English Electric, one of the four principal electrical manufacturers in Britain, in 1921.90 He was also part of a group of businessmen who co-authored a series of studies on unemployment in Britain: The Third Winter of Unemployment (1922), Is  Unemployment Inevitable? (1923), and Unemployment Insurance in Great Britain: A Critical Examination (1925).91 Some of the members of the group had previously collaborated on a proposal to modify the 1920 Unemployment Insurance Act, which they submitted at the time of the Act’s passing and which is included as an appendix to the 1922 study. The proposal resonates with Macassey’s study in advocating for industry contributions to unemployment, though the authors suggest that this method may not be adequate to respond to “exceptional emergencies” like the current crisis.92 Whether or not Mauss read these specific texts, the mere fact of his passing reference to Pybus and Macassey is indicative of the depth of his interest in British 88 See Rodney Lowe, “Macassey, Sir Lynden Livingston (1876–1963),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); last modified Jan. 2008, doi:10.1093/ ref:odnb/34667. Mauss also mentions “Sir Lynden Macassey, M. Pybus among others” in a footnote to another essay written around this time, “A Sociological Assessment of Bolshevism (1924 –5),” included in Mike Gane, ed., The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 211, n10. The reference is equally vague there. In an annotated index of names, the essay’s translator, Ben Brewster, quite appreciably acknowledges not being able to trace “M. Pybus” (223–4). 89  “That industry should provide for its unemployment is obviously reasonable,” he writes, and “[w]ithout a doubt the best approach to unemployment by industries or by industry as a whole is to start with insurance by firms.” Macassey, Labour Policy—False and True; A Study in Economic History and Industrial Economics (London: T. Butterworth, 1922), 259–62, https://archive.org/details/ cu31924002622771. 90  William J. Hausman, Peter Hertner, and Mira Wilkins, Global Electrification: Multinational Enterprise and International Finance in the History of Light and Power, 1878–2007 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 159. 91  It is thanks to a review of the third of these that I discovered the existence of the first two. See N. A. Tolles, review of Unemployment Insurance in Great Britain: A Critical Examination, in Journal of Political Economy 34.6 (Dec. 1926): 780–2. 92  John Jacob Astor et al., The Third Winter of Employment: The Report of an Enquiry undertaken in the Autumn of 1922 (London: P. S. King & Son, 1922), 79, https://archive.org/details/ thirdwinterofune00astouoft.

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reforms. But it is also somewhat surprising given his admiration for other, far more readily recognizable British figures—namely, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Prominent socialist reformists, core members of the Fabian Society, and friends of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Webbs were well known in France and stood for Mauss as the “finest examples of the new English reformist thinking” (MM 198). Although they do not make an appearance in The Gift, Mauss highlights their recent constitution socialiste—A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain—in a brief essay from October 1920, declaring with characteristic exultation that the Webbs were developing principles applicable not only in Great Britain but in all Western countries.93 Like Mauss’s essay, the Webbs’ 1920 Constitution ends on an expressly moral note. And, to a degree, it anticipates—and quite possibly helped to inform—Mauss’s call in The Gift five years later for a moderate mix of individualism and communism. The latter—what they call the “spirit of service”—is cast as both the cause and effect of recent economic changes, including the “rapid growth of the consumers Co-operative Movement.”94 Mauss had an opportunity to admire the “specifically English” organization of this movement during a trip to England in the fall of 1920 (MM 198). For the Webbs, as for Mauss, the cooperative movement signaled the falsity of the assumption under capitalism that man “is and should be inspired by a passion for riches.”95 Yet, like Mauss, they take care to stress that social service does not mean “Utopian altruism”: “no Socialist expects, or even desires, a race of self-sacrificing saints.”96 Service, as a form of labor, ought to be compensated, but moderately so, as is already the case for a variety of “public-spirited” workers, such as scientists, teachers, civil servants, cooperative administrators, and trade unionists. “What the establishment of a genuine Co-operative Commonwealth” requires, in the Webbs’ view, is for “those who have the gift for industrial organisation” to be “as public-spirited in their work, and as modest in their claims to a livelihood,” as is the case with these other workers.97 In thus using the language of the gift to describe the unique talents of industrial leaders, the Webbs suggest that gifts, in the sense of natural abilities, may be used either altruistically (to serve society) or egoistically (to accumulate riches). Indeed, it would seem that the man with a gift for industrial organization may find himself in an especially paradoxical situation insofar as his gift may translate into a gift for being immodest in his claims to a livelihood—that is, a gift for taking more than he gives and turning a profit. By this logic, capitalism is a gift economy of sorts, but it is a perverse gift economy, 93  See Mauss, “Formes nouvelles du socialisme,” in Écrit Politiques, ed. Marcel Fournier (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 343–5. He also wrote an article in honor of their visit to Paris in May 1921 for the French socialist journal, Le Populaire (MM 206). The Constitution offers a thorough outline of the Webbs’ vision for socialization, including recommendations for the creation of two parliaments (one political and the other social and industrial), the nationalization of certain industries (e.g., railway, mining, and insurance), the abandonment of ministerial administration, and the reorganization of local government. See Sidney and Beatrice Webb, A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain (London: Green & Co., 1920). 94  Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Constitution, 350. 95 Ibid. 96  Ibid. 351. 97  Ibid. 351.

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transforming the potential for public good into a source of private gain. According to the Webbs, the key to regulating the employment and expenditure of individual gifts and correcting the ill-fated course set by capitalism is a shift in public opinion. What is needed is general agreement that one ought to give and take in moderation and that “the exceptionally gifted man who insists on extorting from the community the full rent of his ability [is] a mean fellow” for taking as much as he can fetch for his gift.98 In proposing that man may have a gift for taking, the Webbs, like Mauss, challenge a strict opposition of gifts and exchanges. And yet, their assumption remains that man is inspired either to give or to take, hence their recommendation of a “substitution of the motive of public service for the motive of self-enrichment.”99 By contrast, Mauss invites his readers to imagine that giving and taking, public service and self-enrichment, are not in fact mutually exclusive but may be “mixed up together.” The difference between Mauss’s call for mixture and the Webbs’ call for substitution is crucial for it marks both what is most radical in Mauss’s approach and what, in my view, most recommends the relevance of his work to modernist literature—that is, his tendency, in Graeber’s words, “[to] see everything, all social possibilities, as simultaneously present.”100 While the writers here may not share Mauss’s ethics and politics, they nevertheless tend to see—and their writing works to bring into relief—social possibilities that are present but tend to go unacknowledged or underappreciated (e.g., the affective support provided by Rhys’s down-and-out heroines) or perhaps have yet to be realized (e.g., the affective support her heroines are in turn refused). While Mauss and Woolf were responding to the emergence of some of the same social possibilities in postwar England, their responses were far from synonymous. The difference in their responses to the Webbs in particular is emblematic of what I take to be the fundamental difference in their politics more generally. While not explicitly acknowledged in The Gift, the Webbs’ vision of a cooperative commonwealth was arguably among the many auspicious signs of a “new morality” that Mauss had in mind. Woolf, for her part, was admiring of the Webbs. Yet she was also extremely ambivalent toward both them and the Fabian socialist project. Indeed, it seems safe to say that part of what most attracted Mauss to the Webbs was the very thing that increasingly came not simply to concern Woolf but to repel her— namely, their espousal of what Mauss referred to as a “group morality.” For Mauss, the group and the gift go hand in hand: the promise of the gift is its spiritual power to bind together “men and groups of men” (G 70). For Woolf, however, the question of the gift is fundamentally tied to the question of how to imagine a form of sociality beyond the group—a form that can accommodate differences between subjects as well as within them. For Woolf, the gift that held the greatest promise of mediating relations between individuals without sacrificing their singular gifts was, as we might suspect, fiction.

98 Ibid.

99 Ibid.

100  Graeber, “Finance Is Just Another Word,” 170.

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Returning the Gift “ W H O A R E ‘ W E ’ ”: WO O L F ’ S G I F T O F F I C T I O N

In February 1920, just a few months before the publication of the Webbs’ Constitution, Leonard and Virginia Woolf had what the latter considered an especially dreadful lunch with Sidney and Beatrice. Taking a moment “to obliterate” them in her diary, a vexed and irritated Woolf recalls Beatrice telling her that “it was wrong to prevent L[eonard] from going into Parliament; we want men of subtle intellect &— But what is ‘right’ & who are ‘we.’ ”101 One gets a sense of whom this “we” is for the Webbs in their Constitution when they note that the Labour Party “has achieved a great measure of success in welding into a homogeneous political force the aspirations and desires of its four million members.”102 It is hard to imagine much of anything more alarming or distasteful to Woolf than millions of people being homogeneously welded together. As Leonard went on to have an unsuccessful run as the Labour Party candidate representing the Combined Universities, Virginia continued to contemplate the question of who “we” are—of what voices and vagaries group identifications include and exclude. As Jessica Berman argues, it would preoccupy her throughout the 1920s and, as the Fabian “we” grew increasingly nationalistic and imperialistic, would eventually drive a wedge between the Woolfs and the Fabians.103 Woolf much preferred the Women’s Co-operative Guild (WCG), with which she became involved through her friend, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, the WCG general secretary. Contra the Fabians, the WCG “rejected the nation as the primary locus of community affiliation,” and, in general, the consumer cooperative movement seemed “less patriarchal” because of women’s involvement.104 While the WCG, like the Fabians, raised the question for Woolf of who “we” are, it seems to have done so in very different terms. Whereas the Fabians prompted Woolf to wonder and worry over the issue of what singularities and differences were potentially sacrificed in favor of forging a communal “we,” the WCG raised the inverse question—that is, whether certain kinds of “we” are even possible. Can community even be forged

101 Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, 20. 102  Sidney and Beatice Webb, Constitution, 85. 103  “Between the wars,” Berman writes, “the Fabians moved from principles of small-scale co-operation to those of national federation and, finally, to a soviet-like hierarchical model of the state. For the Woolfs, both vehement opponents of rampant nationalism and imperialism, and critics of the soviet experiment, this change in Fabianism was disastrous.” Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 126. 104  See Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community, 127, 129. By contrast, Mauss seems to have seen no disparity between Fabian socialism and the consumer cooper­ ative movement, regarding the Webbs as “theorists of consumer democracy” (MM 206). But the Webbs were also concerned with “democracies of producers” (e.g., trade unions) and reserved a strong role for the state in the reorganization of production in their idealized socialist commonwealth. In his history of cooperative culture in Britain, Peter Gurney notes that, while the Webbs were interested in the consumer cooperative movement, they “disparaged attempts at co-operative production, arguing that production would be better organised by the state under the direction of an expert elite.” See Peter Gurney, Co-operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England, 1870–1930 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 181–2. I am grateful to Berman’s book for pointing me toward Gurney’s study.

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across lines of difference, particularly that division which often appears as the most inevitable and insurmountable in her writing—class division? Discussion of class in Woolf ’s writing is often heated and always difficult, not least because Woolf was, as she was about most everything, so extraordinarily selfconscious and reflective about it. Hermione Lee perhaps puts the problem most succinctly when she suggests that Woolf “excoriates and defends herself better than anyone else can.”105 As Woolf knew only too well, she could be a snob and an elitist, and at times seems to have enjoyed playing these parts as much as she felt condemned to assume them. But she could also be a shrewd materialist, by which I mean she was thoughtfully attuned to the force of her own class position in ­shaping and constraining her personal experience as well as her ability to know and understand the experiences of other people, especially those of other women.106 “Woolf ’s refrain in all her writings that touch on class,” as Mark Hussey notes, “is that one class is unknowable by another.”107 Nowhere is this refrain in greater evidence than in Woolf ’s 1930 “Introductory Letter” to a collection of working women’s autobiographical writings edited by Llewelyn Davies. Looking back on her experience of listening to members of the WCG speak at a 1913 convention in Newcastle, Woolf recalls feeling, “in my own blood and bones, untouched” as they talked about “divorce, education, the vote— all good things.”108 Much though she appreciated the women’s demands, she did not personally share them and so felt physically alienated from them. Especially noteworthy for our purposes is Woolf ’s use of the language of the gift—of altruism and benevolence—to describe the nature of her relation with the women not in spite of this alienation but rather because of it: If every reform they demand was granted this very instant it would not touch one hair of my capitalistic head. Hence, my interest is merely altruistic. It is thin spread and moon coloured. There is no life blood or urgency about it. However hard I clap my hands or stamp my feet there is a hollowness in the sound which betrays me. I am a benevolent spectator. I am irretrievably cut off from the actors.  (IL 227)

Woolf ’s engagement with the women is interested, but it is not self-interested. It is not egoistic but rather “merely altruistic.” 105  Hermione Lee, “Virginia Woolf and Offence,” in The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 138, doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182894.003.0010. Noting the tonal “mixture of shame and pleasure” in Woolf ’s private reflections on her snobbery, Lee ultimately opts “to praise her for her malice,” arguing that “same energy which might power an ‘offence’ ” is also the source of Woolf ’s wicked, feminist satire (144). 106  Woolf would presumably reject my use of the term “materialist,” having used it to criticize Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy for their failure to capture the spirit of life, the experience of “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.” Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1994), 160. 107 Hussey, “Mrs. Thatcher and Mrs. Woolf,” Modern Fiction Studies 50.1 (Spring 2004): 22. Hussey provides a helpful overview of Woolf ’s reflections on class and critical responses to them; see especially 20–6. 108  Virginia Woolf, “Introductory Letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies,” in The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5, ed. Stuart N. Clarke (Boston, MA, and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 227. Hereafter cited in the text as IL.

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Returning the Gift

Later in the letter, Woolf ’s language of altruism and benevolence gives way to the language of aesthetics and fiction as she recalls telling Llewelyn Davies that the  sympathy she and the other middle-class women felt at the conference was “largely fictitious . . . It was aesthetic sympathy, the sympathy of the eye and of the imagination, not of the heart and the nerves” (IL 231). The “merely altruistic” and the “aesthetic,” the “benevolent” and the “largely fictitious”—all appear to be comparable, even interchangeable. And, in this respect, fiction itself seems to constitute a gift and the gift in turn to constitute a kind of fiction. The exchangeability of gifts and fiction is important, for it helps to explain Woolf ’s attachment to preserving a certain distance from the Guildswomen. Despite her claim to being “cut off” from the working women and her concomitant suggestion that she could not transcend her class if she wanted to, it is not clear that Woolf actually wants to: “To expect us, whose minds, such as they are, fly free at the end of a short length of capital to tie ourselves down again to that narrow plot of acquisitiveness and desire is impossible” (IL 231). Crucially, what is rendered “impossible” here is not sacrificing the relative freedom afforded by ­capital but expecting that spectators like Woolf would sacrifice it if they could. After all, why would they? Such a sacrifice would mean giving up the security that comes with having “baths and money” (IL 231). Yet it would also mean wasting the “gifts,” in the sense of unique abilities, which both middle-class women and working-class women potentially have to give one another—gifts of which, Woolf suggests, each group is “equally deprived” (IL 232). “How many words,” Woolf wonders, “must lurk in those women’s vocabularies that have faded from ours! How many scenes must lie dormant in their eye which are unseen by ours!” (IL 232). As if tracing the origins of language to some primordial feminine spring, Woolf will even go so far as to speculate that working women “still keep the power which [middle-class women] have lost of making new [sayings]” (IL 232). But what middle-class women supposedly lose in originality they make up for with a slew of more conventionally civilized traits—“wit and detachment, learning and poetry, and all those good gifts which those who have never answered bells or  minded machines enjoy by right” (IL 232). Woolf ’s attempt to treat the two groups’ respective gifts equally is problematic, to be sure. On the one hand, her nominally admiring take on working women’s gifts reads as patronizing and primitivist and in this respect it reinforces the very social hierarchy between working-class women and middle-class women that Woolf nominally means to displace. On the other hand, Woolf ’s move to displace this hierarchy is itself troubling insofar as it means ignoring the real economic inequality between women of different classes. In other words, in treating working-class and middle-class women’s gifts equally, Woolf in effect treats class difference as one among many other differences to be celebrated rather than contested. At the same time, whatever we make of Woolf ’s representation of the gifts of each group, it remains important that the exchange she imagines between the two groups is fictitious. Unrealizable in the present moment, this exchange belongs to a phantasmatic future moment when the power dynamics and social conventions that structure encounters between women of different classes might be suspended

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and the two might meet as equals—albeit not equals on economic grounds. But fiction also comes into play here in another way, for the gifts of both groups are themselves fictitious insofar as they are all gifts of language and literature. Fictitious sympathy—that is, wit and detachment, the capacity “to enter into the lives of other people” (IL 237)—turns out to be not only the thing Woolf remembers giving the Guildswomen at the convention but also the thing middle-class women have to give period in exchange for the “words” and “scenes” of their working-class peers. Fiction is Woolf ’s gift—one that is inescapably tied to class and which she would rather not forsake. If the logic I am trying to outline here sounds paradoxical, it is. I am suggesting that Woolf denies the possibility of reciprocity with the Guildswomen in the present only to relegate this possibility to some far-off fictive future—but why do this? Why forsake practical solidarity, which might actually lead to greater economic equality, in favor of a fantasy of “friendship and sympathy” that presupposes and reinforces this inequality (IL 232)? One answer is that, while I have been pointing to Woolf ’s lack of desire to connect with the women, she also quite simply did not feel connected to them. In this vein, Mary Childers argues that Woolf had “trouble seeing” the connections she in fact shared with the Guildswomen as occupants of the same hierarchical system.109 Unable to see their interdependence in this system, Woolf turns to literature in search of a common ground. Imagining “women of different classes talking freely to one another in their different languages,” Woolf assumes that “literature can transcend class conflict” and aesthetics can resolve what politics on its own cannot.110 I, however, read the value ascribed to literature and specifically to fiction somewhat differently than Childers. As the site of an egalitarian exchange of gifts, fiction does not promise to transcend class conflict; rather, it promises, paradoxically, to preserve, in non-hierarchical form, the differences born of this conflict by casting these differences as gifts to be exchanged. In other words, fiction turns inequality into a source of equality, of even exchange, but this exchange still needs inequality. For without inequality, there would be no “good gifts” for women of different classes to give one another. From a feminist or socialist perspective, this logic may be no less false or problematic than the idea that literature transcends conflict. Indeed, there may not be much if anything in Woolf ’s rendering of the Guildswomen or class division that we—whomever this “we” may be—would want to hold onto. Ultimately, however, I am less interested in making a case for Woolf ’s politics or their immediate usefulness for progressives today than I am in deciphering the logic of the gift in her writing. And seeing fiction—whether literature proper or the metaphorical space of imagination and reflection—as a site of preservation, a place to house those ­differences that get elided by any politics of identification, does help to explain Woolf ’s attachment to the sense of an intractable barrier between middle-class women and working women. 109  Mary Childers, “Virginia Woolf on the Outside Looking Down: Reflections on the Class of Women.” Modern Fiction Studies 38.1 (Spring 1992): 67. 110  Ibid. 68.

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Then again, it is not clear that to Woolf ’s eyes there would be anything to preserve were it not for fiction. Across her writing, fiction repeatedly figures as not just a site for preserving gifts but also a site for producing those personal and interpersonal gifts whose free play is inevitably preempted by the demands of politics. Consider, in this light, Woolf ’s 1927 essay, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure.” As the essay’s narrator rambles through the streets of London on her way to buy a pencil, she initially casts her urban adventure as an opportunity to indulge the inveterate multifariousness of the subject, a gift that it was “Nature’s folly” to impart: “into each one of us [Nature] let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colors have run.”111 Not only is the narrator gifted with multiplicity but this multiplicity is also a gift she gives to London. In other words, the gift at play in this essay, too, is a gift in the sense of a natural endowment as well as a gift in the sense of a social gesture, a means of engagement. There is a kind of reciprocity between the rambler and “the sociability of the streets,” which are “grateful” for our presence and give us something in return— namely, anonymity and “the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow.”112 Free of responsibility and the fixity of identity, the rambling flâneuse famously imagines herself as an “enormous eye”; “sportive and generous,” the “eye”/“I” not only feasts on the spectacle of her surroundings but in so doing also adds something to them—projecting the inner lives of strangers, furnishing a “vast imaginary house.”113 In thus enhancing the sights of the London streets, the narrator also gives herself something—the narcissistic illusion of multiplicity, the illusion that one can divest oneself of the strictures of selfhood: “Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.”114 As an impersonal pronoun, this “one” serves to enable the reader’s identification with the narrator. “One” can be any one. And yet, if the narrator is to be believed in this moment, then any sense of relation we might feel to this “one” is bound to be an illusion on our part, for the possibility of interpersonal relation and reciprocal give and take on the basis of anything but fictitious grounds is precisely what Woolf calls into question here. We find a related logic at work in Woolf’s conclusion to A Room of One’s Own when she suggests that human beings stand “in relation” to two worlds: “the world of reality” and “the world of men and women.”115 For the woman writer in particular, seeing oneself in relation to the world of men and women has tended to mean finding one’s view of the world—indeed, one’s worldview—obscured and mediated by men. Relegated to the fringe of the phrase (“world of men and women”), fettered to men by the conjunctive “and,” women relate directly not to the world but to men, the world’s privileged proprietors. It is a man’s world—and not just 111  “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1994), 486. 112  Ibid. 480–1. 113  Ibid. 481, 485. 114  Ibid. 490. 115  Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1957), 114.

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any man, when it comes to the woman writer, but “Milton’s bogey”—that is, the mute and inglorious Miltons who rule literary history and are always perched on high ready to “shut out the view.”116 By contrast, the world of reality is explicitly figured as a world of “gifts,” a world where women enjoy the freedom to exercise their “creative power,” to contemplate and reflect on the world without having to refer to masculine standards.117 Thus, in relating to the world of reality, women in effect give themselves the illusion that they are not also bound to the hierarchical world of men and women where the value of their gifts is always at risk of being diminished. “I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character,” Woolf writes, “can be weighed like sugar and butter,” and yet weigh them men do at academic institutions like Cambridge, “where they are so adept at putting people into classes and fixing caps on their heads and letters after their names.”118 The world of reality is a world of one’s own reality, but it is also, and for this same reason, a more egalitarian world, a world where each worldview is weighed equally because it isn’t weighed at all. Of course, as A Room of One’s Own strategically insists, it is also a world one must have money to access, inevitably raising the question for critics of just how egalitarian, inclusive, and even free Woolf ’s world of reality actually is. Far from being transcended in the writer’s escape from the world of men and women, class remains a condition of creative freedom—not necessarily of having a gift but certainly, in this particular text, of expressing it. What A Room of One’s Own ultimately has in common with the “Introductory Letter,” “Street Haunting,” and, as I will argue in Chapter 2, Mrs. Dalloway is the sense that some isolation, some barrier between subjects, is the condition of counting all gifts equally and creating a reciprocal give and take that Woolf repeatedly suggests is bound to be fictitious under the conditions of the present. For this reason, I also think it is worth taking Woolf ’s rhetoric of altruism and benevolence in the “Introductory Letter” seriously, if guardedly.119 While Woolf ’s tone smacks of both superiority and shame—particularly when she claims that her interest is merely altruistic—her use of such language might also be read as part of a move to rethink what it means to be altruistic. Of the two traits Woolf claims to exhibit, altruism and benevolence, the former is probably an easier sell to skeptical readers. In describing her sympathy and support for the women as “thin spread,” “moon coloured,” and “hollow,” Woolf makes painfully (if somewhat dubiously) explicit that her feelings are not backed by any personal, visceral feeling—that is, a gift of self. Her interest is, quite literally, self-less and, in this sense altruistic, if still paradoxically so. 116  Ibid. This is, of course, a rather simplified reading of a phrase that is, in Anne Fernald’s words, “both prominent and undeveloped” in Woolf ’s text. See Anne Fernald, Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 5–7, for her thoughtful discussion of how Woolf ’s strange allusion to “Milton’s bogey” exemplifies a “resonant feminist response” to literary history that can be traced throughout her career. 117 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 86. 118  Ibid. 105. 119  Childers, for example, is quick to read Woolf ’s language of “altruism” and “benevolence” iron­ ically, calling Woolf “remarkably honest in admitting to the failures of altruism and to class discomfort in the presence of the co-operative women” (“Virginia Woolf on the Outside,” 67).

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Woolf ’s claim to benevolence is even more suspicious. There is nothing obviously benevolent, in the sense of generous or kind, about her treatment of the women as actors in a spectacle. And yet, as an implicit extension of her gift of and for fictitious sympathy, her spectatorship is a gift of sorts. In other words, by establishing a link between the gift and fiction, Woolf in effect recasts benevolence as an extension of one’s imagination beyond the pale of what is knowable. Being benevolent means not reducing the other to a reflection of the selfsame. Here we might note that the women are not completely unknowable according to Woolf. Her sympathy is, as she puts it, largely fictitious but not, she implies, entirely so. In Woolf ’s hands, the impossibility of knowing the other in full becomes the possibility of the gift. The generosity of the imagination begins where knowledge and the epistemological limits of the ego end. Thus, the gift presupposes an unbridgeable social divide. Or, rather, more precisely, it presupposes a divide bridgeable only by fiction. The test of the gift, what makes the gift count as a gift, is its power to exceed the bounds of the ego and, in so doing, to create a fictitious relation. Of course, some egoism comes into play here. There is more than a tinge of selfinterest in her resistance to sacrificing all those “good gifts” she has the privilege to enjoy. At the same time, feeling ego-bound and “cut off” from the Guildswomen by her class is supposedly what enables her openness to the various gifts of otherwise stratified socioeconomic parties in the first place. Altruism, therefore, depends on egoism but without being an extension of it—at least in theory. Whether Woolf ’s altruism is anything more or other than egoism—a gift she gives herself—is an open question. For the moment, in preparing to turn to Mrs. Dalloway, I simply mean to underscore the logic whereby altruism and egoism are not mutually exclusive but instead appear to be intimately related and even, as Mauss might have it, mixed up together, though in ways that Woolf suggests literature alone can sustain.

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2 Virginia Woolf and the Limits of Feminine Hospitality More so than any of the other authors in this study, Virginia Woolf was not only thinking about the gift during the period between the world wars but also thinking about it in epistemological and ethical terms that resonate with Mauss’s call for a “new morality” under the banner of sociology. Morality, of course, was not Woolf ’s intended province as a writer. In 1920, while reading Bloomsbury economist John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Woolf described the work in her diary as “a book that influences the world without being in the least a work of art: a work of morality, I suppose.”1 While works of art and works of morality would therefore appear to be mutually exclusive, works of each kind, Woolf implies, do have something in common. They both have the potential to “influence the world”—but how? Woolf offers one clue to understanding how literature in particular might influence the world in her 1924 essay, “Character in Fiction,” when she compares the relationship between “the writer and his unknown reader” to that between “the hostess and her unknown guest.”2 Like the hostess, the writer must find something familiar to put the reader at ease—“something which he recognises, which therefore stimulates his imagination, and makes him willing to co-operate in the far more difficult business of intimacy” (CF 431). It turns out that literary conventions and social conventions are “not much different”: “Both in life and in literature it is necessary to have some means of bridging the gulf ” (CF 431). Woolf ’s concern is that, at present, we—that is, modern novelists—have no means of 1 Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1978), 33. It bears noting that Jane Guyer, in her recent translation of Mauss’s The Gift, translates the phrase “morale nouvelle” as “new ethics” instead of “new morality,” as W. D. Halls does in the translation I cite throughout this book. In her introduction to the translation, Guyer describes the French morale as being “more like active regimes of teaching, learning, ethical guidance, and discipline than like a coherent domain of moral-philosophical propositions that we might call, in English, ‘morality.’ ” Jane L. Guyer, “The Gift that Keeps on Giving,” translator’s introduction to The Gift by Marcel Mauss, ed. Jane I. Guyer (Chicago, IL: HAU Books, 2016), 21. It seems to me that Woolf ’s own use of the term “morality” in the passage from her diary spans both senses of morale/morality as “active regimes” and as a “coherent domain” of propositions. In other words, it seems safe to say that both types of morality are, at least in this moment of Woolf ’s writing, antithetical to art. For Mauss’s original French, see Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1968), 263; for Guyer’s translation, see Marcel Mauss, Essay on the Gift: The Form and Sense of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Jane L. Guyer (Chicago, IL: HAU Books, 2016), 182; and for Halls’s, see G, 69. 2 Virginia Woolf, “Character in Fiction,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1988), 431. Hereafter cited in the text as CF.

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bridging the gulf, “no code of manners which writers and readers accept as a prelude to the more exciting intercourse of friendship” (CF 434). In the wake of this problem, the feminine figure of the hostess serves a dual function. Not only is she an avatar for modern writers in need of a new means of communication but also she is this means. In other words, the figure of the hostess is the “something familiar” that Woolf plucks from daily life in order to stimulate our imagination and win our cooperation. By way of this figure, then, Woolf ’s essay ultimately suggests that the relationship between social conventions and literary conventions is more than one of mere analogy. The modern novel is not simply like a gesture of hospitality. Rather, in playing hostess to, and helping to mediate, modern life, the novel is itself a form of hospitality—one that works to make us more imaginative, more cooperative, and more hospitable to unknown guests in and beyond literature. The figure of the hostess similarly serves as a bridge between literature and its nominal outside in the novel that Woolf was writing at the time of the essay— Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, the same year as Mauss’s Essai sur le don. As a novel about a society hostess on a June day in London in 1923, Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about codes of manners—about the gender norms, class divisions, national identifications, and party politics (in all senses of the term “party”) that shaped British social relations. But it is also about the unsettling yet propitious ways that these codes seemed to be breaking down in postwar England. Mrs. Dalloway responds to this social turbulence by working to imagine the possibility of a new code of manners, a new form of hospitality—particularly via its characterization of Clarissa. By giving form to Clarissa’s consciousness and rendering her experience of connectedness to the social world representative of experience in general, Woolf plots the conditions, as well as the potential limits, of hospitality in the modern age. While she thus joins Mauss in pointing the way to a new morality, Mrs. Dalloway also bears the distinctive marks of her disciplinary and political formation as a fiction writer and feminist (her misgivings about the latter term notwithstanding). In focusing on feminine experience, Mrs. Dalloway lays the groundwork for a more egalitarian ethos than the masculine group morality imagined by Mauss. Moreover, while Mauss’s agenda in The Gift was decidedly political, Mrs. Dalloway leaves unanswered the question of whether this ethos can or ought to extend beyond the bounds of fiction. As we saw in Woolf ’s encounters with the Women’s Co-operative Guild in Chapter 1, fiction has the power to supersede certain limits in her eyes, enabling sympathies across various social divisions that lived experience cannot. But fiction, too, necessarily has its limits in Woolf ’s writing, a point beyond which its influence cannot reach. Ultimately, Mrs. Dalloway is as much a reflection on the private pleasures and social possibilities afforded by the persistence of divisions— including those between groups, between individuals, and between life and literature—as it is a reflection on the permeability of these divisions. WO O L F ’ S M I X E D F E E L I N G S Lest we mistakenly assume that bridging gulfs is necessarily a good thing in Woolf ’s writing, it bears underscoring Clarissa’s difference from another hostess born of the

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Bloomsbury Group—Margaret Schlegel in E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel, Howards End. Contra Miss Schlegel, Clarissa does not abide by the dictum that one ought to “Only connect!”3 Rather, she takes a certain pleasure in secretly knowing that some disconnection is inevitable—both disconnection from other people and disconnection among the various parts of her personhood. Indeed, Clarissa’s desire to protect “the privacy of the soul” might be read in two ways: as a desire for some physical and emotional distance from her husband and the wider social world, and as a desire to preserve space for feeling disjoined and fragmented, for feeling as full of contradictions as she is certain she is (MD 126–7). Yet Clarissa is also certain that the opposite is true—that she is already fundamentally connected to the world in ways that ultimately make any hope of ever being absolutely alone with one’s own private thoughts and feelings impossible. And here it bears noting Mrs. Dalloway’s difference from another novel by Forster, A Passage to India, published the year before in 1924. At the end of Forster’s text, the natural and built environment revolts against the possibility of a cross-cultural friendship between the British Fielding and the Indian Aziz. The horses, earth, temples, tank, jail, palace, birds, and carrion all “said in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not there.’ ”4 Clarissa’s world would seem to be more welcoming of connections insofar as she is “part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there . . . [and] part of people she had never met” (MD 9). Whether these people include inhabitants of the British colonies or she could locate India on a map is doubtful. Her feeling of connectedness clearly stretches only so far—certainly not beyond England and barely to some of London’s suburbs. Bracketing for now the question of the expansiveness—and thus the limits—of Clarissa’s hospitality, I want to stress the play of contradictory ideas and impulses here. In the course of Woolf ’s novel, Clarissa oscillates between feeling that she is already invisibly connected to other people, places, and things, feeling that she is too connected and so wants to be less connected, and feeling that she is too disconnected and so wants to be more connected, as if she could never be connected enough—as if privacy were not a precious thing to be guarded but rather a tragic fate one can never avoid. To some degree, the burden of the novel is simply to convey the psychological coexistence of these feelings for the individual—to demonstrate that, despite their apparent contradiction, they are not mutually exclusive. In her nonfiction, Woolf, like Mauss, will use metaphors of mixture to describe the coexistence of seemingly antithetical feelings and phenomena. In Chapter 1, for example, we noted the street rambler’s fleeting sense that the mind is “all of a mixture” while traversing the city in Woolf ’s essay, “Street Haunting.”5 Elsewhere, Woolf took care to distinguish between different gradations of intermingling. In her 1927 essay, “Poetry, Fiction, and the Future,” she suggests that the “monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions” that converge in the mind “blend but do not mix.”6 In this moment, she maintains a sense of contradiction that Mauss tends to 3  E. M. Forster, Howards End (New York: Penguin, 2000), 159. 4  E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1952), 362. 5  Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1994), 486. 6  Virginia Woolf, “Poetry, Fiction, and the Future,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, 429, 433.

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gloss over in his dream of a harmonious blend of egoism and altruism. Nevertheless, each finds mixed feelings to be especially characteristic of the “modern mind”: “Feelings which used to come simple and separate do so no longer,” Woolf writes.7 Unsurprisingly, for Woolf, the mind of the modern writer is especially adept at creating associations between “things that have no apparent connection.”8 Beauty and ugliness, amusement and disgust, pleasure and pain—all are “broken up on the threshold” of the writerly mind, only to be blended together in incongruous ways once they cross.9 Little wonder then that motifs of psychological breaking and blending recur across Woolf ’s writing. We saw it in Chapter 1, in Woolf ’s memories of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, when she described feeling “cut off” from the Guildswomen yet capable of sympathizing with them on fictitious, aesthetic grounds (IL 227).10 We see it in Mrs. Dalloway, when Lady Bruton criticizes Clarissa’s nonsensical practice of “cutting people up . . . and sticking them together again” (MD 104). Woolf ’s and Clarissa’s practices of cutting and recombining resemble Mauss’s sociological method, particularly his identification of what he called “total social phenomena.” As we saw in Chapter 1, total social phenomena or facts are institutions, such as gift exchange, which permeate every domain of a given society— including politics, economics, law, morality, aesthetics, the family, and so on. As Mauss himself repeatedly insisted, the societies where we find gift exchange did not actually distinguish among these domains. Rather, such distinctions are a product of Western civilization. In nevertheless using these distinctions to characterize total social facts and arguing that concepts we keep separate are “mixed up” in other societies, Mauss in effect breaks up non-Western social systems just to blend them back together again. As the cultural anthropologist David Schneider memorably put it, “What we carefully separate with the left hand we then discover with the right hand has been inseparable all along” in Mauss’s analysis.11 What matters most for our purposes is not the ethnographic merit of Mauss’s account of non-capitalist societies so much as the parallels between Mauss’s and Woolf ’s accounts of the modern mind as a morass of mixed feelings. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf not only gives form to experiences of these feelings but also, like Mauss in his conclusion to The Gift, encourages her audience to entertain these feelings. That is to say, Woolf ’s text, too, has a prescriptive valence, albeit a far more subtle one than we find in Mauss’s explicit call for a return to an ethos of gift exchange. In making this claim, I join recent scholars who have argued that Woolf ’s aesthetic engagement with questions of psychology and epistemology—her use of innovative formal strategies to explore how we think and feel and what we can know about ourselves and others—has ethical and political implications. Molly Hite, for example, links Woolf ’s stylistic project in her mid-career novels to the challenges 7 Ibid. 433.   8 Ibid.   9 Ibid. 10  Even more precisely, Woolf ’s dis-identification with the women on the basis of class in effect served as the condition of her capacity to give them sympathy and to appreciate their “gifts” in turn, making it seem that inequality is not just a social reality in Woolf ’s eyes but also, and more troublingly, a good thing, a sort of gift in its own right. 11  David Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 197.

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introduced by growing demands for egalitarianism across the social spectrum. In Mrs. Dalloway, she argues, Woolf engages these challenges not by promoting normative values but rather by stripping away authoritative tonal cues that might clarify how the reader is to feel about different characters and events. Woolf, according to Hite, “enabled an intense concern with social categories ­without allowing attentive readers to slot narratorial observations into overall judgments of admiration or censure.”12 As readers of Mrs. Dalloway, we may decide that individual characters are or are not deserving of sympathy—and certainly many scholars have—but Woolf refuses to let us attribute any such decisions to her or the novel. In arguing that Mrs. Dalloway works to make us more welcoming to differences, I do not mean to negate the text’s tonal undecidability. Rather, as Hite suggests that a good reader should, I mean to attend to its undecidability—to give attention to the mixed messages the novel gives us in refusing to dictate how we ought to feel in any given moment. In rarely, if ever, letting us lean toward this or that judgment, the novel often reads as affirming both this and that judgment. This is not to suggest that Woolf would necessarily sanction our judgments, nor to suggest that some readings are not more convincing than others. What interests me is the way that Woolf ’s lack of cues can produce—and has produced—a sort of excess of conflicting perspectives. Of course, it may be argued that literary criticism is excessive in its very nature. After all, does the world ever need another critical take on this or that text? Presumably not—especially when the text in question is one as extensively discussed as Mrs. Dalloway. Nevertheless, I want to suggest that the wealth of contradictory takes on Mrs. Dalloway—the fact that some critics feel Clarissa is deserving of sympathy while others feel she clearly is not—assumes a kind of necessity in the context of Woolf ’s concern with enabling more egalitarian forms of reading. Mrs. Dalloway, in other words, works to produce mixed feelings. Part of my project here is to show that the novel’s ethos of mixture is rooted in an understanding of the modern subject on the model of the hostess—a being, like Clarissa, who wavers between feelings of connection and disconnection because she is immersed in a web of give and take she can never fully grasp. “ T H E E N D O F L A I S S E Z - FA I R E ” : E C O N O M I C S , S O C I O L O G Y, L I T E R AT U R E Given our mention of Keynes and Bloomsbury, it is worth pausing here, before we turn to the novel, to consider Keynes’s possible influence on Woolf ’s literary project. Keynesian economics and the rise of consumerism more generally have been central to a number of recent readings of Woolf, as well as a broader move within modernist studies to challenge the conventional wisdom that modernists were ­hostile to the market. Jennifer Wicke’s work has been especially influential. In an 12 Molly Hite, “Tonal Cues and Uncertain Values: Affect and Ethics in Mrs. Dalloway,” NARRATIVE 18.3 (Oct. 2010): 250.

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oft-cited reading of Mrs. Dalloway, for example, she argues that Woolf was far from hostile; on the contrary, Woolf “offers marketing as modernism,” focusing her ­fiction on the experience of “human beings caught up in their buzzing, blooming socio-economic system.”13 Woolf and Keynes, she argues, were “doing the same thing, i.e. giving representation to the everyday of the market in the genres and institutional formats appropriate to their quite different formations as literary writer and theoretical economist.”14 Invaluable though economic approaches such as Wicke’s have been in generating a more nuanced picture of modernism’s relationship to the market and mass culture, I want to insist that the discourse of economics inevitably comes up short in explaining Woolf ’s gift economies—even the discourse of such a generous social and political theorist as Keynes. In insisting on the limits of economics, I do not mean to discount the importance of economic history as a driving force behind intellectual developments during the postwar period, including the development of Mauss’s own theory of the gift. Issues of reparations and international debt, widespread unemployment, the growth of socialism, cooperative movements, and trade unions, as well as new forms of insurance and governmental policies that anticipated the eventual rise of the welfare state—all were part of the context that shaped Woolf ’s and Mauss’s writing about the gift. I do, however, want to take care to differentiate between influential events in economic history and the explanatory power of economic theory. We begin to lose this distinction, I think, in Michael Tratner’s Keynesian analysis not of Mauss but of Jacques Derrida’s reading of Mauss. In Given Time, Derrida discusses two elements of Mauss’s The Gift that are especially noteworthy in Tratner’s view: Mauss’s claim that new policies, such as Social Security, are indicative of the gift’s return, and his claim that credit is not unique to capitalism but has always played a role in economic systems. Tratner argues that, in discussing the first of these claims, “Derrida presents Mauss’s gift economy in terms that connect it to economic transformations of the Keynesian era.”15 It is certainly fair to note that The Gift was published at a moment when consumerism was replacing productivism and that Mauss admired policies that would eventually be linked to “Keynesian influences”—though the question of whether these influences could 13  Jennifer Wicke, “Mrs. Dalloway Goes to Market,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 28.1 (Autumn 1994): 13, 11. Wicke’s account of the relay of ideas between economics and literature here and ­elsewhere has paved the way for a series of provocative analyses of the consumerist bent of Woolf ’s aesthetics. See also Jennifer Wicke, “Coterie Consumption: Bloomsbury, Keynes, and Modernism as Marketing,” in Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading, ed. Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 109–32. Subsequent studies on Woolf and consumerism include Michael Tratner, “Consumer Cooperation, Gender Cooperation: Virginia Woolf ’s Answer to War,” in Deficits and Desires: Economics and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 91–120; Alissa G. Karl, “Consumerism and the Imperial Nation in Virginia Woolf ’s The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway,” in Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen (New York: Routledge, 2009), 43–79; and John Xiros Cooper, “Bloomsbury Nation,” in Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 243–55. 14  Wicke, “Mrs. Dalloway Goes to Market,” 12. 15  Michael Tratner, “Derrida’s Debt to Milton Friedman,” New Literary History 34 (2004): 795.

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fully be felt or would be labeled thus in the 1920s is debatable.16 Either way, the connection between Mauss and Keynes is more Tratner’s than either Derrida’s or Mauss’s. While Mauss undoubtedly saw contemporary economic transformations as “steps towards the kind of gift economy he advocates,” there remain important tensions between the ways that he and Keynes conceptualized these transformations.17 As we have seen, Mauss observed and called for a “good but moderate blend” of egoism and altruism, arguing that the conventional separation of selfinterest and generosity and, with it, of different kinds of services was rapidly becoming a thing of the past (G 69). By contrast, as of the mid-1920s, Keynes maintained that egoism and altruism were irreconcilable. In The End of LaissezFaire, initially given as a lecture in 1924 and published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press in 1926, Keynes challenges the “idea of a divine harmony between private advantage and the public good,” noting that even the famed neoclassical economist Alfred Marshall, his teacher and predecessor at Cambridge, elucidated “cases in which private interest and social interest are not harmonious.”18 Unconstrained pursuit of the former will not promote the latter. Presuming that it would—that “unfettered private enterprise would promote the greatest good of the whole”— was an error propagated by nineteenth-century proponents of the doctrine of ­laissez-faire.19 One of Keynes’s central claims in the pamphlet is that the modern doctrine of laissez-faire was not born in the field of political economy, as is so often assumed, but rather derives from two strands of political philosophy that were speciously conjoined in—and by—the early nineteenth century. Anthropomorphizing the period, he claims, “The early nineteenth century performed the miraculous union. It harmonised the conservative individualism of Locke, Hume, Johnson, and Burke with the Socialism and democratic egalitarianism of Rousseau, Paley, Bentham, and Godwin.”20 Jeremy Bentham cast an especially long shadow. In Benthamite utilitarianism, we find laissez-faire “in the shape in which our grandfathers knew it”—that is, in the shape of a doctrine against government interference in trade— being used to support the false synthesis of egoism and altruism.21 Bentham’s primary heir, John Stuart Mill, was a Cambridge man like Keynes and, being a couple of generations older than Keynes, was among the latter’s intellectual “grandfathers.” Keynes’s biographer, Robert Skidelsky, notes that Mill would ultimately find it impossible to reconcile the “egoism–altruism split” in a way that made both the economists and the moralists at Cambridge happy.22 That 16  Ibid. 796. 17  Ibid. 795. 18  John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (London: Hogarth Press, 1926), 10, 27, emphasis in original. 19  Ibid. 12–13. 20  Ibid. 10. 21  Ibid. 21. 22  Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 1 (New York: Viking, 1986), 31. While Mill succeeded in making Cambridge Benthamite in disciplines such as economics that were related to social policy, he had much less success when it came to moral philosophy. G. E. Moore’s reign at Cambridge seems to have driven out whatever remained of Bentham’s legacy in that realm. A great admirer of Moore’s, Keynes would spend his life “zigzagging” between the two intellectual schools at Cambridge, according to Skidelsky.

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Mill had greater luck with the economists is not especially surprising. In a brief defense of utilitarianism published in 1861, Mill follows Bentham in arguing that the utilitarian standard for judging actions is fundamentally altruistic—“that the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent’s own happiness, but that of all concerned.”23 The difference between the happiness of the individual and the happiness of all is promptly blurred, however, when Mill goes on to claim that the “ideal perfection of utilitarian morality” is embodied in Jesus’s golden rule: “To do as one would be done by, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself.”24 In taking self-love as the model for love of others, utilitarianism does not harmonize altruism with egoism so much as it reduces altruism to egoism. Keynes and Mauss were in agreement about utilitarianism. In The Gift, Mauss objects to “icy, utilitarian calculation” on both economic and moral grounds, insisting that “it is not in the calculation of individual needs that the method for an optimum economy is to be found” and that the “brutish pursuit of individual ends is harmful to the ends and peace of all” (G 76–7). Both Mauss and Keynes combine description and prescription in declaring the decline of individualism. The figure of “the Master-Individualist, who serves us in serving himself,” Keynes assures us, “is becoming a tarnished idol” and “lethargic monster.”25 Like Mauss, he is especially heartened by, and encourages, the development of corporate bodies that lie midway between the individual and the state. Though careful to insist that he is not advocating “State Socialism,” Keynes is confident that the “tendency of big enterprise to socialise itself ”—that is, the tendency of management to focus on “the general stability and reputation of the institution” once shareholders have received sufficient dividends—marks a move in the right direction, optimistically declaring, “The battle of Socialism against unlimited private profit is being won in detail hour by hour.”26 It should be clear that the problem, in Keynes’s view, is not private profit per se but rather unlimited private profit. By the same token, the solution is not necessarily nationalization. Rather, what Keynes sought—and felt confident that England was progressing toward—was a balance between egoism and altruism to replace utilitarianism’s dissolution of altruism into egoism. Throughout the mid- to late 1920s, Keynes embraced a “politics of the Middle Way,” aiming at an “Aristotelian sense of balance” between a drive to defend ­capitalism and concern with stabilizing capitalism’s inherent risks to better serve the greater good.27 While Keynes’s aim of balance resonates with Mauss’s call for a moderate blend of egoism and altruism, Keynes differed from Mauss—and, in my reading, Woolf—on a fundamental point. For Mauss, egoism and altruism were not at base mutually exclusive. Their separation was a culturally and historically specific ­phenomenon—hence the tendency of their separation to break down in lived 23  John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005; originally published 1861), 19. 24 Ibid. 25 Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire, 38. 26  Ibid. 42–4. 27  Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1992), 239.

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experience and Mauss’s excited claim that we might even go so far as to throw such concepts back “into the melting pot once more” (G 73). Keynes, however, assumed the exact opposite. The problem was not that egoism and altruism had been falsely separated but rather that they had not been separated enough. Individual interests and social interests could not be harmonized; the notion that they could be was a lie told by ideologists of laissez-faire. Correcting their error, Keynes argues, would require “separating those services which are technically social from those which are technically individual.”28 By contrast, Mauss was not certain that these services could technically be separated. In positing that gift exchange, as a system of total services, is “one of the human foundations on which our societies are built,” Mauss assumes that individual services and social services are at base harmonious (G 4). I hasten to add that Mauss, as we have seen, thoroughly shares Keynes’s concern with the utilitarian pretense that the greatest good can somehow be derived from one’s own personal good, and insists that pursuing one’s own interest will not necessarily serve the interest of all. Thus, there remains a sense of tension of between egoism and altruism and between capitalist economies and gift economies in The Gift. Yet he also suspects that the individual and the social are fundamentally connected in ways that are obscured by modern principles of individualism and the idea that individual interests and social interests are necessarily opposed. The problem, in other words, is not some underlying antithesis between the individual and the social that we need to better appreciate, but rather an ideological and institutional framework that divides the two. In promoting the separation of interests and services, Keynes leaves this framework intact—all of which may be fine from an economic standpoint. But, from a literary critical standpoint, his insistence on separation where Mauss sees the possibility of connection limits the usefulness of Keynes’s economic theory when it comes to accounting for the logic of the gift in Woolf ’s writing. The limits of his theory become clear when Wicke suggests that “consumption is reformulated as the nature of the gift” in Mrs. Dalloway; this reformulation, she further suggests, “appears paradoxical, in that gift-giving looks like the reversal of consumption, the 28 Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire, 46, emphasis in original. Thus, Keynes argues that the state must supplement the activities of private individuals and “do those things which at present are not done at all” in order to counter the inequality brought about by rampant individualism. Specifically, he recommends centralized control of the currency and credit, close examination of the investment market at home and abroad to ensure that savings are distributed “along the most nationally productive channels,” and a new population policy (The End of Laissez-Faire, 46–9). Skidelsky suggests that Keynes “does not explain why the last two are technically social”—that is, why individuals cannot determine the best quantities of savings and children for themselves. The problem, in Skidelsky’s reading, is that Keynes did not actually succeed at separating individual and social interests in this relatively early text but was still modeling collectivism on individualism. In other words, despite his critique of utilitarianism, Keynes at times repeats the utilitarian gesture of imagining altruism on the basis of egoism. See Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 2, 225–9. In his own reading of the relationship between Woolf ’s writing and Keynesian economics, Jed Esty suggests that Keynes’s pronouncement of the “end of laissez-faire” in 1924 was fairly premature: “it would take the external machinations of 1930s history to give full theoretical coherency and practical force to Keynes’s declarations.” See Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 170.

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taking in or appropriation of something through an act of exchange.”29 But giving and consuming “appear paradoxical” only if we presuppose a strict distinction between gifts and exchanges—only if we presume that any gift given is, or ought to be, a free gift. That Wicke assumes these acts will appear paradoxical to us, her readers, is especially striking given the fact that she begins her essay by inviting us “to entertain the notion that modernism contributed profoundly to a sea-change in market consciousness.”30 Much though Keynes in particular may have caused a sea-change, he seems not to have disrupted public opinion about the distinction between gifts and exchanges. To be sure, neither did Woolf. Her writing does not dissolve this distinction—nor does it entirely aim to. For Woolf, too, giving and exchanging are bound to appear paradoxical. Like the things that get mixed up in the modern mind, they have no apparent connection. Yet, like Mauss, Woolf is attentive to the deceptiveness of this appearance, imagining that gifts and exchanges are bound in more subtle and complex ways than Keynes’s rule of separating ­services would permit. Notably, Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which we know that Woolf read, offers a pivotal exception to this rule. As we saw in our introduction, Keynes’s 1919 book argues that the only way to enable the good of all after the war was to restrict reparations to a level that Germany could actually afford to pay and to relieve all inter-Ally debts. He claims that, far from being self-destructive, adopting a generous attitude toward Germany and debtor countries will serve the interests of the Allies. Thus, he concludes that “expediency and generosity agree together, and the policy which will best promote immediate friendship between nations will not conflict with the permanent interests of the benefactor.”31 At least in this case, self-interest and generosity are indeed harmonious. Nevertheless, we find Keynes taking a very different stance in The End of Laissez-Faire just a few years later, as Woolf was writing Mrs. Dalloway and Mauss was writing The Gift. With Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf not only responds to the same material context as Mauss and Keynes but also shares their mutual concern with the question of how 29  Wicke, “Mrs. Dalloway Goes to Market,” 18. 30  Ibid. 5. Notably, Tratner similarly assumes that gifts and exchanges will appear paradoxical in his reading of Three Guineas and Mrs. Dalloway in light of consumerism and cooperativism. Tratner argues that Woolf ’s “central indictment of the current economic system is that men use the surpluses they have to pursue increased surpluses instead of devoting them ‘to education, to pleasure, to philanthropy.’” Tratner expects that the juxtaposition of pleasure and philanthropy “might seem strange, since pleasure appears self-centered while philanthropy is altruistic.” Ultimately he suggests that the juxtaposition of pleasure (which is achieved by consumption and so entails spending money) and philanthropy (which entails giving money away) is not as strange as it may at first seem. The link between them is consumption: “the ultimate goal of spending is pleasure or consumption, and the point of philanthropy is to allow others to consume as well.” Michael Tratner, Deficits and Desires: Eco­ nomics and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 98. In identifying consumption as the link between pleasure and philanthropy, Tratner implicitly reads Woolf as imagining others’ pleasure on the basis of her own. In other words, Woolf, in his reading, challenges the supposed opposition between self-centeredness and altruism by reducing the latter to a reflection of the former. Thus, here, too, I would argue, we end up returning to an ethos of utilitarianism. 31  John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920), 282.

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the lethargic yet lingering doctrines of utilitarianism, individualism, and laissez-faire do and do not continue to constrain the conceptual and practical relationship between egoism and altruism in the years following World War I. Woolf ’s novel, as we noted, takes place on a June day in 1923—just months prior to the election of Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Party prime minister, and hence on the eve of another stride made in the “battle of Socialism.” Mrs. Dalloway anticipates this inevitable, if fleeting, moment of victory when, at the end of her luncheon, Lady Bruton assures Conservative M.P. Richard Dalloway that he will have a chance to write a history of her family “whenever the time came; the Labour government she meant” (MD 111). In Mrs. Dalloway, a change is not just “in the air,” as Keynes suggested in The End of Laissez-Faire, but rather on the minds and in the speech of its characters.32 The fact that Woolf drew inspiration from Keynes’s wife, the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, in creating the character of Rezia suggests a parallel between Keynes and Septimus.33 Arguably, both Keynes and Septimus bear messages of a need for greater generosity after the war. While Keynes made a case for financial forgiveness, Septimus harbors the terrible truth that “human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment” (MD 89). Septimus’s skepticism about the selfishness driving seemingly selfless gestures is understandable considering his experience of the medical profession. Yet Septimus also enjoys a different experience of charity—one that calls the physical and psychological boundaries of the self into question. While walking with Rezia during the novel’s opening sequence, he luxuriates in what he perceives to be the “inexhaustible charity” of the skywriting capturing the crowd’s attention and marvels at the trees which seem “connected by millions of fibres with his own body” (MD 22). This experience of fibrous connection is echoed in the reflections of other characters throughout the novel—for example, in Lady Bruton’s and Richard’s contented feelings of being bound to friends and loved ones by a “spider’s thread of attachment” and in Miss Kilman’s far more tortured sense that “the very entrails in her body” are being stretched across the room upon Elizabeth’s departure after tea (MD 115, 132–3). Miss Kilman suspects that her desire to keep Elizabeth 32 Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire, 5. Similarly situating Mrs. Dalloway in the context of the “incipient welfare state,” Janice Ho examines material examples of new public services in the novel— namely, the ambulance bearing Septimus, which Peter observes, and the two doctors, Holmes and Bradshaw, whom Ho reads as representing liberalism and state intervention, respectively. See Janice Ho, “Toward Social Citizenship in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway,” in Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 59–84. 33  In her diary entry of September 11, 1923, Woolf notes going “to observe Lydia as a type for Rezia” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, 265). Also pointing to this remark, Suzette Henke draws a connection between Septimus and Keynes on the basis of the former’s homoerotic feelings toward Evans, his officer, and the latter’s homosexuality. Suzette Henke, “Mrs. Dalloway: the Communion of  Saints,” in New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jane Marcus (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 141. By contrast, Christine Froula draws a parallel between Keynes and Miss  Kilman. Christine Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 102–10. According to Woolf ’s biographer, Septimus was based on a young man named Cyril Zeldwyn, a student of Woolf ’s in a 1907 Morley College Reading Circle on Keats, Shelley, and Browning. See Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Random House, 1996), 219.

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from leaving her is selfish; she wants Elizabeth all to herself and “it was this ­egotism that was her undoing” (MD 132). And yet, as the source of her undoing, Miss Kilman’s self-centeredness is strangely selfless, her ego not quite her own but rather, as Clarissa might say, “attached to this person or that” (MD 153). The line between egoism and altruism is not necessarily dissolved but the two commingle in characters’ paradoxically private yet common experiences of connection that complicate individualistic conceptions of personhood. While elements of Septimus’s experience may therefore be generalized, the central theorist of the gift in Mrs. Dalloway is not Septimus but Clarissa. Whereas Septimus prophesies “the birth of a new religion” in the clamor and connectedness of London life, Clarissa, an avowed atheist, takes a more sociological approach, developing a “transcendental theory” of the subject as a being that permeates, and is permeated by, the social world (MD 23, 153). In her notes for Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf described Clarissa and Septimus as seeing “the truth” and “the insane truth,” respectively.34 More important than their relative sanity and insanity—the difference between which tends to give way when it comes to the gift—are their gender, ­generational, and socioeconomic differences. In casting Septimus, a young veteran, as the “double” to Clarissa, an aging, ruling-class society hostess, Woolf suggests that the truth he bears—that all gifts are selfish and yet we are exposed to gifts in a way that transforms what it means to be a self—is already at play in the paradoxes of Clarissa’s own widely pondered gift for bringing people together.35 In other words, the values driving the socialist turn are already operative in everyday English life. Yet, as Mauss might further say, they have been kept “hidden, below the surface” (G 4). In focusing on the figure of the hostess, Mrs. Dalloway suggests that these values have also been hidden someplace else—enclosed in the private house. As an icon of Victorian moral authority, the hostess reveals as she conceals what we might think of as the hidden secret of laissez-faire: that our system of capitalist exchange is never entirely free and unconstrained but always depends on—and thus might be undone by—a flow of feminine gifts. Whether or not the world of the novel or its readers is entirely ready for the truth Clarissa shares with Septimus, their truth is already woven into this world. In Mrs. Dalloway, postwar London life can be a maddening, but also magical, mixture of gifts and exchanges. M R S . D A L LOWAY ’ S G I F T O F S O C I A L C R I T I C I S M Woolf ’s claim in her diary on a June day in 1923 that her new novel, still ­tentatively titled “The Hours,” was intended to criticize the social system has fueled much discussion. Yet just as pivotal, in my view, is her use of the language of the gift earlier in the same sentence to describe her critical technique. Woolf writes, “I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & 34  Quoted in Lee, Virginia Woolf, 450. 35  Virginia Woolf, “An Introduction to Mrs. Dalloway,” in The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, 549.

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to show it at work, at its most intense.”36 In drawing a syntactic parallel between the desire to give and the desire to criticize, Woolf implies that the two are somehow tantamount—that the gesture of giving these seemingly opposed things in the same text might itself serve to criticize the social system. This system in turn is at base characterized by its laborious efforts to keep these things separate, to cordon off life from death, sanity from insanity. Thus, in criticizing the social system by showing it “at work, at its most intense,” Woolf also shows it failing to work. What we find in Mrs. Dalloway is a social system breaking down as it struggles to maintain separations between phenomena that are ineluctably mixed up in the same “gift”— that is, the text of Mrs. Dalloway. While Woolf ’s description of the book that would become Mrs. Dalloway as “giving” is exemplary of her frequent figuration of writing as a gift, it is especially provocative in the context of a novel that is so rife with rhetoric and acts of giving.37 Indeed, it is worth compiling a somewhat thorough list to underscore not just the number of gifts in the novel but also the many forms they take. There are material gifts: the flowers and jewelry men buy for women, the hat that Rezia and Septimus create together, in a rare moment of happiness, for their landlady’s daughter, and the pillow Clarissa instructs Lucy to give the cook. Other gifts take the form of festivities: Clarissa’s party, Lady Bexborough’s and Lady Bradshaw’s openings of bazaars, and Lady Bruton’s luncheon. We find gifts of service, some of which are free of financial reward—such as the assistance that Lady Bruton receives from Richard and Hugh and which all three want to give Peter after his return, as well as the help Rezia once thought she and Septimus could give to each other. Other services are remunerated—including the odious advice Sir William gives patients for a “very large fee” and the help Clarissa’s servants give her so that she might “be what she wanted” (MD 94, 39). There are creative gifts, particularly feminine creative gifts: Clarissa’s “gift” for throwing parties, which she further describes as “[a]n offering for the sake of offering, perhaps”; Sally’s “gift, her personality” and her “way with flowers, for instance”; and Rezia’s “artist’s fingers,” not to mention the mysterious talents of Clarissa’s sister, Sylvia, whom Clarissa considered “the most gifted” of the Parry children before Sylvia was killed by a falling tree (MD 122, 33, 87, 78). Then there are amorous gifts—some of which are given, like Sally’s kiss, and others of which are not, like the words of love Richard “could not bring himself to say” to his wife (MD 118). Yet we also encounter other, more painful or violent gifts—gifts of suffering and sacrifice for England and empire. Septimus’s tour of duty for the war’s duration and eventually his suicide are the prime examples here. But we should not neglect Rezia and the torture she 36 Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, 248, emphasis added. The most enduring reading of Woolf ’s desire to criticize the social system is surely Alex Zwerdling, “Mrs. Dalloway and the Social System,” PMLA 92.1 (Jan. 1977): 69–82. 37  In “Modern Fiction,” for example, Woolf writes that, while we thank writers such as Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy for “a thousand gifts, we reserve our unconditional gratitude for Mr Hardy [and] for Mr Conrad.” Later, turning to Joyce’s Ulysses, she notes how much easier it is “to feel what it lacks than to name what it gives.” Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, 158, 162.

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endures—“Why should she suffer?” Rezia wonders to herself—or poor Miss Kilman, who was expelled from Miss Dolby’s school because she “would not pretend the Germans were all villains” (MD 65, 124). In addition, there are gifts in the form of physical gestures—some fairly friendly (the “little pats” Richard and Peter “giv[e] each other” at Clarissa’s party) but others far less so (the “friendly push” Holmes “had to give” Rezia on more than one occasion to get past her into Septimus’s room [MD 170, 92]). Long as this list is, we have yet to touch on the many figurative ends to which the language of the gift is put in the novel. For there is also the “vast philanthropy” that Peter, like the street rambler in Woolf ’s essay, feels while wandering the streets of London, and “the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to the solitary traveller” (MD 52, 57). There is, moreover, the life that Clarissa imagines “one’s parents giving . . . into one’s hands” and which she imagines giving back to them as if it were a thing she had made and which “grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life” (MD 185, 43). In characterizing so many facets of everyday life—not to mention life itself—as gifts, Mrs. Dalloway repeatedly suggests that modern experience is an experience of give and take. In Woolf ’s novel, it is not simply that characters have gifts (i.e., unique abilities) or exchange gifts (e.g., things, gestures, parties) with one another. Gift exchange is also a phenomenon of consciousness—the means by which characters conceptualize themselves in relation to other people and the world around them. This phenomenon further comes into relief in the novel’s opening sequence—a trip to buy flowers that is framed as both a defiant gesture of consumerist autonomy (“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself ”) and a gesture of generosity, a gift Clarissa gives her servant, for as we are immediately told, “Lucy had her work cut out for her” (MD 3). Wicke also underscores the “generosity of [Clarissa’s] gendered acts of consumption,” but whereas she suggests that “gift-giving looks like the reversal of consumption,” I want to argue that it is precisely the appearance of their opposition that the novel undermines by exposing the mixture of giving and taking in the minds of its characters—and not just Clarissa’s mind.38 To think in Mrs. Dalloway is to feel and imagine oneself to be caught up in a web of gift exchange.39 Critics have long focused on the role of various external objects and “public materials” (the passing motorcar, the skywriting airplane, the sounding of Big Ben) 38  Wicke, “Mrs. Dalloway Goes to Market,” 18. 39  At the outset of The Nets of Modernism, Maud Ellmann similarly describes modernist subjects as subjects “enmeshed in relations of exchange—sexual, linguistic, financial, pathogenic—that violate the limits of identity.” Woolf, Joyce, James, and Freud, she argues, all “confront the entangled nature of the self, caught in the nets of intersubjectivity and intertextuality.” Maud Ellmann, The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1. In focusing on the ways in which such relations of exchange are primarily represented as relations of gift exchange, I mean, in part, to trouble the implicit dynamic in this moment of Ellmann’s text between “relations” and “identity.” If relations “stop nowhere” (as Henry James claimed) then can we speak of identity as having pre-established limits that are then “violated,” or might these limits in fact be constituted—drawn and redrawn—by “nets” of relation? It is precisely these types of questions that I argue were of central concern to Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway.

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in providing a “means of transition from the mind of one character to the mind of another.”40 Yet when we look at how characters actually experience being in public, we find a repeated turn to the language of the gift. When Maisie Johnson, in London for the first time, asks Septimus and Rezia the way to the Tube, the couple “gave her quite a turn,” making her wish she had never “left her people” in Edinburgh (MD 26–7). When Mrs. Dempster in turn sees Maisie she “could not help wishing to whisper a word” to her and “to feel on the creased pouch of her worn old face the kiss of pity” (MD 27). For these minor characters, as for Clarissa, “life; London; this moment of June” is a life of giving and receiving (MD 4). Whereas Clarissa feels endlessly indebted for the many of gifts life has given her, Mrs. Dempster feels like she has personally given more than she can bear without much in return, thinking of life, “What hadn’t she given to it?” (MD 27). Rezia is similarly desperate for recompense. When she takes Septimus’s arm to cross into the park she perceives the limb to be a gift she is owed for her sacrifices: “He would give her, who was so simple, so impulsive, only twenty-four, without friends in England, who had left Italy for his sake, a piece of bone” (MD 16). It is, in her eyes, the least he can do for all she has given up for him. Thus the exchange of gifts is not necessarily even but rather is differentiated along hierarchical lines of class, gender, and age. Despite these differences, however, the gift consistently figures as the tie that fictitiously binds the variegated people, places, and things that make up modern life. At the same time, we might ask if some of the novel’s many “gifts” are really gifts at all. Not only is the narrative’s originary gift a shopping spree, but the above litany of gifts includes a significant number of commodities—from the gendered gifts of jewelry Hugh and Richard buy for the women in their lives to the help that Clarissa’s servants are paid to give her. Are these truly gifts, or is the narrator’s rhetoric of gift-giving merely a mystification of commerce? What, for example, are we to make of the gift of time that the “commercial clock” hanging outside Messrs. Rigby and Lowndes on Oxford Street seems “to give . . . gratis” (MD 102). Standing outside the shop, Hugh feels “grateful to Rigby and Lowndes for giving one time ratified by Greenwich” and thinks about showing his gratitude by “buying off Rigby and Lowndes socks or shoes” (MD 102). Thus, the free gift of time is little more than a lure, Hugh’s experience of gift exchange a mere cover for what is in fact a commercial transaction. Commerce similarly masquerades as a gift at Lady Bruton’s luncheon, to which Hugh is walking when he passes Rigby and Lowndes. The luncheon is a “grand deception,” giving guests the “profound illusion” that the food “is not paid for” and “the table spreads itself voluntarily” (MD 104). But the illusion would soon dissipate without the help of old family money and servant labor. Moreover, the hostess, in this case, has selfish motives, bent as Lady Bruton is on getting Richard’s 40  Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 84; J. Hillis Miller, “Mrs. Dalloway: Repetition as the Raising of the Dead,” in Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 180. See also Gillian Beer, “The Island and the Aeroplane: The Case of Virginia Woolf,” in Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 149–78.

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and Hugh’s assistance writing a letter to The Times about emigration. Thus, when it comes to Lady Bruton, there is, quite literally, no such thing as a free lunch. Like Rigby and Lowndes, she, too, must be “bought off,” so to speak. Of course, that is only part of the story. For although Lady Bruton may be eager to dispense with the “unnecessary trifling” of small talk so that she and her guests can get down to the business of letter-writing, her luncheon is also a meeting among friends—friends to whom she later feels physically and emotionally attached by a “single spider’s thread” (MD 108, 112). Tenuous and fictive though this thread may be, it is no mere illusion or symptom of false consciousness, but rather an index of the bond forged via the sharing of time, space, conversation, and food. In Mrs. Dalloway, personal attachments and political causes, genuine affection and self-interest, gifts and commodities are all intermingled—although not always in the same ways, for the same people, at the same times. Consider, in this regard, Rezia’s very different experience of the clocks of London as she leaves Sir William’s office. There is no mistaking their message for a gesture of generosity on her part; like Sir William, whose office she has just left, the clocks “counselled submission, upheld authority” (MD 102). Both Hugh and Rezia in effect project their experiences of life, as either generous or ungenerous, onto the material world. We see them both (to borrow from a description of Rezia in a different moment) “giv[ing] meanings to things” and, in so doing, receiving meanings from things (MD 83). Such gifts of meaning—the stories characters tell themselves about the world around them—are not necessarily an object of the novel’s criticism, at least not in and of themselves. Rather, the novel takes aim at the tendency to force one’s experiences on others—for example, to insist, as Sir William does, that “life was good” even as he personally helps to make it so unbearable for the patients who complain that “life has given [them] no such bounty” (MD 101). Still, it is not just a question of revealing apparent gifts to be otherwise—say, by revealing William’s help to be a curse. No doubt it is from the perspectives of patients such as Septimus who bear the emotional and financial costs of Sir William’s personal good life. But William also thinks he is helping, and this detail is not negligible. Rather, in shifting among different perspectives, Mrs. Dalloway attends to the way disparate feelings, perceptions, and beliefs converge on the same gifts, whether Sir William’s help, Lady Bruton’s luncheon, or the clock time offered up by Rigby and Lowndes. To put the matter more precisely: in Mrs. Dalloway, the gift is a, if not the, central trope of Woolf ’s widely analyzed exploration of psychological, phenomenological, and epistemological questions—of how we think and feel and of what we can know about ourselves and others. The language of the gift is the means by which she conveys individual variations in our experience of the same objects, gestures, and events—by which she registers the capacity of a given thing to be both this and that. In the case of Sir William, the help that seems cruel to some also seems kind to others. It is the case both that he exacts terrible sacrifices from his patients and that he is “endeared . . . to the relations of his victims” (MD 102). And, unforgivable though his gift may be to his victims’ and our eyes, it is in part driven by a kind of generosity. Indeed, if anything, Sir William gives too much. At least, he gives too much of himself—stamping his will “indelibly in the sanctuaries of others,” sinking

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his wife’s “will into his” (MD 102, 100). In this regard, he resembles Lady Bruton, for whom emigration, her imperial cause du jour, has become an outlet of “pent egotism,” an object into which she secretes the “essence of her soul” (MD 109). Sir William’s personal object of cathexis, which he also prescribes for his patients, is Proportion. Of course, the catch is that, in giving himself over to Proportion’s ­sister, the Goddess of Conversion, Sir William’s own worship of Proportion has paradoxically become disproportionate, his sense of proportion utterly senseless. Thus, it is not simply that Sir William and other characters have contradictory impressions of the logic behind his gift but also that this logic is fraught with internal contradictions. Sir William “offers help, but desires power,” kindly coaching Septimus to “think as little about yourself as possible” and therefore to think more like Sir William (MD 100, 98). In imposing his will on others, Sir William, too, could stand to think less of himself, and yet he maintains that these phenomena are fundamentally opposed—that “this is madness, this sense” (100).41 As his repetition of the pronoun “this” to identify both madness and sense suggests, though, distinguishing between the two is not so simple. Not only can sense be converted into madness, but it is already quite mad. “ T H E U N S E E N PA RT O F U S ” : C L A R I S S A’ S T R A N S C E N D E N TA L T H E O RY While Sir William represents the imperial social system at its most intense, the key to the novel’s criticism of this system—the novel’s use of idioms and gestures of gift-giving to expose the everyday mixture of seemingly separate phenomena— remains Mrs. Dalloway’s titular hostess and her unique gift for sensing connections that others cannot. To give Clarissa Dalloway this privilege is to go somewhat against the grain of Woolf ’s own representation of Septimus and Clarissa as ­doubles, equally carrying the weight of the narrative. Nevertheless, I take quite seriously the decision to title the novel Mrs. Dalloway and thus to suggest that it is above all a novel about “the perfect hostess,” to use Peter’s double-edged moniker (MD 7). In the context of the novel, and for our purposes here, Peter’s reflections on Clarissa and her gift are especially illuminating—not because he loves her, though he clearly does, but rather because he can so often be her harshest critic. Peter tends to reinforce Clarissa’s personal experience even as he focuses on her supposed flaws. In another text, such a contradiction might make a character seem unreliable. But in Mrs. Dalloway, where unreliability and inconsistency are fundamental features of experience, Peter’s mixed messages about Clarissa have the opposite effect, lending his reflections a degree of authority. I do not mean to ­suggest that Peter tells us, as readers, how we ought to feel about Clarissa—whether 41  Susan Squier argues that Woolf “wanted to transcend the very habit of thinking dualities and to criticize a society based upon such habitual polarization.” Susan Squier, Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 93. For Squier, Woolf’s novel above all criticizes a gendered “public/private dichotomy,” revealing this dichotomy to be the “origin . . . of both sexual oppression at home and war abroad” (95).

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we ought to find her likable or unlikable. Rather, in thinking about Clarissa and her gift, Peter helps to prove her understanding of how individuals feel and think period—her sense that one’s personal experience is never entirely one’s own but a gift we take from and give to other people. Although Peter supposedly does not think much of Clarissa’s gift in particular, he does think of it—and of her—quite a bit in the wake of their morning meeting. To his eyes, she has “that extraordinary gift, that woman’s gift, of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be,” of serving as the consistent thread that ties people together (MD 76). While admiring of her creative genius, Peter also dismisses it as a useless expenditure, “a real drain on her strength” (MD 77). The question that nags at him, as it will later nag at Clarissa herself, is Why? Why engage in the “interminable traffic that women of her sort keep up” if it is so taxing (MD 77)? In “trying to explain her,” Peter channels a familiar gender ideology, at once romanticizing and discounting the value of feminine gifts on the basis of their excessiveness, their deviation from norms of rationality and necessity (MD 76). Yet he also suggests that, while seemingly wasteful, Clarissa’s gift does satisfy a personal need on her part: “She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers” (MD 78). If Clarissa wastes her time and her energy—if she gives to excess—it is because she needs other people in order to realize her gift, specifically, in this case, her “exquisite” sense of comedy. Her neediness, her apparent lack, grates on Peter, arguably because it reflects his dependence on external supports, most glaringly the pocket knife with which he fiddles throughout the novel. However, like Clarissa, Peter is also dependent on people, later admitting to himself that nobody is “more dependent on others” than he (MD 158). Still, what is most striking about this particular criticism of Clarissa on Peter’s part is not its potential hypocrisy but rather its irrationality. After all, can Clarissa be faulted for relying on others to bring out her sense of comedy? Could we imagine a sense of comedy that would not be socially mediated or relational in some way, even if the other with whom one shares the joke is internalized or projected? While Peter judges Clarissa negatively for her need of other people, the irrationality of his judgment—how could she not need other people to be funny?—has a very different effect. Wittingly or not, Peter points to the paradox of Clarissa’s gift: her gift, the special property that makes her who she is, is not something she simply has a priori but rather something that other people continually give her. If Clarissa feels compelled to keep up “interminable traffic,” it is because she must constantly be giving and taking in order to be herself—a woman with a distinctly feminine gift for giving. Clarissa, as we know, has a theory about the logic behind her need of other people—her “transcendental theory,” whereby she imagines not only herself but also people in general to be part of the world around them, spread out in imperceptible ways. Peter recalls Clarissa saying that, to know her or anyone, we “must seek out the people who completed them” and make up “the unseen part of us”

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(MD 153). Peter sheds light on what exactly this “part” entails when he concedes that “her theory worked to this extent”: Brief, broken, often painful as their actual meetings had been what with his absences and interruptions . . . the effect of them on his life was immeasurable. There was a mystery about it. You were given a sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain—the actual meeting; horribly painful as often as not; yet in absence, in the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent, let you touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel of it and understanding, after years of lying lost. Thus she had come to him; on board ship; in the Himalayas; suggested by the oddest things (so Sally Seton, generous, enthusiastic goose! thought of him when she saw blue hydrangeas). She had influenced him more than any person he had ever known.  (MD 153)

In affirming Clarissa’s theory, Peter also adds an important addendum: if her ­theory holds true in his experience, it is because the world of the subject in Mrs. Dalloway is not simply, as I have suggested, a world of give and take but also a world of ­symbols. It is a world in which the “oddest things”—from hydrangeas to the Himalayas—can come to signify one’s feeling of connectedness to others. In thus refining Clarissa’s theory, Peter translates it into a theory of symbolic thought—of the way we use symbols to represent otherwise invisible social relations. That is to say, he plays the role of structuralist to her sociologist. Peter is the Claude LéviStrauss to Clarissa’s Mauss. Lévi-Strauss’s reading of Mauss has been extremely influential, helping to solidify Mauss’s reputation in some circles as a proto-structuralist. For our purposes, his reading has the merit of recasting Mauss’s account of the gift in terms that further dovetail with Woolf ’s exploration of consciousness in the field of literature. Whereas Mauss focuses on the role of the spirit of the gift in cementing social ties, Lévi-Strauss shifts attention to the symbols used to represent this spirit. In so doing, the latter helps to illuminate both the way that thought works in the world of Mrs. Dalloway and the way that Woolf represents thought as a sort of literary phenomenon—as an associative play of symbols that functions like literature. Lévi-Strauss makes a case for Mauss’s proto-structuralism in his Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, first published in 1950. There he proposes that Mauss’s foundational work on both magic and the gift was “controlled by a logical certainty” of the “existence of a structure.”42 This certainty is evident in Mauss’s notion of the total social fact—his notion in The Gift that exchange is “the common denominator of a large number of apparently heterogeneous social activities” in archaic societies (IWMM 45–6). Mauss’s mistake was setting out to prove the existence of this structure empirically, “to reconstruct a whole out of parts” (IWMM 47). But this process could take him only so far. Once Mauss had pieced together the rules and rituals governing exchange, something was still missing—something he tried to supplement by bringing an “additional quantity” to bear on his analysis (IWMM 47). In The Gift, this quantity is hau—the spirit of the donor that is supposed to inhabit 42  Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge, 1987), 45–6. Hereafter cited in the text as IWMM.

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the thing given, compel reciprocation, and guarantee the smooth functioning of exchange in Maori society. Lévi-Strauss’s concern is that, in characterizing hau as a kind of “emotional-mystical cement,” magically holding exchange together, Mauss merely reproduces the indigenous thinking he is studying (IWMM 58). Hau in The Gift and mana in Mauss’s work on magic are pivotal, but not quite for the reasons Mauss identifies. What matters most—and what Mauss overlooks—is the symbolic function performed by hau and mana. In short, these terms enable groups to think the otherwise unthinkable totality of exchange—of exchange not simply as a set of empirically observable facts but rather as a structure underlying these facts. Lévi-Strauss argues that exchange is a unity—“a synthesis immediately given to, and given by, symbolic thought” (IWMM 58). But while exchange may be given to thought—hence Mauss’s certainty of its existence—we are not especially given to conceptualizing exchange. Our thought inevitably runs up against a contradiction in our perception of the objective world. On the one hand, we perceive objects to be “elements of dialogue,” inalienable parts of a system; on the other, we perceive those same objects to be alienable, independent entities, “destined by nature to pass from one to the other” within this system (IWMM 58–9). This second perception presumes a division between one and the other—a division that the exchange of gifts is supposed to overcome by bringing the two into relation. LéviStrauss, however, argues that the opposite is true: “The fact that those things may be the one’s or the other’s represents a situation which is derivative from the initial relational aspect” (IWMM 59). In other words, we perceive the possibility of being brought into relation via exchange because relation already exists, but it exists at “a deeper level of thinking” (IWMM 59). Symbolic thought recreates this deeper level by invoking floating signifiers, or “zero symbols,” such as hau and mana. Such symbols are not grounded in an accessible signified—in other words, there is no real spirit to which they refer. Rather, hau and mana serve a supplementary function, enabling symbolic thought to function despite our inability to decipher whether we are or are not already related, and whether things belong to you or to me, to both of us or to neither of us. Considered in this context, the impressions that characters in Mrs. Dalloway give one another—the turn Septimus gives Maisie, the wish for pity Maisie gives Mrs. Dempster, and the “grain” Clarissa gives Peter—might be read as indices of the fact that, as Clarissa is so certain is the case, these individuals are already connected within a single system of exchange. In Mrs. Dalloway, too, this system is at base a symbolic system, one in which anything can assume an exceptional symbolic status for any individual at any time. Or, rather, more precisely, symbols are the means by which characters represent and conceptualize this system and their relation to others. Thus, hydrangeas make Sally think of Peter while the Himalayas make him think of Clarissa. Such symbols are, in a sense, gifts of thought insofar as they are also the means by which one gives attention to others in their absence. But they are also gifts one gives oneself. As Clarissa poignantly puts it when she thinks of Peter while going to buy flowers, the fact that we think of others in their absence is the “reward of having cared for people” (MD 7). From this perspective,

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the ultimate gift at stake in Peter’s reflections on Clarissa’s transcendental theory is not the initial discomfort that Clarissa gives him so much as the poetic reveries he lavishes on her—the imagery of grains and flowers by which he, at first painfully and later pleasurably, symbolizes their relationship. Or, rather, the gift of thought he gives her, we might say, is proof of the gift she has given him—of the fact that, as he notes, Clarissa “had influenced him more than any person he had ever known.” The measure of the gift in Mrs. Dalloway is thus its capacity to continue to give us pause and to elicit a return gift of thought. Woolf ingeniously registers this logic by way of Peter’s sudden memory of Sally. While his characterization of Sally as “generous” is no doubt ironic, the fact that he is haunted by her association of him with blue hydrangeas suggests that there is a grain of truth in his language: she is generous insofar as her words continue to demand a return gift of his time and attention. But can we even speak of words and thoughts as “his” and “hers”? After all, does the parenthetical—“(so Sally Seton, generous, enthusiastic goose! thought of him when she saw blue hydrangeas)”—belong to Peter or Sally? Peter is not exactly eager to own the association. So to whom do these thoughts belong, to him or to her? The answer, as one might guess, is both and neither. The thought is both of theirs insofar as Peter ascribes it to Sally yet thinks it himself. Yet it is neither of theirs insofar as symbolic thought—as an imprecise map of relation and yet all we have to go by—blurs the boundaries of belonging. It is hard to say what belongs to one or the other, even when one is alone and the other of whom one thinks is far away. If we might expect physical distance to clarify and reify psychological boundaries, in Mrs. Dalloway it has the opposite effect, amplifying the possession of one’s thoughts by other people. In this same vein, Gillian Beer suggests, “Separation may even be the condition for recognising kin” in Woolf ’s novel.43 Her elegant formulation assumes particular weight in the context of theories of the gift, which routinely distinguish between gifts and commodities by claiming that the former are inalienable and the latter alienable.44 Unlike commodities, gifts are an extension of their owners, hence their power to create a personal connection. Lewis Hyde distinguishes between gifts and symbols on the same basis in his study of the gift of art. While Hyde characterizes all works of art as “symbolizations”—that is, embodiments of an inalienable “species-essence, which is a general possession of the race”—he also suggests that symbols carry the 43  Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 55. 44  While Mauss understands the gift’s inalienability in spiritual terms—the gift embodies the spirit of the donor—others understand it in more symbolic terms, as an index of the gift’s investment with personal meaning and solidification of a bond between parties. See, for example, C. A. Gregory, Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997), 77–9. John Frow argues that the exclusive identification of the “concept of alienation,” which “refers to the transference of privately owned property,” with capitalism “sets up too simple a distinction between capitalism and the totality of pre-capitalist societies. Few if any societies lack altogether the category of alienable goods and particular mechanisms for transferring them.” In Frow’s view, it is more instructive to compare the ways that different societies distinguish between general and restricted exchange—“between those goods that may be circulated freely and those whose circulation is restricted.” See Frow, “From Gift to Commodity,” in Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 127.

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risk of alienation and disembodiment.45 In the context of his reading of Ezra Pound, a poet notoriously critical of the money economy, Hyde suggests that, unlike the gift, “[t]he symbol is alienable,” and not just the monetary or financial symbol; Hyde is also concerned with symbolic thought: “Symbolization in either exchange or cognition requires that the symbol be detached from the particular thing.”46 While the detachment imposed by capitalism is the enemy of the spirit of the gift in Hyde’s study, detachment becomes the condition of the gift’s possibility in Mrs. Dalloway—enabling one to give thought to another by means of this or that thing-turned-symbol. At the same time, the novel’s representation of consciousness as social consciousness—as never strictly belonging to this or that individual—always points us back to what Lévi-Strauss calls the “initial relational aspect.” Alienation and relation are not mutually exclusive. Rather, both are at play in the symbols that mediate one’s experience of other people and serve to recreate relations one is certain already exist. Thus, if Peter sees Clarissa while on board ship in the Himalayas, it is proof that she had already influenced him. Mrs. Dalloway in effect asks whether one can understand one’s relations to other people without recourse to free-floating symbols or, even more provocatively, whether one would want to—whether pondering Clarissa from a safe distance, via a sublime substitute such as the Himalayas, may not be preferable to a direct encounter. In Peter’s view, some separation is inevitable; there remains something mysterious about Clarissa’s influence and, indeed, Clarissa herself. But separation is also desirable, turning the pain of an initial encounter into an eventual source of pleasure. He is not alone in this regard. Consider once more poor Maisie and Mrs. Dempster: in coming to London, Maisie “got her way at last,” and yet she is promptly repelled by the Conradian horror she finds there, wishing she had stayed at home (“Horror! Horror! she wanted to cry” [MD 26–7]). Just as the fantasy of London is more enjoyable to Maisie than the thing itself, so Maisie’s status as a stranger is pivotal to the fictive status she assumes for Mrs. Dempster, who dreams of giving her a word of worldly advice (Beware philandering husbands!) in exchange for a kiss of pity. Clarissa, too, enjoys a degree of separation. Upon seeing Peter, she imagines that if she “had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day,” but we know better than to trust her feeling entirely in this moment, for she also enjoys the “little licence” she and Richard give one another (MD 47, 7). The privacy she wants so desperately to protect is also a gift that “Richard gave her, and she him” (8). Jacques Godbout and Alain Caillé argue that the definitively modern gift is a “gift to strangers.”47 Mrs. Dalloway tends to agree while also suggesting that anybody can be—and even ought to be—made a stranger. The novel thus raises the epistemological uncertainty noted by Lévi-Strauss to the level of an ethical 45  Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 2007), 198. 46  Ibid. 342–3. 47  Jacques T. Godbout with Alain Caillé, The World of the Gift, trans. Donald Winkler (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 65. Self-help groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous are especially exemplary for Godbout and Caillé in giving freedom to their members to come and go and insisting on anonymity. See 67–72.

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principle—turning the curse of our difficulty thinking relation in the wake of alienation into a gift for which we ought to be grateful. Jessica Berman invokes the Deleuzian notion of “the fold” to make a number of parallel claims about the way Woolf ’s writing links aesthetic and ethical questions. The fold, she argues, may be literal (e.g., the drape of Orlando’s dress in Orlando) or figurative (e.g., the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse), but in each case serves to resituate the relationships between subject and object and between subject and subject. As a boundary between bodies, the fold “creates new ways of perceiving the body’s relationship to the world” and to “bodily possessions.”48 Within this new perceptual framework, possessions are not fixed but rather “in flux, coming and going, mine then someone else’s.”49 Berman traces this flux in the image of the crumpled glove in To the Lighthouse, arguing that the glove enfolds Lily’s complex experience of Mrs. Ramsay as a singular being, separate from herself, and as a woman with whom she feels profound intimacy, about whom she wonders if love could make them one. The play between these two experiences of their relationship culminates in an ethical crux for Lily after Mrs. Ramsay’s death: she must conform to gender norms and get married, as Mrs. Ramsay would have wanted, or resist Mrs. Ramsay’s influence and pursue her painting instead. Part of the appeal of the Deleuzian figure of the fold for Berman seems to be that it enables her to draw out the ethical implications of Woolf ’s aesthetics without resorting to a notion of reflection or representation to mediate between aesthetics and ethics. As Berman notes, Roger Fry’s espousal of a non-representational aesthetics of immediacy have often been considered the basis of Bloomsbury aesthetics in general, including Woolf ’s. But for Fry, contra Woolf in Berman’s view, art exists beyond any moral action. The post-Kantian tradition might seem to provide an alternative framework for reading Woolf insofar as it establishes a link between aesthetics and ethics, but this link depends on the situation of both aesthetics and ethics in a realm of judgment “predicated on the movement away from experience.”50 Berman, however, works to reserve a space for an aesthetic concern with experience in Woolf ’s writing—with the way individuals perceive themselves in relation to others by way of possessions that endlessly escape clear lines of ownership—while also maintaining that this concern necessarily opens onto ethical questions. While I similarly want to argue that aesthetics and ethics are inseparable in Mrs. Dalloway, I also want to insist on the centrality of representation to bridging them—though not at the expense of experience per se. Far from marking a movement away from experience, representation is the way characters experience one another in a world where subjectivity spreads wide. The subject here is not simply caught up in a symbolic web of exchange but is itself such a web—an invisible give and take of thought that overflows boundaries and attaches to visible things by way of a shared tendency to create symbolic connections. Indeed, the unseen part of Clarissa is not what she attaches herself to so much as it is what others attach to the thought of her—the things she becomes in their eyes when she is out of sight but 48  Jessica Berman, “Ethical Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf,” Modern Fiction Studies 50.1 (2004): 161. 49  Ibid. 160–1. 50  Ibid. 156.

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not out of mind. This interpretation of Clarissa’s transcendental theory bears some resemblance to Ann Banfield’s account of “phantom” reality in Woolf ’s writing. Banfield’s point of departure is Andrew’s description of Mr. Ramsay’s work to Lily in To the Lighthouse: “think of the kitchen table . . . when you’re not there.”51 For Banfield, this dictum translates into “an aesthetic of the impersonal,” whereby the unobserved, or “phantom,” table becomes a “shared object of knowledge” between Lily and Mr. Ramsay; it “fills in the gap to create continuity between Lily’s and his private perspectives.”52 Our reading of Clarissa’s transcendental theory suggests a somewhat different dictum—not to think of an object, such as a kitchen table or blue hydrangeas when you’re not there, but rather to think of another subject when you see or even imagine that object. In other words, the phantom reality of the subject in Mrs. Dalloway consists of the objects that come somehow to symbolize the subject when she’s not there. Representation is on the scene here but it does not presuppose, as Woolf criticism sometimes can, an initial moment of presence or transcendence that might be lost and which it then becomes the task of representation, whether in the form of memory or the novel itself, to recover and preserve. Reflecting on Clarissa’s ­survival in Peter’s thoughts, Christine Froula argues that Clarissa is “ ‘recovered’ in his memory and by the narrative,” where she is “preserved from time, death, loss, absence.”53 Both Clarissa and Peter use the language of recovery to describe the retrieval of those parts of her that are spread out in the past and other people. In my reading, though, this language does not quite correspond to a protection of plenitude against the threat of time. In his recent account of the “traumatic” structure of experience in Mrs. Dalloway, Martin Hägglund argues that “the experience of plenitude is always already temporalized.”54 For Hägglund, this means that “experience in general is characterized by a delay and deferral”: characters are “always in the process of comprehending past experience (delay)” and “their present experience can be apprehended only in retrospect (deferral).”55 Thus, the repetition of memory is not, as J. Hillis Miller puts it, “the raising of the dead,” but rather the delayed comprehension of a past that was always already dead—a past that, even when it was a present, was shot through with the apprehension of eventually, in Hägglund’s words, “ceasing to be.”56 In refracting these long-standing critical debates about time, experience, and representation in Woolf ’s writing through theories of the gift and exchange, I want to suggest that the fundamental feature of experience in her writing is neither presence (Froula) nor its passing away (Hägglund) but rather excess. As the medium of experience, symbolic thought is not a means of preserving or resurrecting an 51  Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1955), 23. 52 Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 55. 53 Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde, 100. 54  Martin Hägglund, Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabakov (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 63. 55  Ibid. 63. 56  Miller, “Mrs. Dalloway: Repetition as the Raising of the Dead,” 178; Hägglund, 64.

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experience that has been or may be lost; rather, symbolic thought is a means of conceptualizing a set of relations that is felt and lived yet exceeds perception. To “recover” other people by way of symbolic associations such as Sally’s blue hydrangeas or Peter’s budding grain is to re-cover them in the sense of adding to them— supplementing initial encounters with impressions accrued across time, in absence. Lévi-Strauss registers this sense of excess when he suggests that signifiers such as hau and mana do not correspond to any signified—at least none that we can perceive. They are instances of a “signifier-surfeit” (IWMM 62). But while they are excessive, they are also necessary at both structural and subjective levels. As we have already seen, zero symbols serve a structural function for Lévi-Strauss, enabling signification and communication to work despite the ambiguity surrounding questions of possession and relation. Yet as products of magical thinking, mana and hau also satisfy a need. The notion that things are possessed by the spirit of their owners, he argues, is “no more than the subjective reflection of the need [exigence] to supply an unperceived totality”—that is, an otherwise invisible system of  exchange (IWMM 58).57 We might read Clarissa Dalloway’s “need” of other people in similar terms as a need to supply an unperceived totality—namely, the totality of the subject, Clarissa Dalloway. While Peter appears to share this need, it remains the case that his experience— and the experience of every character in the novel for that matter—is subsumed via the title under the proper name, Mrs. Dalloway. It is as if all of their thought, as the stuff of the novel, belongs to Clarissa. Peter even implies as much when he gives a linguistic turn to Clarissa’s transcendental theory. In recasting Clarissa’s theory as a theory of symbolic thought, Peter—and perhaps even Woolf—offers a framework for interpreting the novel itself. To read this theory as a theory of the novel would mean that we cannot know Clarissa in her entirety without a generous swath of the symbolic fabric into and from which her life is woven—that is, without Mrs. Dalloway. The novel is not just a transcription of the unseen part of Clarissa but, as a web of symbolic threads, is itself this part. S Y M B O L I C T H O U G H T, O R , T H E T H O U G H T F O R M OF MARKET SOCIETY Given the identification of Clarissa with the novel, we might ask: just how transcendental is Clarissa’s nominally transcendental theory of subjectivity? Or rather, more precisely, in what sense is it “transcendental”? Does it transcend her personal experience and explain experience in general? Or is she the exception to the rule? To what extent has the novel been fitted to its subject—a white, British wife of a Conservative M.P., mother of one, and member of a ruling class whose control is teetering despite its continued sway? Would a novel called Mr. Whitbread or

57 Original French from Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction à l’œuvre de Marcel Mauss,” in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1968), xlvi.

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Dr. Holmes have the same texture, or would such a title necessarily punctuate a different theory and portrait of subjectivity and social relation? The short answer to these questions is yes. In other words, Clarissa is transcendental in both of the senses I have laid out; she is exemplary in her experience of connectedness to other people and yet exceptional in her sensitivity to their mutual connectedness. She is, in a sense, a transcendental signifier of subjectivity in the novel. Before unpacking this claim further, we should pause to acknowledge just how loaded it is in light of my invocation of Lévi-Strauss. In his work, women also figure as transcendental signifiers—at once exceptional and exemplary, not in their role as subjects, of course, but in their role as objects. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, published in 1949, one year before his Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, Lévi-Strauss notoriously proposes another modification to The Gift, arguing that the archetypal form of reciprocity is not simply the exchange of gifts, as Mauss argued, but rather, more specifically, the exchange of women in marriage. “It is no exaggeration,” he insists, “to say that exogamy is the archetype of all other manifestations based upon reciprocity, and that it provides the fundamental and immutable rule ensuring the existence of the group as a group” (ESK 481). Within this structure, women are not donor-subjects but “the supreme gift” (ESK 65). As such, they are also the original thing whose ambiguous status had to be resolved via symbolic thought. At the very end of his study, Lévi-Strauss speculates that the “emergence of symbolic thought must have required that women, like words, should be things that were exchanged” (ESK 496). Like things in general, women are characterized by a contradiction: they are objects of possession and yet might pass from one to the other. More specifically, they are both “the object of personal desire” and “the subject of the desire of others” (ESK 496). Yet unlike other things, it truly is in their nature to circulate as women. Their exchange is driven not just by their status as a “sign of social value,” as is the case with other gifts, but by their status as a “natural stimulant” (ESK 62). They are “valuables par excellence from both the biological and the social points of view” (ESK 481). Moreover, their social value derives from their biological value as natural objects of masculine desire. Like hau and mana, women serve a symbolic function, guaranteeing alliances by way of their circulation. Unlike hau and mana, women’s social value is rooted in a signified—namely, feminine sexuality, but feminine sexuality as it is conceived by men. Women—or, more precisely, Woman—is the transcendental signifier of masculine desire. Just as it is men who exchange and women who get exchanged, so it is men who think and women who are thought of. Symbolic thought emerges from “man’s ability to think of biological relationships as systems of oppositions” and thus to distinguish between women as means of descent and women as means of interpersonal alliance—“between wives who are acquired and sisters and daughters who are given away” (ESK 136). While I mean to emphasize Clarissa’s status as a subject, it is crucial to recognize the role that she also plays as a form of feminine property. In titling the novel Mrs.  Dalloway, as opposed to, say, Clarissa (a title that was, admittedly, already taken), Woolf suggests that her heroine’s eligibility to knot the various threads of the novel together is indissociable from her status as a wife, a part of someone else’s

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personhood. And indeed she seems to be Richard’s most precious possession. He considers it “a miracle that he should have married Clarissa” and finds it “difficult to think of her,” thus lending her a quasi-divine status, as if some part of her resisted symbolization (MD 115). In her analysis of sexual difference in Western religious, philosophical, and literary accounts of hospitality, Tracy McNulty argues that the figure of the hostess, as a figure of femininity, “contests the autonomy of the host by giving voice to the alterity within personhood, functioning as the internal marking of the Other.”58 As a “structural function,” the feminine, like the divine, is both “in excess of the social link and at the same time its condition of possibility”—paradoxically serving both to undermine and to guarantee masculine bonds.59 As we will see later in this chapter, Clarissa also fulfills this dual function, supporting and subverting the social link among “the Dalloways, the Whitbreads, and their set” (MD 50). Yet it is also crucial that, for Woolf, women such as Clarissa occupy this strange position for historical reasons rather than structural ones. Or, rather, the structural exclusion of women in particular, the feminization of structural excess, is itself an historical phenomenon. Woolf was a shrewd, if accidental, critic of the treatment of femininity in contemporary theories of gift and exchange from other fields. Though she did not necessarily read Mauss, she was certainly well versed in the gender norms operative in his work and later structural accounts of non-Western societies. In recent years, feminist anthropologists such as Annette Weiner have argued that early anthropology was marred by ethnocentrism, particularly in its presupposition that capitalist social norms, such as reciprocity and the patriarchal division of public and private spheres, equally apply to non-capitalist social systems. In the work of Malinowski and Mauss, this bias translated into a tendency to focus on “‘gift exchange’ among men” at the expense of seeing how women might also be “the controllers of highly valued possessions.”60 Lévi-Strauss clearly shares this bias in insisting that “the ­relationship of reciprocity which is the basis of marriage is not established between men and women, but between men by means of women, who are merely the occasion of this relationship” (ESK 116). It is important to recognize the specificity of Lévi-Strauss’s argument here. He is making a claim about the exchange of women in marriage—one that may not be a “universal fact,” as Lévi-Strauss claims, but which actually reads as a fairly accurate description of the traditional function served by marriage in Western societies (ESK 116). Part of the problem, of course, is that his argument reads less like a description of the historical fact of women’s exclusion from full social participation and more like a justification of their exclusion when he naturalizes their status as objects of exchange. As Weiner further argues, in claiming that “women occupy a special place among ‘objects,’ ” Lévi-Strauss “denies women motivation and access to their own resources and strategies.”61 58 Tracy McNulty, The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxv. 59  Ibid. xxvii, xxxviii. 60  Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 2, 3. 61  Weiner, 14.

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He idealizes women as objects, only to discount their contributions as subjects. Women are the supreme gift, and yet their individual gifts don’t count for much— at least, such is the magical thinking Lévi-Strauss indulges in universalizing a patriarchal, heteronormative myth of sexual difference. Woolf takes aim at this myth and the tension between idealization and devaluation to which it gives rise when she reflects on the legacy of Coventry Patmore’s figure of the Angel in the House—the archetypal Victorian hostess—in her 1931 speech to the London and National Society of Women’s Service. “Above all,” Woolf suggests of the Angel, “she was pure.”62 But her supposed purity turns out to be anything but “pure,” in the sense of uncontaminated, insofar as being pure means being whatever a man wants you to be: “whatever you say let it be pleasing to men,” the phantom Angel whispers over Woolf ’s shoulder as she sits down to write.63 That the Angel “never had any real existence” but rather was an “ideal of womanhood created by the imaginations of men and women” only makes her all the more dangerous and “difficult to deal with.”64 But Woolf also clearly felt that it was necessary to deal with this literary and material prehistory by, for example, putting feminine avatars of hospitality such as Clarissa Dalloway at the center of her writing. Thus, both Woolf and Lévi-Strauss are in some respects writing about the bourgeois patriarchal house. It is because of Lévi-Strauss’s ethnocentrism—and not in spite of it—that his theory of symbolic thought proves so relevant and resonant here. In other words, it is because his theory may be read, at least in part, as a theory of how thought works in patriarchal, capitalist societies that it is so helpful in illuminating the way that thought works in Mrs. Dalloway. In Woolf ’s novel, symbolic thought is the thought form of a modern capitalist social system—and, even more specifically, of the imperial British social system.65 Notably, the language of symbols explicitly appears in the novel only in reference to public emblems of “English society” and capitalist progress (MD 172). The royal who may or may not have been in the motorcar, the aeroplane, the cross on St. Paul’s cathedral, Buckingham Palace, the Prime Minister—each is explicitly perceived by one character or another to be a 62  Virginia Woolf, “Speech to the London and National Society for Women’s Service,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5, ed. Stuart N. Clarke (Boston, MA, and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 638. 63  Ibid. 639. 64  Ibid. 638. 65 In calling symbolic thought the thought form of this society, I draw inspiration from the Marxian theorist Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s critique of yet another transcendental theory—Kant’s transcendental idealism. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology, trans. Martin Sohn-Rethel (London: Macmillan, 1978). In short, Sohn-Rethel argues that epistemology, as it culminates in Kant’s philosophy, is the thought form of capitalism. The commodity form (as we find it in Marx) and the thought form (as we find it in Kant) are not just analogous but share a “secret identity” (xiii). The root of their identity is abstraction. Contra traditional philosophy, Sohn-Rethel argues that there is an abstraction other than that by thought and it is the “real abstraction” that we find in the act of exchange, which serves as “an original source of abstraction” (28). Thus, abstraction for Sohn-Rethel above all entails abstraction from use, an abstraction that takes place “not in mind, but in fact”: “It is the action of exchange, and the action alone, that is abstract” (25–6). In shifting from a Marxian to a Maussian perspective, I mean to pry open space for imagining other forms of exchange—forms that may also be rooted in market society but which are not in the end identical or reducible to the commodity form.

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“symbol” (MD 16, 28, 117, 172). The language of symbols further makes an appearance when Sir William asks Septimus, “You served with great distinction in the War?” Septimus “repeat[s] the word ‘war’ interrogatively,” prompting Sir William to observe to himself that his patient “was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious symptom” (MD 96). Sir William is not altogether wrong. Attaching symbolical meanings can be a serious symptom, although not necessarily of shell shock, as he assumes. Rather, the overinvestment of meaning in things (aeroplanes and crosses), places (churches and palaces), and people (the otherwise ordinary-looking Prime Minister) is cast in the above examples as the symptom of a social system that institutes all manner of magical thinking in order to justify the sacrifice of individuals such as Septimus, who volunteered for the war “to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square” (MD 86). This is not to suggest that Mrs. Dalloway invites us to see all symbols and their meanings as having the same value or posing the same threat—quite the contrary. If attaching meanings of a symbolical kind can be dangerous and come at an exorbitant cost, it is also simply the way people think in the world of the novel. In Mrs. Dalloway, this is what people do: they create associations; they confuse this with that; they treat things (and people and places and words) as if they were interchangeable. In thought and in deed, they practice symbolic exchange. Symbolization becomes a concern, however, when it is dominated by identification-based group politics that demand sacrifices and drive out differences. In another striking instance of misdiagnosis, Sir William suggests that Septimus is too self-absorbed, too ego­ istic, advising him, as we noted earlier, “to think as little about yourself as possible” (MD 98).66 Arguably, Septimus suffers from the opposite tendency. He is too open, too exposed, too hospitable to the unseen—most unsettlingly so in Regent’s Park, when he imagines his body reduced to “nerve fibres” and “spread like a veil upon the rock” (MD 68). The world around him seems to say, “We welcome . . . we accept; we create” (MD 69). In this moment Septimus hallucinates something he otherwise lacks—not a sense of proportion, as Sir William might wish, but rather a home for the creative gift he once channeled into writing poetry for Miss Pole and which the war has converted into a revelatory message with no recipient. Mrs. Dalloway works to cultivate a recipient—that is, to establish the conditions of a postwar world that would say, as the park does to Septimus, “We welcome.” That the novel primarily does so by exploring the consciousness of its characters is not to suggest that Woolf privileges the world of abstract thought over the world of material reality. If Septimus’s fate proves anything, it is that the two—thoughts and acts—are inseparable. Not just what we think but also how we think can have 66  In her study of various misdiagnoses of Septimus, Levenback draws on Durkheim’s classification of suicide as either egoistic, altruistic, or anomic to argue that Septimus fits the last category: “Durkheim would classify his postwar suicide as anomic, based on ‘regulative action’ of society, its power to control.” His suicide is not, as Bradshaw has it, a direct result of shell shock so as much as a response to his experience of a postwar world that offers him no “correlative to his moral sensibility.” Karen L. Levenback, “Life and Death, Memory and Denial in Postwar London,” in Virginia Woolf and the Great War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 71.

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practical consequences and translate into actual gestures of give and take. The harmless love of literature and beautiful women can turn into a destructive love of country and so-called civilization, but that also means they might equally turn into something else—namely, a new ethos of hospitality. In turning briefly in the next section to the essay with which we began this chapter, “Character in Fiction,” I want to suggest that, if Clarissa has the potential to usher in this ethos, it is because, in Woolf ’s eyes, feminine subjectivity—and the figure of the hostess in particular—is newly representative of subjectivity in general in the modern age. T H E H O U S E T H AT WO O L F B U I LT: C H A R A C T E R , R E L AT I O N S , G E N D E R It is, of course, in “Character in Fiction” that Woolf asserts that “on or about December 1910, human character changed” (CF 421). Given our focus on webs of social relation, what is most interesting about this oft-cited change in character is that it corresponds to a change in relations: “[a]ll human relations have shifted— those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children” (CF 422). Thus, what has changed is the traditional balance of power across lines of class, gender, and age difference and thus the value and authority of some character types in relation to others. Recalling her observation of Mr. Smith and Mrs. Brown (as she calls them) in a train headed to Waterloo, Woolf suggests that the latter appealed to her writerly sensibility because of her victimization by Mr. Smith, who clearly “had some power over her” (424). Voyeuristically watching Mrs. Brown, Woolf is struck by the “overwhelming and peculiar impression” of “character imposing itself,” forcing Woolf to “begin almost automatically to write a novel about her” (CF 425). Woolf concludes that “all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite . . . all novels, that is to say, deal with the character” (CF 425). It is in the context of these very familiar claims on Woolf ’s part that we might return to our earlier question: if Mrs. Dalloway were to begin with a character other than Clarissa Dalloway—with someone other than an old lady opposite—would it have the same form and texture? “Character in Fiction” suggests not only that beginning a novel with, say, a Mr. Smith would entail writing a novel very different from Mrs. Dalloway but also that writing such a novel would be anachronistic against the backdrop of the 1920s. It is a moment when, as we noted, writers have no code of manners to express character in its modern guise. In invoking the figure of the hostess to describe the writer’s conundrum, Woolf is in part troping on the work of her main target in the essay—the Edwardian and thus passé Arnold Bennett. Turning to Bennett’s 1911 novel, Hilda Lessways, to see how it is that he conveys character, Woolf finds the focus to be not Hilda herself but the house in which she lives. “House property,” Woolf observes, “was the common ground from which the Edwardians [such as Bennett] found it easy to proceed to intimacy” (CF 431). For the Georgians, such as Woolf, however, the common ground is not the house but rather the character inside the house—that is, the hostess. Notably, Mrs. Brown is herself a hostess, albeit one whom Woolf imagines to have been

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“unmoored from her anchorage” (CF 425). In imagining Mrs. Brown “in a seaside house, among queer ornaments,” Woolf does not entirely eschew the house property that so preoccupies writers like Bennett but rather reworks the conventions of domestic fiction to capture the otherwise marginalized character of Mrs. Brown (CF 425). Woolf ’s engagement with domestic fiction and her feminization of character have been the subjects of much discussion. While Nancy Armstrong has argued that there is nothing particularly new about Woolf ’s identification of middle-class women as a site of literary and moral authority, Emily Blair has proposed a somewhat different reading. Blair argues that Woolf ’s “struggle with the house,” as both the proper stuff of fiction and the proper place of the feminine subject, “becomes the field on which Woolf battles with the conflicting demands of femininity and artistry.”67 In comparing the writer and the hostess, Blair suggests, Woolf “substitutes feminine relationality and domestic artistry for masculine house building,” shifting attention from the “house as a material property” to the “social behaviors that the house contains.”68 I would argue though that what distinguishes the modern house in Woolf ’s writing is actually its failure to contain women and their gifts or “creative power”—a power that Woolf elsewhere suggests has “so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.”69 Unlike the hostesses of her literary forebears, Woolf ’s modern hostess is no Angel. Mrs. Brown’s character is not pure but rather gives rise to all kinds of “irrelevant and incongruous ideas” (CF 425). Nor is Woolf ’s hostess morally pure, at least not according to any patriarchal standards. Woolf makes this clear when she refers to another hostess at the beginning of her essay: Clytemnestra. Noting the shift in sympathy that accompanied the change in human character, she advises her audience to read Agamemnon and “see whether, in the process of time, your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra” (CF 422). Woolf herself was not only  reading but also translating Aeschylus’s Agamemnon during this period.70 In Aeschylus’s version of the tale, Clytemnestra plots with her lover, Aegisthus, and murders her husband, Agamemnon, King of Argos, upon his return from the 67  Emily Blair, Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), 42. See Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 224–50. Tamar Katz argues that feminine figures such as Mrs. Brown function as “modernism’s characteristic subjects” because of their “paradoxical doubleness”: “The female subject is central because she frames a series of contradictions central to modernism. She at once represents a decentered subject and the most securely enclosed interiority; the most thorough construction by historically specific places as well as the ability to transcend history. In this way she offers a figure for modernism’s contradictory aesthetic self-definition, its attempt to manage a relation to the history that produces it.” Tamar Katz, Impressionist Subjects, Gender, Interiority, and Modernist Fiction in England (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 3–4. 68 Blair, Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel, 50. 69  Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1957), 87. 70  For a reading of the influence of Aeschylus and Woolf ’s translation work on Mrs. Dalloway, see Emily Dalgarno, Virginia Woolf and the Visible World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 67–84. Curiously, Dalgarno does not make mention of Woolf ’s contemporaneous reference to Agamemnon in the essay.

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Trojan War in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter. James Heffernan suggests that Agamemnon’s murder is “perhaps the founding instance of treacherous hospitality in Western literature.”71 That Woolf identifies his murderer as a figure of sympathy suggests a familiar modernist reversal of values, whereby what is traditionally “bad” is made “good.” The villain (and not just the victim, as in the case of the frail Mrs. Brown) is transformed into the hero during a postwar moment when, as Woolf claims, the relations between husbands and wives “have shifted.”72 For Woolf, the timely hostess is the treacherous hostess—the one who, in spirit if not in deed, turns on her king and upsets the order of the patriarchal house. Yet we might also wonder just how timely such a subversive ethos of hospitality actually is. As in the case of Mauss’s “salutary revolution” and Keynes’s “end of laissez-faire,” the temporality of the historical change identified by Woolf is ambiguous. She begins her essay by claiming that human character and relations have already changed and that it is now the task of literature to develop new ­conventions adequate to capturing it. In suggesting that our sympathy with Clytemnestra will not be immediate but may unfold in time, however, she relegates this change to an uncertain future—presumably to a time when there are more novels about characters such as Mrs. Brown in circulation that might help to train us in the art of what she calls “character-reading” (CF 421). For Woolf, literature is a kind of equipment for living (to use Kenneth Burke’s term), giving us the skills to navigate “[o]ur marriages, our friendships . . . [and] our business” (CF 421). The implication, then, is that it may in fact be up to literature, and especially to us, its supposedly increasingly hospitable readers, to bring about the very change in human character and human relations—from the sexual (our ­marriages) to the social (our friendships) to the economic (our business)—that literature is supposed to reflect. Thus, the reader is not simply a guest to the writer-hostess but must also play the hostess, gradually coming to make room for characters who, like Mrs. Brown, may seem undeserving of our time, attention, and sympathy—or, indeed, like Clarissa Dalloway, whom Woolf feared might be “too stiff, too glittering & tinsely.”73 For her part, Clarissa serves as both a figure for the writer and a kind of hinge between what we might think of as two different styles of hospitality, between a dominant, yet dwindling utilitarian ethos of laissez-faire that reduces the common good to a narcissistic reflection of one’s own good and a new, more egalitarian ethos of gift exchange that could accommodate difference. In calling Clarissa a ­figure for the writer-hostess I do not mean to suggest that she ought to be read straightforwardly as a stand-in for Woolf. There remains a crucial tension between the code of manners that Clarissa self-consciously adopts and the novel’s own code 71  James A. W. Heffernan, Hospitality and Treachery in Western Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 6. 72  If they have shifted, it was not least because of significant gains in women’s rights, including the right to vote in 1918 and the right to enter the professions and earn a living following the Sex Discrimination Removal Act of 1919—though Woolf of course makes no mention of such landmark events in this particular essay. 73 Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, 272.

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of manners—between the breadth of Clarissa’s hospitality as “the perfect hostess” and the possibilities for hospitality opened up by the text of Mrs. Dalloway. At the same time, it is only by means of Clarissa’s consciousness—by means of the mixture of irrelevant and incongruous ideas to which she plays hostess—that we can begin to glimpse Mrs. Dalloway’s own ethos of hospitality. If Clarissa is a hinge, then it should be clear that she is a squeaky one, oscillating between disparate yet coeval systems of relation and ultimately giving way, despite herself, to the thought of a new common ground. The link between these two systems is the symbol—the polysemous figures that complete Clarissa and mediate her experience of the world while signifying in ways that inevitably escape her understanding. THE IMPERFECT HOSTESS The tension between these two different styles of hospitality comes into relief in the novel’s climax, when the storylines of Clarissa and Septimus converge and she finds her party suddenly interrupted by that most untimely of visitors—death. Seeking privacy in the “little room” off the party to absorb the news of Sir William’s patient’s suicide, Clarissa imagines in vivid detail what each moment of his experience must have been like: his defenestration (“Up had flashed the ground”), his impalement (“through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes”), and finally his death (“then a suffocation of blackness”). But still she is left with the question: “why had he done it?” (MD 183–4). As readers, we have seen Clarissa puzzle over a similar, though apparently far less weighty, question before. Reflecting on her husband’s and Peter’s criticisms of her parties earlier in the day, she imagines Peter asking “what’s the sense of your parties?” (MD 121). Her conclusion is paradoxical. While she thinks of her parties as a free gift (“An offering for the sake of an offering”) she suggests that they nevertheless serve a valuable social function in bringing people who would otherwise be scattered across London together: “she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine; to create” (MD 122). In combining and creating people anew, Clarissa’s party is not just an offering for its own sake but an offering to and for “life”—that is, for the lived feeling of connection that she casts as both the motivating cause and desired effect of her gift: “‘That’s what I do it for,’ she said, speaking aloud, to life” (MD 121). In dedicating her gift to life and addressing life directly, Clarissa anticipates Septimus’s own final speech act as he throws himself from the window and cries, “I’ll give it you!” (MD 149). This “you” at once refers to Dr. Holmes at the door, the old man staring at Septimus from across the way, and the humanity whose motives Septimus has come to distrust and whose vague, voracious desires he means to appease with his death: “Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings— what did they want?” (MD 149). What human beings seem to want is a gift— whether in the form of Clarissa’s gift to and for a humanized life or in the form of Septimus’s gift of his own life to and for a brutal humanity.

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In later groping to explain the unknown Septimus’s death, Clarissa turns to a symbol—and not just any symbol but rather a form of money. For the second time in the text, Clarissa wistfully remembers her own relatively minor sacrifice of a coin: “She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away” (MD 184). While initially sensitive to the incommensurability of her loss of a coin and Septimus’s loss of his life, Clarissa goes on not only to imagine their kinship but also, and even more chillingly, to appropriate his loss for her own enjoyment: “But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble” (MD 186). Hite notes that the especially unsettling lines here— “He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun”—were added by Woolf for the U.S. edition.74 Even without these lines, however, Clarissa’s gladness at an unknown veteran’s decision to “throw it away” is disconcerting. In this moment, Clarissa cheerfully plays the utilitarian Goddess of Conversion, transforming Septimus’s suicide into another mere toss of the shilling into the Serpentine, into a source of pleasure and a token of her own good fortune. The symbol of the shilling both is and is not like the other, more flowery figures we have seen. Like the hydrangeas Sally associates with Peter, the shilling enables the private thought of a connection between disparate individuals. It bridges apparent divisions. And yet, as a form of money, the shilling cannot help but further symbolize Clarissa’s class privilege relative to Septimus and the material security that allows her to experience his sacrifice as a good thing. In this respect, it has the opposite effect, reinforcing hierarchical social divisions. Indeed, as a form of British currency in particular, the shilling is much closer in kind to the novel’s various national and imperial symbols—including, in this scene, Big Ben, the sounding of which hurries Clarissa back to her party. As a ritualistic celebration of ruling-class authority, Clarissa’s party is also an imperial symbol of sorts. Like these other symbols of Englishness, the party helps to unify a social body, but the unity it creates comes at a cost—specifically, here, the cost of Septimus’s life, as well as the death-in-life for which he stands throughout the novel. The novel’s social system, as we have seen, rests on not only class division but also a number of ideological divisions, such as life versus death and sanity versus insanity. While the public spectacle of Septimus’s suicide and the surprise appearance of death at Clarissa’s party undermine these divisions, her revaluation of his death’s meaning and reassembly before heading back to her party mark a restoration of order. The shilling then registers the role of Clarissa and her parties in sustaining this order by traversing another division typical of the social system—namely, a gendered division between gift exchange and capitalist exchange such as we see in Peter’s and Clarissa’s conceptions of her gift as a frivolous, feminine offering. While the sacrifice of the shilling and her memory of it would seem to constitute just such an offering, they also owe their existence to, and are inseparable from, the material world of commerce. 74  Hite, “Tonal Cues and Uncertain Values,” 252.

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Whether or not Clarissa can fully make sense of the reason behind her seemingly senseless parties, the shilling betrays their complicity with the serious business of ­masculine political economy and her part in sustaining an imperial, patriarchal status quo. If “death comes to Clarissa’s party,” it is not because, as Froula suggests, “she can admit it”—because she is an exception among the Dalloway set—but rather because, despite her own suspicions of Sir William, the Bradshaws are her invited guests.75 Then again, Clarissa is exceptional. She is also unlike the other guests at her party. For although she plays Invisible Hand to the Dalloway set’s imperialism at home and abroad, her brief communion with Septimus also harbors the potential for another kind of gift—a form of connection that would neither reinforce preexisting divisions nor rest on the violent neutralization of difference. Imagining that Septimus’s suicide may have been a gesture of preservation rather than expenditure, Clarissa wonders of “this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged holding his treasure” (MD 184)? In posing this question (which goes unanswered but for the inferences of the reader) Clarissa in effect puts a symbol other than money at our disposal for conceptualizing the relation between Clarissa and Septimus. At stake here is not what one throws away but what one keeps, a gift whose value is not exhausted by use.76 What, then, is Clarissa’s “treasure”? As many critics have noted, the rhetoric of treasures echoes Clarissa’s language earlier in the day when she catalogs the debts she owes others for her happiness. An avowed atheist, Clarissa feels a duty to “repay in daily life to servants yes, to dogs and canaries, above all to Richard her husband, who was the foundation of it . . . one must pay back from this secret deposit of exquisite moments, she thought” (MD 29). The mystery that later surrounds the rationale behind Clarissa’s party is thoroughly missing here. The “life” for which she is grateful and to which she provisionally pledges her offering would appear to be her life, a life founded, which is also to say funded, by Richard. Far from being a free gift, her offering is a repayment to her 75 Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde, 102. The overtly political hostess in Mrs. Dalloway is of course Lady Bruton, who has just exited from the little room with the Prime Minister, whose ear she had been bending about emigration, before Clarissa enters. Whereas Heffernan takes Bruton at her word when the latter thinks she has “nothing in common” in Clarissa—Bruton is political, Clarissa apolitical—Blair is rightfully slower to separate the two (Heffernan, Hospitality and Treachery in Western Literature, 309). Blair argues that Bruton’s presence at Clarissa’s party and the news of Septimus’s death both serve to stress “how the hostess has actual, complex, and untidy connections with the effects of British militarism and masculine aggression” (Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel, 188). Still, Blair, too, suggests that Clarissa’s hospitality may be “‘purely feminine’ and disinterested,” particularly when contrasted with Lady Bruton’s lunches (197). 76  This is what the anthropologist C. A. Gregory, and Glenn Willmott following his lead, would call a “good” instead of a gift—a thing that, in Annette Weiner’s terms, one keeps while giving. Glenn Willmott, Modernist Goods: Primitivism, the Market, and the Gift (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 13–23. In his brief discussion of Woolf ’s writing, Willmott suggests that Clarissa’s parties, the parties in The Waves, and the pageant in Between the Acts all offer “epiphanic moments of communal ritual”: “The party . . . persists as the hollowed out shell of an aboriginal rite, an engine of spiritual creation disconnected from other social machines and left to produce for the departing individual, social effects that wither when the hour has passed” (194). It is not clear which social effects Willmott has in mind in the context of Mrs. Dalloway: is it the communion between Clarissa and Septimus (“the departing individual”?), between her party-goers, or both? On the party as a kind of rite, see also Morris Philipson, “Mrs. Dalloway, ‘What’s the Sense of Your Parties?’ ” Critical Inquiry 1.1 (1974): 123–48, and Henke, “Mrs. Dalloway: the Communion of Saints,” 125–47.

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husband and others for making her lifestyle possible: “her mother,” Elizabeth notes, “had breakfast in bed every day” (MD 131). And yet, this account, too, is promptly revised and Richard ousted from his temporary reign as the foundation of her well-being when Clarissa recalls another gift—the kiss she received from Sally, which she describes as “the most exquisite moment of her whole life” and thus the most valuable gem in her secret deposit: Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! She felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it—a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!  (MD 35–6)

It bears asking whether we ought to believe Clarissa when she describes the kiss as the most exquisite moment of her whole life. Not only has she just paid Richard a similar compliment but later, when temporarily secluded in the little room off the party, she again muses that her good fortune is “due to Richard; she had never been so happy” (MD 185). Arguably, however, we need not trust Clarissa’s judgment in order to put stock in her assessment of Sally’s kiss. For in representing the kiss as a “diamond,” Clarissa in effect puts in circulation a symbol that, by way of its repetition, supports her reading even as its rhetorical effects exceed her grasp. What initially corresponds to the “radiance” of a subversive jouissance is transformed by way of its next mention to the “radiancy” embodied by Clarissa as a domestic idol. Pondering her image in the mirror, Clarissa thinks: That was her self—pointed; dart-like; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting-point, a radiancy no doubt in some dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps; she had helped young people, who were grateful to her; had tried to be the same always, never showing a sign of all the other sides of her—faults, jealousies, vanities, suspicions, like this of Lady Bruton not asking her to lunch; which, she thought (combing her hair finally) is utterly base!  (MD 37)

The self that Clarissa projects to the world is as much an object of combination and creation as the gatherings she orchestrates. But can we be so certain that her effort is rewarded—that she is actually perceived “to be the same always, never showing a sign of all the other sides of her”? Instead of granting us any solid ground on which to answer this question, the text plays with indeterminacy. Any clear distinction between variegated fragments and unified whole, between private and public, breaks down—and not simply by dint of the fact that the two “sides” of Clarissa (that is to say, the one she exhibits and “all the others”) intermingle here as objects of reflection. It is not simply because the drive toward dispersal and the call for consolidation are conjoined in her consciousness that the division between inside and outside is called under suspicion. Rather, Clarissa’s two “sides” also converge and commingle formally, at the level of the sentence. To a degree, the text reinforces Clarissa’s perception of her self as “pointed; dart-like; definite”—the severity of the pauses introduced by the

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semi-colons and the trochaic thrust of each term rendering the prose as pointed, dart-like, and definite as the self she describes. And yet, her sense of fixity stands in tension with her proliferation of self-descriptions: instead of whittling the self to a point, the text yields three points as Clarissa imagines herself to be, when necessary, “one centre, one diamond, one woman.” The “centre,” we promptly notice, is off-center, having been displaced by the figure of the diamond. But this term, too, far from being fixed, gives way to an alternative, as if “one woman” constituted the telos of a dialectical progression, as if it were the best name for the self that she becomes—and in a way it is insofar as answering the call to be a self (such as when Hugh Whitbread hails her in the street) means taking up the mantle of gender. What, then, does it mean for this “one diamond”—which, we might further note, is not the one “diamond” in the text—to occupy the center of a decentered self ? As a pivot between past and present, this signifier “diamond” functions as a lynchpin, a zero symbol (to use Lévi-Strauss’s term) that, in the context of the novel, figures a tension between two notions of what it means to play the hostess. On the one hand, Clarissa occupies the center of a conventionally gendered network of gift-giving that appears senseless and superfluous and yet serves to support the social system and consolidate ruling-class authority. She is, in this mode, “the perfect hostess,” the benevolent mistress who resolves into one self. On the other hand, Clarissa plays hostess to a gift that renders resolution into a single self impossible even as it paradoxically constitutes the core of her identity. Of her offering, Clarissa thinks, “Nothing else had she of the slightest importance” (MD 122). This gift is not simply, as Peter would have it, a typical “woman’s gift” but her gift, the thing that makes her in particular who she is. And yet, insofar as the “present” of the kiss from Sally might be read as the cause of Clarissa’s own gift, it is not clear that her gift can in fact be called hers at all. The link between Sally’s and Clarissa’s gifts is further suggested by Clarissa’s final allusion to diamonds later in the day. After Peter’s surprise visit and a brief conversation with Richard, Clarissa feels “desperately unhappy,” but cannot determine the reason why, and so she begins to reflect, “[as] a person who has dropped some grain of pearl or diamond into the grass and parts the tall blades very carefully” (MD 120). Sorting through the list of possible reasons for her discontent, she finally realizes that both had criticized her for her parties: “That was it! Her parties!” (MD 121). Having found her diamond, so to speak, Clarissa turns to the perplexing question of why she throws her parties, without of course realizing that the reason behind them is already there, in her thoughts, in the form of the symbol, “diamond.” She already possesses it. Or, rather, it already possesses her. As the cause of her gift, the kiss from Sally poses a constant, if closeted, challenge to Clarissa’s “perfection” and, with it, the closure and coherence of the social system she supports. As Kathryn Simpson notes, “the spirit of Sally’s homoerotic gift re-emerges, circulates and works to energise a libidinal economy that repeatedly threatens to irrupt uncontrollably and to disturb dominant social, sexual, and political structures.”77 At the same time, we should be careful not to overestimate the practical 77  Kathryn Simpson, Gifts, Markets and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 69.

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threat posed by this alternative economy in the world of the novel. Insofar as Clarissa finds herself most consumed by the spirit of Sally’s gift when she is alone, in private, the primary structures disturbed by its persistent power are psychological. Moreover, as the initial force behind Clarissa’s parties—the “diamond” that enables Clarissa to become a “diamond” for others—Sally’s gift actually serves the opposite end, supporting a heteronormative status quo, though not without some loss, according to Simpson. The gift’s “essential qualities,” she argues, “are diluted and corrupted [in being] channelled into conventional social and sexual structures”; only the arrival of death at Clarissa’s party enables a “full realisation of the gift she risks losing completely.”78 My concern is that something else is lost in the course of this reading—namely, a sense of the role that language plays in both preserving this gift and charting its loss. In his own reading of the gift’s repression and redirection in Mrs. Dalloway, Joseph Boone emphasizes Woolf ’s attentiveness to language’s role in constituting the subject, arguing that “Woolf ’s most radical contribution to modernity’s breakdown of logocentric conceptions of sexuality, identity, and narrative” derives from her revelation of the self ’s “production within and as language.”79 I mean to suggest here that Woolf is equally attuned to the production of social connections in and as language. Clarissa inadvertently registers language’s connective power when she describes the treasure that Septimus preserved in death: “A thing there was that mattered; a thing wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter” (MD 184). Chatter would clearly seem to be the adversary of the “thing,” marring and masking the significance of an experience that evades language. And yet, the repetition of the term “chatter” invites us to ask if all “chatter” is created equal: is the “chatter” that wreathes the thing the same as the “chatter” of lies and corruption? While chatter corrupts, it also connects. After all, if there is a thing that binds Clarissa and Septimus it is above all chatter, albeit of a more literary kind—their shared references to Shakespeare, their respective conceptions of life as a “gift,” their retreats from the social world only to imagine a more generous form of communication. How then are we to distinguish between the “chatter” that corrupts and the “chatter” that connects— in other words, between these two varieties of figurative language, between “good” and “bad” forms of defacement? “THE OLD LADY OPPOSITE”: READING A N D T H E R I S K O F FA I LU R E It is, of course, only in the process of reading that any such distinctions can be drawn and the linguistic connections between Clarissa and Septimus can be realized. The reader is, as Gillian Beer and others have noted, the “medium of 78  Ibid. 82. 79  Joseph Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 192.

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connection.”80 If the reader is able to serve as a medium, it is insofar as Woolf ’s writing trains her audience in the workings of symbolic thought—most immediately via Clarissa’s transcendental theory and its subsequent linguistic turn. Thanks to Peter, we learn to spend time following symbolic threads and seeking out connections. “Character in Fiction” is also relevant here. In giving a sympathetic nod to Clytemnestra, Woolf teaches us to sympathize with Clarissa’s own fairly limited, private acts of treachery. Earlier I suggested that the ambiguity surrounding the question of how we ought to feel toward any given character in Mrs. Dalloway can give rise to—and even justify—mixed feelings, simultaneously pulling our sympathies in contrary directions. In “Character in Fiction,” Woolf suggests that we further understand sympathy as not only a reflection of what is right or wrong according to a literary work but also a reflection of what is possible under the conditions of the present—that is, our present, the present of reading. To suggest that Clarissa is deserving of sympathy is thus to suggest that the text renders her deserving of the thought it takes to grasp what she cannot: that she plays hostess to new possibilities for social relation even as the everyday conditions of her own life keep her from realizing these possibilities in a socially transformative way. Berman gives Clarissa somewhat more credit, arguing that Clarissa’s response to the old lady in the room opposite hers before returning to her party marks an ethical shift. Moreover, Berman describes this shift in terms that resonate with our earlier discussion of the nominal “end of laissez-faire” according to Keynes. Berman suggests that the old lady initially “stands in Clarissa’s mind . . . for a certain laissezfaire.”81 When Clarissa sees the woman across the way earlier in the day, she thinks, “here was one room; there another,” essentially adopting a morality of leaving the other alone (MD 127). Later at her party, however, when Clarissa suddenly discovers the old lady staring straight at her, Clarissa “for the first time extend[s] to the woman across the street an agency of her own and a demand to be recognized as a subject with a call for more than laissez-faire.”82 Clarissa experiences a “moment of ethical awareness”—a moment when she genuinely recognizes the old lady as a  singular other and the possibility of engaging “in a relationship of mutuality . . . becomes real.”83 Yet in suggesting that Clarissa’s newfound awareness enables her to “make sense of the importance of the death of Septimus and return to the world of her party,” Berman’s reading raises the question: just how “real” is this ­ethical possibility in Clarissa’s eyes at this moment?84 Even if we grant that Clarissa is personally changed, the “world of her party” has not changed in her absence. 80 Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground, 53. 81  Berman, “Ethical Folds,” 168. 82  Ibid. 169. 83  Ibid. Drawing a parallel between the novel and Freud’s account of female sexuality, Elizabeth Abel reads the former as a narrative of development “proceed[ing] from a pre-Oedipal female-centered natural world to the heterosexual male-dominated social world.” Clarissa’s final observation of the old woman opposite signals the final shift in this process: “Clarissa’s willingness to contemplate an emblem of age instead of savoring a memory of youth suggests a positive commitment to development—not to any particular course, but to the process of change itself.” Elizabeth Abel, “Narrative Structure(s) and Female Development: The Case of Mrs. Dalloway,” in Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Margaret Homans (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), 96, 110. 84  Berman, “Ethical Folds,” 169.

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How can we know that Clarissa’s return to this world is anything more than a return to the status quo? Arguably, the ruling-class world of her party also abides by an ethos that exceeds the bounds of laissez-faire—though not of the sort Berman has in mind. We see this excess in Sir William’s compulsion to convert the other— a compulsion that is mirrored in Clarissa’s assimilation of Septimus’s sacrifice for her own enjoyment and renewed appreciation of her own relatively privileged life. Thus, while Clarissa’s sudden feeling of exposure and vulnerability—her awareness of not just seeing but also being seen by the old lady opposite—opens onto the possibility of greater responsibility toward the other, the realization of this possibility ultimately belongs not to Clarissa but to us, her readers. If, as Woolf suggests in “Character in Fiction,” all novels begin with an old lady opposite, then this moment marks the beginning of our engagement with Mrs. Dalloway. It figures as a call to return—not with Clarissa to the world of her party but to her reflections throughout the day leading up to it and those unrealized connections among so many gifts that we, as readers, then enable to “become real.” In “How Should One Read a Book?” Woolf describes “a good reader” as one who “will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as he can.”85 In her penchant for giving thought to strangers such as Septimus, Clarissa not only serves as a partial figure for the writer-hostess but also sets an example for the good reader. Yet Clarissa can also be a bad reader—troublingly limited in her capacity to stretch her imagination beyond her “one little point of view” (MD 168). In mapping her mix of altruistic openness and egoistic closure to others, the novel allegorizes the writer’s own attempt to communicate with the reader, as well as the potential failure of that attempt. In other words, Mrs. Dalloway reflects on its own fate, modeling possibilities for its reception in the flow of gifts between different characters. The youthful bond between Clarissa and Sally would seem to provide an especially ideal model of communication. Of her feeling toward Sally, Clarissa recalls, “It was not like one’s feeling for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality which could only exist between women, between women just grown up” (MD 34). Notably, Clarissa’s feeling of disinterest—of exemption from the social, political, and economic ends served by heterosexual unions—is complicated by the fact that the two women at one point “meant to found a society to abolish private property” (MD 33). Their mutual affection turns out to be both disinterested with respect to patriarchal, capitalist society and interested with respect to a more communal, egalitarian society. The revolutionary potential of Clarissa’s feeling for Sally echoes in her recollection of the power of Sally’s kiss. In that moment, she further recalls, “The whole world might have turned upside down!” And yet, here we might ask: Might have? If the world might have turned upside down, why didn’t it? It would seem that realizing the potential at stake in the relationship between Clarissa and Sally demands something more—presumably something like an 85  Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, 398.

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actual society to abolish private property, but also something like the novel itself.86 These two things are not entirely unrelated insofar as the novel works to dispossess us, its readers, of our own one little point of view, above all by demonstrating that our thought is never strictly our own. But just as it would be a mistake to overestimate the actual power of Sally’s gift, so it would be a mistake to overestimate the sociopolitical ends to which the gift of the novel justifies being put. After all, Woolf will repeatedly take issue with the notion that either novels or people—the two being intimately linked in the context of Mrs. Dalloway—ought to impose themselves on others too much. Rather, in thinking with and through Clarissa, the novel tends to play her youthful socialism against her sincere, if sometimes dubious, devotion as an adult to protecting the “privacy of the soul.” Not only does the novel mourn the repression and redirection of lost gifts, as Simpson and Boone have stressed, but it also manifests anxiety about the interests served by the kindest of gestures and the violence that threatens to trump every good intention. This violence bubbles up in the “little glow of pleasure” that Peter feels as he watches the ambulance bearing Septimus pass, in Clarissa’s voyeurism and feeling of fun in the little room off the party, and especially in the questionable care of Doctors Holmes and Bradshaw (MD 151). In continuing to haunt characters many years later, gifts such as Sally’s kiss and Clarissa’s influence on Peter do not mark an escape from this violence so much as they register the possibility that, in giving pain, the gift may also give pleasure. In this vein, we might recall the force of the impression left by Mrs. Brown on Woolf in her essay. Contemptible though Mr. Smith undoubtedly is for the power he exerts over Mrs. Brown, she, too, exerts a certain power as her character “impos[es] itself ” on the novelist (CF 425). How then are we to differentiate between good and bad ways of making an impression? What is to keep a well-intended gift from having unintended consequences—or, indeed, from having no consequences? Woolf ’s primary fear in “Character in Fiction” is not that the Mrs. Browns of the world will have too great an impact on budding novelists but rather that she will continue to go unnoticed altogether—that she will be seen as having nothing of much importance to give. In the wake of the chance that e­ goism might eclipse 86  In “Character in Fiction,” Woolf wonders of the novels of Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy if they can be called books at all since they seem to require something else for their completion: “In order to complete them it seems necessary to do something—to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque” (CF 427). While thus critical of books that demand an extra-literary response, she does ascribe a certain sociopolitical, consciousness-raising potential to literature and the imaginative process that reading sets in motion. In her “Introductory Letter” to the writings of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, she notes the working women’s “hungry appetite” for literature and the ideas it can help to inspire: “A chance saying in a book would fire [a girl’s] imagination to dream of future cities where there were to be baths and kitchens and washhouses and art galleries and museums and parks. The minds of working women were humming and their imaginations were awake” (IL 235, 236). In this particular rendering of the guild’s formation, fictive though it may be, books very much inspired their readers not simply to join but to create a “society” and did so without diminishing their value as books—that is, as works of art. Arguably, there is more than a hint of Woolf ’s own political formation in this account. Anne Fernald argues that Woolf “experienced literature and feminist politics as continuous; more importantly, her political stance derives from her reading and remaking of the literary past.” Anne Fernald, Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 2.

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altruism—on either the side of the giver or the receiver—Mrs. Dalloway cannot help but harbor the suspicion that the gift of the novel, if not best ungiven, may be best enjoyed in private, as a treasure the reader keeps to herself. As the example of Mrs. Brown begins to suggest, this suspicion derives not only from Woolf ’s sense of the uncertainty that attends gifts in general but also from her sensitivity to the risk of failure—of never finding a hospitable outlet or audience— that has traditionally shadowed women’s gifts in particular. We can point to any number of unfulfilled or failed feminine gifts in her work. Consider, for example, the reddish-brown stocking that Mrs. Ramsay is knitting for the lighthouse keeper’s son and which she gives up completing once Mr. Ramsay reprovingly tells her, “You won’t finish that stocking tonight.”87 Or there is Miss La Trobe’s gift of the pageant in Between the Acts. Though she imagines proudly telling the world, “You have taken my gift!” her feeling of triumph promptly fades, leaving her feeling that her gift was a “failure” like others before it.88 Or, we might turn to Three Guineas, where Woolf anticipates from the outset that her epistolary attempt to answer the question of how to prevent war is “doomed to failure.”89 Amid the complex intersection of patriarchy, capitalism, and war, failure would seem to be an especially feminine fate. While Woolf imagines that her words may be doomed to failure, the guinea she pledges to the cause of preventing war promises to be somewhat more felicitous. The guinea, she suggests, is “a free gift, given without fear, without flattery, and without conditions.”90 Although the gift is free, the occasion of a woman having money to give freely to a man merits some celebration. Thus, she calls for the destruction of the word “feminist”—“a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day,” but which she happily proclaims “is now obsolete” because women have earned the most important right of all—that is, the right to earn a living.91 Bracketing the thorny question of the “vice” and “harm” supposedly perpetrated by the word “feminist,” I want to lay stress on the implicit contradiction here. The guinea is supposed to be a free gift and yet it calls for a counter-gift in the form of a celebratory sacrifice of a word. Not only do the free gift and reciprocal exchange end up looking oddly similar but monetary symbols and linguistic symbols, coins and words, also end up being equivalent, substitutable—but only if we take Woolf at her word when she claims that “feminist” is now obsolete. Only if we assume that granting women the right to earn a living means that women’s rights no longer need championing do the various equivalences in play here—between gifts and exchanges, between coins and words, between men and women—hold up. Woolf, however, resists letting us indulge such magical thinking when she woefully admits the continued relevance of words such as “Tyrant” and “Dictator.” These words “are not yet obsolete” but rather increasingly describe everyday affairs 87  Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1955), 123. 88  Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1969), 209. 89  Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 2006), 5.    90  Ibid. 120. 91  Ibid. On Woolf ’s proposal to burn the word “feminist,” among other things, in Three Guineas, see Naomi Black, Virginia Woolf as Feminist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 23–31.

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both at home and abroad.92 In this context, “feminists” are not obsolete so much as they are deserving of a name that better underscores the particular value of women’s gifts in the fight against fascism—“Outsiders.” What women, as Outsiders, have to give is neither exhausted by the free gift of the guinea, which comes with the right to earn a living, nor equivalent to that which men have to give. “Any help we can give you,” Woolf writes, “must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.”93 The Outsider’s help is not unlike the gift of the novel, Mrs. Dalloway: each is a gift of criticism—one of which draws its value from women’s traditional location outside the social system and the other of which draws its value from exploring the contradictions at the heart of that same system. Each seeks to influence the world by creating a home for historically devalued feminine gifts. Only when such gifts are sure to meet with an equally generous gift of thought will the time of feminism, whatever name it may go by, have passed. 92  Ibid. 122.

93  Ibid. 22.

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3 Jean Rhys and the Fiction of Failed Reciprocity In one of Jean Rhys’s early stories, “In the Rue de l’Arrivée,” the central character, Dorothy Dufresne, a typically down-and-out Rhys woman, is approached at night by a man in a shabby suit who asks if she is walking alone so late. She yells at him to go away, calling him an idiot, and braces for an insult from him in return. To her surprise, he simply looks at her with “curious, kindly, extremely intelligent eyes,” then walks away.1 Dorothy is genuinely touched and, certain that he is “more degraded than she was, more ignorant, more despised,” has a realization: “only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy” (CSS 54). Unhappiness is not hard to come by in Rhys’s fiction. Unlike, say, money or clout, it is one of the few things that both men and women, both the well-off and the poor, tend to have, from her 1927 short story collection, The Left Bank and Other Stories, to her 1966 post­ colonial masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea. While we might therefore expect to find a fair amount of sympathy in circulation as well, it tends to be in short supply. If anything, personal unhappiness tends to serve as an excuse for withholding sympathy from other people—especially from women like Dorothy. And, on those rare occasions when gifts of sympathy and kindness are forthcoming, they are rarely trustworthy. In Rhys’s fiction, gifts are seldom what they seem. Given our discussion of hospitality in Chapter  2, Rhys’s first novel, Quartet, ­published in 1928, is especially noteworthy in this regard. The book opens with an epigraph from a poem by Ralph Cheever Dunning cautioning the reader, “Beware / Of good Samaritans,” thus setting the stage for its protagonist Marya Zelli’s manipulation and victimization by her self-appointed saviors, the Heidlers, who insist on taking her in when her husband is arrested and imprisoned for theft.2 1  Jean Rhys, The Collected Short Stories (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992), 53. Hereafter cited in the text as CSS. 2  Jean Rhys, Quartet (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), 3. Sue Thomas notes that Dunning’s poem was originally published in Ford Madox Ford’s transatlantic review in 1924—a detail that reinforces readings of Quartet as a roman à clef about Rhys’s love triangle with Ford and his wife, Stella Bowen, while Rhys’s husband, Jean Lenglet, was in prison. Sue Thomas, “Adulterous liaisons: Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen and feminist reading.” Australian Humanities Review 22 (2001), http://www.­ australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-June-2001/thomas.html. Annette Gilson has argued that Ford is the archetype for all of the imperial men in Rhys’s fiction. Annette Gilson, “Internalizing Mastery: Jean, Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, and the Fiction of Autobiography,” Modern Fiction Studies 50.3 (Fall 2004): 632–56. For further readings of Quartet’s fictionalization of Rhys’s relationship with Ford, see Sheila Kineke, “ ‘Like a Hook Fits an Eye’: Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, and the Imperial Operations of Modernist Mentoring,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 16.2 (Autumn 1997): 281–301,

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As  if to register just how inhospitable her hosts’ hospitality is, the one time we actually find the word “hospitality” used in the novel it is not in reference to the Heidlers, at least not directly; rather, the narrator uses the word somewhat ironically to describe the hotel where Heidler puts Marya up after she refuses to keep living with him and Lois: “An atmosphere of departed and ephemeral loves hung about the bedroom like stale scent, for the hotel was one of unlimited hospitality, though quietly, discreetly, and not more so than most of its neighbours.”3 The hospitality in question here is that of the hospitality industry and of the sexual commerce that helps to sustain this industry in Rhys’s fiction. While such hospitality exceeds conventional ethical boundaries, it nevertheless fits squarely within economic boundaries.4 In other words, the hospitality of the hotel is anything but “unlimited”—a point further registered when Marya, newly alone and in desperate need of money, decides to sell her dresses to the hotel’s patronne. The latter is described as “sympathetic without for one moment allowing her sympathy to overflow a certain limit of business-like correctness.”5 The patronne gives—and even gives sympathy—but not to excess. The same cannot be said of Rhys’s heroines, whose behavior consistently overflows most every limit of business-like correctness. They give too much—no doubt most tragically in the case of Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, when she attempts to give her husband, the unnamed Rochester, an aphrodisiac only to end up ­poisoning him. Mauss famously argued that the gift always has the potential to become poison. Noting the fact that the German word gift means both “gift” and “poison,” he notes that, even in English, a gift is “always a charm . . . which permanently links those who partake and is always liable to turn against one of them if he would fail to honor the law.”6 For Mauss, the poisonous potential of the gift is the legacy of an earlier “law” of giving. In Wide Sargasso Sea this potential is not a relic of the past so much as it is a product of the modern age of imperialism and the conflict between different cultures and their respective laws of giving. Stranded between two sets of traditions, Antoinette breaks two laws in giving Rochester the potion. She breaks the Caribbean law of obeah, which “is not for béké ” and not for sale, though Antoinette still tries to bribe Christophine with her “ugly money.”7 Yet she also breaks “English law,” the law of coverture, which entitles Rochester, as Mary Lou Emery notes, to “all [his wife’s] property along with her person.”8 As Antoinette tells Christophine, “I am not rich now, I have no money of my own and Judith Kegan Gardiner, “Rhys Recalls Ford: Quartet and The Good Soldier,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 1.1 (Spring 1982): 67–81. 3 Rhys, Quartet, 111. 4  On the “moral panic” incited by figures such as Marya who “would have been classified as ‘amateur’ prostitutes” in early twentieth-century England, see Sue Thomas, The Worlding of Jean Rhys (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 67–93. 5 Rhys, Quartet, 37. 6  Mauss, “Gift, Gift,” in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, trans. Koen Decoster, ed. Alan D. Schrift (New York: Routledge, 1997), 30. 7  Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1982), 102, 107. 8 Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 100; Mary Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at “World’s End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990), 35.

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at all, everything I had belongs to him.”9 With nothing to lose, she risks giving Rochester the potion, only to be repaid by being made a captive in his house and home country. Her final gift in turn is a fiery act of both resistance and self-sacrifice to the literary and legal traditions she defied in not only giving too much but also giving in the wrong ways. This chapter argues that Rhys’s modernism, like Woolf’s modernism in Chapter 2, in part reads as a critical response to the traditional identification of woman with the properties of the gift—that is, to the essentialist myth of feminine generosity. But whereas Woolf repeatedly wrestled with the virtuous and “pure” Angel in the House, Rhys focuses her critical energy on the Angel’s promiscuous, primitivized doubles—from the unhappy women who haunt the fringes of public space in her early fiction to the white Creole Madwoman in Thornfield’s Attic. In Quartet, Heidler registers the identification of the bad woman with the gift when he characterizes Marya’s failure to play by his rules as a form of over-generosity. Whereas his wife, Lois, is a master at the social art of “keep[ing] up appearances,” Marya threatens to “give the whole show away,” exposing their collective indiscretions.10 Calling Marya “Savage” and “Bolshevist,” Heidler warns, “You’ll end up in Red Russia.”11 She reciprocates his taxonomic gesture, at least internally, twice thinking to herself that he is “like Queen Victoria.”12 Marya’s observation is surprisingly wry and even emasculating: if Lois is the good woman to her bad one then Heidler, it would seem, is the Good Woman par excellence—Victoria herself. Or, rather, as Woolf recognized in her critique of the Angel in the House, so here the good woman—that is, Lois— turns out to be little more than a reflection of the man she must please, the nominally bohemian but in fact eminently Victorian and bourgeois Heidler. Either way, the Heidlers’ imperialism is opposed to Marya’s “savage” tendency to give more than she ought—to lose control, to make a spectacle, to be too obviously unhappy. In the world of the novel, such excesses exclude her from enjoying any right to sympathy. Having internalized the Heidlers’ value system, Marya imagines Heidler telling her, “Nobody owes a fair deal to a prostitute. It isn’t done.”13 Looking at Rhys’s second novel, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, first published in England in 1930, I argue that her work counters the ideological norms that foreclose a reciprocal give and take of sympathy across lines of sexual and other differences and thus keep her poor female characters from getting a fair deal. More specifically, the novel takes aim at what Simon Jarvis refers to as the ideology of economism. Economism has become something of a catch-all term for what are in fact very different economic frameworks. In Jarvis’s usage, economism names a specific way of 9 Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 100. 10 Rhys, Quartet, 114. 11 Ibid. 12  Ibid, 115. Heidler is also like God in Marya’s eyes. In a particularly incisive and ironic reverie, Marya remembers Heidler taking her to a little church and imagines him boasting, “God’s a pal of mine . . . He probably looks rather like me, with cold eyes and fattish hands. I’m in His image or He’s in mine. It’s all one” (Quartet, 161). As Gardiner notes, the church where he arranged their tryst was, significantly, “the church of St. Julien le Pauvre, the patron saint of hospitality, especially to the poor, whose values Heidler has violated by seducing his impoverished guest.” In Quartet, she argues, “conventional religious sanctions reinforce class distinctions and the sexual double standard” (Gardiner, “Rhys Recalls Ford,” 75–6). 13 Rhys, Quartet, 161.

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thinking about—or, rather, refusing to think about—gifts and exchanges. Drawing on Mauss’s relativization of our own Western distinction between gifts and exchanges, Jarvis defines economism as the “dogma that the real and fundamental unit of social ontology is the self-interested exchange, and that all other ways of thinking about exchange are myths, fantasies, ideologies or irrelevancies.”14 Jarvis argues that, far from being confined to economics proper, this dogma constitutes a “lived theory of a perfected separation between gifts and exchange,” permeating various fields of reflection and everyday life—hence the conventional wisdom that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.15 This slogan serves—at least in theory, if not in practice—to purge the gift not simply from the realm of exchange but also from the realm of possibility. It performs what Jarvis refers to as a “prescriptive reduplication,” prohibiting something, in this case free gifts, that the slogan simultaneously insists doesn’t exist anyway.16 What interests me is the way in which Rhys aligns the ­division of gifts and exchanges with other ideological and institutional divisions, particularly a sexual division of labor, in order to debunk the notion that gifts are a uniquely female property (to use Lewis Hyde’s term). While focusing on Rhys’s affront to economism in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, which takes place in Paris and London, I mean to deepen our understanding of the economic dimensions of Rhys’s critique of bourgeois culture across her work, including those texts that take place in, and focus on characters from, the West Indies. In other words, Rhys’s critique of the gendered separation of gifts and exchanges is not only a mark of Rhys’s modernism, as I have suggested, but also a mark of her postcolonialism. In recent years, scholars have taken a more comparative approach to Rhys’s work, troubling an earlier tendency to classify her individual texts as either European/modernist or Caribbean/postcolonial. Mary Lou Emery, for example, argues that a tension between European and Caribbean cultural values runs throughout Rhys’s fiction and not just her two so-called West Indian novels, Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea. Shifting attention to the role of Caribbean culture in shaping Rhys’s representation of “sex/gender relations,” Emery argues that Rhys’s writing consistently challenges “European aesthetic, moral, and psychological standards.”17 Her protagonists are not to be seen as merely “passive or masochistic victims” but rather as “presenting an alternative to European concepts of character and identity”—albeit an alternative that is seldom if ever realized or recognized as having any value in their immediate sociohistorical contexts.18 For my part, I want to argue that economism is among the European discourses—and 14  Simon Jarvis, “The Gift in Theory,” Dionysus 27 (Dec. 1999): 204. 15  Ibid. 203. 16 Ibid. 17  Mary Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at “World’s End,” xii. On the relationship between Rhys’s modernism and postcolonialism, see also Sue Thomas, The Worlding of Jean Rhys, 1–7; Coral Ann Howells, Jean Rhys (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 1–6; Elaine Savory, Jean Rhys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), x–xvi; Carol Dell’Amico Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1–5; Leah Rosenberg, “Caribbean Models for Modernism in the Work of Claude McKay and Jean Rhys,” Modernism/modernity 11.2 (Apr. 2004): 219–38; J. Dillon Brown, “Textual Entanglement: Jean Rhys’s Critical Discourses,” Modern Fiction Studies 56.3 (Fall 2010): 568–90; and Sheila Kineke, “ ‘Like a Hook Fits an Eye.’ ” 18 Emery, Jean Rhys at “World’s End,” xii.

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perhaps even the fundamental discourse—that Rhys strategically and skillfully counters in her fiction. After Leaving Mr Mackenzie reveals gifts and exchanges to be (to use Mauss’s phrase once more) mixed up together in ways that the theory of their separation prohibits characters from fully acknowledging either to themselves or to others. Despite themselves, its characters present the possibility of alternative ways of not only thinking about but also enacting exchange. Rhys’s imagining of this alternative is, I think, indissociable from her postcolonial perspective and Caribbean background insofar as they inform her critique of European culture. But this alternative is not Caribbean per se. Indeed, I want to be very precise about what I am not arguing: I am not claiming that the tension between economism and other ways of thinking about exchange in Rhys’s fiction is tantamount to the tension between European cultural values and Caribbean cultural values identified by Emery. In other words, gift exchange is not particular to Caribbean culture and commercial exchange to European culture. The colonial periphery is not the true or proper home of the gift. To make this claim, I fear, would be to risk imposing the same kind of primitivist classification on Rhys’s fiction as Heidler imposes on Marya when he calls her a savage. Rather, in Rhys’s fiction, we find a tension between different economies and different modes of economic thought within European locales and within Caribbean locales. Gift economies and money economies are both always already on the scene, but the contours of their convergence and divergence shift in relation to particular places, periods, and perspectives. In the post-Emancipation Jamaican setting of Wide Sargasso Sea, for example, we find a tension between obeah law, on the one hand, and English laws and institutions such as coverture and slavery, on the other. While the tension between these laws suggests that the field of social possibilities is not entirely eclipsed by the capitalist marketplace, the text also insists that there is no “outside to the market,” particularly in the wake of colonialism and slavery.19 Early in the novel, Antoinette notes of the “black people [who] stood about in groups to jeer” at her white Creole mother, “especially after her riding clothes grew shabby”: “they notice clothes, they know about money.”20 By the same token, in Quartet, the Heidlers “know” about gifts. That is to say, they have ideas about what gifts are and ought to be based on their patriarchal value system, extending their generosity in ways that serve their interests while projecting a distinctly other, primitive form of expenditure and wastefulness onto Marya, their supposedly 19  See Glenn Willmott, “Modernism, Economics, Anthropology,” in Disciplining Modernism, ed. Pamela L. Caughie (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 199. Making a case for the usefulness of current anthropological concepts of the gift and the house for modernist studies, Willmott proclaims, “There is an outside to the market, and it is particularly important to articulate in modernism”; this “outside” is, moreover, “most visible in the work of contemporary anthropology.” It might be argued that the extra-literary space to which Christophine absconds when she disappears from the narrative of Wide Sargasso Sea constitutes an exception to my claim. Yet if we grant that Christophine is thus idealized as occupying a space outside the market, the fact that she has to venture “outside” the novel itself to inhabit this space is telling, crystallizing the status of Wide Sargasso Sea— and perhaps even the novel form in general—as a site of ideological struggle that is always caught up in, if also irreducible to, the market and its values. 20 Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 16.

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ungracious guest. The novel, however, works to demystify the way the Heidlers think and talk about gifts by demonstrating that their economistic distinction between savage excess and civilized exchange does not in fact hold up. Heidler’s determination to put Marya in her place not only indexes the ideological work required to maintain this distinction but also betrays his excessiveness. When he calls Marya “Savage” and “Bolshevist” she has already agreed to do as he wishes, making his gesture gratuitous. Indeed, it is as if, in calling her these names, Heidler were desperately uttering a taboo against some strange threat. As Antoinette tells Rochester in response to his insistence on calling her “Bertha,” so we might say of Heidler’s attempt to lay down the law with Marya: “that’s obeah too.”21 That, too, is a form of sorcery, one that is native to Europe but hardly restricted to it. Antoinette’s comparison of English law and obeah recalls the cross-cultural comparisons of early anthropologists such as James Frazer between Western thought and indigenous magic. In so doing, she undermines not only Rochester’s sense of cultural superiority but also our ability, as critics, to identify any particular set of cultural values in Rhys’s fiction—any laws of giving and ways of thinking about exchange—as purely Caribbean or purely European.22 For her part, Julia Martin, the penniless, British-born protagonist of After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, lacks the cultural exposure that allows for Antoinette’s comparativism. While Julia’s mother is Brazilian and Julia dreams of “some tropical country that she had never seen,” her “career of ups and downs had rubbed most of the hall-marks off her.”23 As Savory notes, Julia does nevertheless bear some 21  Ibid. 133. 22  In her important rereading of Rhys, Savory suggests that part of what attracted feminist critics to Rhys was that “she so early saw the connection between different kinds of hegemony,” though, as Savory quickly adds, “this is entirely because Rhys was of Caribbean origin” (Savory, Jean Rhys, 59). For Savory, identifying Rhys as a Caribbean writer does not mean eliding the tensions between different contexts, value systems, and perspectives in her life and her work. Rather, Savory argues that this “one identity can hold all of these contradictory facets . . . Like Caribbean culture, her writing is both metropolitan and anti-metropolitan, both colonial and anti-colonial, both racist and anti-racist, both conventional and subversive” (x). Thus, Caribbean culture cannot simply be opposed to English or European culture but already constitutes a site of cross-cultural contact and conflict. Rosenberg draws out another element of this cultural conflict, looking at the ways in which Caribbean writers who wanted to portray Caribbean folk culture had to contend with primitivist European representation of this culture. Leah Rosenberg, “Caribbean Models for Modernism in the Work of Claude McKay and Jean Rhys,” Modernism/modernity 11.2 (Apr. 2004): 219–38. Writers such as Rhys and Claude McKay, Rosenberg argues, responded by “redefin[ing] the central figures and dynamics of European modernist aesthetics”—most notably for Rosenberg the figure of the artist’s model and the hierarchical, sexualized space of the artist’s studio (222). Rosenberg argues that, while Rhys reveals the status of “the primitive as a European construction,” she also creates her own form of primitivism—a “new and empowering modernist primitivism” that forges temporary, provisional alliances between “disparate race, class, and religious groups” (231–2). For Rosenberg, as for Savory, Rhys’s Caribbean aesthetic makes room for indigenous and “folk” experiences as well as the fraught figures and spaces of Western Europe between the two world wars. 23  Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), 12, 14. Hereafter cited in the text as ALMM. The edition of the novel cited here includes a full point after “Mr” on the book’s cover and throughout the front matter, but omits it throughout the text itself, preserving the book’s original punctuation (e.g., “Mr Mackenzie”). In keeping with this edition, I have included the point when providing the full reference in this note, on the Abbreviations page, and in the Bibliography. When simply referring to the novel, however, I have opted to follow the original, writing After Leaving Mr Mackenzie without the point.

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marks of “foreignness, of racial mixture.”24 Her hair “stood out rather wildly round her head,” and her hands had “very long fingers, like the hands of an oriental” (ALMM 13). Still, I tend to agree with Emery that the Caribbean subtext suggested by these and other elements of the text “do not give [Julia] an alternative” to her repetitive experience of frustration and failure within the commodified world of the novel.25 This does not mean, however, that the novel offers no alternative. Like Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight, Julia is essentially stuck in “what they call an impasse.”26 The novel starts on a grim note and ends on an even grimmer one. And yet, it is here, in this impasse, that Rhys finds an alternative, another way of thinking about exchange—one that is immanent to European market society and which might open onto the possibility of a more reciprocal, if necessarily unhappy, give and take of sympathy. MASCULINE CONTRACT VERSUS FEMININE CHARITY Rhys’s approach to the question of the gift differs from the approaches of the other authors in this study in ways that can arguably be linked to not only her Caribbean background but also her socioeconomic status and relative isolation. In an oft-cited line, Shari Benstock calls Rhys an “outsider among outsiders” during her time in Paris in the 1920s.27 Indeed, she seems to be the only expatriate writer not mentioned in Sylvia Beach’s modernist Who’s Who, Shakespeare & Company. Like her heroines, Rhys often depended on men for money to get by—though I do not mean to suggest that her fiction ought simply to be read autobiographically. Rather, as Emery argues of Voyage in the Dark, Rhys’s portraits of female poverty and non-normative sexuality exemplify a broader post-World War I “breakdown in traditional patterns of kinship based on the exchange of women . . . Rhys’s novels portray single women, without family ties, acting as individuals in the public world”—albeit rather unsuccessfully, hence the discomfort of many of her readers.28 At the same time, 24 Savory, Jean Rhys, 74. 25 Emery, Jean Rhys at “World’s End,” 124. 26 Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 35. On the figure of the impasse in Good Morning, Midnight, see Rachel Bowlby, “The Impasse: Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight,” in Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1992), 35–60. 27  Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), 448. Benstock further notes that Rhys was “neither part of the cafe crowd nor an occasional visitor to Sylvia Beach’s bookshop. Rhys lived outside the bounds of society, outside the bounds of even so loosely constructed and open a society as that of the Left Bank” (448). Benstock is mistaken on one count: Rhys did visit Beach’s bookshop. In her Black Exercise Book, Rhys notes going to find “a book on Psycho-analysis” and being dismayed by what she found. Critics agree that the book she found was one of Freud’s, though there are different takes on which work in particular prompted her dismay. While Howells avers that it was Freud’s essay, “Femininity,” Thomas concludes that it was “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement” (Howells, Jean Rhys, 17; Thomas, The Worlding of Jean Rhys, 28). 28 Emery, Jean Rhys at “World’s End,” 91–2. As Molly Hite argues, Rhys’s female protagonists are not protagonists in the conventional sense insofar as they do not demonstrate the free will or individual efficacy we tend to expect of central characters. Drawing on E. M. Forster’s distinction between “round” and “flat” characters, Hite argues that “one of Rhys’s most powerful insights is that categories of literary and social determination interpenetrate . . . [T]he belief in individual efficacy is such an

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her novels make clear that, while traditional kinship has faltered, the exchange of women on which kinship was once based continues to function. Far from disappearing, the “traffic in women” seems, as Gayle Rubin argues in her landmark analysis of the political economy of sex, “only to become more pronounced and commercialized in more ‘civilized’ societies.”29 Indeed, as we saw in Chapter  2, some feminist anthropologists have gone so far as to suggest that Lévi-Strauss’s structural theory of the exchange of women was always, in some respects, a theory of so-called civilized societies. As we will further see in our discussion of H.D. in Chapter 5, Rubin’s sense of the relevance of Lévi-Strauss’s theory to capitalist modernity has changed over time. Bracketing for now the nuances of Rubin’s and other feminist readings of Lévi-Strauss, I simply want to stress the institutional position, or, indeed, non-position, of Rhys herself and of Rhys’s heroines in her early fiction, including Julia in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie: as women adrift in a post-kinship Western world, they make their home not in the traditional house but rather on the unglamorous margins of the market—and do so without much if any protection or support by the state. This last point is important given our discussion of Mauss’s eagerness to see proof of a new morality in the rise of the nascent welfare state. There is nothing in Rhys’s early life or early fiction to indicate the existence or even the promise of a social safety net such as Mauss divined—in part because his vision of a “salutary revolution” was fairly premature in 1925 (G 68).30 Yet, it is also telling that, in The Gift, Mauss focuses on what have since come to be known as contributory programs—programs such as Social Security and unemployment that favor the worker who, in Mauss’s words, “has given his life and his labour” (G 67). In their critique of the two-track welfare system consolidated in the U.S. by the 1930s New Deal (about which we will have much more to say in Chapter 4 as well), Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon argue that first-track, contributory programs, or what are often called entitlements, “were constructed to create the misleading appearance that beneficiaries merely got back what they put in.”31 These programs give the illusion of repayment, of a reciprocal exchange between (white, male) workers and the state—an exchange from which women and people of color were systematically excluded. By contrast, second-track public assistance programs “created the important component of the novel’s inherited value system that it can condition responses even of readers [e.g., feminist readers] trained in political analysis.” Molly Hite, The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 27–8. See Hite, 19–22, for an incisive critique of overly autobiographical readings of Rhys’s fiction that end up treating Rhys as if she were “unable to control the form and the ideology of her own text” at the expense of recognizing her innovation, technique, and “deliberate challenge to the value presuppositions of the dominant culture” (22). 29  Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 175. 30  In a related vein, Emery suggests that the mere “facts” of Rhys’s life—poverty, illness, alcohol dependence, three marriages and the birth of two children, one of whom died during the first few weeks of his life—point to “social forces that denied unmarried women livelihoods and respectability” (Jean Rhys at “World’s End,” 10). 31  Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency,’ ” in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 133.

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appearance that claimants were getting something for nothing”—a free lunch.32 Thus, whereas Mauss suggested that the emergence of the welfare state marked the dissipation of a strict distinction between gift and exchange, Fraser and Gordon argue that this distinction persisted under the two-track welfare system: entitlements were fair exchanges while public aid, to which the term “welfare” is most commonly applied, were free gifts. Moreover, this distinction served as a source of moralization in ways that were clearly gendered and racialized: while entitlements were designed to preserve the honor of their white male recipients, public assistance carried—and still carries—the stigma of dependency. Fraser and Gordon are ultimately most concerned with the U.S. welfare state. Nevertheless, their genealogy of the gendered opposition of gifts and exchanges in England and the U.S. since the eighteenth century helps to establish the discursive context within and against which Rhys was writing. Taking English contract theory and law as their starting point, Fraser and Gordon characterize this opposition as one between charity and contract, according to which contractual relationships are cast as “voluntary, temporary, and limited arrangements.”33 The representative parties who engage in these arrangements are individuals—that is, beings who “exist prior to their relationships” and who enter into them freely on the basis of their self-interest.34 While modeled on commerce, contract extended, in theory and in practice, beyond the field of economic exchange proper and “underlay the whole of modern civil society” with one crucial exception—the feminized domestic sphere, where “resources appeared to flow with sentiment wholly outside the circuit of exchange.”35 Charity then occupied a third category with respect to the public sphere of contract and the private sphere of kinship: Any interactions that seemed neither contractual nor familial now appeared to be ­unilateral and entirely voluntary, entailing neither entitlements nor responsibilities. Thus, the hegemony of contract helped to generate a specifically modern conception of ‘charity’ as its complementary other. Charity came to appear a pure, unilateral gift, on which the recipient had no claim and for which the donor had no obligation. Thus, whereas contract connoted equal exchange, mutual benefit, self-interest, rationality, and masculinity, charity took on contrasting connotations of inequality, unilateral gift-giving, altruism, sentiment, and, at times, femininity.36

As a free gift, charity figured as both the radical other of contract and the public face of the private flow of feminine gifts that sustained family life. 32  Ibid. 133. 33  Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “Contract versus Charity: Why Is There No Social Citizenship in the United States?” Socialist Review 22 (1992): 52. 34  Ibid. Fraser and Gordon take care to note that, despite the individualist rhetoric of contract ­theory, “civil rights were not at first rights of ‘individuals’ ” but of “male property owners and family heads” (56). The point is important because it underscores the interdependence of civil citizenship, on the one hand, and coverture and slavery, on the other. In other words, coverture and slavery were not, as others have argued, a vestige of earlier forms of subjection that persisted under modernity despite the latter’s valorization of personal freedoms; rather, each was a “modern phenomenon that helped constitute civil citizenship” (54). 35  Ibid. 52, 58. 36  Ibid. 59.

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Rhys’s early fiction offers a portrait of the paradoxical public status of women navigating between contractual relations that provide them with little to no cover and informal flows of charity that just barely keep them afloat. Consider, for instance, another one of her early short stories, “Discourse of a Lady Standing a Dinner to a Down-and-Out Friend.” The lady of the title performs concern and promises to connect her friend with a woman looking for “a mother’s help,” all the while thinking it “dreadful to try to help poor people. They will not help themselves” (CSS 45–6). As a waged form of affective labor, mother’s help troubles the distinction between gift and exchange while nevertheless reinforcing a gendered separation of spheres and thus the legitimacy of certain kinds of feminine generosity over others—namely, the maternal kind. For her part, the lady offers charity yet takes comfort in knowing that her friend’s misfortune is “her own fault,” a pathological symptom of her own moral failing and psychological imbalance (CSS 46). Channeling the same medical discourse that deified Proportion and dogged Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway (not to mention Woolf herself ), the lady complacently thinks to herself, “When people lack Balance there’s really nothing to be done” (CSS 46). There are no such well-off ladies bestowing even grudging charity on Julia Martin in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie. As Rhys’s biographer, Carole Angier, rightly observes, in this novel, “money belongs to men,” while the “women, accordingly, are poor.”37 But while the haves and have-nots are clearly divided along gender lines, Rhys’s poor women and well-to-do men do have something in common. All are like Julia in harboring a “longing for some show of affection, or at any rate of interest” (ALMM 73). Affection and interest are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Or, rather, more precisely, the longing for one does not exclude the longing for another. Both affection and interest are objects of the same persistent desire for a gift—for some form of attention and engagement that cannot simply be traded for money. Fraser and Gordon suggest that “the contract-versus-charity opposition shrouded the very possibility of noncontractual reciprocity, rendering invisible a whole range of popular practices” by “appear[ing] to exhaust all social possibilities.”38 Their point, of course, much like Jarvis’s in his related critique of economism, is that such possibilities were never actually exhausted but rather obscured and delegitimized. Reading After Leaving Mr Mackenzie in the context of a range of feminist, anthropological, deconstructive, and psychoanalytic critiques of contract, I want to argue that the novel makes visible the existence of, and further potential for, a far more complex field of social possibilities—of reciprocal practices that are neither purely affectionate nor purely interested, neither purely charitable nor purely contractual. Julia’s own longing is at base a longing for reciprocity, a longing not only to get something, such as affection or interest, but also to give something—a “longing to explain herself ” (ALMM 48). She wants to give a credible explanation of her life in exchange for which she might receive understanding or sympathy, but her explanation repeatedly falls on deaf ears. As Howells argues, although Julia “makes repeated attempts to tell the story of her life . . . nobody is willing to listen, 37  Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 1990), 243. 38  Fraser and Gordon, “Contract versus Charity,” 59, 47.

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and if they are forced to hear they disbelieve and distrust her.”39 While Howells and others have focused on the gender norms that make women like Julia seem undeserving of belief and trust in the eyes of others, I focus on the way these norms intersect with economic norms, with commonplace ideas about contract and ­charity. In shifting between the perspectives of Julia and other characters, the novel reveals the degree to which they in fact share her desire for a gift that exceeds the bounds of commerce. As in Woolf ’s writing, so in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, the feminine subject proves to be representative of subjectivity in general. Specifically here, however, it is the poor feminine subject who occupies an exemplary, if not exactly privileged, posture. Materially and psychologically dispossessed, Julia is dependent on others for charity at a moment when the institutional forms and ideological meanings of charity are in flux. Notably, we find the language of charity in another one of Rhys’s early stories— “In a Café.” In this text, an “extraordinarily vulgar” balladeer temporarily disrupts the calm of a Parisian café with a song about a grue, or tart, whose “charity,” “warm-heartedness,” and “practical sympathy” are repaid with “abominable ingratitude” when her ex-lover passes her in the street, “reduced to the uttermost misery,” and shuns her (CSS 14). The balladeer’s vulgarity, the accompanying pianist’s ­“imitation of passion,” and French literary tradition all lend the rhetoric of charity more than a slight note of irony (CSS 14). Given the story’s Parisian setting, we might recall the charité of the figure of the poet in Baudelaire’s prose poem, “Les foules,” or “Crowds,” whom the speaker describes as engaging in “that holy prostitution of the soul which gives itself totally, poetry and charity, to the unexpected which appears, to the unknown which passes by.”40 Like the “charité which prostitutes claim for themselves,” the charity of the grue is a total gift of self—a gift that is erotic in nature and its repayment monetary. 41 At the same time, the audience’s discomfort during the song—the women “looked into their mirrors” while the men “drank up their beers thirstily and looked sideways”—suggests that the balladeer’s language is also to be taken at face value (CSS 14). The grue’s charity is not purely commercial, even though she presumably received money from the man for “the numberless times on which she had ministered to his necessities” (CSS 14). But neither is her charity a free gift, even though, practically speaking, it goes unreciprocated. Rather, as the guilty identification of the audience with the ex-lover and their applause upon the song’s conclusion imply, the grue is in fact still owed something—namely, a return gift of warm-hearted, sympathetic charity. If grues are “the sellers of illusion,” as the narrator of “In a Café” suggests, then After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is a novel about what becomes of a grue when she can no longer find a buyer (CSS 14). Now in her mid-30s, Julia is “at a point in her life when she is aging out of successful objecthood,” when the charms that have long 39 Howells, Jean Rhys, 58. 40 Baudelaire, The Parisian Prowler: Le Spleen de Paris. Petits Poèmes en prose, 2nd ed., trans. Edward K. Kaplan (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 21. 41  Walter Benjamin, “Paris of the Second Empire,” in Selected Writings, 1938–1940, vol. 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 32.

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been her livelihood and her determination to capitalize on what remains of them are fading.42 Her break-up with Mackenzie “destroyed some necessary illusions about herself which enabled her to live her curious existence with a certain amount of courage and audacity” (ALMM 31). Primary among these illusions, I want to suggest, is the idea that gift and exchange, charity and contract, can be strictly separated. This idea is not unique to Julia. Rather, the novel treats her disillusionment as an occasion to reveal just how commonplace her illusions are and the way in which, despite these illusions, charity and contract are confounded and, indeed, are so for everybody. In exposing the surprising similarities between Julia and those individuals nominally most opposed to her—that is, her male donors—Mackenzie begins to suggest that a more reciprocal exchange of sympathy is possible in the world of the novel even if this possibility remains unavailable and unimaginable to its heroine. F O R L OV E O R M O N E Y: M A C K E N Z I E ’ S T WO L E G A C I E S As its title suggests, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie begins after the affair between Julia and the well-to-do Mackenzie has come to an end.43 We find Julia fatigued and living in a cheap Parisian hotel where she has taken refuge and where she is determined to stay “until the sore and cringing feeling, which was the legacy of Mr Mackenzie, had departed” (ALMM 11). This oppressive feeling is not the only legacy with which he has left her, for we promptly learn that her “monotonous life” is being financed by none other than Mackenzie, who has been sending her weekly cheques for 300 francs through his lawyer Maître Legros for the six months since their split (ALMM 12). The Tuesday on which the narrative opens, Julia receives a cheque for 1,500 francs in place of her usual pittance along with a letter from Legros informing her that “from this date, the weekly allowance will be discontinued ” (ALMM 18, emphasis in original). For Julia, the impersonal send-off has both economic and emotional consequences. As the last installment of her pension, it means that she will have to go back on the market and resume her habit of going “from man to man” (ALMM 26). Yet it also gives her a feeling of “dreary and abject humiliation” (ALMM 20). Wounded, Julia seeks out Mackenzie to reciprocate the blow dealt to her “sense of well-being” and to “have it out with him,” whatever the cost (ALMM 18, 22). Although certain that the confrontation will “end badly for 42 Hite, The Other Side of the Story, 42. 43 As many critics have noted, it therefore begins after the point where novels about financially dependent, sexually available women like Julia traditionally end—at a time when, by the moral standards that shape the novel and tend to steer heroines toward either marriage or death, she should be consigned to the latter. Hite notes that the “action in effect begins after the romance plot has concluded” (The Other Side of the Story, 42), while Emery remarks, “Romance has already failed the female protagonist in this novel” (Jean Rhys at “World’s End,” 122). Davidson suggests that the novel “opens with a half-reversal of the usual fate of the usual demimondaine protagonist. Instead of ending with this foreordained victim seduced and abandoned, we commence that way.” Arnold E. Davidson, “The Art and Economics of Destitution in Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr Mackenzie,” Studies in the Novel 16.2 (Summer 1984): 216.

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her,” she follows him to the Restaurant Albert—the very restaurant where he initially broke off their affair and promised to pay her a weekly sum (ALMM 22). Finding Mackenzie, Julia returns the cheque and then, remembering her intention to hurt him as she had been hurt, slaps his cheek with her glove. The retribution falls woefully short. Mackenzie does not blink, and, although Julia holds her own in the staring contest that ensues, she leaves the restaurant defeated, with “a mournful and beaten expression” in her eyes (ALMM 34). The display attracts the attention of George Horsfield, who tracks Julia down and makes her acquaintance, thereby beginning a long night of what would seem like a game of hard-to-get were it not for her less than coquettish inertia. By the end of the night and against his better judgment, Horsfield has taken the place left vacant by Mackenzie, giving Julia 1,500 francs, the precise amount she earlier returned. Horsfield encourages Julia to take a trip to her native London and the family she long ago deserted—including her sister and her dying mother—and to look him up while there. True to form, she does, sparking a courtship that lasts for the duration of her trip and in which neither party is especially eager to engage. The ten-day stay and the death of Julia’s mother occupy the core of the narrative, which ends shortly after Julia’s return to Paris and to the same cheap hotel on the Quai des Grands Augustins. Thus, the novel ends where it began, but with the welfare of its heroine even less assured than at its opening. In the concluding chapter, Julia passes Mackenzie in the street. In a reversal of their earlier meeting, this time it is he who follows her, determined to prove not to Julia, but to himself that he is not “a bad sort” (ALMM 190). Wishing he had an audience to witness his gesture of good will and confirm his virtuous self-image, he offers to buy her a drink. She accepts and asks for a loan to boot; though shocked, he strips a couple of bills from his “bundle of small change” for himself, and gives the rest to her before buying her a second, final drink and making a quick exit (ALMM 191). The chapter is fittingly yet ambiguously entitled “Last.” Whether it is the last of the commerce between Julia and Mackenzie or, more chillingly, the last of Julia we cannot be certain. Overall, the narrative consists of a series of exchanges—exchanges between Julia and a number of financially secure men; between Julia and her sister, Norah; between Julia and various strangers, all unhesitatingly quick to cast judgment and sum her up; and even, in some sense, between Julia and her catatonic mother, who briefly seems to meet Julia’s gaze “with recognition and surprise and anger” when Julia visits her deathbed (ALMM 100). While these exchanges are driven by a mixture of a need for money and a longing for something more on Julia’s part, there also remains a tension between money economies and gift economies. Julia feels this tension even if she cannot conceptualize it. Indeed, if the slim donations of time and money she manages to garner fail to assuage her hunger for a gift, it also seems safe to say that Julia would not know a gift other than money if she were to receive one. When Norah gives Julia a ring that belonged to their mother after the latter’s funeral because, as Norah tells Julia, “She’d have liked you to have something,” Julia thanks her with characteristic automaticity and indifference (ALMM 133).

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Though Julia takes offense when Norah tells her not to pawn it, it is not clear whether the ring has any personal value for Julia and it seems entirely likely that she will pawn it anyway. Thus, in suggesting that Julia is left longing for a gift she never receives, I do not mean to idealize her or to claim that others alone are to blame for her dissatisfaction. Critics have routinely—and rightly—pointed out the difficulty of sympathizing with Julia. To some degree, this difficulty stems from the fact that she is for the reader, as she is for Mackenzie, “at once too obvious and too obscure” (ALMM 26). Rhys strategically omits Julia’s perspective in key scenes, filtering entire exchanges through the perspectives of men to whom she seems thoroughly clichéd and thoroughly indecipherable so that we are forced to agree with Horsfield that “one can never know what the woman is really feeling” (ALMM 153). Of course, one might make the counterpoint that Horsfield could actually ask Julia what she’s feeling. In lieu of such an unlikely scenario, it is no surprise that some feminist readers have seen Julia’s quest for understanding from exchanges that seem destined to disappoint her as a mark of her complicity with a sexist status quo. Yet it is precisely her recalcitrance and her lack of self-reflection—or, at least, the partial obscurity of her reflections to us—that render After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, of all Rhys’s novels, such a fitting focus here. Other Rhys heroines (most notably Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight) reflect critically on the structural function they serve as scapegoats, indispensable to the social order because they are expendable. By contrast, Julia oscillates between clinging to the illusions that have made her paradoxical posture sufferable and lashing out in rage at her unfair lot. In so doing, she makes manifest the contradictions of a world that expects women in particular to give more than they get on the basis of a gendered division between gift economies and money economies that repeatedly breaks down. While critics have offered both more and less sympathetic readings of Julia, they tend to take for granted the opposition between gift economies and money economies at which the novel takes aim.44 Arnold Davidson, for example, argues that 44  Critics have primarily offered less sympathetic readings of Julia—if they speak of her or the novel much at all. Betsy Berry suggests that, of Rhys’s novels, Mackenzie is the “most resistant to the blandishments of critical attention” (Betsy Berry, “ ‘Between Dog and Wolf ’: Jean Rhys’s Version of Naturalism in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie,” Studies in the Novel 27.4 [Winter 1995]: 544). Other critics suggest why. Howells, for example, calls it the “most forlorn of all Rhys’s novels,” which is saying something (Howells, Jean Rhys, 53). Gregg calls it her “most enigmatic work” (Veronica Marie Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole [Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995], 146). Emery similarly suggests, “Of all Rhys’s novels, the narrative stance in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie remains most distant from its protagonist” (Emery, Jean Rhys at “World’s End,” 131). In her introduction to The Early Novels, Diana Athill argues that this distance translates into an “unsparing gaze”; Mackenzie, she claims, is the “most severe” of Rhys’s novels in its indictment of its heroine: “the reader who judges Julia severely is not doing so against the will of Jean Rhys” (Diana Athill, introduction to Jean Rhys: The Early Novels [London: André Deutsch, 1984], 11–12). Hite takes issue with Athill’s claim, while nevertheless referring to Julia as the “most thoroughly unsettling of the Rhys women” (Hite, The Other Side of the Story, 42). If Rhys’s novels invite comparisons to one another due to their similarities, then Mackenzie and its heroine tend to attract superlatives—claims that they are the most this or that. I would argue that these claims are a reflection of Julia’s excessiveness. It is as if, in being most this

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these two economies are mutually exclusive, scolding Julia and the men who give her money (“her customers”) for pretending that their relations are “not primarily commercial.”45 The fact that Julia is “both and neither” a “mercenary” and a “romantic” is an index of her personal failure, not the falsity of the division between commercial and noncommercial relations in Davidson’s eyes.46 He also wonders, however, if Julia’s confusion of love and money might be due to her environment: “After all, money is, in Julia’s world, the best proof of concern.”47 The implication, then, is that “Julia’s world” rather than Julia might be to blame and that this world is primary commercial. In Arnoldson’s reading, as in Betsy Berry’s, “money is all”— but is it?48 Julia’s confusion, I argue, derives not from the fact that money is the best proof of concern but rather from the fact that money is supposed to be the best proof of concern and yet inevitably comes up short. In Chapter 2 we noted the growing body of criticism that reads Woolf ’s fiction in light of the early twentieth-century rise of consumerism. Rhys’s fiction has also been read in this light. Alissa Karl, for example, attributes Julia’s “unfulfillable desires” to “consumer capitalism’s inability to eradicate the longings it creates.”49 While generally agreeing with Karl’s claim that Mackenzie is concerned with “who gets control inside the marketplace of desire,” I also want to insist that this marketplace is not entirely explained by the logic of consumerism.50 If the modern marketplace fails to eradicate the longings it creates—if money fails to count as a gift even as gifts such as the ring fail to count as more than money—in the end it is only partially commercial. It is also made up of and sustained by gifts, especially, as we will see, unreciprocated feminine gifts. In overlooking the gap between the illusory totalization of commerce and the text’s testimony to the existence of other or that, the novel verges, as Julia does in the eyes of her donors, on demanding too much—too much forgiveness, too much patience, too much thought and time. An early reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement certainly suggests as much when he pointedly declares the novel to be a “waste of talent” despite Rhys’s admirable “economy of language” (review of After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, by Jean Rhys, Times Literary Supplement, 5 March 1931: 180). 45  Davidson, “The Art and Economics of Destitution,” 218. 46  Ibid. 217. 47  Ibid. 224. 48  Berry locates the novel within a French naturalistic literary tradition whereby “the only ­control . . . is economic determinism”: “money is all, and everything else—power, love, exquisite clothes and other luxury goods—follows” (Berry, “ ‘Between Dog and Wolf,’ ” 556, 555). 49  Alissa G. Karl, Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen (New York: Routledge, 2009), 34. Karl further suggests that “any specific desires that Julia may have are deferred by her continual fixation on money itself ” (40). 50  Ibid. 40–1. In a more recent piece, Karl also reads Rhys through a consumerist frame, while pointing to the limitations of this frame, arguing that Voyage in the Dark complicates a Keynesian model of the economic nation: “Like the economics of her day, Rhys’s novelistic form is a technology of national representation, albeit one that contests national quantification that would exclude or oversimplify imperial history and colonial subjectivity” (Alissa G. Karl, “Rhys, Keynes, and the Modern(ist) Economic Nation,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 43.3 [Fall 2010]: 426). Rhys creates an “alternative economic form of Englishness,” one that Karl conceives in terms of excess: “Through formal disjoinder and excess, Rhys exposes the blank space in the nation where the colony and empire are present-but-not, where they ‘disturb the calculation’ but are not entirely struck from the ledger, and where the nation necessarily leaks out of its self-construed boundaries” (426, 440). Recalling our discussion of Keynes in Chapter  2, I would suggest that gift theory provides us with a means for conceptualizing this “excess” over a Keynesian ideal of equilibrium.

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forms of exchange, critics such as Davidson and Karl ultimately reinforce the ideology of economism that, as noted above, turns all forms of exchange other than self-interested commerce into “myths, fantasies, ideologies or irrelevancies.”51 It is worth pausing here to reflect on the tension between these different forms of exchange and, with it, the implicit tension between the different elements of my argument. On the one hand, I want to suggest that After Leaving Mr Mackenzie challenges an ideological separation of gift and exchange, or, as I have also called them following Fraser and Gordon, charity and contract. Yet, on the other, I want to suggest that the novel attests to a persistent disjunction between these different economies and the failure of money to satisfy the longing for a gift. To some extent, the tension between these claims is a version of what Derrida identifies as the aporia of the gift in his deconstruction of the opposition between gift and exchange. Derrida argues that, in speaking of an exchange of gifts, Mauss “does not worry enough about [the] incompatibility between gift and exchange.”52 Whereas Mauss treats gifts as contractual entities, Derrida argues that gifts necessarily exceed contractual bounds; they are characterized by “a certain essential excess” (GT 10). Thus, in order for a gift to count as a gift, “it is necessary [il faut] that the donee not give back, amortize, reimburse, acquit himself, enter into a contract, and that he never have contracted a debt” (GT 13, emphasis in original). Derrida would seem to be identifying the gift with the free or pure gift, but he resists letting us draw this  conclusion too readily. As he points out, the language of necessity (il faut) “is already the mark of a duty, a debt owed” (GT 13). The duty to give freely and excessively is the condition of the gift and yet, as a duty, also annuls the gift as a gift. This contradiction, this double bind, defines the gift. Or, rather, this contradiction is what keeps the gift from being easily defined and identified. Now affirming the logic of the Maussian gift, Derrida maintains that “there is no gift without bond, without bind, without obligation or ligature,” but it is also the case that “there is no gift that does not have to untie itself from obligation, from debt, contract, exchange, and thus from the bind” (GT 27). In Derrida’s reading, as many others have noted, the free or pure gift is impossible. What most interests me is the far less

51  Jarvis, “The Gift in Theory,” 204. In their readings of Good Morning, Midnight, Zemgulys and Dell’Amico argue that the novel gestures toward a beyond of exchange. Yet they also leave intact an economistic separation of gifts and exchanges. Zemgulys draws on gift theory to analyze the status of menus that Sasha in the novel (and Rhys in her own life) kept as souvenirs. But in reading the menus as gifts, Zemgulys reinforces what Mauss considered a fallacious distinction between gifts and exchanges, claiming that “a gift represents an object not exchanged” (Andrea Zemgulys, “Menu, Memento, Souvenir: Suffering and Social Imagination in Good Morning, Midnight,” in Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Mary Wilsom and Kerry L. Johnson [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013], 27). Instead drawing on a Marxian tradition, Dell’Amico convincingly reads Good Morning, Midnight as a flâneur novel in which fascism and the global market are linked and all interactions take the form of exchanges—with the exception of the final interaction between Sasha and the commis. Whereas other men in the novel “prove to be in some way predatory” and always want something from Sasha, the commis wants “nothing” of her. See Carol Dell’Amico, Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys (New York: Routledge, 2005), 37. 52  Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 37. Hereafter cited in the text as GT.

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acknowledged but no less crucial other side of this claim—the conclusion that pure exchange, perfect reciprocity, must also be impossible. In keeping with the philosophical concerns of deconstruction, Derrida above all means to challenge the metaphysical ideal of a gift that transcends economy— economy always being an order of identity and the selfsame. With its “values of law (nomos) and of home (oikos, home, property, family, the hearth, the fire indoors),” economy aims at the circular return of property, the return of goods, signs, and even the subject himself “to the point of departure, to the origin” (GT 6–7). If the gift is “the very figure of the impossible” in Derrida’s reading, it is not, as Jarvis argues, because the gift resides outside the economic circle and “is in no way contaminated by exchange.”53 Rather, the gift is impossible because it is contaminated by exchange without, however, being reducible to it. But the gift also contaminates exchange. It is, in Pheng Cheah’s words, “contamination itself, if there is such a thing.”54 Like “essential excess,” “contamination itself ” is a contradiction in terms. “Excess” and “contamination” are at odds with the closure and the containment, the purity and the self-presence, implied by terms such as “essential” and “itself.” As contamination itself, the gift keeps the economic circle from closing, rendering reciprocity, too, impossible.55 Derrida is an especially relevant theorist here because he occupies an important place within the larger genealogy of thinking about economy in which I mean to situate Rhys’s second novel—a genealogy that spans philosophy, politics, law, and literature. While deconstruction plays an implicit role in Fraser and Gordon’s unsettling of the ­contract-versus-charity dichotomy, it plays a much more explicit role in Fraser’s reflections on the respective roles of redistribution and recognition in remedying inequality. Fraser argues that deconstruction does for hierarchies of social recognition what socialism does for the uneven distribution of wealth: it undermines the entire system. As the cultural counterpart to socialism’s restructuring of the relations of production, deconstruction “aim[s] at deep restructuring of relations of recognition.”56 Rather than merely bolstering or countering the claims of ­specific groups, it “tends to destabilize group differentiations.”57 That is to say, it destabilizes the group as such, not by challenging its difference from other groups 53  GT 7; Jarvis, “The Gift in Theory,” 211. 54  Cheah, “Obscure Gifts: On Jacques Derrida,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 16.3 (2005): 45. 55  Martin Hägglund similarly suggests that “the very desire for a gift is a desire for contamination.” Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 37. Taking aim at negative theological readings of late Derrida, Hägglund argues that the Derridean gift is above all the gift of time: “Time is unconditionally given, since nothing can be given without being temporal. The given time is what makes economy possible . . . But the given time is also what makes it impossible for economy to be a closed system, since the temporality of the gift cannot be mastered by calculation. Rather, it exposes every calculation to the incalculable coming of time and opens the economy to irretrievable loss, since time cannot be recuperated” (38). Time, as a gift, as the gift of gifts, is what keeps economy from closing absolutely. I will take up Rhys’s representation of the relationship between gifts and time below. 56  Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Postsocialist’ Age,” in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 27. 57 Ibid.

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but by challenging the logic underwriting its members’ mutual recognition. In staging a critique of this logic in the field of literature, Rhys similarly begins to gesture toward a deep restructuring of relations of recognition on the basis of what may be an impossible desire for reciprocity. Of course, Derrida also drew inspiration from literature and, like Rhys, owed a  debt to French literary tradition—particularly the work of Baudelaire. While I earlier made reference to Baudelaire’s “Les Foules,” it is another one of his prose poems about duplicitous gifts that will prove most significant here—“La fausse monnaie,” to which Derrida gives significant attention in one of his most sustained analyses of the gift, Given Time. Rhys was well versed in the French literary canon, including the work of Baudelaire, though the fact that she at one point described his writing as giving her a “horrible pain” is not insignificant.58 Perhaps his portraits of modern life were uncannily familiar, or perhaps they missed the mark. Rhys’s own portrait of modern life in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie certainly shares thematic and formal features with Baudelaire’s prose poems—from the novel’s ­episodic tableaus (e.g., Julia’s first and second encounters with “unknowns” in the street) to the sometimes wry and even humorous narrative voice.59 Yet Rhys’s fiction also gives its readers something that Baudelaire did not always—namely, the perspectives of figures such as the prostitute, the passante, and the poor person.60 In not only giving us the perspective of the poor person, which is otherwise missing from “La fausse monnaie,” but also gendering this perspective, Mackenzie serves as a counter-text to Baudelaire’s prose poem and complicates the French literary and theoretical tradition in which both Baudelaire and Derrida—not to mention Mauss—were writing.61 Ultimately, while After Leaving Mr Mackenzie shares a Derridean sense of the impossibility of reciprocity, the gender politics of the text demand that we distinguish between those desires for reciprocity that are, properly speaking, impossible and those gifts that go unreciprocated because reciprocity is prohibited or foreclosed in a given sociohistorical context. In Rhys’s work, modern market society depends on and is constituted by the circulation of gifts. And yet, it systematically disavows this fact. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, this dynamic of dependence and disavowal plays out along normative lines of gender, sexuality, class, age, and racial difference, so that while Julia and her male benefactors are similarly dependent 58  Reflecting on a recent bout of gloom and despair in a 1946 letter, Rhys writes, “I couldn’t look at Rimbaud whom I thought so great or Mallarmé or Baudelaire (I haven’t got Verlaine) without a horrible pain—I don’t know why.” Jean Rhys, Letters 1931–1966, ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (New York: Penguin, 1985), 45. 59  In a letter to Jean in June 1931, Peggy Kirkaldy remembers the “quiet irony” of Mackenzie keeping her in “perpetual chuckles” (Rhys, Letters, 21). 60  In “Central Park,” Walter Benjamin notes that “Baudelaire never wrote a poem on prostitution from the standpoint of the prostitute” (Selected Writings 1938–1940, vol. 4, 174). 61  In his study of the “regressive, or enchanted, idea of the household” in modern literature and thought, Vincent Pecora suggests that Derrida and Mauss were writing in the same Durkheimian tradition: “The Durkheimian tradition, running from Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille to Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, and beyond, constitutes a sustained elaboration of the noble household as both sumptuary and linguistic practice.” Vincent P. Pecora, Households of the Soul (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xi.

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on others for gifts, the latter disavow their dependence, taking more—and, more precisely, other—than they give. The familiar notion that reciprocity between the sexes is bound to fail because women in particular are essentially excessive turns out to be one of the fundamental fictions of modern market society. “ N OT M O N E Y B U T A S Y M B O L ,” O R , T H E U S E S O F AU TO B I O G R A P H Y Rhys, as we have noted, often drew on her personal experience in her writing, and After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is no exception. In her unfinished and ingeniously titled autobiography, Smile Please, published posthumously in 1979, Rhys recalls her experience of being “pension[ed] off” like “a servant” after her early love affair with Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith, a stockbroker, ended.62 Rhys met Smith in 1910, by which point, Angier suggests, he “was rich and getting richer.”63 Smith provided Rhys with financial support throughout the course of their affair and for many years after they split in 1912, initially through his cousin, Julian, and then through a lawyer. It was only when Rhys wrote to him in 1919 and told him to end the payments because she was marrying Jean Lenglet that the cheques stopped. Reflecting on her early experience of financial and emotional dependence, Rhys writes in Smile Please: It seems to me now that the whole business of money and sex is mixed up with something very primitive and deep. When you take money directly from someone you love it becomes not money but a symbol. The bond is now there. The bond has been established. I am sure the woman’s deep-down feeling is ‘I belong to this man, I want to belong to him completely.’ It is at once humiliating and exciting.64

In identifying the “symbol” with a “bond,” Rhys recalls our account of the symbol in Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway. In that context, the symbol—for example, the “diamond” that Clarissa remembers receiving from Sally and presenting to the world in turn— not only stood for a preexisting relation between characters but also, and especially, served as the means by which characters experienced their relation with one another. Like the gift of Clarissa’s parties, the symbol combined individuals and, in so doing, created them anew. In Smile Please, Rhys suggests that what enables money, an otherwise impersonal medium of exchange, to assume the value of a symbol and thus to figure as a gift is both the transaction’s immediacy and the woman’s love for the man. As a loving subject, she rather than he is the primary donor, the initial giver of love for which money constitutes a counter-gift. At the same time, the bond to which her love gives rise ensures the woman’s subordinate social status. She imagines that she is an object belonging to the man. The woman’s feelings of humiliation and excitement imply that her fantasy of belonging is a masochistic fantasy. While motifs of 62  Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 98. 63 Angier, Jean Rhys, 63. 64 Rhys, Smile Please, 97.

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masochism in Rhys’s life and work have been much discussed, situating the above passage in the context of theories of the gift enables us to revise our understanding of this masochism. The term “masochism” was initially used by critics to describe the passivity, helplessness, and dependence of Rhys and/or her heroines. These traits tended to be viewed either pathologically, as symptoms of feminine complicity with a patriarchal status quo, or historically, as realistic effects of women’s oppression. More recently, however, critics such as Carol Dell’Amico and Sheila Kineke have argued that Rhys’s male characters also exhibit “feminine” traits of passivity and that the “perceived passivity” of her female characters is in fact a means of contesting rather than reinforcing “imperial mastery.”65 In these readings, masochism names not a psychological or affective condition peculiar to women but rather a matrix of relation that turns powerful men and passive women into relative equals, establishing an “element of reciprocity” between them.66 Smile Please lends weight to both of these understandings of Rhys’s masochism while also suggesting that the two visions of femininity they offer—of women as subordinate objects, on the one hand, and as equal subjects, on the other— are inseparable. Insofar as the thrill of bondage answers a feminine desire for a bond, the woman’s masochistic fantasy is at base a fantasy of reciprocity within which woman figures both as a subject and as an object. She is both giver (she gives love) and gift (she belongs to the man). For Mauss, it is because persons and things are inseparable—“because by giving one is giving oneself ”—that gift exchange has the  power to forge bonds of interdependence and mutual obli­ gation (G 46). As an inalienable extension of the donor, the gift itself enforces and guarantees the rule of reciprocity by causing the recipient to realize “one must give back to another person what is really part and parcel of his nature and substance” (G 12). For Mauss, this rule does not disappear with the legal separation of persons and things, but is rather forced to keep operating “below the surface” (G 4). From this angle, the “something very primitive and deep” with which modern sexual commerce is mixed up in Rhys’s view is none other than the “primitive” gift and the rule of reciprocity with which it is equated. Using rhetoric of mixture and psychic depth much like Mauss’s own, Smile Please similarly suggests that the primitive persists into the present. Yet here it persists in the form of a feminine fantasy of reciprocity. Or, rather, feminine consciousness becomes the refuge for primitive gift exchange—for the feeling that individuals might be bound by their exchange, despite ideological divisions such as those between money economies and gift economies, between money and symbols. In the above passage, Rhys presupposes a division between money and symbols but 65  Kineke, “ ‘Like a Hook Fits an Eye,’ ” 288–9. Dell’Amico provides a useful summary of earlier accounts of Rhys’s masochism; see Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys, 58–61. For her part, Dell’Amico situates After Leaving Mr Mackenzie in a Masochian tradition, whereby masochism constitutes a “contestation of oppressive authority” (58). I will return to her reading of the novel later in this chapter. 66  Kineke, “ ‘Like a Hook Fits an Eye,’ ” 283. Taking the relationship between Rhys and Ford as a model for romantic relationships in general in Rhys’s fiction, Kineke suggests that, in exchange for literary connections, Rhys helped to support Ford’s “psychic well-being” (283).

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she also suggests that the feminine gift of love enables the woman to subvert this division—to imagine, for once, that she belongs. Still, the woman’s feeling of belonging is not unshakable. Smith’s lawyer took over payments toward the end of 1913, when Jean was just in her early 20s. Recalling the first time she received a nondescript envelope with a cheque and a letter from the lawyer while staying at a hotel in Bloomsbury—a further reminder that British modernism consists of at least two Bloomsburies—Rhys reflects, “To get money through a lawyer, stating please acknowledge receipt and oblige, was a very different matter.”67 In contrast to the direct payments, which ensured the woman’s belonging, the legal mediation by a third party made Rhys feel that she “would never really belong anywhere.”68 After Leaving Mr Mackenzie takes the experience of getting money through a lawyer as its narrative starting point. When the novel opens, the weekly cheques that have been sent to Julia for the past six months through Mackenzie’s lawyer, Legros, are all accompanied by the same typewritten letter, which echoes the legalese in the autobiography and is presented in full in the text: Madame, Enclosed please find our cheque for three hundred francs (fcs. 300), receipt of which kindly acknowledge and oblige Yours faithfully, Henri Legros, per N.E. (ALMM 13)

While Rhys thus draws on her past in writing Mackenzie, she also recontextualizes her personal history in significant ways, transposing her experience with Smith and his lawyer to a later historical moment, as well as to a later moment in her heroine’s personal “career of ups and downs.”69 After Leaving Mr Mackenzie was written in 1929 and 1930, half in Paris and half in London, according to Rhys. She and her first husband, Lenglet, were no longer together and, though they were not officially divorced until 1933, Rhys had become romantically involved with a new man, Leslie Tilden Smith, whom she eventually went on to marry.70 The narrative of Mackenzie takes place in Paris and London on or about April 1928, ten years after the armistice, during a period of widespread economic instability.71 In the course of the two years during which 67 Rhys, Smile Please, 97. 68  Ibid. 100. 69  For a full account of the first year following the end of the affair with Smith—including Rhys’s pregnancy and abortion—see Angier, Jean Rhys, 71–9. 70  The way Rhys tells it: “With some money I got from America for Quartet I went to Paris, because I loved Paris and I hated London, and there, in a cheap hotel, I wrote the first half of After Leaving Mr Mackenzie. My husband Jean divorced me. I came back to London, married Leslie, and wrote the second half of Mr Mackenzie” (Smile Please, 126). See also Angier, Jean Rhys, 228. 71  Dating the narrative present of Mackenzie requires piecing together a number of fragmented comments and reflections in the text. At the start of the novel, the narrator notes that Julia came to her current hotel in Paris “six months before—on the fifth of October”—suggesting that the current month is April (ALMM 11). Later, Julia remembers having left London in February of the year after the 1918 armistice—that is, February 1919 (ALMM 48). Given Julia’s further recollection that it has been “nearly ten years” since she left London, it would seem that the narrative takes place in April of 1928 (ALMM 67).

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Rhys wrote the novel, unemployment in England more than doubled, going from just over a million in 1929 to two and a half million in 1930.72 The novel registers traces of this broader economic context when Julia visits her Uncle Griffiths during her two-week trip to London. Reluctant to give her money, he advises her to return to Paris because London is going through “hard times” and “jobs were not easy to get” (ALMM 82, 83). Growing anxious, Griffiths “thought to himself that the time was coming when he would have to give up this comfort, and then that comfort, until God knew what would be the end of it all” (ALMM 84). His anxiety about his personal finances is unfounded. The narrator wryly notes that Griffiths “was an imaginative man, and when these fits of foreboding overcame him he genuinely forgot that only a succession of highly improbable catastrophes could reduce him to the penury he so feared” (ALMM 84). The catch is that a very large catastrophe was not far off, but occurred just over a year later, in the form of the stock market crash of October 1929, as Rhys was still working on the novel. Thus, while Griffiths’ personal fears may be irrational, they also presage this later event and resonate with other traces of economic decline and insecurity in the novel. In addition to Griffiths, Julia’s suitor, George Horsfield, may or may not be on the brink of ruin. Having spent his “only legacy” during the same six months that Julia has been holed up in a Parisian hotel, Horsfield is now dependent on a “small and decaying business” inherited from his father (ALMM 36, 41). Other people’s loneliness “being a mere caricature of his own,” he fantasizes about one-upping Julia’s own show of sulkiness by telling her, “I’m a decaying hop factor, damn you! My father did the growth and I’m doing the decay” (ALMM 40, 41). Far more harrowing than Horsfield’s decay—and far more portentous of Julia’s own potential decay—is the skeletal thin man she sees “drooping in a doorway” toward the end of the narrative (ALMM 188). By way of such troubling signs of the novel’s broader sociohistorical context, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie begins to suggest that the financial and emotional crisis confronting Julia when Mackenzie and Legros discontinue her payments dovetails with and anticipates a far broader crisis in the social contract. It is in wrestling with the paradoxes at the heart of this contract that the novel most forcefully departs from the autobiography. In Smile Please—unlike Mauss’s The Gift—gift exchange and contract are strictly opposed. Gift exchange is feminine, primitive, personal, and binding, while contract is masculine, modern, impersonal, and alienating. Moreover, the gift and the feeling of belonging it generates turns out to be little more than a fantasy—one that the intervention of the law effectively dispels. But the novel eschews the primitivist and economistic dichotomies of the autobiography. The one time the word “primitive” is used in Mackenzie it has to do not with acts of giving but rather with refusing to give. Julia speculates to Horsfield that well-off people must get some “subtle pleasure” out of forcing poor people like her to ask for money, then refusing you and telling you “all about why they refuse you” (ALMM 90). Horsfield replies, “Subtle pleasure? Not at all. A very simple and primitive pleasure” (ALMM 90). The woman’s primitive communism 72  R. K. Webb, Modern England: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 528.

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in Smile Please is replaced in the novel by a liberal myth of primitive economic man, of a fundamentally calculating being driven by rational self-interest. The gift, I will argue, is still on the scene in the novel, but rather than appear as a vestige of the primitive past it is bound up with commercial exchange in ways that the myth of homo economicus and the rule of contract work to conceal. “A F I G U R E O F T H E L AW ” : T H E PA R A D OX E S OF MODERN CONTRACT In contrast to Smile Please, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie presents a postlapsarian world in which social and sexual relations are always already contractually mediated. The aftermath of Julia’s affair with Mackenzie establishes a contractual template that repeats throughout the novel. Like the payments from Mackenzie through Legros, the donations given to Julia by her Uncle Griffiths and Neil James, her first lover, are explicitly framed by certain conditions. The pound from Griffiths is accompanied by some unsolicited advice to leave London and “get along back [to Paris] as quickly as you can,” and the twenty quid sent by James is accompanied by a note saying “after this I can do no more” (ALMM 85, 172). Clearly these payments are meant to get rid of Julia—to dissolve a preexisting bond by ensuring that the money is not mistaken for a symbol and is instead received as a free gift, a unilateral act of charity.73 And yet, the only way that a bond can be annulled is, paradoxically, by reinforcing a bond with Julia. As Rhys’s presentation of the terms of donation in the text makes explicit, the meaning(lessness) of the money is an object of agreement that binds both parties. As in the case of the payments from Legros, so in the case of these other donations Julia must implicitly “kindly acknowledge and oblige.” Thus, the contractual mediation of relations does not sever the tie between gifts and exchanges, as in Smile Please. Rather, contract mystifies the lived entanglement of gifts and exchanges. In the autobiography, the confusion of money economies and gift economies, of money and symbols, is an illusory effect of feminine love. What is illusory in Mackenzie is the separability of  these economies. The gifts of money Julia receives throughout the novel are, paradoxically, both charitable and contractual—free gifts that depend on mutual agreement for their freedom. In her foreword to Mauss’s The Gift, Mary Douglas suggests that a “gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.”74 As a gift that carries an obligation to reciprocate by leaving the donor alone, the money routinely given to Julia 73  By contrast, Wendy Brandmark argues that the gifts of money received by Rhys’s protagonists “may be humiliating, but they are also comforting because they establish without a doubt the relationship between possessor and possessed.” Wendy Brandmark, “The Power of the Victim: A Study of Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys,” Kunapipi 8.2 (1986): 26. It bears noting that Betsy Berry also juxtaposes Rhys’s memories of her first affair in Smile Please with After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, calling the novel Rhys’s “most relentless probing of that ‘bond’ of ‘money and sex’ ” (Berry, “ ‘Between Dog and Wolf,’ ” 545). 74  Mary Douglas, “Foreword: No Free Gifts,” in The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies by Marcel Mauss (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1990), vii.

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constitutes such a contradiction. Arguably, this contradiction is typical of modern social life in general insofar as all social relations are supposed to follow a contractual model in market society. More precisely, modern market society abides by one form of contractual model. It is crucial that gift economies are also contractual in Mauss’s essay, the point of which, as we have seen numerous times now, is to undermine primitivist distinctions between gift and exchange. He begins The Gift by noting that, in Scandinavian and other civilizations, “exchanges and contracts take place in the form of presents” (G 3). Contract is not unique to modern Western societies but instead assumes different forms in different cultural contexts. In his influential reading of The Gift, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins picks up on this thread of Mauss’s argument in order to define the gift as the “primitive analogue of social contract”—“the primitive way of achieving the peace that in civil society is secured by the State.”75 In order to draw an analogy between the gift and social contract—and, more specifically, between Mauss’s The Gift and Hobbes’s Leviathan—Sahlins must downplay pivotal elements of Mauss’s essay, particularly Mauss’s discussion of the role played by the Maori hau and the spirit of the gift more broadly in ensuring reciprocity. Taking distance from Lévi-Strauss’s structural reinterpretation of hau, which we discussed in Chapter 2, Sahlins argues that hau registers “a general principle of productiveness.”76 It names the increase generated by the gift’s circulation—but not in the capitalist sense of surplus value or profit. As Lewis Hyde puts it in his discussion of Sahlins, “gifts that remain gifts do not earn profit, they give increase”; whereas, in commercial exchange, profit “stays behind,” the increase of the gift “stays in motion,” bearing fecundity as it follows the thing given.77 Sahlins takes care to illuminate and underscore this principle of increase in Maori society, but in his reading this principle does not explain the analogy between primitive gifts and modern contracts as culturally specific forms of reciprocity. The key to understanding the link between the two is not Mauss’s discussion of hau early in The Gift but rather the conclusion, where Mauss represents exchange as a rational, evolutionarily superior alternative to war. Mauss writes, “It is by opposing reason to emotion, by setting up the will for peace against rash follies of this kind, that peoples succeed in substituting alliance, gift and commerce for war, isolation and stagnation.”78 Alliance, Sahlins concludes, is always a result of the “triumph of human rationality over the folly of war.”79 And even more definitively: “The gift is Reason.”80 Sahlins is certainly right to point out the dramatic shift from Mauss’s rhetoric of spirituality to this later rhetoric of rationality. Yet, it bears recalling that the peaceful exchange for which Mauss calls is never purely 75  Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago, IL: Aldine Atherton, 1972), 169. 76  Ibid. 168. 77  Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 2007), 47. 78  Mauss, quoted in Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 175. Sahlins appears to be using his own translation of Mauss’s text. In the W. D. Halls translation, on which I have primarily relied here, we find a few small differences in word choice: “It is by opposing reason to feeling, by pitting the will to peace against sudden outbursts of insanity of this kind that peoples succeed in substituting alliance, gifts, and trade for war, isolation and stagnation” (G 82). 79 Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 175. 80 Ibid.

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rational. Indeed, in The Gift, reason itself is never purely rational—his surprising opposition between reason and emotion in this moment notwithstanding. Elsewhere in his conclusion, Mauss undermines this opposition when he claims that the ­avatar of tomorrow’s “man of science and reason” is not today’s self-proclaimed man of reason—the utilitarian (G 76). Rather, the best examples of true reason are, paradoxically, the wasteful elites who indulge in “purely irrational expenditure” on luxury items; they are the ones who most “resemble the nobles of former times” and who therefore promise a return to an archaic ethos of reciprocity (G 76, 77). The anthropologist Jonathan Parry convincingly claims that Sahlins “misrepresents Mauss” in suggesting that The Gift’s arguments about the spirit of the gift, on the one hand, and about the gift as social contract, on the other, can be separated.81 By contrast, Parry insists that both arguments are underwritten by what he takes to be the central principle of The Gift—that is, the notion that persons and things are indissociable. Riffing on Sahlins’s comparison of Mauss and Hobbes, Parry argues that, in Mauss’s view, “The gift only succeeds in suppressing the Warre of all against all because it creates spiritual bonds between persons by means of things which embody persons.”82 Moreover, Hobbes and Mauss do not have the same person in mind. Hobbes “starts with the individual,” whereas Mauss “starts with the group.”83 In The Gift, Mauss stresses that, in archaic societies, “it is not individuals but collectivities that impose obligations of exchange and contract upon each other” (G 5).84 The “person” whose spirit infuses the thing given and ensures a connection through exchange is actually “clans, tribes, families” (G 5). Thus, the analogy between the gift and the social contract is less precise than Sahlins assumes. In presupposing the separation of persons and things—and, more precisely, of selfinterested individuals and the private property they defensively aim to protect— the social contract does not, as Douglas might say, enhance solidarity between parties so much as it reinforces the boundaries of the possessive individual. And yet, the only way it can reinforce these boundaries is paradoxically by establishing bonds of mutual obligation—not spiritual bonds but symbolic bonds. If, etymologically, symbols throw parties together, then the modern contract is a symbol that throws together only to tear apart. Like the gifts of money given to Julia, it is a symbol that says it is not a symbol—not a gift per se but a contradiction. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Julia in effect exposes the contradiction at the heart of the social contract—its dependence on symbolic bonds it denies—by way of her circulation. To others, her repeated return to places where she is not wanted 81  Jonathan Parry, “The Gift, the Indian Gift and the ‘Indian Gift,’ ” Man 21.3 (Sept. 1996): 457. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84  Mauss further develops this point in “A Category of the Human Mind,” where he offers a “social history” of the notion of the self. Beginning with North American Pueblos and Kwaikutl, for whom the person is a personnage, not an individual, but a character that plays a role within “the prefigured totality of the life of the clan,” he briefly traces the birth of the legal person among the Romans; the further development of the moral person among Greeks and Latins; the foundation of the person as a metaphysical entity with Christianity; and finally the emergence of the modern self, a psychological consciousness, formalized most precisely by Kant. See Mauss, “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of Self,” in Sociology and Psychology: Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 57–94.

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is purely irrational. For example, when she attempts to reciprocate Mackenzie’s humiliating send-off at the Restaurant Albert, Mackenzie thinks, “Why in the name of common sense do a thing like that?” (ALMM 30). But while her behavior here and elsewhere is unjustified in the eyes of other people, it is consistently ­justified on a symbolic plane. When Julia visits James, he thinks her appearance “tactless, really,” but grants the intrusion for “what is one to do?” (ALMM 110). If James is aggrieved by such “resurrections of the past,” he also seems to have brought this one on himself (ALMM 110). Before visiting James, Julia recalls him telling her seventeen years earlier, “I am your friend for life. I am eternally grateful to you—for your sweetness and generosity” (ALMM 109). Julia in effect takes James and others at their word and holds them to their word, even if their kindness is “merely rhetoric” (ALMM 81). In so doing, Julia represents the return of a rule of  reciprocity that contract is supposed to repress but on which it nevertheless depends. In this regard, she serves as what Derrida refers to as “the figure of the law” in his reading of the poor man in Baudelaire’s “La fausse monnaie,” or “Counterfeit Money”—not the law of the state personified by Legros but the symbolic law (GT 144). In Baudelaire’s text, it will be recalled, two men leaving a tobacconist’s encounter a poor man, to whom one, the narrator’s friend, gives a counterfeit coin, setting in motion a series of speculations on the part of the narrator about the motivations of his friend and the fate of the coin in the hands of the poor man. The poor man does not ask for money but rather gives the two men a look. They are confronted by “the mute eloquence of those supplicating eyes that contain at once for the sensitive man who knows how to read them, so much humility and so much reproach” (quoted in GT 143, emphasis in original). Reproach for what? In Derrida’s reading, the two friends are rendered “indebted and guilty” as soon as the poor man looks at them precisely because they are friends—because they are included in a “symbolic circle” that excludes the poor man (GT 144). Yet the bond between them and the society they represent also depends on the poor man. Although he does not contribute economic value to society—that is, he does not produce or accumulate material wealth—the poor man nevertheless serves a pivotal symbolic function. He “delineates the pocket of an indispensable internal exclusion,” a constitutive but inassimilable outside that enables the two men’s identification (GT 135). Not only are they indebted to the poor man for their own relative good fortune, but, as friends, they are also indebted to each other: “they owe themselves each to the other” (GT 145, emphasis in original). In Derrida’s eyes, the ultimate centerpiece of Baudelaire’s narrative is not the act of almsgiving but rather the test that this act poses to the bond between the narrator and his friend. This test and the uncertainty opened up by the counterfeit coin are the true gifts to which the otherwise routine economy of alms gives rise in Baudelaire’s text. After Leaving Mr Mackenzie provides a counterpoint to “Counterfeit Money,” both in providing the otherwise excluded perspective of the poor person and in gendering the economy of alms. As in Baudelaire’s text, almsgiving in Mackenzie is “prescribed, programmed, obligated” (GT 137). We see this element of prescription in the “vague sense of responsibility” that compels both Griffiths and James to

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ask about Julia’s absentee husband—the man who presumably should be taking care of her (ALMM 83). In Derrida’s reading of Baudelaire, such ritualized gestures “transform alms into exchangist, even contractual circulation” (GT 138). In Mackenzie, as in Baudelaire’s poem, there are actually two axes of contractual relation at stake in almsgiving—one that runs vertically between the almsgiver and the poor person or beggar and another that runs horizontally between members of the symbolic circle. Power is always triangulated and relation mediated. Even when Julia deals with Griffiths and James directly, their offerings are framed by conditions that reproduce the contractual arrangement between Julia, Mackenzie, and Legros. Within this arrangement, Legros appears to mediate between Mackenzie and Julia, and yet Julia feels as if she is the one who mediates between Mackenzie and Legros by way of her exclusion—as if the two men’s bond is the primary one. “Together,” she at one point thinks, “the two perfectly represented organized society, in which she had no place and against which she had not a dog’s chance” (ALMM 22). What Julia does not quite realize in this moment is that, in occupying this nonplace, she plays a crucial role in their seemingly perfect representation of society. Recalling Lévi-Strauss’s account of the exchange of women, we might say that Julia “ensur[es] the existence of the group as a group” (ESK 481). In mediating between powerful men, she is the means by which society organizes itself. The novel’s vision of modern exchange is a familiar one. The relationship between Legros and Mackenzie is strictly professional and totally impersonal. Mackenzie, we are told, “had only received three very businesslike communications” from Legros since depositing the affair in his hands (ALMM 31). The international alliance of the British businessman and the French lawyer testifies to the triumph of commercial interest over national identification, but this shift does not mean the dissolution of tribal politics so much as it means a reconstitution of the tribe. Julia tells Mackenzie she was “bullied” by Legros, who threatened to have her deported as his office staff “stared at her and laughed” (ALMM 31). While his intimidation tactics are effective, his threats are dubious; Mackenzie suspects that “three-quarters of it was a bluff” (ALMM 31). Yet Mackenzie also suspects that Julia herself is bluffing when she tells him that Legros had a clerk lock the doors since, in Mackenzie’s ­recollection, “locking doors is one of the things that is not legal” (ALMM 31). But whether or not it is legal is beside the point. What matters—what enables Legros’s performance to be so effective—is that he has authority in Julia’s eyes. In the world of the novel, as in Derrida’s reading of Baudelaire’s work, “Authority is constituted by accreditation”—in both economic and ethical senses of the term “credit” (GT 97). Julia registers the link between these two senses when she visits James and thinks, “Because he has money he’s a kind of God. Because I have none I’m a kind of worm” (ALMM 112). But having money is not the only measure of value. Julia feels that she fails to measure up on multiple fronts, further thinking to herself that she is “[a] worm because I’ve failed and I have no money. A worm because I’m not even sure if I hate you” (ALMM 113). While her first failing is social—being poor in a society that equates material wealth and moral worth—her second failing is more personal and psychological. In short, she does not know herself. The distinction between these two orders of accreditation, between the way others assess her

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value and the way she assesses herself, is important. To some degree, this distinction parallels the residual distinction between money economies and gift economies in the novel—between Julia’s need for money and her desire for another kind of credit altogether. Oddly, though, in showing the way in which Julia fails to trust herself and the depth of her belief in others’ authority, the text suggests that she may have more authority and be a more powerful donor than she realizes. While Julia feels powerless, the narrator makes explicit the force of her belief: “When she thought of the combination of Mr Mackenzie and Maître Legros, all sense of reality deserted her and it seemed to her that there were no limits at all to their joint powers of defeating and hurting her” (ALMM 22, emphasis added). Julia’s impression of their total power and of her total defenselessness is a fantasy, one that clearly ceases to give her much satisfaction in the course of the novel. Like the woman’s fantasy in Smile Please, Julia’s own fantasy of abjection might be considered masochistic. But whereas in Smile Please the woman imagines that she belongs to the man and wants to belong to him completely, Julia is certain that she  does not have “a dog’s chance” of ever belonging. Julia’s belief in, and even enjoyment of, her outsider status might be read, and often have been read, as signs of her complicity with a misogynistic status quo—and certainly they are.85 Yet, in exposing Julia’s complicity, Rhys also invests women’s thoughts and feelings with a surprising degree of efficacy. Julia’s instrumentality in sustaining organized society derives not just from the role she plays as an object (as in Lévi-Strauss’s account of exogamy) or from the role she plays as a figure or function (as in Derrida’s reading of Baudelaire’s portrait of almsgiving), but from the role she plays as a subject—that is, as a participant in the exchange of accreditation that keeps organized society intact. By making explicit the role that women, as subjects, play in supporting masculine authority, Rhys admits not only women’s vulnerability but also men’s vulnerability—their dependence on a feminine gift of credit for their authority. My point here is not to overestimate Julia’s power or to underestimate the disadvantages she suffers as a poor woman in the world of the novel. Rather, my point is to establish the paradoxical nature of Julia’s position as one who contracts with, but does not fully belong to, organized society. In her groundbreaking feminist critique of contract, Carole Pateman argues that this paradox is typical of women’s position in general under modern patriarchy. Patriarchy, Pateman argues, does not disappear in civil society but, with the defeat of the tyrannical father, takes the form of a fraternity. As the basis of civil society, the fraternal pact is at once a social contract, established between newly free male individuals, and a sexual contract, authorizing “men’s political right over women” and “orderly access by men to women’s bodies.”86 In classic contract theory, however, the sexual contract is routinely displaced onto and occluded by the marriage contract. As a contract between a man and a woman, at least traditionally—I suspend here the important 85  Thus, of Rhys’s early short stories, Howells writes: “It is a paradox of Rhys’s version of femininity that, though she offers a merciless exposure of women’s vulnerability, her stories make no attempt to unsettle the traditional balance of power between the sexes. Rather, women’s fantasies continue to sustain it” (Jean Rhys, 52). 86  Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 2.

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question of how same-sex marriage may complicate Pateman’s discussion—the marriage contract reinforces women’s nominally natural subordination to men, the sexual division of labor, and the separation between private and public spheres. But the marriage contract is also supposed to guarantee that women “enjoy the same standing [as men]” by proving that women are “part of civil society and capable of entering into contracts.”87 The marriage contract is thus characterized by “a variant of the contradiction of slavery”: through it, “women both are and are not part of the civil order.”88 This contradiction also characterizes the exceptional place occupied by the figure of the beggar within an economy of alms. In gendering this economy, Rhys’s novel makes provocative contributions to both Pateman’s critique of contract theory and Derrida’s reading of Baudelaire’s “Counterfeit Money.” As a credulous subject, responsible for cementing the social bond between Mackenzie and Legros, Julia in effect constitutes a third party to the original sexual contract. In other words, she is not just secondarily contracted into civil society, as Pateman suggests of women under modern patriarchy, but rather serves as the primary witness to the fraternal pact. At the same time, in establishing Julia’s centrality in sustaining this pact, the novel in effect reinscribes the poor person and, more specifically, the beggar as a figure of not only poverty but also feminine subordination, particularly the subordination of women who, like Julia, are aging out of sexual desirability. Notably, the one time the language of begging explicitly appears in the novel it is used to describe some “older women [who] looked drab and hopeless, with timid, hunted expressions,” going into a movie theater (ALMM 69). “The girls were perky and pretty” but the older women “looked ashamed of themselves, as if they were begging the world in general not to notice that they were women or to hold it against them” (ALMM 69–70). In Mackenzie, begging becomes the trope of women’s paradoxical relation to a fraternal social order that renders them always already guilty for failing to be either a man or an object of male desire. The “unquenchable thirst for the gift” signified by the beggar in Derrida’s reading here takes the form of a feminine desire not to be recognized for being a woman—a desire to be forgiven for being what one is (GT 137). This desire for forgiveness echoes in Julia’s longing to explain herself and in her occasional wish to please other people even though they no longer take much pleasure in her presence. When Julia visits Griffiths she feels “a great desire to please him, to make him look kindly at her” (ALMM 81). Hers is a desire to give (i.e., to give Griffiths pleasure) and a desire to take (i.e., to get a kind look)—a desire for reciprocity. While the desire for reciprocity is feminized via the novel’s representation of Julia and the older women, this desire is not unique to female characters. Rather, the failure of the contract between the almsgiver and the beggar to satisfy a feminine desire for reciprocity exemplifies the failure of contracts and commercial exchange in general to answer the desire of both men and women for a gift in excess of money. 87  Ibid. 180.

88  Ibid. 180–1.

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“UNENDING BUSINESS”: THE GIFT OF TIME As the shame of the older women at the movie theater begins to suggest, Julia’s failure to garner a gift is in part a function of time. Julia’s impropriety and indefensibility in the eyes of others, derives from the fact that she “deserted [her] family” when she left London years earlier and “now . . . expect[s] to walk back and be received with open arms”; that James broke up with her “a hell of a long time ago” but she still asks him for help; that she seeks out Mackenzie even though his final payment has been made and her allowance discontinued (ALMM 84, 109). In short, her fault is behaving as if she were untouched by the passage of time, as if she were timeless.89 How she could possibly persist in this manner let alone survive continually baffles those around her. Horsfield finds himself wondering about the “pathetic illusions” that Julia must entertain in order “to go on living” (ALMM 91). Indeed, even as he professes his willingness to help her in any way he could, he wonders to himself: “Did she still see herself young and slim, capable of anything, believing that, though every one around her grew older, she—by some miracle—remained the same?” (ALMM 91–2). His disbelief is ironic considering that he later credits her with having “given me back my youth” (ALMM 161). In Voyage in the Dark, Vincent assures Anna in a letter, “You are young and youth as everybody says is the great thing, the greatest gift of all.”90 Arguably, the same holds true in the world of Mackenzie—though if youth is a gift Julia gives, it is not one she possesses. Does she nevertheless imagine she has remained the same? Yes and no. Does she believe she has not aged? No. Must she believe that she is “not finished” but still has more time in order to manifest the will to press on despite what others see as her diminished capacity to do so in good faith (ALMM 59)? It would appear so. The temporal disjunction between Julia and others is especially pronounced in her meeting with James, whom she is absolutely right to presume will think her “an importunate ghost” when she calls on him (ALMM 66). For his part, James is reluctant to give Julia too much of his time. He tells her, “I’ve got loads of time— heaps of time. Nearly three quarters of an hour” (ALMM 111). Strikingly, it is the same length of time that Sir William gave his patients in Mrs. Dalloway. James’s show of generosity is no less dubious than Sir William’s and, in its own way, just as psychologically taxing for his visitor. The precision of James’s calculation and his subsequent glance “sideways at the clock” make his impatience clear both to the reader and to Julia who worries that she is keeping him (ALMM 112). She knows 89  On temporality in Rhys’s early fiction, see Nicole Flynn, “Clockwork Women: Temporality and Form in Jean Rhys’s Interwar Novels,” in Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Mary Wilsom and Kerry L. Johnson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 41–65. Flynn argues that “Rhys depicts a woman’s struggle to survive in the modern world, against the sadistic power of men, poverty, and society, as a battle against time” and, more specifically, modern standardized time, as represented by the “figure of the clock” in her narratives (43, 45). In Rhys’s view, “the modern subject must keep private time in sync with public time in order to survive” (63). In Mackenzie in particular, Julia suffers from a “lack of synchronization with the rest of the world,” while also having internalized the mechanics of the clock and clock time, so that, as the narrative progresses, it is as if “her clockwork [were] running down with each second that passes” (54–5). 90  Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1982), 93.

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that she threatens to take too much time and, although she has prepared a speech to explain her visit, ultimately gives up trying to deliver it. Instead, she resorts to the same rhetoric used by Mackenzie when he broke up with her and “proposed to present her with a certain sum of money weekly to give her time to rest, to give her time to look about her” (ALMM 27). She implores James, “I thought perhaps you’d help me to have a rest” (ALMM 113). To give Julia a rest is to give her a gift of time, a respite from the business of going from man to man. The language of rest also codifies her marginality—her status as a sort of remainder of organized society. The embodiment of a certain structural excess, Julia also survives on excess, whatever surplus others are willing to spare. When Julia asks James for a rest, he is relieved but also perturbed by this “unending business” of people trying “to get money out of him” (ALMM 113). In nevertheless giving in and promising Julia a rest—“I’ll do something for you . . . I’ll write you tomorrow and send you something”—James also gives himself a rest from the threat of losing his time and, by extension, his money all the time, at least for now (ALMM 113). While Julia gets a promise of “something” from James, she still leaves wanting “something”: “She had hoped that he would say something or look something that would make her feel less lonely” (ALMM 116). Loneliness, like time, appears to be quantifiable. In wanting something that would make her feel less lonely, Julia, like the woman in Smile Please, wants a symbol—that is to say, a bond. We might recall that in the autobiography it was in part the immediacy of the gift of money that enabled its conversion into a symbol. But such immediacy is lacking in the exchange between Julia and James, leaving Julia wanting a sign that the other is more present and more in time with her. In Mackenzie, the symbol is cast as a gift of time. Or, put somewhat differently, the willingness to give one’s time in a world where time is money is the difference between money and the symbol—between empty rhetoric (the “something” James promises) and a genuine gift of self (the “something” Julia still wants). Because James spends his time speculating about the loss of his time, he is inevitably out of sync with Julia, so that even when they are in the same room, Julia “felt a little as though she were sitting in an office waiting for an important person” (ALMM 110). To be sure, James’s frustration with Julia is not beyond the pale of our sympathy as readers. Yet the novel suggests that Julia, too, is justified in her frustration— indeed, that she might actually deserve “something” beyond what she gets. Before Julia leaves James’s home, he insists to her, “you must come and look at my pictures” (ALMM 115). Immediately following his request, there is a numbered section break in the text and, when the narrative resumes, the two are looking together at his pictures. He, we are told, has become “a different man. Because he loved [his pictures] he became in their presence modest, hesitating, unsure of his opinion” (ALMM 115). In becoming “different” in their presence, James in effect becomes like Julia in his presence. Just as Julia was earlier unsure of whether she hated James, so he now fails to trust his own feelings. He asks if she likes one of the pictures and she confirms, “Yes, I like it” (ALMM 115). In so doing, she in effect gives James the same some “something” that she leaves his home still wanting from him—that is, a look (“look at my pictures”) or an utterance (assurance that the pictures are

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good) to make him feel less lonely. Whether Julia means what she says or whether James is satisfied is doubtful. “Fancy wanting to be told what you must love!” she  thinks, thus chiding him for the same weakness she earlier saw in herself (ALMM 115). Both are left lonely and isolated, incapable of recognizing or appreciating their likeness in this moment. Nevertheless, the question remains: even if Julia is not exactly generous in her response to James, why does she give at all? Why minister to his necessities? It is tempting to consider her gift a repayment for the money he promises. After all, doesn’t she owe him her time? Having received a promise of money, shouldn’t she now make herself useful? Not quite. The section break between his call and her response, as well as James’s “difference” in this moment, suggest that their earlier transaction is complete. Her gift exceeds their earlier exchange as almsgiver and beggar. If she gives, then it is because, as James himself says, she must do so—because she is obliged. “Sometimes,” as Julia remarks to Horsfield of her concession to dance with a ghoulish older man later in the novel, “one has to do things” (ALMM 152). And sometimes, the text suggests, women in particular have to do things, not just for purely economic reasons—when Julia accepts the dance, she is with Horsfield, who is footing the bill—but because they are women. “ M A D T H I N G S ” : F RO M WO M E N ’ S WO R K TO WO R L D WA R The support that Julia gives James constitutes one example of the unrequited affective labor undertaken by female characters in the novel—of the women’s work that others treat as if it were a free gift. The other primary, and surely more respectable, example is Julia’s sister Norah’s care for their invalid mother. Unlike Julia, Norah is showered with praise, as everybody tells her, “You’re wonderful, Norah”; still, their admiration has little practical value, for ultimately, “they did not help” (ALMM 104). In its portrait of these women, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie casts the notion of the free gift, which Mauss argued is particular to Western societies, as a fantasy about femininity. This fantasy serves as the counterpart to Julia’s own fantasy about masculinity—that is, her sense that Legros and Mackenzie form an indomitable pair before which she is powerless. As we noted earlier, Julia’s fantasy of having no power works to conceal the extent to which she complies with her submission and therefore might have more of a say in her social status than she realizes. By contrast, the fantasy of a feminine free gift—the idea that it is in women’s nature to give freely—works to conceal the extent to which Julia and other women are obliged to give “something” other than they get. If Julia fails to get what she wants, it is because women are supposed to give without return—because they are (again to trope on Derrida) essentially excessive. Women give, men exchange, and never the twain shall meet. Reciprocity is impossible—or so the story goes. While the novel undermines this myth of feminine excess, it also suggests that, in the case of Julia, the identification of woman with the free gift is not entirely unfounded. A creature of consumption, Julia would seem to exemplify the essential

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excess of the gift. After all, she is prone to wasting time (daydreaming, reading, finding “pleasure in memories, as an old woman might have done”); sacrificing appearances (crying in public, making seemingly “uncalled-for scene[s]”); and spending whatever money she has, even going “to the extremity of giving up money” when she insists on returning the cheque to Mackenzie (12, 33). She gives too much—even for a woman. Mackenzie is “[a]lmost . . . forced to believe that she was a female without the instinct of self-preservation” even though he does not “believe that any female existed without a sense of self-preservation” (ALMM 27). Julia is the type that, in the parlance of the novel, “gives itself away” (ALMM 87). The problem is that, in practicing “expenditure without reserve,” Julia inevitably practices expenditure without return.91 Because keeping up appearances and the  semblance of self-possession are of paramount importance in the world of the novel, losing—sacrificing one’s time, money, and composure as Julia does— inevitably means losing face. Yet the novel also takes care to alert us to the many ways in which Julia does not give, in which she withholds elements of her experience in her exchanges with others. The scene between James and Julia is especially poignant in this regard. Julia imagines telling James about the death of her newborn baby years earlier, thinking: “When you’ve just had a baby, and it dies for the simple reason that you haven’t enough money to keep it alive, it leaves you with a sort of hunger. Not ­sentimental—oh no. Just a funny feeling, like hunger” (ALMM 111). The use of the second person at once indexes Julia’s alienation from her own past and interpellates “you,” the reader, forcing our identification with her feeling of hunger. As Julia reflects further, her train of thought is abruptly interrupted by another internal voice, this one in the first person and clearly distinguished by the use of quotation marks: “ ‘Look here, I don’t believe that; you’re making it up.’ [To which the first voice then responds:] All right, don’t believe it then.” (ALMM 112). The interruption reads as both a memory of past failures of address on Julia’s part and a prediction of future ones. Having internalized others’ incredulity, Julia seems to anticipate the same response from James and so keeps the memory to herself. Although her thoughts go unspoken in the scene, we in effect are obliged to share in—and thus to sympathize with—the psychological and emotional costs of both her painful experience and the later devaluation of that experience. We cannot help but find ourselves hailed by the text and told what we have been through in one moment (“it leaves you with a sort of hunger”) only to be discredited in the next (“you’re making it up”). 91  Andrew Gibson, “Sensibility and Suffering in Rhys and Nin,” in The Ethics in Literature, ed. Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, and Tim Woods (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 192. Gibson draws on Levinasian philosophy to argue that, relative to other characters, Julia in Mackenzie and Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight embody a privileged ethos of sensibility and self-expenditure. Others have argued that, via such gestures, Rhys effects a reversal of conventional values. Gardiner, for example, argues that, in her early short fiction, Rhys “reverses rather than dismantles the sexual and moral double standard, and she confusingly justifies women as both victims and predators.” Judith Kegan Gardiner, Rhys, Stead, Lessing and the Politics of Empathy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 31.

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While such glimpses of Julia’s perspective and Rhys’s strategic use of the second person certainly help to enlist our sympathy as readers and to explain the behavior that so often seems inexplicable in the eyes of others, these glimpses are not as many as we might want. Julia’s history remains largely shrouded and her exact feelings in any given moment mysterious. Indeed, it is largely in giving us other characters’ perspectives that the novel works to establish Julia’s credibility and to suggest that a more even exchange of sympathy is possible in the world of the novel. No doubt the clearest evidence of this possibility is the figure of Horsfield. Though he ultimately—and understandably—balks at taking full responsibility for Julia, he is fairly unique in sympathizing with her and thus serves as a partial model for the ideal reader. On the night they meet, for example, Julia tells Horsfield about her experience of telling a female sculptor the story of her life. Though initially annoyed—he thinks, “If it’s going to be the story of your life, get on with it”—Horsfield finds himself “filled with a glow of warm humanity” by the time she is done (ALMM 50, 54). The story Julia has told is not only a story within a story but also a story about telling the story of her life. She recalls feeling at the time “as if I were before a judge, and I were explaining that everything I had done had always been the only possible thing to do” (ALMM 52). Horsfield ends up being a more sympathetic audience than the sculptor, whom he obligingly calls “rather an ass” (ALMM 53). To some degree, the novel suggests that Horsfield’s protectiveness of Julia—and, even more simply, his willingness to believe what she says—can be traced to his experience in the Great War. When Julia later tries to explain to Horsfield that “people do what they have to do, and then the time comes when they can’t any more, and they crack up,” he is quick to remind her, “I know something about cracking up too. I went through the war, you know” (ALMM 152). While the war thus helps to explain Horsfield’s ability to identify with Julia, it also helps to explain other characters’ wish that she would just go away. In Mackenzie, World War I is coextensive with the past that Julia continually resurrects and others would rather forget. In other words—and odd though it may initially sound—there is something about Julia that is like the war and there is something about the war that made other people like Julia. Shortly after arriving in London, Julia passes a theater where she had watched a film of “Belgium being bombarded” and suddenly thinks, “My God, that was a funny time! The mad things one did—and everybody else was doing them, too. A funny time. A mad reckless time” (ALMM 68). With that, “[a]n exultant and youthful feeling took possession of her” (68). If Julia seems strangely nostalgic for the war, it is in part because she was younger then; she tells Horsfield she was “twenty when it started” (ALMM 152). But her nostalgia also appears to be due to the fact that, for once, “everybody else” was doing the same “mad things” that she did. Simply put, what she seems to have enjoyed about the war was everybody being essentially excessive—doing things that are “mad” and “reckless” but which they paradoxically “have to do” until they “crack up” entirely.92 92  Emery suggests that “whatever adventure Julia enjoyed during the war did not give her the public identity or economic independence” that it supposedly gave other women working on the home front

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Yet Julia also seems to have enjoyed the war as a war—that is, as a large-scale conflict, and not only as a sort of carnivalesque occasion that necessitated recklessness. Thus, she tells Horsfield, “I rather liked the air raids” (ALMM 152)—but why exactly? The fact that her expression of fondness for the air raids is narrated from Horsfield’s perspective, without any explanation of her tone, makes it difficult to judge her meaning or motives. Nevertheless, it is tempting to abstract from her fondness an inchoate intuition about the rivalrous underpinnings of “organized society”—about the continuity between the Hobbesian war of all against all and the social contract that is supposed to replace it. What the air raids would seem to make blaringly clear is the otherwise hidden excess at the heart of commerce and the possessive individual it presupposes. In embodying this excess—the mixture of irrationality and rationality that the war made manifest—Julia represents not only a ghost of others’ personal pasts but also a ghost of Europe’s collective past, one that continues to have powerful effects in the present of the narrative. “ S O M E K I N K I N H I S N AT U R E ” : E V E RY B O D Y ’ S E S S E N T I A L E XC E S S After Leaving Mr Mackenzie not only reveals the debt owed to Julia, her own shortcomings and sometimes troubling characteristics notwithstanding. It also, and even more significantly, works to rethink the ground of social relation and recognition by exposing a tension between a still dominant ideal of self-possession and a common experience of dispossession. The burden of the novel is to demonstrate that Julia is not alone in her dependence, vulnerability, and excessiveness but rather shares these traits with “everybody”—from “you,” the reader, to the men on whom she depends. As James’s transformation into “a different man” in the presence of his pictures and Horsfield’s own experience of “cracking up” begin to suggest, Rhys’s male characters, too, are the type that “gives itself away.” Yet it is in its portrait of Mackenzie that the novel most forcefully suggests that the apparent (sexual) difference between Julia and her male benefactors—between (feminine) dispossession and (masculine) self-possession—is actually a difference within the individual subject, a difference that Mackenzie represses and disavows in adopting a moral code that is “perfectly adapted to the social system”: Mr Mackenzie’s code, philosophy or habit of mind would have been a complete protection to him had it not been for some kink in his nature—that volume of youthful poems [that he wrote in his youth] perhaps still influencing him—which morbidly attracted him to strangeness, to recklessness, even unhappiness. He had more than once allowed himself to be drawn into affairs which he had regretted bitterly afterwards, while men were in the trenches (Jean Rhys at “World’s End,” 136). Emery further argues that, while “Horsfield exhibits feminine-coded qualities of empathy and compassion, he has not had to suffer the same consequences of his wish for freedom and adventure that Julia, because of her sex, has faced” (135). While I agree that there remain important differences between Julia’s and Horsfield’s experiences based on their sex and class, I also want to take seriously the generalizing gesture at stake in Julia’s claim that everybody else was doing the same things as she was.

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though when it came to getting out of these affairs his business instinct came to his help, and he got out undamaged.  (ALMM 24)

In identifying the kink in his nature—his gift, we might say—with the poems he wrote in his youth, Mackenzie implies that he, like Julia, is bound by a kind of symbolic law. Mackenzie, however, flouts this law by taking refuge in his code, untrustworthy though the latter may sometimes be. This moment is not the only one in which Mackenzie is revealed to be governed by a literary tradition that precedes and exceeds him. He remembers having written Julia letters, one of which began with an unmistakable homage to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. Remembering the line—“I would like to put my throat under your feet”—Mackenzie “wriggled,” thinking to himself, “Insanity! Forget it; forget it” (ALMM 28). Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s anti-Freudian reading of Sacher-Masoch, Carol Dell’Amico argues that the presentation of various missives in the text registers an ongoing “masochistic attachment to contractual relations.”93 In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze argues that the masochist parodies the rule of law by demonstrating overly strict adherence to its dictates: “his apparent obedience conceals a criticism and a provocation.”94 In Dell’Amico’s reading, masochism is not a sign of feminine submission but rather, as a contract between a male victim and an idealized female dominatrix, entails a “deflation of the punitive powers of the law.”95 By contrast, I have argued that the withering of the ­contract between Mackenzie and Julia and its replacement by the contract between the almsgiver and the beggar sets in motion a critique of contract in general in the novel—including the masochistic contract. The novel is not attached to contractual relations but instead takes issue with these relations precisely because the attachment they afford is disingenuous. In presupposing the independence of ­contracting parties, contract problematically parodies the primacy and endurance of symbolic bonds. Offering a somewhat different reading of Deleuze alongside the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek argues that masochism is the perverse underside of bourgeois ideology. As such, masochism has a relationship of “antagonistic complicity” to social order: it “suspends social reality, [but] none the less fits easily into that everyday reality.”96 The “fit” between them derives from masochism’s contractual nature. For the masochist, “the most intimate desires become objects of contract and composed negotiation.”97 In this vein, Lacan suggests that the masochist aims to reduce himself to “this thing that is treated like an object, to this slave whom one trades back and forth and whom one shares.”98 In turning the subject into an object of exchange, “the economy of masochistic pain ends up 93 Dell’Amico, Colonialism and the Modernist Moment, 72. 94  Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty in Masochism (New York: Zone, 1997), 88. 95 Dell’Amico, Colonialism and the Modernist Moment, 64. 96  Slavoj Žižek, “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing,” The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 109, emphasis in original; 92. 97  Ibid. 92. 98  Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60, trans. Dennis Porter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 239.

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looking like the economy of goods”—that is, the very economy that masochism is supposed to suspend in indulging one’s most intimate desires.99 I would argue, however, that there remains a tension between the economy of goods and the ­economy of masochism—although not a tension between the law and contract, as Dell’Amico might have it. What is antagonistic about masochism—what keeps it from collapsing into the economy of goods—is not its parody of the law so much as its parody of contract. In blurring the boundary between person and thing, masochism, I would argue and as we began to see in our reading of Smile Please, manifests the return of a notion of personhood that the individualism of bourgeois ideology and political economy represses. Masochism pays tribute to the idea that, to quote Mauss, “the thing itself possesses a soul, is of the soul” (G 12). In other words, masochism resembles a gift economy in which, as Žižek puts it, “The very kernel of the masochist’s being is externalized in the staged game towards which he maintains his constant distance.”100 In Žižek’s reading, this game has greater truth than the reality from which it promises an escape. Yet, in keeping his distance, the masochist avoids this truth—hence his complicity with so-called reality and its illusory promise of mastery. In its portrait of Mackenzie, however, Rhys’s novel calls into question the masochist’s ability to keep his distance, to control the extent to which he does or does not give himself away. Although Mackenzie treats his fling with Julia as a commercial transaction, “plac[ing] the whole affair in the capable hands of Maître Legros,” the novel’s foray into his consciousness makes clear that it still haunts him (ALMM 28). He continues to think about the kinky letters Julia swears to have destroyed, about the lies he told her and the lies she may have told him, and about the promises he made but “never intended to keep” (ALMM 25). Even empty rhetoric, the text again suggests, has the power to create bonds. In thinking that Julia “haunted him, as an ungenerous action does haunt one,” Mackenzie is therefore only half right (ALMM 28). Certainly he has been ungenerous insofar as he has not been especially kind. Yet the fact that he finds himself bound by their exchange also suggests that he has given himself away more than he intended and thus that he has given too much. That his excessiveness is traced back to an originary gift of language (“that volume of youthful poems”) furthermore suggests that it is because Mackenzie is already caught up in symbolic exchange that he is bound to get caught up in symbolic exchange. Bonds are the condition of a desire for bonds—and, in the case of Mackenzie, a masochistic desire for bondage. This desire, moreover, is bound to be “an unending business” insofar as “strangeness” is not just something external to Mackenzie and to which he is attracted, but is something “in his nature.” As the bearer of a linguistic kink, a poetic gift, he, like Julia, is essentially excessive. The similarity between Julia and Mackenzie has paradoxical implications. On the one hand, if both are essentially excessive, then a total balancing of accounts, both within and between subjects, is at base impossible. Reciprocity is bound, in time, to fail. Because the gift is inexhaustible, one can never get as much as one gives. Some loneliness is inevitable. The gift poses a limit to reciprocity though not, 99 Ibid.

100  Žižek, “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing,” 92.

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as we might expect, because it is absolutely free of exchange but rather because of what we referred to in Chapter 2, following Lévi-Strauss, as the initial relational aspect—the underlying, imperceptible relations between seemingly separate, independent individuals. As a giver and taker of language, Mackenzie is bound by a symbolic law that drives his desire while guaranteeing that he is always left wanting more of a return, more of a bond, more relation, more “something.” On the other hand, if excessiveness is a thing individuals have in common, then that means more reciprocity is possible in the novel than the gendered separation of free gifts and interested exchanges allows. Notably, Horsfield, too, is inhabited by a kink of sorts. While in Julia’s room, he feels “something sensitive in him [that] was puzzled and vaguely unhappy” (ALMM 152). Horsfield’s compulsion to give Julia the understanding of which she is otherwise deprived would seem to be proof of the principle with which we began this chapter: “Only the unhappy can either give or  take sympathy.” But while Horsfield is possessed by unhappiness, he, like Mackenzie, is ultimately reticent to give too much. Here, too, the fact that the unhappy can give sympathy does not mean they will. In stressing the parallels between Mackenzie, Horsfield, and Julia, my intention is not to excuse Mackenzie in particular for his unkind behavior and tendency to take more than he gives. At one point, the narrator quips that Mackenzie’s “tips were not always in proportion to the benevolence of his stomach, but this mattered less than one might think” (ALMM 23). This nihilism echoes throughout the novel, though Julia’s tone when making such claims is disconsolate and despondent where the narrator’s is blasé. In telling Horsfield about her failed attempt to justify herself to the sculptor, Julia recalls feeling that “all my life and all myself were floating away from me like smoke and there was nothing to lay hold of— nothing” (ALMM 53). Later in the novel, she thinks over and over, “like a clock ticking in her head, ‘Nothing matters, nothing matters . . . . ’ ” (ALMM 166; ellipses in original). Her feeling that nothing matters is emblematic of what Howells refers to as the novel’s “scepticism about the value of storytelling itself.”101 Indeed, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is not certain that its own attempt at storytelling matters much. And yet, the insistent repetition of this term, “nothing,” begins to lend it a kind of substance and force. It is as if, in thinking that nothing matters, Julia is hitting on an important insight—not that nothing matters but rather that nothing matters. Those things that are supposed to be insignificant and negligible according to the standards of the social system—whether masculine gifts of money or feminine gifts of affective labor—in fact have value and meaning. They produce effects, even if those effects remain hidden—or, rather, even if characters such as Mackenzie have the “business instinct” (i.e., material and symbolic resources) to  help to keep them hidden. In putting these effects on display, Rhys rewrites the difference between the have-nots and the haves in the world of the novel as a 101 Howells, Jean Rhys, 65. In a related vein, see Emery on Julia’s discovery that “she can only be as she is represented” by others (Jean Rhys at “World’s End,” 124–35). Angier calls Mackenzie a “philosophical novel” into which Rhys channeled her own “metaphysical doubts,” asking, “What is the truth behind appearances? What is the real meaning of my experience?”—only to conclude that “there may be no meaning at all.” See Angier, Jean Rhys, 246.

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difference between the helpless and the helped—between those, like Julia, whom “it doesn’t always help to talk to people,” and those, like Mackenzie, for whom help has always been forthcoming without his having to utter a word (ALMM 50). When Mackenzie looks around “with a helpless expression” after Julia confronts him at the restaurant, he is relieved to find the owner “looking at him with significance,” silently communicating his support (ALMM 28). Though help comes to his aid, Mackenzie is characterized in this moment by dispossession, by a failure of mastery and dependence on others. Thus while Alicia Borinsky has argued that Rhys draws “a detailed picture of the woman as guest . . . [whose] role is permanently to be there as an occasion for the selfishness or generosity of others,” I have tried to argue that Mackenzie renders all of its characters guests—some of whom are treated to selfishness and others of whom are treated to generosity on the basis of their social standing.102 While the similarity between Rhys’s male and female characters has been noted by critics, their similarity tends to be conceived, as modernist affect so often is, in terms of loss.103 Howells, for example, argues that “confusion and loss” are cast as “the human condition” in Mackenzie.104 In readings of Julia, this sense of loss is often traced back to her experience of being rejected by her mother, whom Julia longingly recalls having once been “the warm centre of the world,” before Norah was born (ALMM 106).105 In the wake of this trauma, Julia displaces her need for love onto sexual relationships while continuing to wish for some connection and communion with another woman, whether her sister, the sculptor to whom she tells her story, or the beautiful woman she sees working in a café and to whom she feels a “great longing” to talk (ALMM 184). Importantly, though, Julia does not strictly characterize her loss of her mother as a loss in the sense of an absence or lack as these other readings suggest. In responding to her mother’s death, Julia’s language suggests that, if anything, she has experienced too much loss. In other words, here, too, the fundamental ­feature of Julia’s experience is not one of lack but rather one of excess. In the chapel of the crematorium, Julia begins “crying now because she remembered that her life 102  Alicia Borinsky, “Jean Rhys: Poses of a Woman as Guest,” Poetics Today 6.1–2 (1985): 240. 103  Konzett writes of Mackenzie: “Much of the novel, with its absence of any decisive action and its resigned and dejected tone, illustrates a vacuum of meaning that can be explained both as a result of Europe’s postimperial history, with its sense of loss of a historical mission and its newly emerging mass culture, with its rituals of empty repetition and hollowed-out bourgeois conventions.” Delia Caparoso Konzett, Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 152. 104 Howells, Jean Rhys, 67. 105 Simpson similarly reads the novel as a “search for maternal presence.” Anne B. Simpson, Territories of the Psyche: The Fiction of Jean Rhys (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 41–64. On maternal loss and the absent mother in Rhys’s fiction more broadly, see Deborah Kelly Kloepfer, The Unspeakable Mother: Forbidden Discourse in Jean Rhys and H.D. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) and Patricia Moran, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and the Aesthetics of Trauma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Drawing, as Dell’Amico does, on Deleuze, Moran argues that the masochism of Rhys’s characters and the “masochistic aesthetic” of her fiction are in part a response to the early psychic trauma of Rhys’s own relationship with her “repudiating mother” and her mother’s replacement by a “brutalizing lover” (see 115–47).

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had been a long succession of humiliations and mistakes and pains and ridiculous efforts” (ALMM 131). The long succession of negative terms mirrors and reinforces the long succession of negative experiences to which it refers. Together, the form and the content of Julia’s lament suggest that she has experienced a surfeit of ­failures. Shifting from the personal (“her life”) to the general, she adds, “Everybody’s life was like that” (ALMM 131). We might not expect Julia, whose impropriety and difference are endlessly reflected in the judgmental looks of others, to draw such a conclusion. Still, this is not the first time that she has generalized on the basis of her own experience. When telling Horsfield about her failed attempt to explain herself to the sculptor, she seeks his confirmation that others, too, act as they feel they absolutely have to, inexplicable though their actions may seem to others: “it’s always so with everybody, isn’t it?” (ALMM 52). Hesitant to grant too much agreement, Horsfield partially concedes that he thinks “there’s a good deal of tosh talked about free will” (ALMM 52). Yet in this moment in the chapel, Julia has no addressee to support her view, at least none other than the reader, all of which makes her subsequent feeling of empowerment all the more surprising: “At  the same time, in a miraculous manner, some essence of her was shooting upwards like a flame. She was great. She was a defiant flame shooting upwards not to plead but to threaten” (ALMM 131). What enables the conversion of pleading into threatening is Julia’s realization that others are like her—that everybody is the type that gives too much and still comes up short. Not only are they bound by language but they are also bound by the passage of time—by a past they would prefer to forget (e.g., the insanity of Mackenzie’s affair with Julia) and by a future they cannot entirely predict or control (e.g., the business of almsgiving that James fears will consume him completely). Julia’s feeling of empowerment is short-lived: “Then the flame sank down again, useless, having reached nothing” (ALMM 131). The novel, however, is less quick to sink—especially if we grant that nothing does matter. In other words, we might argue that in this moment Julia has reached nothing, not a tangible thing per se but rather “some essence”—the excessive core of experience, or gift, which at once isolates her from other people and binds her to them. Noting the acronym of the novel’s title—ALMM—we might conclude by suggesting that the novel is also a gift of sorts. It is an act of charity, albeit one that defies expectations, marked as the title’s acronym is by a linguistic kink—an extra “M” at the end of ALM where we would expect an “S” to be. As a gift, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, like all of Rhys’s fiction, is engaged in a cultural struggle for recognition, while also beginning to rewrite the underlying terms of recognition. The novel is “transformative” in the sense defined by Fraser in her analysis of different remedies for the uneven distribution of social recognition. Transformative remedies, Fraser suggests, “would not only raise the self-esteem of members of currently disrespected groups; they would change everyone’s sense of self.”106 In this same vein, Rhys’s novel aims not to idealize its heroine who, by her own account, ends up “where most sensible people start, indifferent and without any pity at all” 106  Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition?” 24.

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(ALMM 188). Rather, the novel calls on us to reimagine what it means to be a self, to be someone who, like everybody, and like the gift of the novel itself, sometimes fails to keep up appearances, giving more—and other—than one ought to infelicitous ends. Mackenzie insistently tells us that we, too, are bound to be unhappy, sensitive, even kinky from time to time, hence our potential to end up somewhere very different than the novel’s denizens—not simply capable of giving and taking sympathy but also willing to do so.

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4 Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Literary Genius In the first three chapters of this book, I have tried to argue that, despite differences in their disciplines and gender politics, Mauss, Woolf, and Rhys all characterize the post-World War I period in terms of a crisis in the traditional separation of gifts and exchanges. Moreover, they all treat this crisis as a potentially positive, socially beneficial phenomenon. In her late-career writing of the 1930s and early 1940s, Gertrude Stein, too, I will argue, perceives the separation of gifts and exchanges to be breaking down. But whereas this breakdown bore the promise of a “salutary revolution” to Mauss’s eyes and the promise of a more egalitarian embrace of differences to Woolf ’s and Rhys’s, Stein was certain that it spelled disaster (G 68). One of the main perpetrators of this disaster as far as Stein was concerned was U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. We may recall that for Mauss, writing in the mid1920s, the development of insurance schemes that would eventually be hallmarks of the fully formed welfare state—for example, unemployment, Social Security— signaled the emergence of a “new morality,” one that would “consist of a good but moderate blend of reality and the ideal” (G 69). As it happens, President Roosevelt would seize on similar language to describe the growth of the welfare state under the New Deal in his second inaugural address in January 1937. Celebrating the changed “moral climate” of the United States, Roosevelt proudly declared, “We are beginning to wipe out the line that divides the practical from the ideal; and in so doing we are fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for the establishment of a morally better world.”1 For Stein, a staunch fiscal conservative and public critic of the Roosevelt administration, the exercise of “unimagined power” by the federal government constituted anything but moral progress. In turning to her wide-ranging nonfiction from the 1930s, as well as her underappreciated 1941 narrative, Ida A Novel, this chapter argues that, to Stein’s eyes, wiping out the line dividing the practical from the ideal was tantamount to breaching the boundary between the realm of politics and the realm of art. Blurring the two posed a serious threat to both realms—undermining national economic stability and representative democracy, while also diminishing intellectual freedom and aesthetic autonomy. Practical, material matters—namely, the 1  Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Second Inaugural Address,” in Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States from George Washington to Bill Clinton (Champaign, IL: Project Gutenberg, n.d.), eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), 177, 176.

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U.S. economy—were the business of politics, although, as far as Stein was ­concerned, the most appropriate way for the federal government to support the economy was by not interfering with it. Ideality—the capacity to conceptualize and create ideal forms—was a gift strictly reserved for, and thus best left to, individuals of genius and, more specifically, Stein herself. Aghast at the mixture of the practical and the ideal, for reasons that were at once political, personal, and professional, Stein works tirelessly across her writing to redraw the line supposedly wiped out by the Roosevelt administration. In different genres and in different ways, she repeatedly insists on the need to maintain a division between artistic ideals and practical politics as well as a related, and perhaps even more fundamental, division between gifts and exchanges. And yet, in the process, Stein characterizes life in the interwar period and, more specifically, her life, a frequent focus of her 1930s prose, in terms of the convergence of these different phenomena in ways she cannot control. She is, we might say, unwittingly Maussian in her view of the welfare state—certain there is nothing good about the confusion of ideal and real, and yet, for this reason, an insightful ethnographer of the way formerly separate categories are newly “mixed up together” (G 46). In his innovative account of the literature of the U.S. welfare state and what he calls “New Deal Modernism,” Michael Szalay argues that government and art are analogous for Stein because they both have “intentional criteria for coherence.”2 Art, however, succeeds where government cannot help but fail: “organic art can in fact be planned in ways that government actions and structures cannot”—although, to Stein’s extraordinary chagrin, that did not stop the government from trying to create a state apparatus that exceeded both its planning abilities and its proper reach.3 In my reading, art and government were not only analogous but also rivalrous for Stein—locked in a competition over which types of institutions and individuals have and ought to have the authority to give. Like so many of her predecessors and contemporaries, including Woolf, Stein figures artistic creativity as a “gift,” in the Romantic sense of a natural endowment or, to use the term Stein so often ascribed to herself and a few privileged friends, of genius. Yet, as we will see, Stein also lends her literary gift a philanthropic, humanitarian valence. Reflecting during her 1934 to 1935 U.S. lecture tour on the “gradual making” of her magnum opus, The Making of Americans, Stein traces the book’s development back to her youthful idealism. Even before college and her work with William James she remembers being “full of convictions” and wanting to understand what made people who they are—their “basis of existence” or “bottom nature.”4 And not just some people. No, Stein wanted, in her typically populist, self-aggrandizing way, to understand and, in the case of The Making of Americans, to catalog the nature of everybody—of the whole of the American people. According to Stein, these ambitions were never just epistemological but always had an ethical, even 2  Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 82. 3 Ibid. 4  Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1985), 136–7. Hereafter cited in the text as LA.

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evangelical component. Indeed, we hear more than a hint of missionary zeal when she attributes her early adventures in talking and listening to others—one of her many idiosyncratic definitions of genius—to “a desire not only to hear what each one was saying . . . but also then of helping to change them and to help them to change themselves” (LA 136). Given Stein’s characterization of genius in these idealistic terms, I want to suggest that the welfare state implicitly represents, among other atrocities, the government’s misappropriation of the artist’s gift—of an idealism and a power to help everybody that are particular to art. At one point in Tender Buttons, published in 1914, the speaker asks, “Giving it away, not giving it away, is there any difference.”5 By the 1930s, Stein’s answer seems clear: there is very much a difference, particularly when it comes to art and government. Only by giving without demanding a return is art sure to be art. By the same token, it is only by not giving freely—by not spending lavishly, by not providing too much assistance or imposing “too much organization”—that the U.S. government can remain ­viable.6 And yet, the reason the difference between art and government and between gifts and exchanges seemed so important is that it simply would not hold up. Not only was the government, to her eyes, “giving it away” under the New Deal, but Stein’s work had ceased to be, as it had theretofore been, a de facto free gift. She was “not giving it away” anymore, but getting both money and recognition in return for her writing. Notably, Roosevelt’s first year as president, 1933, was also the year Stein ­published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Initially serialized in The Atlantic Monthly, the book was an immediate bestseller.7 Having found a significant paying audience for the first time in her thirty-year writing career and finally “earned [her] first dollar,” Stein was suddenly in the intoxicating but also unsettling position of garnering economic and symbolic capital in exchange for her work.8 Of course, that had been the goal. By her own account, Stein wrote The Autobiography with the aim of commercial success. In “The Story of a Book,” a short piece published on the heels of The Autobiography in 1933, Stein recalls telling Toklas once she had finished writing it, “I would love to write a best seller” (HWIW 61). Bryce Conrad has argued that, having struggled to find an American publisher and audience for her work, Stein wrote The Autobiography in response to a “crisis of non-recognition.”9 5  Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (Los Angeles, CA: Sun & Moon, 1991), 70. 6  Stein, “My Last about Money,” in How Writing Is Written, Volume II of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1974), 111. Hereafter cited in the text as HWIW. 7  In his biography of Stein, James Mellow notes, “The first printing of 5,400 copies was sold out by August 22, 1933, nine days before the book was officially published” by Harcourt. James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company (New York: Praeger, 1974), 354. 8  Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1993), 42. Hereafter cited in the text as EA. 9  Bryce Conrad, “Gertrude Stein in the American Marketplace,” Journal of Modern Literature 19.2 (Fall 1995): 223. Before The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein had published just four books in the U.S., and the first, Three Lives in 1909, was at her own expense. The others—Tender Buttons (1914), Geography and Plays (1922), and Useful Knowledge (1928)—did not perform well in the marketplace (Conrad, “Gertrude Stein in the American Marketplace,” 216–17). According to Conrad, Stein’s “deepest purpose” in writing The Autobiography was to make her little-read and largely unpublished

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While the book won Stein the widespread recognition she craved in her home country, her newfound celebrity status generated its own crisis of non-recognition of sorts. Stein now worried about being recognized for the wrong things—about being valued for her personality and not for her writing. In her far less successful sequel to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Everybody’s Autobiography, published in 1937, Stein notes that it “always did bother me that the American public were more interested in me than in my work” (EA 51). Again, it was a problem of her own creation, for although The Autobiography was intended to generate interest in Stein’s work, one of the primary ways in which the text actually does so is by generating interest in “Gertrude Stein”—the Parisian art-world personality behind the experimental writing. Of course, the personality, “Gertrude Stein,” does not actually preexist the writing but is instead a product of it. Jonathan Goldman argues that Stein’s primary “means for creating herself as author within the text [of The Autobiography]” is the “network of celebrity names.”10 By positioning “Gertrude Stein” at the center of this network, The Autobiography establishes Stein’s dual ­status as an elite authorial subject, whose “attributes are beyond the conception or capability of ordinary people,” and an object readily available for consumption by a mass audience.11 In Goldman’s reading, celebrity—and, in the case of Stein in particular, the celebrity name—marks modernism’s “convergence with and separation from mass culture.”12 Goldman is one of a number of critics who have argued that Stein’s writing from this period crosses the so-called great divide between modernism and mass culture. In his highly influential (if sometimes misread) 1986 study, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Andreas Huyssen argues that modernism and later theorists of modernism such as Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg presupposed and insisted upon “the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture.”13 As Goldman notes, Huyssen’s study has oeuvre more accessible to readers so that she might, in her words, “publish everything” (224). Even after The Autobiography’s success, however, she was unable to find an American publisher amenable to the task (224–7). On the broader institutional conditions that allowed for The Autobiography’s success, see Alyson Tischler, “A Rose is a Pose: Steinian Modernism and Mass Culture,” Journal of Modern Literature 26.3/4 (Spring 2003): 12–27. Tischler argues that Stein found an “accidental promoter” in Don Marquis, a columnist for The Sun Dial who would parody Stein’s non-referential writing style, thus teaching his readers how to read Stein and piquing public interest in Stein herself. 10  Jonathan Goldman, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2011), 85. 11  Ibid. On Stein’s strategy for balancing her desire for public recognition with her wariness about sacrificing her uniqueness after the success of The Autobiography, see Kirk Curnutt, “Inside and Outside: Gertrude Stein on Identity, Celebrity, and Authenticity,” Journal of Modern Literature 23.2 (Winter 1999–2000): 291–308. In the wake of her newfound celebrity, Curnutt argues, Stein maintained—and straddled—an “inside/outside distinction,” enjoying the external attention she received on her lecture tour, for example, while repeatedly insisting that “her inner essence” remained unperturbed by the attention (302). For a comprehensive reading of Stein’s relationship to the public in the decades leading up to The Autobiography and after its success, see Karen Leick, Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity (New York: Routledge, 2009). 12 Goldman, Modernism Is the Culture of Celebrity, 8. 13  Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), viii.

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become an “obligatory reference” in works of the new modernist studies intent on demonstrating modernists’ engagement with mass cultural media such as advertising, propaganda, film, and radio.14 Part of my objective in this study has been to further expand our purview of the mass cultural media with which modernists were thoughtfully engaged by looking at economic media such as money and contracts. Returning the Gift might therefore be read as further bridging the nominal divide between modernism and mass culture and countering the well-worn notion that modernists were hostile to the market. Yet I also mean to trouble the primacy of the opposition between modernism and the market in guiding our scholarly inquiry by arguing that modernist thought and praxis took shape in response to a somewhat different opposition—that is, the modern opposition between gifts and exchanges—as well as the promises and threats posed by the lived breakdown of this opposition during the interwar period. When it comes to reading Stein’s late-career writings, scholars tend to begin with a narrative of modernist antipathy to mass culture and the market, even if ultimately to argue that Stein does not quite fit this narrative mold. My concern is that, in nevertheless taking this narrative as their starting point, they have neglected the extent to which the market itself—or, rather, more precisely, market society—was changing in the 1930s. Loren Glass rightly claims, “The significance of the Depression for Stein’s writing in the 1930s has not been adequately appreciated.”15 Yet even in those studies that take into account the Depression’s significance, including Glass’s, its potential impact on the “relation between art and commerce” and on Stein’s perception of this relation are largely disregarded.16 In other words, the relation between art and commerce and, especially, the notion of an opposition between them continues to be treated as a given and to anchor criticism without consideration of the possibility that the Depression and Roosevelt’s response to it transformed these categories and their relation to one another. Even if we grant that Stein used to think about her art in relation to commerce, we must acknowledge that, to Stein’s conservative eyes, commerce in the 1930s was not what it had been before: the supposedly once-free market was no longer free but was bound up with the state in perilous ways. In the wake of the convergence of market and state, the great divide for Stein—the paradigmatic axis of opposition underwriting her late aesthetics—was that between art and politics or, even more precisely, between art and the welfare state in its troubling coextension with, and control of, the ­capitalist market.17 14 Goldman, Modernism Is the Culture of Celebrity, 3. 15  Loren Glass, Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 118. 16  Ibid. 125. 17  Luke Carson offers perhaps the most robust reading of “Stein’s political economy.” See Luke Carson, Consumption and Depression in Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 52–141. Carson argues that Stein responded to the Depression by waging a “defence of the market” and advocating an “ethic of sacrifice . . . a historically new version of the traditional American ethics of thrift, restraint and work” (9). While my own reading converges with Carson’s on a number of specific points, which I acknowledge here, they diverge on some large and important ones. Most immediately, it bears noting two points of disagreement. First, despite our agreeing about

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One of the basic premises of this chapter, then, is that in order to understand Stein’s aesthetics, we have to understand her politics and her economics, and vice versa. Stein was, in my reading, a profoundly systematic and binary thinker during this period. Particularly in her nonfiction, oppositions proliferate: masterpieces versus government, entity versus identity, human mind versus human nature, freedom versus organization—and the list goes on. These oppositions, I argue, at base correspond to an economistic separation of gifts and exchanges. Exchange, in this context, is not reducible to either the market or mass culture though it certainly dovetails with, and even underwrites, each. As a result, Stein’s own determination to separate gifts from exchanges will sometimes look like modernist hostility to the market. In discussing Ida A Novel, for example, I will argue that Ida is an avatar for the Depression-era artist and that her penchant for performing favors when she moves to Washington, D.C. is expressly opposed to buying and selling. The name “Ida” is fittingly an anagram for “aid.” As a figure for the gift of art, Ida’s aid would seem to reinforce an antithesis between art and commerce, yet commerce is never strictly commercial in Ida. Rather, as the primary things people appear to do in the nation’s capital, buying and selling assume economic and political valences. By the same token, “exchange” in this chapter does not name a strictly economic activity but instead serves as shorthand for an entire family of concepts that Stein casts as the business of the nation state in the 1930s: relation, necessity, human nature— none of which are in and of themselves “bad,” but all of which ought to be kept in their place, namely outside the realm of art with its unique purchase on gifts and giving. Keeping them outside—separating art from politics and gifts from exchanges—is no easy task. As the dichotomy of human nature and human mind in the foregoing list of oppositions begins to suggest, gifts and exchanges, as social possibilities, are not just embedded in institutions. Both are possibilities for the human as a being split between nature and mind. In other words, the difference between gifts and exchanges is a difference internal to the individual subject. Each Stein’s concern with defending the market, we disagree about what exactly she was defending it from. Nuanced though Carson’s study is, it very much presupposes a great divide between modernism and mass culture. As a “committed modernist,” Stein, he argues, was above all defending both her art and the market against “the rise of mass consumption” (97). Second, while Carson describes Stein’s ideal ethic of sacrifice as “historically new” and initially claims that Stein successfully sidestepped the atavism of many of her modernist peers—including, in Carson’s reading, that of Marcel Mauss—he ultimately suggests otherwise. In Carson’s reading, The Gift exemplifies a modernist “longing for archaic forms of social relations prior to the Enlightenment and modernity”: “One of the most significant examples of this modernist symptom is Marcel Mauss’ essay,” particularly its claim that modern society continues to be underwritten by the total social phenomena of gift exchange (2, 252, n2). Despite her nominal avoidance of this symptom, Stein seems to share Mauss’s “longing for archaic forms” in her representation of the U.S. economy and systems of value more generally; according to Carson, “Stein’s aesthetic, cultural, social and economic systems of value resonate with each other because each is determined by the unstable structure of the fetish” (58). In other words, each is founded on a loss or sacrifice that enables exchange by initiating a dynamic of credit and debt such as we see in Mauss’s account of gift economies. This loss is simultaneously preserved and concealed in the form of the fetish—for example, money. Carson then argues that this other, more primordial fetishistic economy of credit and debt “haunts exchange” in Stein’s writing (74). For my part, I have clearly resisted reading Mauss and, indeed, modernism in atavistic terms. Still, the greatest disparities between Carson’s reading and my own stem from my primary focus on the Western distinction between gifts and exchanges and Mauss’s and Stein’s very different responses to it.

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corresponds not simply to a way of acting in the world but also to an attitude toward the world. Little wonder, then, that the distinction between them is so wont to break down in lived experience. Indeed, it should be clear from the start that, while I read Stein as a systematic thinker, the system she builds is also highly unstable and fraught with contradictions. Not only was the divide between art and politics one that Stein brazenly overstepped in taking the U.S. government to task in her writing, but it is also one that Ida A Novel crosses in offering a vision of artistic generosity that serves political ends. Our path to Ida will be a twisting one, as we work through Stein’s formulations of different gift economies in her nonfiction. I take these detours not simply to trace the contours of Stein’s philosophical system but also to demonstrate the ways in which questions of the gift—of what the gift is, of what it should be, and of who should give it—are central to this system. Concerns with gifts and giving unify the multifarious strands of Stein’s writing in the 1930s, from her myriad reflections on art, celebrity, and genius to her many thoughts about government and what would become an especially “fascinating subject”—money (EA 42). M O N E Y, T H E M E E T I N G - G RO U N D O F A RT AND POLITICS Although the subject of money interested Stein throughout her career, it became especially fascinating in the 1930s for two reasons: she started earning it from sales of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and from the success of her lecture tour, and, as far as she was concerned, the U.S. government started mishandling it.18 In tackling these phenomena in her writing, Stein not only represents money as a practical medium of exchange—a thing that “everybody earns every day and spends every day to live” and which Stein herself very much enjoyed earning and spending (HWIW 106). She also upholds money as an ideal that transcends the base world of exchange. In The Geographical History of America, her 1936 treatise on human nature and human mind, Stein claims that money is “like master-pieces” insofar as it shares in art’s apparent autonomy from the creativity-killing constraints of human nature, time, memory, and relation.19 It is unbound from exchange—like a free gift—paradoxically because it is potentially exchangeable for most everything. Stein 18  Mix suggests, “ ‘Currency,’ in all its valences, occupied Gertrude Stein throughout her career”— “currency” in the sense of money but also in the sense of symbolic or cultural capital (“being current or in vogue or having a kind of electric charge”). Deborah M. Mix, “Gertrude Stein’s Currency,” Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity, Modernity, Culture, ed. Aaron Jaffe and Jonathan Goldman (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 92. As for Stein’s earnings from The Autobiography: she received $1,000 for the four installments published in the Atlantic, $4,495.31 in royalties from Harcourt, and $3,000 for the book’s sale to the Literary Guild to be offered as its September selection to subscribers. With her earnings, Stein bought a new eight-cylinder Ford, as well as a custom-made Hermés coat and two studded collars for her dog, Basket. She also took on two new servants. See Mellow, Charmed Circle, 354, as well as EA, 41. 19  Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America, or The Relation of Human Nature to Human Mind (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 217. Hereafter cited in the text as GHA.

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cryptically registers money’s universality when she declares, “Anything can make me think what money is, what is it” (GHA 181). As a general equivalent for anything, money has aesthetic properties: it fascinates; it drives speculative thought; it resists facile understanding. Thus, money, she further notes, “is not easy to describe” (GHA 199). Yet, as the lifeblood of the national economy, money is also central to governance. Indeed, money is the “only thing about government and governing that is interesting”—in both economic and aesthetic senses of the term “interest” (GHA 194). If following Henry James, whose work Stein more or less credits with ushering American literature into the twentieth century, the sole criterion of the modern novel “is that it be interesting,” then money is the one thing that brings government anywhere close to feigning the status of art.20 At the same time, in mediating between art and government, money endlessly threatens to collapse the divide between them. Critics tend to consider Stein’s meditations on money “quite simplistic,” and to a degree their judgments are fair.21 Her writing on the topic reflects her politics— namely, her laissez-faire liberalism and contempt for so-called big government. Luke Carson helpfully characterizes Stein’s political views thus: “Stein is at times a bourgeois conservative, often a libertarian, and at other times she demonstrates an aristocratic nostalgia for a peasant and artisanal tradition.”22 While Carson resists putting Stein in the same “reactionary camp” as Ezra Pound, Stein’s political gaze was cast decidedly backward—not to a primitive, premodern past, but to the unrealized promise of the eighteenth century.23 Thus, Barbara Will notes that, in the eyes of writers such as Stein and Pound, the eighteenth century marked “the high point of a kind of authentic American populism as well as the pinnacle of classical economic liberalism.”24 And therein lays the root of Stein’s apparent naiveté. 20  Henry James, “The Art of Fiction.” The Art of Fiction by Walter Besant and Henry James (Boston, MA: Algonquin Press, 1900), 60, https://archive.org/details/cu31924027192941. More specifically, Stein credits James’s paragraphs. In “What is English Literature,” Stein links shifts in English literary form to shifts in the material conditions of its production, or what she calls “daily island life” (EA 34). Whereas the eighteenth century is best represented by the sentence and the nineteenth century by phrases, at the end of the nineteenth century, “the paragraph came to be the thing” and was so especially in American literature, which is “the twentieth-century literature” (49). Presumably like the United States itself in Stein’s view, American literature has a “lack of connection,” or autonomy, that finds realization in the paragraph and “Henry James being an American knew best what he was doing when he did this thing” (53, 48). 21  Mix, “Gertrude Stein’s Currency,” 97. 22 Carson, Consumption and Depression, 40. 23  Ibid. 3. 24 Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 48. Contra Carson, Will very much groups Stein in the same reactionary camp as Pound, claiming that Stein’s “politics over the course of the 1930s began to resemble quite closely the profascist populist Jeffersonianism” of Pound, as well as to “dovetail with emerging reactionary discourses of the French Right, including those of Maréchal Pétain’s National Revolution,” which aimed at “a return to the past,” before the decadence of the French Revolution and nineteenthcentury progressivism (49–50). Pétain, we may recall, was the leader of the collaborationist Vichy regime during the Nazi Occupation of France. Stein worked on translating some of Pétain’s speeches for an American audience. In order to explain Stein’s role as Vichy propagandist and apparent attraction to authoritarianism, Will turns to Stein’s friendship and “unlikely collaboration” with Bernard Fäy, a scholar turned Vichy official whom Stein first met years earlier, in 1926, and who seems to have protected Stein and Toklas during the Occupation. Among other things, Fäy (a biographer of Benjamin Franklin) and Stein shared an admiration for “the eighteenth century,” though their uses

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Stein’s romanticization of pre-industrial agrarian life, before “they began inventing machinery” and “began factory organization,” entails a labor theory of value that can seem to be many historical steps removed from the realities—or, rather, the virtualities—of 1930s U.S. financial capitalism (HWIW 111). Conrad suggests that Stein did not understand the “speculative capital of the sort wielded by the corporate interests that had defined market economics during the period of her thirty-year absence” from the United States.25 Having always lived off a fixed income distributed by her eldest brother, Michael, she was troubled by the volatility of value in the wake of the stock market collapse and Roosevelt’s decision to move the U.S. dollar from the gold standard to the silver standard in 1933, after which, as Mix notes, Stein’s monthly income dropped by 40 percent.26 In “And Now,” published in Vanity Fair in 1934, Stein recalls that, after her windfall from The Autobiography, “I was spending my money as they had spent their money all the other painters and writers . . . And then the dollar fell and somehow I got frightened, really frightened awfully frightened” (HWIW 64). But while Stein clearly felt the economic and emotional effects of this crisis in value, according to Conrad, she “could come by no strict accounting of how value was generated in America.”27 Perhaps not, but there is also a certain willed ignorance on Stein’s part, as if in failing to account for how value was generated she refused to lend legitimacy to a process that looked suspiciously like the process of creating aesthetic value. In other words, if Stein could not understand the way value was generated it was because she did not think value should be generated that way—at least not outside the fields of art and literature. What Stein seems to have understood, albeit somewhat partially and intuitively, is that the abstractions of the welfare state—for example, Roosevelt’s seeming ­dematerialization of monetary value, the normalization of credit and debt, statistical calculations of risk—bore a certain kinship to the abstraction that had long been the defining feature of her literary project as a self-proclaimed genius. Using terms that anticipate Goldman’s focus on celebrity and especially the importance of the celebrity name, Bob Perelman has argued, “Genius was Stein’s trademark: what she wrote had to be ‘Gertrude Stein,’ unfathomable and glamorous as art but as immediately available as the shine of goods in a store window.”28 We might use of the phrase varied to fit “their own political and ideological agendas: the former, through systematic historical accounts of the period as a lost epoch of advanced culture; the latter, through ruminations on a rather unusual convergence of literary and socioeconomic decadence” in the more than a century since (51). In New Deal Modernism, Szalay comes closer to Carson than to Will in arguing that the reactionary politics of Stein, Pound, and other modernist defenders of aesthetic autonomy differ far more than has been recognized. Whereas for Pound, Eliot, and Yeats organic art can “prefigure an ideal polis,” for Stein and Hemingway it “signals a desire to escape from political organization altogether”; the latter “cleave to classical, laissez-faire liberalism” (84). 25  Bryce Conrad, “Gertrude Stein in the American Marketplace,” Journal of Modern Literature 19.2 (Fall 1995): 229. 26  Mix, “Gertrude Stein’s Currency,” 97. 27  Conrad, “Gertrude Stein in the American Marketplace,” 229. 28  Bob Perelman, The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 168. Susan Schultz reads The Autobiography of

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a similar formula to characterize the New Deal’s commingling of ideal and real: if  unfathomable and glamorous in its unprecedented scale and scope, the New Deal was also immediately available in its appeal to an ailing nation. The problem, however, is not just the government and its apparent aping of artistic genius, for example, in taking the U.S. off the gold standard. While Stein finds the government to be terribly irresponsible, especially when it comes to monetary reform, her writing also suggests that the problem runs deeper. There is something in the nature of money itself that makes it difficult to distinguish what is ideal and what is real—something she had long mirrored in simultaneously making her writing unfathomable (ideal) and universally available (real). In other words, Stein’s aesthetics had always been underwritten by a certain monetary logic. Her art had always resembled money, yet the resemblance between them became a source of anxiety once she started making money and the government, as far she was concerned, started taking it. Thus, I want to give Stein a bit more credit than is typical—not for her politics but rather for her philosophy of money. Across Stein’s writing from the 1930s, we can see her wrestling with the status of money as “a manifestation of an ideal and a real thing,” to quote Marc Shell.29 Alfred Sohn-Rethel similarly describes money as “an abstract thing which, strictly speaking, is a contradiction in terms.”30 As we will see in greater depth shortly, this contradiction had long been built into the form of Stein’s writing. By the mid-1930s, it was newly central to the content. Much like Simmel in his Philosophy of Money, Stein is especially focused on the subjective experience of money.31 She returns time and again to the fact that money has an everyday instrumental function and yet it seems to be a kind of idealized thing in itself. Not only does it mediate between art and politics but also it straddles and thus blurs the line between human mind and human nature. In an implicit reversal of Marx’s characterization of logic as the money of the mind, Stein characterizes money as one of “the symbols of the human mind” (GHA 97). Money is not the material ground of thought but rather a representation of the capacity for abstraction. But while money is a privileged medium of human mind, it can also bring out the worst in human nature: “Human nature can use it but Alice B. Toklas as an advertisement for Stein’s more difficult works, particularly Stanzas in Meditation, written in the same year, 1932. As Stein’s narrator and nominal muse, Alice B. Toklas “does not so much inspire as advertise her work.” While The Autobiography “proclaims over and again . . . that [Stein] is one of the three great geniuses of the century” (the other two being Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead), Stanzas serves as a “commodity through which Stein can buy the label of genius, and become famous less for what she writes than for the fact that she writes so obscurely.” Susan M. Schultz, “Gertrude Stein’s Self-Advertisement,” Raritan 12.2 (Fall 1992): 71–87. 29  Marc Shell, Art and Money (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 7. 30 Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology, trans. Martin SohnRethel (London: Macmillan, 1978), 19. 31  Marcel Hénaff provides a helpful overview of Simmel’s method and argument: “Simmel dispassionately explains the nature and potential of the money instrument . . . His entire demonstration is based on individual experience, even though its purpose is to show that this experience is situated within objective social conditions of which the development of the monetary economy is a part.” Marcel Hénaff, The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy, trans. Jean-Louis Morhange (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 334.

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cannot refuse it” (GHA 153). While scholars of Stein’s late writings have given ­significant attention to her admiring affiliation of money with the mind and masterpieces, they have tended to ignore money’s tyrannical appeal to our baser instincts. But the two phenomena are inseparable. As an ideal thing and a real thing, money bridges the divide between mind and nature, yet it is also what makes this and other divides necessary in the first place. It is because money can appear to be both a thing in itself (a free gift) and a thing in relation (a medium of exchange) that we must take care to distinguish between the two. In the context of my larger argument in this study, I am at base making two claims about Stein: not only was she thinking about gifts in systematic ways but also she was thinking about money in ways that women writers are seldom recognized as having done. That is to say, she merits inclusion among those thinkers who have, in Shell’s words, “tried to confront and to account self-critically for the money of the mind informing their own thought.”32 For Shell, the first of these thinkers in the U.S. context is, as we might expect, Edgar Allan Poe in “The GoldBug.” In Anglo-American modernist studies, Ezra Pound is no doubt the writer whose economics have received the most critical attention and whose poetics have most readily seemed to fit Shell’s criterion. That Stein seems to have thought more of Poe than of Pound—calling the former “first class in American letters” while famously dismissing the latter as a “village explainer” in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—is telling.33 Stein’s thinking about money and art—and her conceptualization of art on the model of money—comes much closer to Poe’s than to Pound’s. Kevin McLaughlin argues that Poe conceptualized literary value on the model of paper money, establishing a “link between paper and potential.”34 In Poe’s work, paper—for example, the foolscap in “The Gold-Bug” and the purloined letter in the Dupin mysteries—“becomes associated with a theory of value that opposes itself to the old identification of value with substance, gold for instance.”35 The value of paper and thus of the literary text is virtual, speculative rather than substantive. Whereas Poe preferred paper, Pound relied on gold metaphors to capture the “concentrated value” of his genius: “it is gold, metonym of the transcendent fire of the sun, that most powerfully figures the pure ideality of divine or poetic vision” in his early Cantos.36 Pound saw only the potential for usury in money’s “alienation of symbol from thing” and the dematerialization of value.37 And yet, Richard Sieburth argues, in the course of the 1930s, Pound increasingly 32 Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 4. 33  In a letter to Ellery Sedgwick, editor of the Atlantic, in December 1919, Stein groups her writing with “all that is first class in American letters whether it’s newspapers, Walt Whitman or Henry James or Poe.” Quoted in Conrad, “Gertrude Stein in the American Marketplace,” 219. For Stein’s take on Pound, see The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage, 1990), 200. 34  Kevin McLaughlin, “Just Fooling: Paper, Money, Poe,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 11.1 (1999): 41. 35 Ibid. 36  Richard Sieburth, “In Pound We Trust: The Economy of Poetry/The Poetry of Economics,” Critical Inquiry 14 (Autumn 1987): 151. 37  Ibid. 158. In a passage that Sieburth also quotes, Lewis Hyde writes of Pound’s concerns about the alienating effects of monetary symbolization: “All the crimes that Pound warns us against come

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placed “emphasis on the primacy of sign over substance, of stamp over metal, of design over material,” both in his economics and in his poetics, suggesting that Pound’s thinking about art and money may ultimately have more in common with Poe’s thinking—and Stein’s—than it first appears to.38 Given the attention paid by Shell and others to American men of letters who have thought about money, I am interested in what happens to our understanding of the relationship between art and money when we shift our attention to a woman of letters. If as Stein claims, in the twentieth century, “the only real literary thinking has been done by a woman,” then what difference does it make for a woman to do the thinking (GHA 210)? Indeed, does it make a difference? The fact that Stein was a woman who loved women in her personal life and practiced formal innovation in her professional one does not make it a given that she was particularly feminist or progressive politically—though that has often been the assumption. “For most contemporary readers,” as Will notes, “Gertrude Stein is an unquestionably progressive writer.”39 Her writing has been read as a feminist affront to patriarchal poetry, a transgressive expression of lesbian eroticism, and a prescient precursor to postmodernism and poststructuralism. The staying power of these readings owes a partial debt to her influence on the later twentieth-century Language poets, as well as to the tendency of many scholars, including feminist scholars such as Lisa Ruddick and Marianne DeKoven, to end their analysis of Stein’s literary career with the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—that is, before Stein’s writing became more readable and some of its content more overtly conservative. Whether Stein herself was progressive but became more conservative during this period is a question beyond the bounds of this study. I am less concerned with comparing the early and late Stein than I am with further fleshing out our understandings of the latter’s aesthetics and politics and the relation between the two. What we find in Stein’s writing from the 1930s, amid the coincidental crises of her ­success and Roosevelt’s failure, is a self-conscious effort to wedge a gap between the realm of art and the realm of politics—a gap that looks suspiciously like a traditional sexual division of labor insofar as Stein seems able to establish space for creative genius, and especially for her genius, only by falling back on a patriarchal view of government and civil society as a necessarily masculine realm of exchange that her gift falls outside, at least in theory. Before turning to Stein’s expressly political writings, I would simply stress that, while her politics may be conservative, even reactionary, the gift she imagined was also distinctly modern in its responsiveness to the contemporary American scene. Like the gifts of Rhys and Woolf, Stein’s gift was materially and conceptually rooted in the conditions of modern market society, although in Stein’s work the primary link between gifts and exchanges was money. Of course, money also played a part in our readings of Woolf and Rhys. In Mrs. Dalloway, money, in the form of the wasted shilling, constituted one among many imperial symbols that quashed down to one: to profit on the alienation of the symbol from the real.” Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 2007), 343. 38  Sieburth, “In Pound We Trust,” 162. 39 Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 12.

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differences and therefore never quite measured up to those gifts of thought that registered the ongoing influence of other people. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, money, whether in the form of cash or a cheque from a lawyer, was a paradoxical symbol that masqueraded as a free gift yet continued to forge interpersonal bonds. Stein is similarly attuned to the paradoxical status of money in attending to its ideal and real properties. But she also seeks, impossibly, to resolve the tension between money’s real and ideal faces by relegating the messy, relational properties of money to the real world of politics while valorizing money’s potential in the world of art. “ I S M O N E Y M O N E Y ”: T H E FA I L I N G S A N D F E E L I N G S O F   T H E F E D E R A L G OV E R N M E N T In 1936, Stein published a series of five articles devoted to the topic of money in The Saturday Evening Post. In the first article, titled simply “Money,” Stein admonishes the federal government for its mismanagement of public money, particularly in its adoption of tax-and-spend economic policies.40 Unabashed not only in her conservatism but also in her contempt for Roosevelt in particular, Stein attributes what she sees as the government’s irresponsibility to a conceptual failure. The problem, she claims, is that the “people who vote money, presidents and congress, do not think about money” the same way as “[e]verybody who earns it and spends it every day in order to live”—that is, as a scarce commodity for which one has to work (HWIW 106). Indeed, for Stein, “the trouble really comes from this question is money money” (HWIW 106). Is the abstract idea of money the same as the material currency earned and spent on a daily basis or not? Is the ideal thing the same as the real thing? For all of F.D.R.’s interest in wiping out the line between the ideal and the real, Stein suggests that, when it comes to money, he fails to see the link between the ideal thing and the real thing and, more precisely, he treats as ideal what he ought to treat as real. In using this language of ideal and real, I draw inspiration from the work of both Marc Shell and Jean-Joseph Goux—though I also hasten to add that they do not use these terms in exactly the same way. For Goux, the money economy is one among a number of symbolic economies—that is, modes of thought wherein “a hierarchy is instituted between an excluded idealized element,” or general equivalent, and “the other elements, which measure their value in it.”41 In economic thought, of course, money is the general equivalent for all other commodities; in psychoanalytic thought, the father figures as the general equivalent of subjects while the phallus figures as the general equivalent of all other objects of desire; in semiotics, speech is the general equivalent of signs, and so on. Moreover, general equivalents have 40  The articles’ titles are “Money,” “More About Money,” “Still More About Money,” “All About Money,” and “My Last About Money.” All five are republished in HWIW. 41 Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 4.

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three “ontological registers”—ideal, symbolic, and real—each of which corresponds to a different function: “(1) that of the measure of values, (2) that of the means of exchange, and (3) that of the instrument of payment and of hoarding or reserve,” or, as Goux will also refer to them, that of the archetype, the token, and the treasury.42 Contra Goux, Shell tends to use the terms “symbolic” and “ideal” interchangeably in discussing the aesthetic elements of various monetary media of exchange as opposed to their “real” or “material” elements. For Shell, the money economy is also a symbolic economy of sorts yet it is so insofar as monetary media—coins, bills, checks, et cetera—draw their value from a symbolic “system of tropes,” from socially recognized markings or inscriptions; as he puts it, “money is the expression of inscription and inscribed.”43 Thus, aesthetics and economics, art and commerce, are not “essentially separate” or even separable but are rather engaged in a history of “tropic interaction.”44 Art and semiotics are always involved in the production of monetary forms of value, and these forms, in turn, influence the way that meaning and value are produced in other fields. In exploring their mutual constitution and the way different discourses and media internalize the problem of the relationship between inscription and inscribed, Shell’s work offers a valuable counterpoint to Goux’s. Contra Goux, Shell “looks from the formal similarity between linguistic and economic symbolization and production to the political economy as a whole”—that is, to the sociohistorical context that conditions such similarities.45 In drawing out this context, Shell also helps to draw our attention to the politics of symbolization and the ideological and institutional struggle over who has the authority to inscribe and thus to ascribe meaning and value. While I will follow Shell’s example in using the terms “ideal” and “symbolic” fairly interchangeably in this chapter, both Goux’s and Shell’s work will help us to make sense of Stein’s polyvalent figuration of money. An abstraction that has artlike properties but is also necessary to everyday survival in the modern age, money figures in her writing as a general equivalent with different forms and functions (à la Goux), as well as the centerpiece of an institutional struggle between art and government (à la Shell). Money is all of these things and is so, Stein suggests in “Money,” whether or not the government realizes it—whether or not they realize that their decisions will have real consequences when the money they vote is “gathered in as taxes” (HWIW 106). If they fail to realize as much, it is in part because of the lag between voting and “the time . . . when the money voted comes suddenly to be money just like the money everybody earns every day and spends every day to live” (HWIW 106). What suddenly changes is not the nature of money but rather a subjective experience, an understanding of money. While the shock of this transformation “makes everybody very unhappy,” their unhappiness could be easily avoided if there were more checks and balances incorporated into the voting process (HWIW 106). Willfully naïve about the actual structure of the legislative 42 Jean-Joseph Goux, The Coiners of Language, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 33. 43 Shell, Art and Money, 4, 8. 44 Shell, Art and Money, 5; Money, Language, and Thought, 4. 45  Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 7.

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branch, Stein proposes splitting Congress into “lots,” one of which would vote, then “wait a long time, and another lot have to vote,” before the first lot would vote again (HWIW 107). But then her proposal takes a significant turn. Without so much as starting a new sentence, Stein wishfully muses, “in short, if there was any way to make a government handle money the way a father of a family has to handle money if there only was” (HWIW 107). Needless to say, two congressional lots and one father are hardly equivalent. In treating them as if they were—as if authoritarian decision-making were somehow the abbreviated version of bicameral deliberation—Stein suggests that the problem is not only conceptual but also social. The dilemma confronting her is how to get everybody “to make up their mind about money being money”—how to make multiple minds think as if they were one mind. That the solution to this dilemma is the figure of the father is rather surprising. Stein, after all, complains in Everybody’s Autobiography, published just one year later in 1937, “There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing,” listing “father Roosevelt” among her examples (EA 137).46 How, then, are we to reconcile her anxiety about excessive fathering with her call here for what Szalay calls “a more patriarchal model” of governance?47 Stein’s idealization of the father in “Money” is not entirely inconsistent with her concern about the economically and emotionally depressive effects of there being “too much fathering,” for what it means to be a father is not the same in each case. In Stein’s view, Roosevelt is too patriarchal insofar as he thinks for the American people and, perhaps most upsettingly for Stein, for American artists. In both Everybody’s Autobiography and her final article on money, Stein recalls an exchange of letters with a young man named Donald Vestal, a puppeteer with the Works Progress Administration, about artists going “on the dole” and “working for the government” (EA 211). In what is surely an apocryphal, self-serving paraphrase of Vestal’s remarks, Stein remembers him telling her that “he was ready to let the president do the thinking for him” and, indeed, that “we are all glad to have Roosevelt do our thinking for us” (EA 211, HWIW 111). While Roosevelt, in Stein’s view, thinks for everybody, he fails to think like everybody—that is, like the average American, the archetype of whom, both for Stein and historically, is the breadwinning father. And, in this regard, the President and Congress are not patriarchal enough. They forget what each of them, as paterfamilias, already knows: there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If “you spend more than you have,” you will pay the price later (HWIW 107). Still, what makes the father such an icon for Stein is not just that he understands the value of hard work—or, rather, more precisely, that he understands work as the source of value—and so “think[s] several times” before spending money (HWIW 107). His appeal is rooted in something 46  Stein’s list of fathers is notoriously varied: “there is father Mussolini and father Hitler and father Roosevelt and father Stalin and father Lewis and father Blum and father Franco” (EA 137). Building on what she sees as Stein’s concern with the debilitating and destabilizing effects of over-organization, Mix suggests that “each of these men represents an organization, all of which she sees as dangerous to the stability of identity and value—the value of individual judgment, the value of a dollar, the value of literary reputation” (Mix, “Gertrude Stein’s Currency,” 103). 47 Szalay, New Deal Modernism, 89.

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far more instinctive and primordial: “The natural feeling of a father of a family is that when anybody asks him for money he says no” (HWIW 107). The challenge, then, is to get the government to remember this feeling, to channel “how he feels as a father of a family when he says no” (HWIW 107). Even those who are not fathers know this feeling, according to Stein. Everybody, “any member of a family, knows all about that”—that fathers always say “no” and so sacrifices must be made (HWIW 107). In treating fathers, elected officials, and ultimately every American interchangeably, Stein not only presupposes an analogy between the family and the nation, but also makes explicit a theory about the relation between the individual and the group that otherwise remains implicit in much of her short article. For Stein, the American people are a group in which individuals, no matter their number, always add up to one. The whole is not a sum of its parts, but rather equal to each one of its parts, which are in turn equal to one another. The U.S. is a family of fathers— and is so, in Stein’s eyes, even if we forget as much. Thus, we find the same logic of identification in Stein’s conception of the country as we find in in her conception of money. For Stein, money is money whether or not the people who vote money realize it: “Whether you like it or whether you do not money is money” (HWIW 107). So, too, everybody is everybody whether or not the President and Congress think like fathers and vote in the public’s interest. Just as the money voted will suddenly become the same as money earned during tax season, so everybody is bound to become “very unhappy” and realize what they should have known all along: father knows best. What is at stake in the case of both money and everybody is a crisis in representation. In failing to cognize that money is money—to know that symbol and thing are indissociable—the government also fails to represent its constituents. This failure has material effects in the form of widespread economic and emotional depression. Yet, according to Stein it originates not in the material world but rather in the minds of modern politicians. In positing collective identification with the father as a solution to their shortcomings, Stein implies that, as a general equivalent of personal experience, the father can do what money cannot— namely, stabilize the economy. As Carson puts it, “in the midst of the monetary crisis,” the father appears to be a “more durable good”—an ideal that has an empirical referent and in which the American people can therefore trust without, Stein suggests, actually having to give it much thought.48 If the father offers a fix it is insofar as the “natural feeling” of the superegoic non du père forecloses the difficulty of having to think much about money at all. It is as if Stein were hedging her bets 48 Carson, Consumption and Depression, 48. Carson similarly notes that, while “Stein at times seems to be anti-paternal and anti-patriarchal,” she also promotes “subjection to the paternal Leader who demands renunciation or sacrifice” (41). Carson further argues that Stein’s simultaneous rejection of the “bad fascist father” and “appeal to a good father” is not only paradoxical but also based on a fundamental “misunderstanding of fascism”: “Stein sees fascist and paternal leaders as promising a plenitudinous satisfaction of consumer demands; historically, therefore, Stein’s apparent anti-fascism is best understood as a glimpse of a fear of the new consumer society and its awakened demands or desires” (41).

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against a government whose cognitive powers she thoroughly distrusts, in effect telling Roosevelt and Congress, don’t think, just feel. Feelings, for Stein, are the stuff of human nature not human mind. Human nature is the same as animal nature: “All animals,” she writes in “All About Money,” her penultimate article on the topic, “have the same emotions and the same ways as men . . . But the thing no animal can do is count, and the thing no animal can know is money” (HWIW 110). And yet, Stein essentially tells the federal government to be more animalistic in their handling of money, precisely because they are already so animalistic or, indeed, so primitive in their capacity for calculation—because they do not know that money is money or know how to count it. In “Money,” Stein further makes this point by comparing the government’s mathematical abilities to those of a child via a story about her nephew when he was young: [My nephew] was out walking somewhere and he saw a lot of horses; he came home and he said, oh papa, I have just seen a million horses. A million, said his father, well anyway, said my nephew, I saw three. That came to be what we all used to say when anybody used numbers that they could not count well anyway a million or three. That is the whole point. When you earn money and spend money every day anybody can know the difference between a million and three. But when you vote money away there really is not any difference between a million and three.  (HWIW 106)

Ultimately, then, the conceptual failure of the government is twofold. They are, in other words, doubly childish. While its members neglect to realize that money, as an abstract measure, is the same as that on which a household runs, they also neglect to realize that one numerical amount (a million) is different from another (three) and that these differences, abstract though they may seem, will eventually have real effects in everybody’s lives. As Stein says, “sooner or later there is disaster” (HWIW 107). Szalay argues that Stein was concerned about Roosevelt “trying to evacuate money of meaning.”49 Yet it is also important that money has different meanings or values in the world of politics and the world of art. In “Money,” she strategically links money with all those phenomena she associates with human nature in The Geographical History of America and her 1936 lecture, “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them”—with identity, feeling, memory, time, necessity, and relation. Identity, for Stein, is tantamount to recognition in the eyes of other people, which in turn depends on memory, persistence across time: “you know who you are because you and others remember anything about yourself.”50 The government, to Stein’s chagrin, forgets everything: their natural feeling as fathers, the memory of telling others and having once been told “no,” their relation to the American people, the identity of symbols and things, the inevitable transformation of abstract numbers into the cash in people’s pockets, and so on. They govern as if they existed outside “the business of living which is relation and necessity”—that is, as if they 49 Szalay, New Deal Modernism, 89. 50  Gertrude Stein, “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them,” in What Are Masterpieces? (New York: Pitman, 1970), 84.

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were an entity.51 Stein defines entity as “a thing in itself and not in relation.”52 It is antithetical to identity, which, in turn, “destroys creation”—namely, the creation of masterpieces, which are free-floating autonomous entities, ideal things seemingly disconnected from real things.53 As we noted above, in The Geographical History, Stein will compare money to masterpieces. But in The Saturday Evening Post, we find her making a very different claim, in effect decrying the government for its treatment of money as if it were a masterpiece. While the confusion of the two is disastrous in the world of politics, it is also at the heart of Stein’s aesthetics. Money, I want to suggest, is not just like a masterpiece according to Stein. Rather, in appearing to float free of the material world, money is central to Stein’s conceptualization of what art is and how it generates meaning. Stein’s issue with Roosevelt was not only political but also artistic. In evacuating money of its material value, Roosevelt parodied the creation of aesthetic value. Not only was he undermining democracy and destabilizing the economy but also he was infringing on Stein’s personal and professional territory. As we will see, to the question “is money money,” Stein the artistic genius—nominally not to be confused with Stein the conservative critic—considered it her privilege to issue an emphatic “no.” T RU E A N D C O U N T E R F E I T M O D E R N I S M Goux argues that the “end of gold money” in the early twentieth century occasioned a crisis in monetary representation that ramified across other symbolic economies and the world of art and literature, bringing forth the “birth of ‘abstract’ art” and “the crisis of realism in the novel.”54 For Goux, André Gide’s 1925 novel, The Counterfeiters, exemplifies this widespread questioning of the value of general equivalents, including money, language, paternity, and “all other values that regulate exchanges.”55 Stein seems to have thought about as much of Gide as she did of Pound. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “Alice” recalls “rather a dull evening” with Gide at Mabel Dodge’s villa outside Florence.56 And later, when she overhears Bernard Faÿ telling “Gertrude Stein” that “the three people of first rate importance that he had met in his life were Picasso, Gertrude Stein and André Gide,” she remembers Gertrude responding “that is quite right but why include Gide.”57 Stein’s quickness to discount Gide’s importance notwithstanding, the works of all three people named by Faÿ might fairly be read as exemplars of the crisis in general equivalents described by Goux. In The Picasso Papers, the art historian Rosalind Krauss considers Picasso’s career in light of Goux’s reading of Gide. Picasso’s shift from cubist collage to neoclassicism, Krauss argues, reflects the shift to inconvertible token money. Without any referential backing in gold, token money “carries fraudulence to the heart of the

51  Ibid. 88. 52 Ibid. 53  Ibid. 84. 54 Goux, The Coiners of Language, 3. 55 Ibid. 56 Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 131.

57  Ibid. 245–6.

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system.”58 Counterfeiting “no longer makes sense at the level of the object” because counterfeiting “has risen to the level of the code.”59 Token money—the value of which is purely fictive—is, paradoxically, the “true” money. Following Goux, Krauss argues that the paradoxical nature of token money sets the stage for modernism’s and, in particular, Picasso’s break with realism and reimagining of aesthetic value. Krauss defines modernism in literature and the arts as “severing the connection between a representation (whether in words or images) and its referent in reality, so that signs now circulate through an abstract field of relationships.”60 In wresting materials from their original contexts, Picasso’s prewar collages are “the modernist, ‘true’ Picasso.”61 By contrast, his postwar painting marks a “return to the gold standard of visual naturalism,” but it is a failed return, a mere imitative pastiche of earlier artists and thus a “blatant betrayal of the modernist project.”62 The important point for Krauss is that these two phenomena—Picasso’s true modernism and his later counterfeiting—are both extensions of the paradoxical logic of token money, which turns fiction into truth and attempts at authenticity into mere knock-offs. Scholars of Stein have pointed to a similar shift in her late writing from innovative experimentation to relative readability.63 To some degree, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas reads as a bridge between the two, exemplifying the dual logic of token money—and token modernism—outlined by Krauss. As a specimen of modernism, The Autobiography is true in its playful appropriation of the autobiographical form and yet counterfeit in its ventriloquistic use of that form to promote the genius, Gertrude Stein. Whether or not we read it as a continuation or betrayal of Stein’s earlier modernist project, The Autobiography stands in stark contrast to a text such as 1914’s Tender Buttons. Routinely read as an anti-patriarchal affront to phallocentrism and logocentrism, Tender Buttons celebrates the advent of token language. Its very title prepares the way for an issuance of familiar words, or “buttons,” that in their sensuality, or “tenderness,” may or may not pass for “tender”—that may or may not signify the various objects, food, and rooms that fill the book’s pages. This is literature off the gold standard—not empty of meaning but rather generative of new meanings. Stein does in her writing exactly what Pound considered the most criminal of acts in the financial world: she “plays the gap,” capitalizing on the abstraction of symbol from thing.64 Notably, while Stein’s literary works since The Autobiography, including Ida A Novel, are more grammatical and readable than texts such as Tender Buttons, Stein’s theory of literature during this period promotes the same aesthetic of abstraction that we find on display in her earlier texts. In texts such as her Lectures in America and “What Are Master-pieces,” Stein sells a style, a series of bygone brands, that are 58  Rosalind E. Krauss, The Picasso Papers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 20. 59 Ibid. 60  Ibid. 6. 61  Ibid. 12. 62  Ibid. 12. 63  DeKoven, for example, suggests that in the late twenties and early thirties Stein “reinvented for herself, ‘from scratch,’ some of the structures of the literary order she had abandoned two decades earlier, a reinvention which produced the relatively conventional writing of the thirties and forties.” Marianne DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 112. 64 Hyde, The Gift, 343.

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no longer on display as much in her writing. Stein herself would probably be the first to admit as much insofar as true creative types, in her view, are inspired to undertake a new project, then completely empty themselves of it, and move on to the next thing. Thus, Stein claims that she stopped writing portraits when she “had completely emptied myself of all they were” (LA 178). But useful though Stein’s lectures have been in thinking about both her earlier writing and the growth of a potential audience for that writing, they are seldom placed in their economic and political context. Read alongside Stein’s criticism of Roosevelt and the New Deal, Stein’s aesthetic musings on what makes masterpieces, above all her own, mark an effort on her part to reclaim aesthetic value for the field of art and cordon off an ideality that properly belongs to the artistic genius. In the next section I want to suggest that, in redrawing the line between art and politics, Stein lays claim not only to a system of thought beyond government’s grasp, a symbolic economy in which language circulates like token money, but also to a system of gifts. THE GIFT OF GENIUS, OR, NO GIFTS B U T G E RT RU D E S T E I N ’ S Two familiar notions of gifts find support in Stein’s writings from the 1930s, one artistic and the other political. The first is inherited from the Romantics and assumes that artistic ability is a “gift”—a natural endowment or talent. In Picasso, for example, Stein’s 1938 homage to the painter, Stein claims that “Picasso’s gift is completely the gift of a painter and a draughtsman.”65 Such gifts are inalienable and unexchangeable. Thus, in Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein remembers being irked when Picasso temporarily took up writing because “writing belonged to me” (EA 16). It was her gift, not his. The second commonplace, which is more immediately troubling, at least to this progressive reader, is that the welfare state encourages dependency by giving away services and aid for “free.” Not only are public services and assistance gifts but these gifts are also a bad thing. Stein’s own anxiety about dependency—or, as she will also call it, “the slavery of being in an organization”—takes a xenophobic turn as she worries about immigrants from French Indochina taking advantage of ­government assistance (HWIW 111). She recalls asking her Indo-Chinese cook, Trac, why Indo-Chinese immigrants do not “stay in a job when you get it,” to which he essentially replies, because it pays better not to work: [Indo-Chinese immigrants] get ten francs a day as unemployed. Now a Chinaman can live on five francs a day and that gives him five francs to gamble. The rest of the time he puts on his hat and goes out. He takes a temporary job, which still leaves him unemployed, and buys a new suit of clothes. Then by and by he catches cold, he goes to a hospital, free, and then he dies, and has a free coffin. All the Indo-Chinamen in Indo-China want to come to Paris to live like that. They call that living like frenchmen.  (HWIW 109) 65  Gertrude Stein, Picasso (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1984), 5.

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Stein’s quotation of Trac is about as dubious as her nominal reportage of Donald Vestal’s remarks about Roosevelt. In both cases, Stein uses a native informant much like she used “Alice” in The Autobiography—that is, as a mouthpiece to promote her own ideological viewpoint while also lending her viewpoint an air of ethnographic authority. Cynical though this reading of Stein may sound, it is no more so—and hopefully less so—than Stein’s account of unemployment recipients as idle masses: “when there is a great deal of unemployment you can never get any one to do any work” (HWIW 109). As we saw in Chapter 3, the New Deal instituted a two-track welfare system that distinguished between contributory social insurance programs modeled on contractual exchanges and public assistance programs that were “cast as proffering unreciprocated aid to the ‘innocent’ and ‘deserving’ poor with the state assuming the role of previously private charity.”66 It would seem that, when it came to social welfare, Stein drew no such distinction between exchanges and gifts or between deserving and undeserving recipients. In her view, any government intervention or assistance appeared to be a free lunch and free lunches are not only unfair but also poisonous, as if gifts themselves generate “the unquenchable thirst for the gift” that we saw Derrida attribute to the figure of the beggar in Chapter 3 (GT 137). In “The Capital and Capitals of the United States of America,” published in the  New York Herald Tribune in 1935, Stein argues that the reason many U.S. ­capitals are not necessarily the largest cities is because Americans are “suspicious” of government and so like their capitals to be “tucked away” (HWIW 74). Using medical metaphors to describe the effects of the Depression and the New Deal, Stein compares America to “a healthy man [who] does not have to know where the doctor lives,” but who was made “most awfully sick” (HWIW 74). Government intervention, she suggests, is a kind of pharmakon, both a remedy and a poison: “Now perhaps they wonder did they have to have the doctor and were they so sick and they wonder do they want to take the medicine that they so badly wanted the doctor to give them” (HWIW 75). Notably, Stein selects a similar—albeit less pharmacological and more seminal—metaphor to describe her experience of ­writer’s block after the success of The Autobiography. In “And Now,” Stein likens herself to young male artists she knew who “became sterile” and “cut off the flow” after gaining some success, confessing that now she is suffering from the same problem: “the syrup does not pour” (HWIW 63–4). The parallel between Stein’s pent-up writerly “syrup” and Roosevelt’s free-flowing federal “medicine” points to the parallel between literature and government as, so to speak, donor agencies. While only one of these agencies is legitimate in Stein’s view, the gift of art and the gift of government are nevertheless bound up in her work insofar as both are tangled up with money. Stein registers their entanglement in using figures such as syrup and medicine—that is to say, figures of liquidity or currency—to characterize their respective gifts. In Stein’s writing, gifts are like money and money like gifts—but on what basis exactly? 66  Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “Contract versus Charity: Why Is There No Social Citizenship in the United States?” Socialist Review 22 (1992): 60.

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Drawing on the work of Shell and Simon Jarvis, I want to suggest that the link between the gift and money runs far deeper than the apparent financial generosity of the welfare state. Rather, the isomorphism between gifts and money in Stein’s writing reflects the theological roots of thinking about gifts even in nominally secular modern Western culture. It bears recalling that, in Mauss’s analysis, the idea that gifts ought to be free is not unique to modern capitalism but is in fact coextensive with Western civilization. Marc Shell looks specifically at the manifestation of this idea in medieval Christianity, where the idea of grace “serves the ideologi­cally useful role of defining the economic exchanges of this world by apparent polar opposition to them.”67 Maintaining this opposition, however, is easier said than done, for the primary figure of grace—the Holy Grail, “the free gift that is the ­container of Jesus’ blood”—turns out to be characterized by the same duality as medieval coins.68 In having substantive value, coins are like other commodities, but in bearing inscriptions that render them universally exchangeable, coins are not like other commodities. The Grail occupies a homologous structural position. As the source of all things, it is heterogeneous with all things. And yet, as the source of all things, the Grail must also be the source of itself, rendering it homogeneous with these things. It is “a thing both of this world and not of this world.”69 In Shell’s reading, then, Christianity and coinage constitute competing systems of representation. While he explores the ways in which their rivalry would continue to frame later debates in the U.S. over paper money, the related question of the formal kinship between the gift and money drops out of his discussion. Simon Jarvis offers a suggestive take on the fate of their kinship in his account of the theological prehistory of political economy and its ideology of economism. As we saw in Chapter 3, Jarvis defines economism as the “dogma that the real and fundamental unit of social ontology is the self-interested exchange.”70 This dogma leaves political economy with a moral conundrum—namely, how to reconcile an ideal of fair exchange with the fundamental unfairness of capitalism: “How can a fair exchange possibly yield a surplus value for one party? Doesn’t that mean that it isn’t fair at all?”71 Jarvis argues that political economy solves this problem by recasting surplus value as a “gift of nature,” a benevolent windfall, rather than “the result of a monopolistic expropriation.”72 Surplus value, political economy tells us, is given not taken. Political economy thus appeals to a theological distinction between worldly exchanges and godly gifts in order to mask the glaring immorality of surplus value. In Jarvis’s reading, slogans such as “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” police the border between gifts and exchanges, at once prohibiting and concealing the free gift of surplus value. To the Christian doctrine, “There shall 67 Shell, Art and Money, 19. 68 Ibid. 69  Ibid. 20. On the gift of the Grail and its parallel with money, see also chapter 2 of Shell’s Money, Language, Thought, “The Blank Check: Accounting for the Grail,” 24–46. What “irks Christianity” about money is that it comes “disturbingly close to Christ as a competing architectonic principle”; as a “god-man,” Jesus, too, is “a manifestation of an ideal thing and a real thing,” a universal equivalent that is and is not “of ” humanity (Art and Money, 7–8). 70  Simon Jarvis, “The Gift in Theory,” Dionysus 27 (Dec. 1999): 204. 71  Ibid. 215. 72 Ibid.

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be no free gifts but God’s,” political economy responds, “There shall be no free gifts but surplus value.”73 If we seem to be getting a long way from Stein, we might recall that she often drew on theological discourse to describe her literary project during this period. In her lecture “What Is English Literature” she distinguishes between “serving god” and “serving mammon”—that is, between writing without thought of earning money or recognition and “writing the way it has been written” and thus the way it is sure to make money (LA 54). The implication is that Stein personally serves God, a point further reinforced by her analogy between the genius and the saint, each of whom is a figure for the artist in her work.74 Both Will and Perelman suggest that Stein’s conception of her genius is characterized by a duality—one that should sound familiar given our discussion of the duality of money and of the free gift of grace. The concept of genius, Will argues, “authorize[s] contradictory authorial positions,” signifying “aesthetic ‘autonomy’ and an attendant social withdrawal,” on the one hand, and, on the other, a “potentially shared capacity” on the part of both author and reader.75 Or, as Perelman argues, Stein simultaneously insists that “genius is unique” and that “genius is unavoidably perceptible and obviously valuable.”76 Just as money and the free gift are heterogeneous and homogeneous with the world of things, so genius is both heterogeneous and homogeneous with the world of other people. We should also hear echoes of Woolf ’s figuration of the hostess in Mrs. Dalloway and Rhys’s figuration of the beggar in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie: like the hostess and the female beggar, the genius is at once exceptional and exemplary. For Will and Perelman, the genius’s duality in Stein’s writing is traceable to Kantian aesthetics, where the genius, as Perelman puts it, “embodies a paradoxical exemplariness: while he is not bound by prior, learned rules, he generates new rules that are useful for society to imitate but useless to a further genius.”77 In terms that parallel many of ours here, Jacques Derrida helpfully draws out the economic dimensions of Kantian genius, coining the term “economimesis” to describe this process of imitation. Kantian genius is “a natural talent, a gift of Nature,” one that supposedly remains outside “the economic circle of commerce,” but which, as we might expect, is in fact bound up with this circle in Kantian aesthetics and aesthetics in general.78 “Politics and political economy,” Derrida argues, “are implicated in every discourse on art”—including, I would argue, Stein’s discourse.79 Thus, my point is 73  Ibid. 213, 216. 74  Marranca calls the genius the “secular counterpart” of the saint and suggests that Stein’s writing, and modernism in general, “participated in the secularization of the spiritual.” Bonnie Marranca, “Saint Gertrude,” Performing Arts Journal 16.1 (Jan. 1994): 108, 107. Will writes, “Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, saints would join a list of other iconic figures in Stein’s imaginative pantheon— geniuses, generals, celebrities, prophets, heroes, and dictators—all synonymous with the figure of the artist and thus with Stein herself ” (Unlikely Collaboration, 32). 75  Barbara Will, Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem with “Genius” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 82–3. 76 Perelman, The Trouble with Genius, 143. 77  Ibid. 162. 78  Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” trans. Richard Klein, Diacritics 11.2 (Summer 1981): 10, 5. 79  Ibid. 3.

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not only that Stein draws inspiration from theological and Romantic discourses but also that, like these other discourses, her own discourse on aesthetics draws inspiration from—and her thinking about gifts and genius is informed by—political economy. Not only is creative genius a “gift,” but it also serves as a kind of general equivalent. Like money, Steinian genius is exceptional yet exemplary, unique yet universal, difficult yet democratic. It is this “gift” that Roosevelt threatens to appropriate in treating money as if it were a free gift. In other words, the problem is not just that he spends too much and taxes too much. It is also that, in so doing, he usurps what Stein takes to be an artistic prerogative. Stein begins to register this point in Everybody’s Autobiography when she grumbles, “Roosevelt tries to spend so much that perhaps money will not exist” (EA 42). While it was a frequent complaint of hers, this instance of it is especially noteworthy insofar as Stein implies that Roosevelt’s transgression is both political and artistic. In treating money as a free-floating symbol, Roosevelt’s policy bears the specter of communism—“a Marxian state” in Stein’s view being that which thinks “money is not money” (EA 42). Yet in pretending money is not money Roosevelt also parrots mysticism, which similarly seems to turn things into their opposite: “if you believe in anything deeply enough it turns into something else and so money turns into not money. That is what mysticism is but I will tell all about that when I tell about Saint Therese and the Four Saints,” by which she means her opera, Four Saints in Three Acts (EA 42). The figure of the saint is analogous to the figure of the genius for Stein insofar as each “does nothing” (EA 112). But doing nothing also means doing something insofar as doing nothing consumes time: “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing” (EA 72). It is by “really doing nothing” that the saint and the genius alchemically create something—that they turn this into that. Stein further codifies—or, rather, mystifies—this process in “Portraits and Repetition,” when she suggests that, in writing many of her portraits, plays, and operas, including Four Saints, “I created something out of something without adding anything” (LA 204). This is what Roosevelt tries to do—create something (not money) out of something (money) without adding anything. To which Stein in effect responds: there shall be no free gifts but mine. T H E PA S S I O N O F G E RT RU D E S T E I N , O R , H OW TO H E L P E V E RY B O D Y While Stein’s notion of genius carries theological and Romantic valences, both of which reveal her gift’s roots in political economy, she will also suggest that her ­particular writerly gift stems from a humanitarian drive to help other people. In “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” Stein famously claims that she wanted to write a book that would “describe every individual human being that could possibly exist” (LA 142). While others have focused on the formal strategies she uses to pursue this aim, what most interests me is her account of the epistemological and philanthropic passion driving her descriptive project. The gradual making

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of the book began, she suggests, with her passion as a child for understanding other people so she could help other people—or, as she puts it, “this passion for knowing the basis of existence in each one” so that she could “help them change themselves to become what they should become” (LA 136). As an advanced expression of this youthful passion, her writing in effect helps people to realize their potential—to realize a value that had hitherto only been virtual. She helps them to be the individuals they were meant to be—and does so according to a logic that looks a lot like Marx’s formula for capital: M-C-M. As we noted, Stein claims to create something (M1) out of something (M2) nominally without adding anything (C). While Stein represents her writing as a free gift, created ex nihilo, lectures such as “The Gradual Making” are nothing if not accounts of the many things that were added along the way—of the time and intellectual labor that went into ensuring that her writing was never a mere recreation of what came before. If, as a genius, Stein really does nothing, then she really does nothing. She works and in working inspires not only a change in her audience but also an exchange of what they were for what they were always supposed to be but presumably never could have been without the gift of Stein’s writing. While Stein’s language of help and change is relatively fleeting, the logic behind this language—the notion that she creates something out of something without adding anything—persists in her figuration of the genius as “talking and listening,” as well as her explanation of her play with grammar. In “Portraits and Repetition,” Stein claims that the “essence of genius, of being most intensely alive . . . is being one who is at the same time talking and listening” (LA 170). As a form of give and take, talking and listening would seem to constitute a form of interpersonal exchange between the writer and her audience. Stein reinforces this point in “The Gradual Making” when she notes that the change she wanted to create in others would be the result of a dialogue and “should of course be dependent on my ideas and theirs theirs as much as mine at that time” (LA 136). The sing-song tune of her prose and the rhyming of “mine” and “time” imply that the relation between the genius and the audience is a harmonious one. Yet the fact that the genius talks and listens at the same time suggests that her relation with the audience is not in fact a relation at all. Stein is not dialogically engaging with her audience so much as she is talking to herself. Thus, she will also declare, “If the same person does the talking and the listening why so much the better” (LA 170). Talking and listening is not a social form of give and take but rather a gift one gives oneself. In “Poetry and Grammar,” Stein further fleshes out the nature of this gift in theory and in practice. Here she implies that her writing is a form of help but the help it gives is paradoxical. In her takedown of that most overbearing of punctuation marks—the comma—Stein suggests that her writing helps but it does so by not helping the reader too much. Commas, according to Stein, “have no life of their own” but are “there just for practical purposes” (LA 218–19). They are servile to the rest of the sentence and, worse yet, they make the writer and reader servile: “A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it” (LA 220). That is why she avoids commas. To help the reader along would mean not helping

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the reader at all. For example, in a long sentence with dependent clauses, commas can simplify the “excessive complication” but this simplicity is cheaply bought— like “cut[ting] the knot” in a thread when you really “want to disentangle [it]” (LA 220–1). In cutting off the flow of a complicated sentence, the comma also cuts off the possibility of self-knowledge: “A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it and the comma, well at most a comma is a poor period that it lets you stop and take a breath but if you want to take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath” (LA 221). It is, paradoxically, only by abstaining from offering too much help that her writing can help us—or, rather, can help us to help ourselves by forcing us to know ourselves. If the comma is, as Stein says, “artificial aid”—a counterfeit gift—then textual difficulty is true aid (LA 220). Stein’s vision for the gift of literature is therefore not unlike her vision for the gift of government: the best help that either one can give is no help at all. There is, however, an important difference between them. Whereas she would have government give absolutely nothing, literature at once refuses to give us pause and gives to excess, forcing itself on the reader. The question for Stein is how to ensure that the gift continues to give without its force being exhausted—how to ensure that, as with money, “no one can really get used to it” and it continues to fascinate (GHA 200). In talking about getting rid of commas and punctuation in “Poetry and Grammar,” Stein is referring to formal decisions she made years earlier, while writing The Making of Americans. But the context of the lecture itself remains crucial to making sense of the logic of her gift. In Everybody’s Autobiography, published, as we noted, in 1937 and largely about her time in America on her lecture tour, Stein suggests that the modern age is characterized by an absence of relation: “now since the earth is all covered over with every one there really is no relation between any one and so if this Everybody’s Autobiography is to be the Autobiography of every one it is not to be of any connection between any one and any one because now there is none” (EA 102). By contrast, when she wrote The Making of Americans, which she completed in 1911, “I did not realize that the earth is completely covered over with every one. In a way it was not then because every one was in a group and a group was separated from every other one” (EA 102). Both books aim to account for everybody but everybody, she suggests, and not just her perception of everybody has changed over the years. And if the whole itself has changed—if there is no relation among its parts—then so must her strategy for addressing the whole. In representing people as having no relation, Stein in effect provides a rationale for her figuration of her gift as a free gift—that is, as a gift to which she has supposedly added nothing (at least not commas) and which never lets the reader settle on a single meaning. We earlier noted Stein’s claim that in writing she emptied herself entirely. That is to say, there is no residual relation between the author and her work, the donor and her gift, which furthermore means that, while her work may change the reader, it cannot create a connection between author and reader. Moreover, as we have seen, the genius talks but she talks to herself not to you, her audience. The author—what she meant by all the excessive complication before us—inevitably eludes us. The reader must, as Stevie Smith might say, “work it out

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for yourself,” to quote her Novel on Yellow Paper, or, Work It Out for Yourself, published during the same period in 1936. Smith’s punchy alternative title in part indexes her antipathy toward mass culture and specifically toward the mindless advice “doled out” by women’s magazines—above all, advice about how best to land a husband.80 Smith refuses to give her readers any such normatively gendered help and implies that, like Stein, she is in fact helping us more by insisting that we work out the meaning of her strange, rambling text—and ultimately of our lives—all for ourselves. Stein adopts a similar strategy of abandonment and, moreover, suggests that this strategy is appropriate to the contemporary age of mass communications and global diaspora, when everyone is spread out yet unrelated. Yet, in the context of Stein’s political writings from this period we must also ask: how could she possibly aver that there is no relation? Thinking that people are not related—that national and familial identity and bonds of recognition do not count as they once did—is exactly what she rebukes the President and Congress for doing, so how can she make this claim? We might justify Stein’s claim that there is no relation by arguing that she is simply reclaiming what is properly hers—an artistic experience of the world through the lens of human mind, which, as we know, rises above the messy business of relation. And yet, in treating non-relation as a given under the conditions of the present, Stein not only risks justifying the governmental méconnaissance she elsewhere ­condemns but also overestimates her own capacity for abstraction—her ability to cut herself off from relation with the material world. If the government’s problem, in Stein’s eyes, is that it is bound by relation and yet fails to realize it, then Stein’s problem is that, as a genius, she ought not to be bound and yet ineluctably finds herself caught up in the social tangle of identity and recognition. Like so many things in Stein’s writing, escaping this tangle is easier said than done. Stein registers both the difficulty of escape and the pleasures that finding oneself caught up in relation can afford in writing about another gift: Picasso’s portrait of Stein. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GIVING IT AWAY A N D N OT G I V I N G I T AWAY Picasso started his portrait shortly after meeting Stein in 1905. After myriad ­sittings (eighty or ninety by her count) he became frustrated and painted out the head. It was only after a trip to Spain—and with the help of exposure to Iberian sculptures at the Louvre—that he was finally able to complete the portrait and “painted the head in without having seen Gertrude Stein again.”81 Of receiving the 80  Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper, or, Work It Out for Yourself (New York: New Directions, 1994), 151. 81 Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 57. Of course, “the head” is what the portrait is most famous for. As Karin Cope writes, “What the painting has been most widely known for in studies of Picasso is its ‘mask-like resolution,’ its apparent abstraction and application of the forms of Iberian sculptures from the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. to Stein’s head.” Passionate Collaborations: Learning to Live with Gertrude Stein (Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2005), 39. She further notes that, while the

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portrait, Stein recalls: “he gave me the picture and I was and I still am satisfied with my portrait, for me, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me.”82 The portrait is doubly a gift insofar as it is both an enduring work of art (“always I”) and an interpersonal gesture (“for me”). And, as Karin Cope underscores, the portrait has remained a gift. Stein held onto it until her death, in 1946, when it was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, becoming the first Picasso in the museum’s permanent collection: “the portrait of Gertrude Stein is and never has been a commodity.”83 For Cope, this detail is crucial to explaining the excess of meanings that the painting has accrued over the years as an icon that can “stand for or stand in for modern art, expatriate life, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, the Metropolitan Museum, modernism, the avant garde, real genius, really not-genius, achievement, lack of achievement, decadence, deviance, a sort of primitivism and so on.”84 Yet, as Cope also acknowledges, the fact that the portrait has never been a commodity does not exempt it from commodity fetishism. In Picasso Stein registers the portrait’s potential commercial value by way of an anecdote about a visit from an art collector, the date of which is unclear but which clearly took place after Picasso had become famous. Stein recounts his visit thus: A funny story. One day a rich collector came to my house and he looked at the portrait and he wanted to know how much I had paid for it. Nothing I said to him, nothing he cried out, nothing I answered, naturally he gave it to me. Some days after I told this to Picasso, he smiled, he doesn’t understand, he said, that at that time the difference between a sale and a gift was negligible.85

It bears recalling that Stein is speaking to the collector not only as the subject and recipient of the portrait—that is, Picasso’s fellow genius—but also as a fellow collector. That Stein is hosting him in her house only further reinforces that she was quite literally at home in the world of gifts and the world of commodities. Thus, her smug riposte—“naturally he gave it to me”—serves two functions. While it positions the painting as proof of her own genius, it also serves as the final blow in their otherwise tit-for-tat exchange of “nothings.” Of course, “nothing” is exactly what the collector gets in lieu of the gift from which Stein continued to gain, at least in symbolic capital if not economic capital. What is most remarkable about this “funny story,” though, is its articulation of the difference between past and present in terms of a change in the difference between a sale and a gift. While Picasso is clearly referring to a specific gift—that is, the portrait—his abstract language lends his statement a certain generality. A difference between gifts and sales, he implies, has always existed, but it used to be negligible. Only now has it become significant, measurable. Again the immediate list of possible influences on Picasso has grown to include, among other things, a 1905 fauvism show, a Manet retrospective, and an Ingres exhibition, the argument made by critics is generally the same: Stein’s head presented a formal problem to which some other source provided a formal solution. Cope in turn reflects on why a painting of Stein in particular would create this problem. 82 Stein, Picasso, 8. 83 Cope, Passionate Collaborations, 29. 84  Ibid. 28. 85 Stein, Picasso, 8.

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reference is quite specific. Picasso has become famous and so now has the option of selling the work at a significant price whereas before (to trope on Tender Buttons) there was little to no difference between giving it away and not giving it away. Still, Picasso’s remark assumes wider relevance in the context of Stein’s writing from this period: in the 1930s, she repeatedly suggests, the difference between gifts and sales ceases to be negligible. The difference matters more—above all because the commodification of Stein’s work has made it harder to tell the difference, to discern what is truly a gift and what is merely a commodity. If the slipperiness between gifts and sales is a source of comedy (not to mention self-aggrandizement) in the context of this “funny story,” it becomes a source of anxiety in Stein’s reflections on the value of her own work. In Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein ruefully notes that, before the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “when nothing had any commercial value everything was important,” but now “when something began having a commercial value it was upsetting” (EA 41). Only when everything was a de facto free gift, was its importance guaranteed. As soon as the distinction between gifts and sales starts to count, it also proves quite difficult to sustain. Commercial value versus importance, sales versus gifts—the distinctions are murky. Thus, while Stein revels in the fact that Picasso’s portrait now has commercial value and still proves to be inexhaustible in giving her endless pleasure, she seems far less certain that these different forms of value can be simultaneously maintained when it comes to her own writing. I hasten to add that Stein undoubtedly enjoyed her newfound fame and relative fortune after the success of The Autobiography. In Everybody’s Autobiography, she notes the pleasure of receiving fan letters, meeting different people, spending money and, above all, “being a celebrity and all the privileges attached to that thing” (EA 172). But she also is certain that the desire for recognition by a reading public destroys creativity and, in fact, such recognition destroyed her own creativity for a time. She further remembers having “no word inside me. And I was not writing” (EA 66). As we noted earlier, the syrup would not pour. Celebrity had killed her gift. She “began to worry about identity” and particularly her own identity as a writer. Her worry is commonsensical—after all, is one a writer when not writing?—and yet, it comes as something of a surprise amid Stein’s constant exaltation of entity over identity. If the writer, for Stein, has no identity while writing, why worry about identity? Or, might worrying about identity be the problem: writers, in Stein’s view, do no worry about identity—they just write. They choose the words. If they are worrying about identity, then it is already too late. The possibility of creating is already foreclosed. Ultimately, then, Stein’s commercial success puts into question a whole series of differences: not only the difference between gifts and exchanges, between literary value and commercial value, but also between entity and identity, nature and mind, and the list goes on. If the confusion of these various categories was upsetting and worrisome to Stein as a writer then it became downright disastrous in her view when it came to politics. Read alongside the anecdote from Picasso, “Money” suggests that the U.S. government confounds gifts and exchanges to altogether unhumorous ends. While “Money” renders the separation of gifts and exchanges—of

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the ideality of art and the reality of governing—crucial to the economic and affective well-being of the nation, Ida A Novel renders their separation crucial to the artist’s capacity to realize her gift. Only by abstracting herself from exchange, can she fulfill her passion for helping everybody become what they should become. I D A A N OV E L Begun in May 1937, completed three years later in May 1940, and published in February 1941, Ida A Novel consists of two halves, aptly titled “The First Half ” and the “The Second Half.” During the First Half, Ida moves around—a lot—going from Connecticut to California to New Hampshire to Ohio to Texas to Washington, D.C. to Wyoming to Virginia, although not necessarily in that order. Indeed, we occasionally find Ida in places that we had been made to assume she had already left and, in this regard, the novel recalls the sometimes dizzying experience of reading Stein’s account of her lecture tour in Everybody’s Autobiography. While one of Stein’s more readable and conventional texts, Ida A Novel remains decidedly strange and surreal.86 In his introduction to his recent “workshop edition” of the novel, Logan Esdale describes Ida as a product of “Stein’s aim to write a narrative relatively free of cause-and-effect logic.”87 The elision of causality makes the sequence of its heroine’s peregrinations, let alone the motivation behind them, if there is any, difficult to track. Yet the proliferation of American place names nevertheless grounds the narrative geographically, if still somewhat unstably, in the real world. Thus there is a hint of realistic referentiality along with its irreducible strangeness. For critics such as Jessica Berman and Cynthia Secor, Ida’s movement is not only her defining characteristic but also renders her representative of America and Americans more generally: she is a “nomadic American Everywoman” (in Berman’s words) with a “gift for abstraction” (in Secor’s).88 Stein’s identification of American 86  Drawing on the structural linguistics of Roman Jakobson, Randa Dubnick argues that there are two styles of abstraction or “obscurity” in Stein’s writing—one that emphasizes syntax (combination or metonymy) and another that emphasizes vocabulary (selection or metaphor). Like Stein’s other works from the 1930s on, Ida A Novel is more “conventionally comprehensible” than her earlier cubistic works, mixing selection and combination “within a normal range.” Randa Dubnick, The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language, and Cubism (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 67. 87  Logan Esdale, “Introduction: Ida Made a Name for Herself,” in Ida A Novel by Gertrude Stein, xviii. Esdale points out that the period of Ida’s composition was coextensive with Stein’s collection of materials for her archive at Yale University’s Beinecke Library. The novel is an “analogue to her archive”—a “composite text” that incorporates pieces of her writing from throughout her career (xxvii, xxiv). Esdale’s edition helpfully includes a genealogy of the novel, drafts, and “intertexts” on which Stein drew in writing it. The text of the novel itself is the same as that approved by Stein and originally published by Random House in 1941. 88  Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001), 195. Cynthia Secor, “Ida, a Great American Novel,” Twentieth Century Literature 24.1 (Spring 1978): 106. For Berman, Stein uses Ida’s nomadism and lack of “parochial loyalty” to reimagine community in ways that resonate with both turn-of-the-century cultural geography and recent feminist cosmopolitan thought (196). In Ida, Berman argues, “The notion of the self almost ceases to exist outside of the community of relations that construct it, and that community is constantly being revised by Ida’s nomadic life” (194).

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life with movement in her lectures certainly seems to reinforce this reading. In “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” Stein describes Americans as “continuously moving”: “it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled with moving” (LA 161). Ida, like Ida, embodies what is for Stein a particularly American experience of moving and, indeed, moving even when one is not moving. Americans, as she stresses, are filled with moving. Moving is not just a physical activity but also a mental state—a point Stein further reinforces in her lectures from the University of Chicago, published separately as Narration, when she says that Americans “move so much even when they stay still and they do very often stay still they all move so much.”89 Staying still figures here as a sign less of physical exhaustion than of mental excitation. Even when they are not moving, Stein in effect says, Americans’ minds are always elsewhere, their thoughts always wandering. From this angle, not moving (mental wandering) is not the opposite of moving (physical wandering) so much as its ­culmination—the fulfillment of a gift for abstraction in both physical and mental senses of the term. Insofar as Ida spends the Second Half of the novel not moving, the structure of Ida begins to suggest a similar point. While Ida’s defining trait during the novel’s First Half is her “geographic restlessness,” the Second Half chronicles her constant rest-ing.90 After a series of marriages during the First Half, Ida settles down with Andrew (by my count, her fifth husband, though we never see her get divorced from her earlier ones). Mentions of her resting are myriad: “Ida had no habit, she was resting”; “she was always resting when they were there”; “when she was at home she was resting”; “resting is a pleasant thing”; “Ida is resting but not resting enough”—and so on and so on.91 What, then, does it mean to rest? Or, insofar as the present progressive form of the verb suggests that we are dealing with an ontological condition, what does it mean to be resting? What mode of being is at stake here? The (in)activity of resting foremost recalls Stein’s frequently quoted claim that the novel is about what it means to be a “publicity saint.” If saints, as we may recall, really do nothing then publicity saints are essentially famous for really doing nothing— or, as we might say today, they are famous for being famous. In an account of Stein’s life in Bilignin during World War II initially published in Vogue in 1942, Therese Bonney quotes a letter in which Stein describes the publicity saint as a distinctively modern saint—“the modern saint being somebody who achieves publicity without having done anything in particular.”92 In his memoir of Stein, W. G. Rogers recalls Stein describing what would eventually become Ida as “a novel where a person 89  Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 11. 90  Esdale, “Introduction,” xxi. 91  Gertrude Stein, Ida A Novel, ed. Logan Esdale (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 106, 107, 110, 112, 126. Hereafter cited in the text as I. 92  Stein’s immediate reference in the letter is not Ida but Mrs. Reynolds. Therese Bonney, “Gertrude Stein in France,” Gertrude Stein Remembered, ed. Linda Simon (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 180. A press release for Ida from 1938 cited by Esdale refers to the book as “a novel about publicity saints” (“Introduction,” xvii–xviii). For Esdale, Ida’s resting, like many details of the text, are explained by Stein’s seldom acknowledged suggestion that the novel was based on the Duchess of

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is so publicized that there isn’t any personality left.”93 In drawing on these and other statements, critics have often treated Ida as a representation of Stein during her own bout of publicity. Yet they disagree over the question of whether the loss of personality to which excessive exposure can lead is a good thing or a bad thing. Whereas Knapp and Bridgman lead toward the latter assessment, reading the novel as a screen for Stein’s personal turmoil in the mid-1930s, Donald Sutherland offers a more triumphant take, reading Ida as a tale of ascension to the heights of human mind, a portrait of what it is to be an entity free of identity, time, nature, relation and also, as I will argue, exchange.94 While my reading echoes his and other idealistic interpretations of Ida, I want to shift focus to the thoroughly overlooked question of what is most saintly about this supposed publicity saint—her passion, like Stein’s, for helping other people change to what they should become. While Ida has a penchant for doing nothing, she also appears to help other people by doing nothing—that is, by resting. Resting, in other words, is Ida’s gift, or, as the narrator suggests, it “is the way Ida was needed” (I 59). If The Making of Americans marked Stein’s “first real effort to express this thing which is an American thing,” then Ida A Novel in effect marks her effort thirty years later to give this “thing” both narrative and human form in ways fitting the political and economic context of the 1930s (LA 161). Situating the novel alongside Stein’s political and aesthetic writings, I want to read Ida as a New Deal Künstlerroman and its heroine as a figure for the modern artist—a creator who avoids giving “artificial aid” such as that provided by either “big” government or conventional grammar. Recalling Krauss’s distinction between “true” and “counterfeit” modernism, we might think of Ida’s resting as a figure for the “true” aid that Stein hoped her writing would have the power to give. In this regard, Ida is less a representation of the actual writer, Gertrude Stein, than she is a representation of Stein’s ideal of a creative genius capable of abstracting herself from the morass of political economy. Ida A Novel, as we might expect, is neither psychological nor plot-driven. Rather, it builds a structure. In drawing from a limited vocabulary, repeating simple words in strange ways and contexts, and paring away hints of reference, while nevertheless largely obeying grammatical rules and gesturing toward the extra-literary landscape, Ida A Novel manifests a kind of dream world—a world in which the artist

Windsor, who frequently found herself “resting” while waiting for a divorce to come through. See Esdale, 180–93. 93  W. G. Rogers, When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person (New York and Toronto: Rinehart & Co. Inc, 1948), 168. 94  See Bettina L. Knapp, Gertrude Stein (New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1990), 166–9; Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 305–9; and Donald Sutherland, Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 195), 154–9. For more pessimistic interpretations of Ida’s loss of identity, see also John Malcolm Brinnin, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World (Boston, MA, and Toronto: Little, Brown & Company, 1959), 359–60, and Michael Hoffman, Gertrude Stein (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1976), 98–100. Notably, Perelman mentions Ida in passing, suggesting that the novel “can easily be considered a self-portrait of Stein as a literary celebrity” and the “tremendous anxiety” caused by her public recognition (The Trouble with Genius, 166).

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could ensure the separation of her gift from exchange and maintain all those oppositions that Stein felt were breaking down during the interwar period. I D A G O E S TO WA S H I N G TO N : T H E G I F T O F R E S T In Ida A Novel, commercial exchange is rather explicitly cast as the business of ­politics. Toward the end of the novel’s First Half, in a chapter titled “Politics,” Ida moves to Washington, D.C. Although other chapters also had titles in earlier drafts, this chapter is the only one with a title in the final published version of the text. That it is the only one is fitting since politics is the realm of titles—of ­representatives with honorifics. In Stein’s view, as we have seen, government is concerned with—or at least it ought to be concerned with—living up to its title as guardian of the U.S. economy, for example, by recognizing its identity with the father. Identity, recognition, relation, memory—all those phenomena that Stein associates with human nature are necessary to the government’s ability to safeguard the health and wealth of the nation. Recalling Stein’s play on various senses of the term “capital” in the title of her essay, “The Capital and Capitals of the United States of America,” we might say that, in Ida A Novel, Washington, D.C., as the nation’s capital, is invested in managing economic capital—or, rather, mismanaging it. Indeed, politics in the novel, as Stein also thought of politics under Roosevelt, seems to entail little more than spending money: “There are so many men,” we are twice told by the narrator, and “they all wanted to buy” (I 53). Importantly, however, “they do not want to buy from Ida,” which is presumably just as well, for Ida “did not sell anything” (I 52, 53). From the start, then, she is differentiated from these men on the basis of both gender and economic disposition. Although Ida does not have anything to sell, she does have something to give, having come to Washington “to do what each one of them wanted”—that is, each one of the men (I 53). The simplicity and ambiguity of these passages are typical of the narrative in general and tend to raise more questions than they answer: What do these acquisitive men want to buy? What does each of them want what cannot be bought and why is Ida inclined to do it for them? Given our discussion of the “charity” of Rhys’s heroines in Chapter 3, it may be tempting to guess that what these men want, which Ida in turn does, is sexual in nature. As we know from texts such as Lifting Belly and Stein’s play with the words “come” and “coming” at the end of Stanzas in Meditation, Stein took pleasure in sexual punning. Yet, as in our reading of Rhys, so here I want to suggest that the men’s wants and Ida’s mysterious compulsion to minister to them are not sexual per se. Rather, we are told that “Ida was a friend”—a term that can have romantic connotations in Stein’s life and writing but which also has a long history in political philosophy (I 53). Since at least Aristotle, political bonds have been cast as bonds of friendship, as we saw even in the last chapter in our brief turn to Baudelaire’s “Counterfeit Money,” another tale of friendship in a modern capital. If political friendships have traditionally been masculine, as they are in Baudelaire’s text, they assume a feminine valence here by way of their association with Ida. Yet, just as the text takes care to

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separate Ida from the business of buying and selling, so it takes care to separate her friendship from politics despite her location and the chapter’s title. When it comes to politics, Ida is not especially enlightened: She was kind to politics while she was in Washington very kind. She told politics that it was very nice of them to have her be kind to them. And she was she was very kind . . .  It was not really politics that Ida knew. It was not politics it was favors, that is what Ida liked to do. She knew she liked to do them.  (I 59–60)

The personification of politics (“She told politics”) implies that politics and the men who conduct it (“them”) are one and the same. They are what they do and what they do is engage in exchange. Moreover, the men of Washington seem to be exchangeable with one another insofar as Ida addresses them as one homogeneous body to which she is kind. Politics—that is, the government—is an undifferentiated mass and, in the context of a text such as “Money,” their lack of differentiation seems like a positive attribute. After all, this is essentially what Stein wanted: for the government to think and act as one. Ida, in turn, is kind to politics, but she is not of its kind. She does not “know” it but rather “knows” and “likes” doing favors and apparently likes doing them for everybody: “Everybody knew she liked to do favors for them” (I 60). If, according to Carl Schmitt, the fundamental political distinction is the distinction between friend and enemy, Ida draws no such distinction. Her generosity is boundless. Favors versus buying and selling, friendship versus politics, Ida versus the men of Washington—Ida A Novel scaffolds oppositions in a way that recalls Stein’s own proliferation of oppositions in her nonfiction. But the novel also does something Stein’s political and aesthetic writings do not: stage an encounter between the artist and the government. Via its characterization of Ida in Washington, the novel suggests that artists satisfy a need that the government cannot. What the men of Washington need is a rest: “When anybody needed Ida Ida was resting. That was all right that is the way Ida was needed” (I 59). Before the chapter entitled “Politics,” Ida is described as resting just once. When she moves to Washington, however, she does little else: “She rested a good deal, she rested even in the evening”; “some days she did rest a little more than on other days”; “Ida did not need to be troubled, all she need do was to rest and she did rest” (I 54, 55, 56). Something about politics and, more specifically, commerce, the money economy, creates the need for a rest—a need that strangely translates into a need for Ida. This is why she has come to Washington: to give everybody a rest from exchange. The status of Ida’s resting as a gift comes into greater relief when she is approached for a favor by a man named Henry: Once upon a time there was a man his name was Henry, Henry Henry was his name. He had told everybody that whatever name they called him by they just had to call him Henry. He came to Washington, he was born in San Francisco and he liked languages, he was not lazy but he did not like to earn a living. He knew that if anybody would come to know about him they would of course call him Henry. Ida did. She was resting one day and somebody called, it was somebody who liked to call on Ida when she was resting. He might have wanted to marry her but he never did.

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He knew that everybody sooner or later would know who Ida was and so he brought Henry with him. Henry immediately asked her to do a favor for him, he wanted to go somewhere where he could talk languages and where he would have to do nothing else. Ida was resting. She smiled. Pretty soon Henry had what he wanted, he never knew whether it was Ida, but he went to see Ida and he did not thank her but he smiled and she smiled and she was resting and he went away. That was the way Ida was. In Washington.  (I 60–1)

For all of the favors Ida supposedly likes to do, this favor is the only one that we see performed. Later, a man named Abraham George, apparently unhappy with his wife and thus, like Henry, wanting to be free, asks Ida to do him a favor and help him to “change to being a widower” (I 69). She says “yes of course” and, though she does “not really laugh,” seems to take it as a joke—if, that is, we can describe Ida as getting and enjoying jokes (I 69). In any case, we never see Abraham George, as we see Henry, get what he wanted and favors are never mentioned again. But while the novel’s talk of favors thus comes and goes, Ida’s encounter with Henry remains extremely suggestive—less for what it tells us about Ida’s favors, which are fleeting, than for what it tells us about her resting, which continues to be her defining characteristic, even after she leaves Washington. While the language of favors disappears, the association of favors with resting continues to lend Ida’s resting—her artistic gift for really doing nothing—a valence of generosity. Ida’s encounter with Henry thus codifies the status of her resting throughout the novel as a figure for the gift of art and establishes the nature of the aid Stein imagines her own art as giving. Henry does not want to have to “earn a living,” but instead wants to “talk ­languages.” The difference between them is a difference not between work and non-work but rather between work that one must do out of necessity and work that one does for its own sake—between ends-oriented work and work that is an end in itself. After all, Henry is “not lazy,” and in talking languages, he will not be doing nothing but rather will “do nothing else.” The passage presents a number of oppositions along these lines—between earning a living and talking languages; between the frenzied repetition of the opening chiasmus and the calm, streamlined style used to describe Ida; between the urgency of Henry’s request for a favor (he “immediately asked her”) and the pacing of its fulfillment (“sooner or later”). Where Henry rushes, abruptly interrupting Ida’s resting, Ida takes her time. And, in so doing, she appears to give Henry time—a rest from the dogged economic imperative to earn a living. We saw a similar rhetoric of “rest” in Chapter  3. In Rhys’s After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Julia is promised a rest by Mackenzie and asks James for help having a  rest. While Julia needs a rest—that is, money and the time it buys—she also embodies the rest in the sense of a remainder, a sort of excess, with respect to so-called organized society. As such, her status is paradoxical: she is a social outsider and yet, as an outsider, is pivotal to sustaining the social system. That is to say, she serves a symbolic function and, in this regard, she occupies a structural position like that of Clarissa Dalloway in Woolf ’s novels, despite the clear differences in

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their social status. At the same time, both Rhys and Woolf take care in their novels to demonstrate that their female leads are more than symbolic functions—more than figures in masculine fantasies of feminine frivolity and fecklessness. In the hands of Woolf and Rhys, the perfect hostess and the ghostly grue also become subjects in their own right, beings who, in giving thought to their worlds, point to the ways in which their many gifts do and do not find receptive audiences and outlets for expression in modern market society. We find something very different in the encounter between Henry and Ida. Ida rests, smiles, and rests some more: she is a cipher, an archetype, not a subject so much as a pure symbol. As an emblem of human mind, emptied of personality, Ida suggests that to be a mind, to have a mind, is to be—as so many misogynist myths of femininity might also have it—impenetrable, mysterious. There is no such mystery when it comes to Henry. His need for a rest is clear. Yet how Ida gives it to him, if Ida gives it to him, and what exactly “it” is are far less so. Henry is uncertain “whether it was Ida”—but whether what was Ida? To what does “it” refer in the statement “Henry had what he wanted, he never knew whether it was Ida”? Certainly we can read and are most likely to interpret the sentence as if it read, “Henry had what he wanted, he never knew whether it was Ida who was responsible.” In other words, we assume “it” refers to the person responsible for satisfying his wish—a person who may or may not be Ida. Henry does not know. But without a relative clause such as “who was responsible,” we might also read “it” as referring back to the direct object, “what he wanted”—namely, the thing Henry gets. Not knowing “whether it was Ida” could mean one of two things: either Henry does not know whether or not Ida was the person responsible for giving him what he wanted or he does not know whether or not Ida was what he wanted. In the first instance, Ida may or may not be the giver. In the second, she may or may not be the thing given. Or, rather, she may or may not be part of the thing given. In Mauss’s account of archaic gift exchange, as we have noted many times now, persons and things are inseparable. The gift is an extension of the giver and it is the recipient’s realization of this fact that compels a return and creates a relation between the two parties. The encounter between Henry and Ida reads as a narrative of what happens—or what does not happen—when the cord between givers and gifts is cut, when the provenance of things and the persons responsible for them are unknown. Unsure of whether the gift and thus its giver is Ida, Henry does not return the favor. While his second visit to Ida and his smile might be read as signs of his gratitude, he does “not thank her,” seemingly to Ida’s own smiling satisfaction. Simmel’s theory of gratitude suggests a further reading of Henry’s second visit to Ida. In a short piece originally published in 1908, Simmel suggests that true gratitude “consists, not in the return of a gift, but in the consciousness that it cannot be returned”—the awareness that no counter-gift can annul the recipient’s relation of indebtedness to the donor.95 The positions of the giver and the recipient are forever

95  Georg Simmel, “Faithfulness and Gratitude,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), 392.

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incommensurable, for whereas the initial gift may be voluntary, the counter-gift can only ever be given out of obligation. Henry’s not thanking Ida might paradoxically be read as a gesture of true gratitude—a sign of his recognition of the impossibility of ever truly reciprocating her favor. Or, alternately, his not thanking her might be considered a sign of their commensurability. Uncertain of whether Ida is responsible, Henry owes her nothing. No relation is created, no debt imposed. Both Henry and Ida are free to do as they please. At the same time, we need not grant Henry so much psychological depth—and probably should not considering the sparseness of Stein’s prose—in order to appreciate the way in which his encounter with Ida allegorizes our encounter with the text of Ida A Novel. While Stein’s syntax and diction are fairly conventional, the narration remains quite ambiguous at times thanks to some of her trademark formal strategies, such as using vague pronouns and omitting relative clauses. Via such details, Henry’s certainty, which is explicitly thematized in the text, becomes our uncertainty. Noting Stein’s strategic use of impersonal pronouns, Ulla Dydo describes Stein as a “master of neutralizing the language.”96 In Ida, this neutralization—the stripping away of grammatical markers of identity, relation, and time—reproduces and encodes Stein’s ideal of literature as a free gift at the level of the sentence. The text comes to us, as Ida’s favor does to Henry, as a free gift, an entity devoid of clues that might enable us to trace any meaning we may find back to some original intention on Stein’s part, even as we cannot help but know that (to borrow from Perelman) what we are reading is Gertrude Stein. In facing Stein’s prose as Henry does Ida, we, too, are given a rest—a rest from identity, relation, time—but what exactly does that mean? How does the rest that Ida gives Henry—and specifically the time she gives him to do nothing but talk languages—translate into the rest that the text gives us? In the context of the novel, Henry’s desire to talk languages recalls Ida’s own decision to talk to herself during the First Half, before she moves to Washington and before she starts resting. Talking to herself in effect takes the place of her earlier invention of a twin: “she was eighteen then, she decided that she had had enough of only being one and she told her dog Love that she was going to be two she was going to be a twin. And this did then happen” (I 12). Ida writes letters to her twin, whom she comes to call “Winnie” because she is “winning everything,” namely, beauty pageants and the public’s attention: “Winnie Winnie is what they said when they saw her and they were beginning to see her” (I 16). Winnie serves as an alias, a persona, mediating between Ida and her admiring public. When Ida “decide[s] that she was just going to talk to herself,” she eliminates the need for an intermediary: “Anybody could stand around and listen but as for her she was just going to talk to herself. She no longer even needed a twin” (I 32). Harriet Chessman argues that talking to oneself extends the concept of twinning. Although talking to 96  Ulla E. Dydo, Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises, 1923–1934 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 6. Specifically, Dydo points to Stein’s replacement of the proper name “Pierpont Morgan,” first with the personal pronoun “he” and then with the impersonal pronoun “it,” in the manuscript of “Business in Baltimore,” claiming that the “disembodied ‘it’ has more power here than any identification” (6).

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oneself may seem to carry the risk of devolving into a “narcissistic monologue,” like twinning, it figures “a deeply democratic doubleness.”97 Thus, while Ida claims to talk to herself, she continues to seek someone with whom to have a dialogue. Chessman argues that, just as Ida realizes her desire in marrying Andrew, the novel, too, engages in a dialogue with us, its readers. “The narration,” Chessman argues, “inscribes its own audience in such a way that we become imaginatively an intimate part of the talking to herself that constitutes Ida.”98 Chessman even characterizes Ida A Novel and Ida—that is, the character with whom the novel is identified—as gifts: “Ida-Ida come(s) to us as a gift for whose surprising and continually new presence we are grateful.”99 Yet, we might ask, how can we show our gratitude if we are, as Chessman argues, already inscribed in the narration? What is there for us to give back to Ida-Ida that It-She has not already given to itself-herself ? Insofar as Ida A Novel accounts for the possibility that we may “stand around and listen,” Chessman is certainly right to argue that we are already part of the novel’s talking to itself. But the fact that we are talking does not mean that the novel is listening to anything we might have to say. At stake in the gift of the novel is not a dialogic exchange between text and audience, as Chessman argues, but rather a potentially limitless creation of soliloquys. In presenting itself as a free gift, the novel in effect gives us what Ida gives Henry: the freedom to “talk languages,” to talk to ourselves without being beholden to the author or obliged to reciprocate. Ida fosters our gifts, so to speak, without calling for a counter-gift. We give in turn but we do not give in return. The flow of gifts set in motion by the gift of the novel thus recalls the logic of economimesis, which aims to produce or inspire what Derrida calls a “good imitation: one which is not a servile repetition, which does not reproduce, which avoids counterfeiting and plagiarism.”100 We paradoxically follow the example of the artistic genius by being exceptional, by not merely recreating and thus counterfeiting her creativity. Ida’s narrator captures something of this logic in the novel’s Second Half when she remarks, “It is wonderful how things pile up even if nothing is added” (I 123). While Stein’s formal techniques free readers to “pile up” meanings in engaging with the text, the readings they produce do not “add” anything to the text itself. The autonomy of the text and the autonomy of the reader are not, as some readers of Stein have suggested, mutually exclusive.101 Rather, the autonomy of the text, its separation from the author, engenders the autonomy of the reader. Like Ida and Henry, Ida and the reader are not 97  Harriet Chessman, The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 183, 167. 98  Ibid. 197. 99  Ibid. 198. 100  Derrida, “Economimesis,” 10. 101  Liesl Olson characterizes the debate over whether Stein embraces a poetics of indeterminacy (as Julianna Spahr and Marjorie Perloff argue) or a poetics of determinacy (as Jennifer Ashton argues) in these terms: those in the indeterminacy camp presuppose the autonomy of the reader, who is invited to bring her personal experiences to bear on the text and participate in the process of meaningmaking, while those in the determinacy camp presuppose the autonomy of the text. Olsen argues that, during her time in Chicago on her lecture tour, Stein herself promoted both models for reading her work. Liesl Olson, “‘An invincible force meets an immovable object’: Gertrude Stein comes to Chicago,” Modernism/modernity 17.2 (2010): 331–61. While I find myself strongly swayed by Ashton’s argument, I am not convinced that these two kinds of autonomy—that of the reader and that of the text—are necessarily mutually exclusive.

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incommensurable, as Simmel might have it, but rather commensurable—equally free to talk to ourselves. Further reflecting on the relative freedom of givers with respect to their recipient, Simmel suggests, “Only when we give first are we free.”102 Ida is an effort to turn us all into first givers. I hasten to add that this ideal of mutual freedom is far from unassailable, either in the scene between Ida and Henry or in the course of the novel. Toward the conclusion of the Second Half, for example, we are explicitly told that Ida enjoys thanking and being thanked: “Anything that was given to her she thanked for she liked to thank, some people do not but she did and she liked to be thanked” (I 112). Does this mark a change in Ida’s character? Has the free gift given way to exchange? Yes and no. The novel concludes with the narrator directly instructing us, its readers, to thank Ida and Andrew—“They are there. Thank them”—then there is a paragraph break and one final word, “Yes” (I 127). While the “Yes” that caps the narrative carries an inevitable echo of Molly Bloom’s final “Yes” in Ulysses, it also reads as the thanks for which the narrator calls. By way of this call and response the reader is engaged in a dialogue with the narration (“Thank them”) only to find herself already spoken for (“Yes”). In this moment, Ida A Novel, like its heroine, tries to have it both ways: to insist on the gift’s purity, its absolute freedom from exchange, by talking to oneself, regardless of one’s audience, and to reap the recognition that giving promises by demanding our gratitude. If Stein seems to be saying, with Mauss, that the gift is characterized by a contradiction—that the gift is free yet constrained, generous yet interested—there is a crucial difference. Mauss’s aim is always to demystify this contradiction, to insist that what may seem like separate phenomena to our eyes are not in fact separate at all. Stein, by contrast, takes pains to insist on separations, to maintain again and again that there is no relation among the various intentions and experiences that otherwise appear to converge on a single gift. We can never confirm that whatever thing Ida may have given is the same as the thing Henry received. Nor can we say when it comes to Ida that the woman who gives is exactly the same as the woman who thanks, for here, too, the narrator takes care to draw a distinction, noting that Ida assumes a different posture while thanking, sitting still rather than standing, moving, or what she does most of all, resting: “She was careful to sit still when she thanked or was thanked . . . Some people like to stand or to move when they thank or are thanked but not Ida. She was not really resting when she thanked or was thanked but she was sitting” (I 113). Why draw this distinction? Why stress that this Ida is not quite that Ida? The distinction between Ida’s two postures recalls the duality of the celebrity genius, “Gertrude Stein,” in Goldman’s and Perelman’s readings—of the woman who simultaneously presents herself as an impenetrable subject and an accessible object for mass consumption. Why position oneself as this and that rather than one or the other? Why maintain a separation only to traverse it? In part, to capitalize on it, as these other critics have also argued. But what most interests me in the context of Ida is not what such separations reveal about 102  Simmel, “Faithfulness and Gratitude,” 392.

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Stein’s paradoxical relationship to publicity so much as what they reveal about Stein’s paradoxical relationship to politics—the domain most in need of the rest art gives. While Ida, as a figure for Stein, does not “know” politics, her resting nevertheless appears to serve a supplementary function with respect to politics. “In Washington,” the narrator declares, “some one can do anything”—even something as unremunerative as talking languages—but only with the help of Ida (I 53). Berman avers that this possibility of doing anything “is also here a definition of politics” and “part of the character of the capital that attracts Ida.”103 Yet, as we saw in the case of poor overworked Henry, this possibility would not be realized—politics would not be politics—without Ida and the rest she gives from politics and, more specifically, from what the novel treats as the inherently political activity of buying and selling. In Ida, Washington, D.C. is very much the capital of American capitalism, which means that to Stein’s eyes, as to many early twenty-first-century voters, the central task of the U.S. government and especially the President is essentially to fix the economy in times of crisis—or, as Stein elsewhere suggests via an organic metaphor, to give the economy its medicine. But while institutions of market and state are mutually dependent, they also turn out to be mutually destructive. Stein’s anxieties about government interference hardly bear repeating: as far as she is ­concerned, the best long-term economic fix Roosevelt can provide is a policy of non-interventionism. More novel is the other side of this dynamic—that is, Stein’s anxieties about how the market might interfere with politics. We have seen Stein’s concern following her own commercial success with the market’s power to interfere in the production of art. In Ida, this concern assumes political dimensions. Here the threat posed by the market is at once more fundamental and more universal than Stein elsewhere implies. When Ida goes to Washington, the market— and, more specifically, the universal need for money as the common denominator of survival in modern market society—does not merely threaten the individual artist but rather threatens the artist within every individual, the common desire to do what one likes rather than what one must do to make money. If the money economy is the foundation of life in Washington, this economy is also at odds with the potential for which Washington supposedly stands: the unmistakably American dream that anyone can do anything. F RO M F E M I N I N E FAVO R S TO M A R R I A G E : STEIN’S GENDER POLITICS In our reading of “Money,” I suggested that, for Stein, the crisis in monetary ­representation (the failure of the federal government to recognize that money is money) translated into a crisis in political representation (the failure of the government to represent the interests of everybody). There, the solution to this joint crisis was the figure of the father—not a father who thinks for everybody à la Roosevelt but rather one who thinks like everybody in intuitively knowing that spending 103 Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community, 196.

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more than one has will lead to disaster. If, as a general equivalent, the father grounds the unification of the American people, Ida in effect invites us to ask: At what cost? What differences among individuals are negated in counting Americans as one—in reducing everybody to a wage-laborer, a taxpayer, a father figure? What gifts are sacrificed? And, more specifically, what feminine gifts insofar as the avatar of American politics in “Money” and Ida is masculine? Ruddick draws a parallel between Stein’s writing and theories of sacrifice set forth by Nietzsche, Freud, and Mauss in his co-authored work with Henri Hubert. In Tender Buttons in particular, Ruddick argues, Stein starts by demonstrating that “patriarchy constitutes itself by a sacrifice, real or mythic,” in order then “to undo sacrifice and to transcend patriarchal thinking” by bringing attention to “what sacrifice makes invisible.”104 Certainly patriarchy and sacrifice are linked in “Money” when Stein calls on the government to be more like a father and practice greater austerity. Crucially, however, Stein suggests there that sacrifice is natural and necessary to the economic and emotional well-being of the nation: saying “no” is the “natural feeling” of a father and so ought to be instinctive on the part of elected officials. Stein’s naturalization of sacrifice is significant, for it marks an implicit reversal of the function served by sacrifice in the early anthropological literature and in Ruddick’s reading. Sacrifice—for example, in the form of the incest taboo—is supposed to enable the transition from nature to culture. Lévi-Strauss memorably claims that only by prohibiting some marriages and thus enabling others is culture able to “firmly declare ‘Me first’, and tell nature, ‘You go no further’ ” (ESK 31). In “Money,” however, the opposite is the case: the paternal prohibition is not a negation of nature but rather its fullest expression.105 If, as Ruddick argues, Tender Buttons echoes the anthropological insight that patriarchal cultures “ground themselves through acts of ritual killing” then Stein’s later writing suggests that what patriarchy kills is culture itself.106 That is to say, patriarchy negates the countless creative gifts that in fact differentiate the American people—and necessarily so. In Stein’s novel, Ida’s resting redeems the personal costs of patriarchal politics. As a gift that helps others to realize their gifts, her resting, like money, is a general equivalent of sorts. Rest is the gift of gifts, at once heterogeneous and homogeneous with politics (to use Shell’s terminology). It enables the egalitarianism promised yet otherwise unrealized by both the free market and the democratic state—the two being indissociable in Ida. Insofar as their well-being depends on a culture of ­gift-giving, Ida ends up giving the lie to Stein’s own laissez-faire liberalism, casting doubt on the dream that in America someone can do anything without a few favors—especially a few feminine favors. While Ida’s centrality to politics may tempt us to read the novel, as I have suggested we read Woolf ’s and Rhys’s texts, as subtly undermining a gendered separation of gifts and exchanges, such a reading 104  Lisa Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 191. 105  To be fair—and as we will see in greater detail in Chapter 5—nature is always on the scene in Lévi-Straus’s account, providing an “empty form” that culture then fills in: “Nature imposes alliance without determining it, and culture no sooner receives it than it defines its modalities” (ESK 31–2). 106 Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein, 256.

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would, I think, be a mistake given how little Stein does to disrupt a patriarchal ideology of separate spheres, particularly in Ida’s Second Half, where Ida settles down with Andrew and a novel that began as a picaresque adventure turns into a monogamous marriage plot. Although the language of favors and politics is gone, Ida continues to play hostess to other people and to play hostess by resting: “So Ida was resting and they came in. Not one by one, they just came in” (I 98). And later: “she was always resting when they were there” (I 107). Notably, her guests are not  individuated as Henry was but rather bear a resemblance to the amorphous, collective “they” that appears throughout Stanzas in Meditation, the experience of reading which John Ashbery ingeniously compared to “living a rather long period of our lives with a houseful of people.”107 Ida’s echoes of Stanzas ­support our reading of Ida as a figure for Stein, the preeminent modernist hostess. Certainly Ida’s perpetual resting and apparent indifference to her audience bring to mind the many stoic representations of Stein—from Picasso’s mask-like portrait to Jo Davidson’s Buddha-like sculpture. The narrator’s observation that Ida’s guests “just came in” also recalls Ashton’s identification of two models of counting in Stein’s writing—one phenomenological and the other logical. The first is experience-based and entails counting one, two, three; the whole is achieved through the accretion of parts. The second puts the whole before its parts: “the whole, instead of being attained through the cumulative experience of its parts, exists in an abstract form prior to and independent of any experience of its parts.”108 According to Ashton, Stein moves in the course of her career “from a model of the whole based on experiential accretion to a model of the whole based on formal abstraction.”109 To some degree, the trajectory of the novel itself seems to mirror the transition from a phenomenological model to a logical model traced by Ashton. As a general equivalent of desire, Ida’s gift of rest depends on a logic of formal abstraction. And yet, the actual praxis of giving others a rest—of entertaining visitors such as Henry, of taking the time to give them what each one wants—follows a phenomenological model. In ceasing to perform favors in the novel’s Second Half, Ida in effect retreats from the time-consuming business of counting everybody—and accounting for the needs of everybody—one by one by one. In other words, in the Second Half, Ida’s resting comes to allegorize a Steinian dream of putting the whole first, of counting everybody at once. If Ida’s visitors previously entered “one by one,” now “they just came in.” Yet, Ida’s resting also takes on a rather different connotation in the context of her marriage to Andrew. Given their union, her resting reads less like a metaphor for Stein’s creative work or public persona than it does a fairly literal description of Ida’s escape to the domestic sphere. Then again, as far as marriage plots go, the story of Ida and Andrew does not entail much of a plot at all. Their relationship does not consist of a chain of events so much as it consists of a number of abstract 107 John Ashbery, “The Impossible,” Poetry Magazine 90.4 (July 1957): 250. https://www.­ poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=60656. 108  Jennifer Ashton, From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 52. 109  Ibid. 53.

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statements about something that may or may not have happened. Consider, for example, the following series of closely situated claims by the narrator: “And then something did happen”; “Well anyway something did happen and it excited every one”; “It happened slowly and then it was happening and then it happened it really happened and then it had happened and then it was happening and then well there it was”; “So in a way nothing did happen” (I 122–3). Arguably, nothing did happen (or nothing did happen) insofar as something—love perhaps?—is still happening now, in the present. Happenings, the text suggests, are antithetical to beginning and ending—that is, to the passage of time: “When something happens nothing begins . . . and you could always say with Ida that nothing began”—the implication being that, with Ida, something always happens, but it happens outside time (I 123). Or, rather, more precisely, happening occupies what Stein refers to as a “space of time,” a space not of rest but of resting—a space “filled with moving,” with difference, with constant variation (LA 161). As a happening, Ida and Andrew’s marriage is presumably a happy one—to trope, as Stein is surely doing, on the homonymy and shared etymology of “happening” and “happy.” Yet their marriage also represents something more than a happy, heteronormative ending, particularly in the context of Stein’s nonfiction. In her University of Chicago lectures on narration, Stein compares marriage to mysticism and the Holy Trinity on the grounds that all three signify a unity that can accommodate multiplicity. Using a copula to characteristically unconventional ends, Stein define all three thus: “That is what mysticism is, that is what the Trinity is, that is what marriage is, the absolute conviction that in spite of knowing anything about everything about how any one is never really feeling what any other one is really feeling that after all after all three are one and two are one.”110 Marriage serves a function for Stein not unlike that which it serves in LéviStrauss’s work when he identifies marriage as the foundation of symbolic thought: it manifests a certainty—an “absolute conviction”—of unity despite our lived experience of alienation. But whereas Lévi-Strauss always shifts our gaze to the union forged between men by way of the exchange of women in marriage, Stein is most fascinated by the couple—by the fact that they can be both one (a union) and two (separate individuals). Of Ida and Andrew’s marriage, the narrator remarks, “Little by little there it was. It was Ida and Andrew” (I 126). Just as two (“Ida and Andrew”) are one (“it”), so, as Stein says in her lecture, “one is always two.”111 It is always Ida and Andrew. Stein uses a similar formula to describe the genius who talks and listens at the same time, assuming the roles of both giver and recipient, both speaker and audience. To be a genius means being “the two in one and the one in two” (LA 180). The genius, we may recall, creates something out of something without adding anything. As in the creation of masterpieces, so in marriage, it is not a question of adding, but rather of changing two into one and one into two, and of exchanging the two for one another, as if they were equivalent. In the case of Ida and Andrew, Ida in particular seems to capitalize on this exchange: “being Andrew’s Ida Ida was 110 Stein, Narration, 57.

111 Ibid.

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more than Ida she was Ida itself ” (I 73). In becoming “Ida itself,” Ida, as Secor ­suggests, satisfies a “quest for entity within marriage.”112 But marriage, too, constitutes an entity, a unified whole that, contra identity, absorbs and even amplifies differences—the two in one and the one in two. In its parallel with genius, the marriage of Ida and Andrew does not mark a departure from Ida’s earlier practice of performing favors. Marriage does not signify a domestication of Ida’s gift for abstraction (to use Secor’s term) but rather signifies the apotheosis of her gift. Along with the Holy Trinity and mysticism, marriage is yet another figure for the creative act—one that also serves to sacralize the artist. Thus, what most matters about marriage is not its status as a heterosexual union—traditionally gendered though Andrew’s possession of Ida (“Andrew’s Ida”) and Ida’s resting may be—so much as its status as a sacred union. This union changes Ida into what she should become, just as she helped Henry to change into what he should become—but how exactly? What does the genius really do in really doing nothing? What is the nothing that did happen when Ida and Andrew got together? In her reflections on marriage, mysticism, and the Holy Trinity, Stein implies that some additional quantity is in fact required to turn something into something else, but it is an abstract quantity, not a thing so much as a thought. Marriage, as we noted, is an “absolute conviction”—an unshakable belief in the possibility of one becoming two and two becoming one despite “knowing” that it is impossible not just on mathematical grounds but also on psychological ones. As Stein further puts it in “A Transatlantic Interview,” “Nobody can enter into anybody else’s mind; so why try?”113 One does not try to bridge the divide between two minds; rather, one believes absolutely that they are one. That is what saints and artists and married people do—they “believe in anything deeply enough [so that] it turns into something else” (EA 42). As we saw earlier, Stein’s primary example of such magical thinking is when “money turns into not money”—when a real thing is transformed into an ideal thing. “That is what mysticism is”—but that is also, to Stein’s dismay, what the American economy is thanks to the fiscal policy of the Roosevelt administration (EA 42). Whether by taking the dollar off the gold standard or by taxing and spending too liberally, Roosevelt turned money into not money. While Stein condemned these moves, chalking them up to childish thought, she also replicates this thought in her conception of genius as the miraculous transformation of something into something else by the sheer strength of one’s belief. Rather, more precisely, Stein’s conception of genius in sacred terms, if not unprecedented in either her writing or the field of aesthetic philosophy, assumes newfound politicaleconomic weight in the New Deal era of token money—an era when money, unanchored in gold and buoyed up by executive decree, turns into not money. Via metaphors of marriage, mysticism, and the Holy Trinity, Stein at once reclaims a creative power for art usurped by the government and reveals the influence of politics and political economy on her thought. Her figuration of artistic 112  Secor, “Ida, a Great American Novel,” 104. 113 Gertrude Stein, “A Transatlantic Interview,” in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles, CA: Black Sparrow, 1971), 34.

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genius, of government, of spiritual forms—everything points back to money and Stein’s simultaneous anxieties about and fascination with its potential inconvertibility, its status as an ideal thing that may or may not ever line up with a real thing. One reason for the parallels between these different artistic, political, and religious phenomena in her work may be structural—an effect of the way in which money, with its different ontological registers, can inform the way we conceptualize nominally noneconomic institutions. Thus, we saw Shell argue (and as Marx argued in a different way in diagnosing commodity fetishism) that Christianity and the money economy share a symbolic structure—one that, I would add, aesthetics replicates in casting the genius as a secularized saint who is and is not part of this world. Yet the primary reason these different symbolic economies converge in Stein’s writing is not structural so much as it is Steinian. As with so many things in Stein’s writing, the homology—or, to use Shell’s term, the tropic interaction— between money, marriage, genius, and government is a problem of Stein’s own making. It is thanks to Stein’s own compulsion to compare—her creation across late works of one expansive and absorptive symbolic economy in which otherwise disparate phenomena become subject to exchange on whatever grounds Stein dictates—that we are invited to look from her writing to her material context. In short, it is because Stein is so money-minded—and, I think, quite self-consciously so, in ways that are both formal (her style replicates the logic of token money) and thematic (she writes a lot about money)—that her writing registers its debts to the money economy. Either way, the tropic interaction between money, marriage, genius, and government in Stein’s writing has significant ramifications for our reading of Ida A Novel. It would seem that, in Ida, both Ida’s marriage to Andrew and the favor she shows her countless friends in Washington—that is, all those transformative acts of resting that mark her transcendence to human mind—owe a greater debt to the logic of the money economy than her apparent abstraction from the world of exchange would suggest. It is to this debt that I will turn in the final section of this chapter. First, though, it bears acknowledging that Stein’s aesthetics always bore a certain debt to the money-form. Her late writing is not radically different in this respect. Thus, I suggested above that the logic of token money is already at play in the way a text such as Tender Buttons plays the gap between symbol and thing—transforming familiar things into something else altogether, often by subtracting elements, such as punctuation, rather than adding anything. What differentiates Stein’s writing from the 1930s is her repeated thematization of this logic in ways that index the influence of contemporary politics on her thought in general. To be sure, I do not mean to suggest that Stein’s earlier experimentations at the intersection of ­literary form and monetary form were not political—as if it were only in this ­historical moment that economics and politics, Market and State, intersect. Rather, I would argue that Stein’s late politics—including both her fiscal conservatism and her collaborationism—call on us to reevaluate the politics of her nominally antipatriarchal poetry in an early text such as Tender Buttons. I hope, at the least, to help to establish a framework for such an undertaking by turning in closing to consider Ida A Novel ’s own debts to money.

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Ida’s gift, her resting, as we have seen, is at once heterogeneous and homogeneous with the domain of political economy—outside politics and yet fundamental to politics. Or, putting the matter in more aesthetic terms, we might say that Ida’s gift is both exceptional and exemplary in its paradoxical capacity to satisfy the unique, individual needs of everybody. In this regard, Ida’s gift occupies a structural position like that of money. If money is the thing on which everybody lives, then a rest from politics and material necessity—freedom to fill one’s time with whatever one wants—is the thing that everybody needs. Yet we might also ask if the similarity between Ida’s gift and money stops at their formal resemblance. Is the favor she grants Henry just like money or might it actually be money? Indeed, how could Ida possibly give Henry what he wanted—namely, a rest from earning a living, so he could talk languages—without giving him money? Or, is Ida “kind” to Henry by giving him in-kind gifts? Is there some other way she, or perhaps one of her friends, “those who could do the favors,” helps to subsidize his free time (I 60)? In omitting traces of causality and relation, Ida works to preempt these kinds of practical questions. Just as marriage is a belief in the possibility of transformation, so the novel calls on us to believe that Ida, merely by resting, can transform something into something else—to believe that Henry can go from the drudgery of earning a living to the pleasurable pastime of talking languages without a generous infusion of capital. Yet for all its surreality and strangeness, Ida maintains a strain of realism, keeping one foot planted in the material world. DeKoven proposes that Stein’s writing from the 1930s and 1940s “does not represent a repudiation of or a release from experimental writing” but rather represents an attempt to translate the utopian possibilities opened up by that writing into something like everyday reality.114 While Stein’s early experimentation “points to a culture beyond ‘phallogocentrism,’ beyond patriarchy,” a later text such as Ida, she implies, “shows us that such a utopian language and culture can . . . situate itself ‘in this world.’ ”115 In Ida, this world is both geographic and economic. In addition to referencing American place names, the narrator takes care to note Ida’s financial status, making clear that her freedom to move and marry as she pleases derives from the fact that she has money. Ida, we are told, “had that kind of money to spend that made it not make any difference about weather”—the term “weather” lending itself to both literal and naturalistic readings (I 40). Presumably, Ida, wherever she may go, has a roof over her head to protect her from the elements, but she also appears to have enough money such that she need not be concerned with or affected by environmental factors. Though she encounters people suffering the effects of economic depression, she is unfazed. At one point, she sees “a sign up that said please pay the unemployed and a lot of people were gathered around and were looking” (I 30). But Ida did not join 114 DeKoven, A Different Language, 150. 115  Ibid. 151. The quotation is from an essay by Roland Barthes.

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them: “It did not interest her. She was not unemployed. She just sat and she always had enough. Anybody could” (I 30). Needless to say, Ida seems to share Stein’s conservatism and voluntaristic view of poverty—one implication being that Ida’s favors may not be so free-flowing after all.116 Does she do favors for just anyone or  must the recipient earn her favor by earning a living and thus proving his industriousness, his capacity to buy and sell? We cannot say. What we can say with certainty is that Ida is, as Stein was, financially independent and it is because she “always had enough” that she enjoys the freedom not to be “interested” in money or, more troublingly, in others’ need of it. Still, Ida’s lack of interest in economic matters appears to come at some psychological cost. While in Washington, she has a handful of dreams, the second of which is about money: “She dreamed, if you are old you have nothing to eat, is that, she dreamed in her dream, is that money” (I 56). What money names here is not the means of satisfying a need, so much as the actual experience of need, of being old and having nothing to eat. Or, rather, these two things are one and the same. Money is equivalent to the need of money. Having “never starved,” Ida has no such need of money (I 33). Yet the dream also implies that, having never needed money, Ida does not know what money is: is that, she dreamed in her dream, is that money. Because she has money she does not have to think about what money is. And yet, as a residue of the economic reality she circumvents in her everyday life, her dream suggests that money is for Ida, as it was for Stein, a “fascinating subject,” albeit one she seems to resist thinking about—but why? Why not give in to this intellectual interest? The novel offers one possible answer in the form of a story about Ida’s brief stay with a cousin of her uncle after she passes the unemployment line: Ida went to live with a cousin of her uncle. He was an old man and he could gild picture frames so that they looked as if they had always had gold on them. He was a good man that old man and he had a son, he sometimes thought that he had two sons but anyway he had one and that one had a garage and he made a lot of money. He had a partner and they stole from one another. One day the son of the old man was so angry because the partner was most successful in getting the most that he up and shot him. They arrested him. They put him in jail. They condemned him to twenty years hard labor because the partner whom he had killed had a wife and three children. The man who killed the other one had no children that is to say his wife had one but it was not his. Anyway there it was. His mother spent all her time in church praying that her son’s soul should be saved. The wife of their doctor said it was all the father and mother’s fault, they had brought up their son always to think of money, always of money, had not they the old man and his wife got the cousin of the doctor’s wife always to give them presents of course they had. Ida did not stay there very long.  (I 30–1) 116  Ida shares this voluntaristic view of poverty with her first husband, Arthur. He is an officer in the army when they meet, but he used to sleep under a bridge, having “used up all his money” (I 28). At night he would wish on a star “that he would be a king or rich. . . . Arthur had not yet come to decide which one was the one for him. It was easy enough to be either the one or the other one. He just had to make up his mind, be rich or be a king and then it would just happen. Arthur knew that much” (I 29).

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Can we trust the judgment of the doctor’s wife? Can we glean from this narrative of greed and murder a straightforward moral about the deleterious effects of raising one’s child “always to think of money”? Certainly the thieving son appears to ­follow the example set by his father. A counterfeiter by trade, the old man seems more interested in gilding frames than in making an accurate count of his children: does he have one son or two? His uncertainty might be read as a joke about the one son having two personalities, one presumably more violent than the other, but the text favors a more literal reading insofar as his son, too, seems to have no interest in taking responsibility for more than his proper share of offspring. Thus, his wife has one child but “it was not his.” Money is a kind of object altogether different from such precious property as women and children. Though the son has stolen “a lot” it is not “the most” and therefore it is not enough, driving him to “up and shoot” his partner. By holding the son’s parents accountable for his crime, the doctor’s wife both affirms the role of environmental factors in determining the son’s path (the “weather” to which Ida pays so little attention) and cautions against fetishizing what may be false idols. In Ida, one is not born a capitalist but rather becomes one, apparently by being brought up “always to think of money, always of money.” While the repetitive phrasing registers the tsk-tsking tone of the doctor’s wife, the elision of “to think” in the second half of the phrase has an intriguing effect: it would seem that always thinking of money in the end means not thinking at all. The constant thought of money abolishes thought; or, at least, it abolishes all thought but the thought of money. In the case of the old man and his wife, bringing up their son always to think of money further entails soliciting lots of gifts: “had not they the old man and his wife got the cousin of the doctor’s wife always to give them presents of course they had.” Barring practical questions such as why in the world they would hit up the doctor’s wife’s cousin for presents, it seems safe to say that we are clearly located in the realm of human nature here, with its bothersome bonds of relation (familial, social, and business ties) and necessity (the doctor’s wife’s determinism). In some respects, the father’s gilding, the son’s stealing, and even the mother’s praying all constitute efforts to transcend these bonds. This is not to suggest that their acts are equivalent on moral grounds. Rather, I mean to register the homology between capitalism and Christianity as symbolic economies. What these family members implicitly have in common is a shared belief in a gift beyond exchange, whether the stolen gift of surplus value or God’s gift of salvation. Yet they also, according to the doctor’s wife, have a voracious appetite for actual gifts, one that she links to their preoccupation with money. In other words, the formal connections we have been drawing throughout this chapter between money in its role as a general equivalent and various figures of the gift—for example, the free lunch, divine grace, genius, the work of art—is suddenly literalized here: simply put, the old man and his wife think a lot about money and insist on getting lots of gifts. What interests me, then, is what this correlation potentially tells us about Ida’s own gift-giving. The doctor’s wife suggests that where we find a ceaseless demand for the gift, there we will also find the constant thought of money. Ida’s generosity would seem

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to affirm the inverse point as well: there we find an impulse to give but very little thought of money or even a basic understanding of economic matters, hence her misreading of the sign about paying the unemployed. At one point, she “decided to earn a living” but she “did not have to” (I 33). She does not have to make money or think about money and yet she dreams of money. As Freud might put it, she thinks of money without thinking of money. She knows what money is without knowing that she knows. If you are old and have nothing to eat, is that money? According to this odd definition, money is the mediation of need. It stands for what one does not have. As Carson puts it in his reading of Stein’s political economy, “money embodies a certain scarcity no matter how abundant it might be. Stein sees money as . . . materializing a certain lack.”117 But this lack also translates into a certain excess. In the case of the old man’s son in Ida and the federal government in Stein’s nonfiction, the thought of money opens onto a rapacious desire for “the most”—a desire to have it all but without having to pay for it. To think of money too much is to begin to want something for nothing. In “Money,” Stein traces the confusion of money and the free gift to the government’s mistaken dissociation of symbol and thing, their failure to identify the idea of money at the time of voting with the thing on which everybody lives. Something curious happens, however, when we turn to Ida. Here the gap between symbol and thing, between the ideal thing and the real thing, is not a trick of perception, a failure of cognition. Rather, this gap is constitutive of money itself. In Everybody’s Autobiography, as in her articles on money, Stein again characterizes money as the difference between men and animals, claiming “if you live without money you have to do as the animals do live on what you find each day to eat and that is just the difference the minute you do not do that you have to have money” (EA 42). In temporalizing need and deferring satisfaction, money also fuels speculation, hence the danger of thinking about money too much. The thought of money can only lead to the thought of more money, until one believes that money is not money at all but a free gift. And there we meet with the paradox of money in Stein’s writing: “money is purely a human conception,” a product of human mind, and yet it poses a threat to the very thing that makes us human—that is, the human mind (EA 42). In setting up solitary reign as the sovereign good, the potential means to every end, money tends to overstep its boundaries, to colonize the mind absolutely and undercut the subject’s ability to think (like the old man’s son in Ida), to understand (like the rich collector in Picasso), and to create (like Stein after the success of The Autobiography). As Stein puts it in “Money,” “it is awfully hard to really know what you know,” and it is hard above all because of money— because money splits the subject into two, dividing mind from nature, entity from identity (HWIW 107). Money animates a need for a free gift that it cannot fill—a need that in Ida is answered by Ida’s resting as “the way Ida was needed” (I 59). While her resting appears to depend on her indifference to and even repression of the thought of money, it also points insistently back to money. Not only does money serve as the 117 Carson, Consumption and Depression, 56.

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material ground of her abstraction from political economy—it is because she has enough that she can choose to do what she likes—but also it implicitly serves as the conceptual ground. The gift she gives, while seemingly separate from all the venal trappings of the money economy, in fact reproduces and obeys the same logic of equivalence. It, too, is indebted to the thought of money. Yet it remains important that Ida’s resting, like the literary gift for which it stands, is never entirely reducible to this thought. Otherwise there would be nothing to distinguish the writer—namely, the gifted genius Gertrude Stein—from everybody else. In The Geographical History, Stein begins to suggest this point by both aligning money with the human mind and gesturing toward the thought of a gift that exceeds money: You may say I think you may say that no one can really give anything to anybody but anybody can sell something to somebody. This is what makes the human mind and not human nature although a great many one might say anybody can say something about this not being so. But it is so. And the human mind can live does live by anybody being able to sell something to somebody. That is what money is not give but sell. Believe it or not that is what money is and what the human mind is.  (GHA 94)

Whereas money and selling are antithetical to the human mind in Ida, the three are equal here. The human mind is “not give but sell”—the imperative form of this phrase suggesting that the mind serves a superegoic function, enjoining the subject to sell and thus to make money. The appeal of selling, as opposed not only to giving but also to buying, is its supposed universality. Not everybody has the money to buy—a fact with which Stein, in her defense of class division, was entirely comfortable. But “anybody can sell something to anybody,” by which Stein presumably means that anybody can sell his labor since she considered earning a living or being unemployed a decision one makes. While the capacity to sell is supposed to be universal, the capacity to give is ineluctably limited: “no one can really give anything to anybody.” Nevertheless, Stein will suggest again and again that she in particular can give at least one thing to everybody—the gift of thought. Toward the end of The Geographical History, Stein inquires of the reader, “why is it that in this epoch the only real literary thinking has been done by a woman” (GHA 210)? In this moment, Stein does not venture an explanation. What matters above all is that she and no one else is the one doing the thinking. If Stein once considered masculinity a characteristic of genius, at this point in her career the fact that she is a woman seems only to reinforce the exceptionality of her gift.118 This gift is not a gift for resting so much as it is a gift for wresting, for listening to and transcribing the money of the mind. It is a gift she shares with the business man: “a business man can and anybody who can sit and write can he can listen to the human mind” (GHA 74). But as Stein’s encounter with the rich collector in Picasso suggests, something also differentiates 118  Pointing to Stein’s early notebooks, Will suggests that Stein “identifies ‘genius’ as her dominant trait, and the ‘maleness’ that belongs to it as a secondary characteristic” (Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius,” 58).

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her from the business man—that is, a belief in a gift beyond money. To trope on her idiosyncratic diction: that is what her writing is not sell but give. More precisely, Stein’s writing is both sell and give. Indeed, if, as I have argued, Stein’s late writing works tirelessly to inscribe lines such as those between giving and selling, between genius and the business of living, then it is in order to prove her own unique ability to cross them—to be at home, as her writing was, in the world of both art and politics. “The thing that differentiates man from animals is money,” but the thing that differentiates Gertrude Stein from man is her capacity to know money is money and to wrest the thought of a gift from the money form (HWIW 110). She is both business man and creator, a patriarch who takes pleasure in saying “no” to the federal government and a publicity saint who dreams of being friends with everybody. She is, at least according to her personal accounting, the two in one and the one in two.

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5 H.D. and the Promise of Queer Kinship If there is a writer who can make Stein’s deification of the artist—and of herself in particular—seem quaint and even dilettantish, it is assuredly H.D. As Eileen Gregory succinctly puts it, “No modern writer takes the ‘gods’ more seriously than does H.D.”1 While Gregory primarily has in mind the Greek gods, H.D.’s pantheon of idols and esoteric influences was decidedly vast. Drawing on Hellenic, Christian, and Egyptian myth, as well as psychoanalysis and an array of occult forms—Tarot, Kabbalah, astrology, numerology, spiritualism—she “constructed her own highly eclectic, syncretic system.”2 H.D. reflects on her desire to create a system that would wed these various modes of meaning-making in “Writing on the Wall,” her 1944 tribute to Sigmund Freud, with whom she undertook analysis in Vienna in 1933 and 1934. H.D. recalls discussing a dream that reminded her of one of Gustave Doré’s Bible illustrations entitled Moses in the Bulrushes. “The Professor,” as she calls Freud, asks if H.D. sees herself as the infant Moses. Though initially doubtful, she then wonders, “Do I wish myself, in the deepest unconscious or subconscious layers of my being, to be the founder of a new religion?”3 Readers 1 Eileen Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 108. 2 Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, introduction to Majic Ring by H.D., ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2009), xxiv. On H.D.’s occultism, see also Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1981), 157–206; Matte Robinson, The Astral H.D.: Occult and Religious Sources and Contexts for H.D.’s Poetry and Prose (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Leonora Woodman, “H.D. and the Poetics of Initiation,” in Literary Modernism and the Occult Tradition, ed. Leon Surette and Demetres Tryphonopoulos (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996), 137–46; and Robert Duncan’s wide-ranging musings in The H.D. Book (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011). In their introduction to Duncan’s text, the editors write, “If there is a master word that haunts the thinking in The H.D. Book, it is . . . occult,” as in “the worlds of hidden fact, hidden history, hidden mind, hidden body” that skirt the edges of so-called normal life, “as if all of us live on the edge of an occult reality that is really quite ordinary.” Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman, introduction to The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 4. For her part, Elizabeth Anderson uses the term “visionary Hermeticism”—that is, “the search for ancient wisdom, and the apprehension of that wisdom through visionary consciousness”—to characterize H.D.’s religious syncretism and occultism. Bringing together pagan, Christian, and spiritualist references and rituals, her religious imagination is “marked by devotion to the Greek god Hermes and the ancient wisdom revealed and concealed in texts ascribed to the ancient sage Hermes Trismegistus”—a wisdom that promises to bring the devotee closer to the divine. Elizabeth Anderson, H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 2, 4. 3 H.D., “Writing on the Wall,” in Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions, 1974), 37. “Writing on the Wall” was initially published in Life & Letters Today, 1945–6; Tribute to Freud was first published in 1956 and also includes “Advent,” a journal nominally based on notes written during her analysis. Quotations from Tribute to Freud hereafter cited in the text as TTF.

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have largely confirmed Freud’s interpretation, at least on this point, contrasting H.D.’s wide-ranging spirituality with his scientific skepticism. By H.D.’s own account, she and Freud had “an argument implicit in our very bones” about the “greater transcendental issues” (TTF 13). It is important, however, that the new religion toward which her thought leaned was not strictly religious. The fundamental source of H.D.’s argument with Freud was not his valorization of science over both religion and art as disparate ways of approaching (or, as Freud would have it, avoiding) the real. Rather, the problem from H.D.’s perspective was that these forms of thought had been segregated at all. “Religion, art, and medicine,” she laments, “through the latter ages, became separated; they grow further apart from day to day” (TTF 50). She thus longs for their reunification and imagines the possibility of the “three working together, to form a new vehicle of expression or a new form of thinking or of living” (TTF 50). In H.D.’s writing, what binds these various forms of thought together is the notion of the gift. Like Woolf and Stein, H.D. uses the language of the gift to characterize the creativity of the artist to invest art with social significance, particularly in her World War II-era memoir, The Gift. Yet, like le don in Mauss’s Essai sur le don, the gift at stake in H.D.’s The Gift also points toward a much broader phenomenon. More than a medium of metropolitan experience (as in Mrs. Dalloway) or a means of American self-realization (as in Ida A Novel ), “the gift” names a total system of thought in which not only art, religion, and medicine intermingle but all manner of seemingly disparate periods, places, people, things, and texts are bound by a single, unifying spirit.4 Of the writers considered here, H.D. offers the fullest integration of an aesthetic notion of the gift (as a naturally endowed wellspring of creativity) and an anthropological notion of the gift (as a whole way of life), as well as the most ambitious vision for the power of her gift in particular to transform and redeem Western culture. And yet, the tremendous scale of H.D.’s vision stands in striking contrast with the extremely limited scale of her readership. Most of her writing went unpublished during her lifetime—including the two primary texts considered in this chapter, The Gift and her early aesthetic treatise, Notes on Thought and Vision. The publication history of The Gift has been especially fraught. It was started in 1940, as bombs routinely rained down around the London apartment where H.D. lived with her partner, Bryher, and daughter, Perdita, and finally completed in 1944. The full text consists of seven chapters and, like Mauss’s Essai, includes a lengthy set of “Notes.” In 1982, New Directions published a heavily abridged version of the text, with the entire second chapter, the “Notes,” and other substantive sections omitted. Individual chapters were published separately in 4  A productive parallel might also be drawn between H.D.’s and Jane Ellen Harrison’s views of art and religion in particular. In Ancient Art and Ritual, Harrison similarly argues that religion and art are born of the same instinctual source: “It is at the outset one and the same impulse that sends a man to church or to the theater”—namely, an impulse toward sociality. Ancient Art and Ritual (London: Williams & Norgate, 1913), 9–10, https://archive.org/details/ancientartritual00harruoft. On the parallels between H.D.’s and Harrison’s views of Ancient Greek religion, see Gregory, “Anthropology and the Return of the Gods: Jane Ellen Harrison,” in Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism, 108–25, and Anderson, H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination, 63–7.

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journals over the years, but the complete text did not see print until 1998, before which it was accessible in its entirety only at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.5 Nevertheless, the tension between the scale of H.D.’s vision and the scale of its dissemination seldom fazes scholars. Adalaide Morris, whose oft-cited 1986 essay, “A Relay of Power and Peace: H.D. and the Spirit of the Gift,” provides the most thoroughgoing account of gift economies in H.D.’s life and work to date, writes that, at the end of The Gift, “the gift passes on to us and we are left . . . holding the future in our hands.”6 In revising the essay for her more recent book-length study of H.D., Morris recapitulates this point, arguing that H.D. “holds the reader responsible for continuing the relay of power and of peace that constitutes the secret of the gift.”7 But how are we to be held responsible if H.D. more or less kept this secret to herself ? What does it mean for The Gift not to have been given by H.D. but to be given only after her death? If, as Morris, building on Lewis Hyde’s theory of the gift, claims, “the gift that does not move is not a gift,” then can we even speak of the text, The Gift, as a gift?8 As we saw in Chapter 1, for Hyde, part of what distinguishes gift economies from market economies is the former’s relatively small scale: “gift exchange tends to be an economy of small groups, of extended families, small villages, close-knit communities, brotherhoods and, of course, tribes.”9 But while this account of gift exchange may explain the size of modernist coteries, such as that which formed around H.D. and Bryher, it does little to explain the scale of modernist utopianism or, for that matter, the nuances of modernist thinking about gifts and markets. Like Morris, I want to take seriously H.D.’s faith in the gift—that is, in a spiritual and erotic force with the power to promote and sustain peaceful coexistence. Yet I also want to take care to consider this faith in combination with the simple fact that H.D. shared her gift with such a small audience. In the context of Notes and Thought and Vision, this tension reads less like a contradiction and more like a strategy, or, at the very least, as a sign of her genuine investment in the idea that a small number of people can create, in her words, a new form of thinking and living. “Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains,” she hopefully proclaims, “could turn the whole tide of human thought, could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of dead 5  Chapter 3 of H.D.’s The Gift, “The Dream,” was published in Contemporary Literature in 1969; chapter  1, “The Dark Room” was published in Montemora in 1981; and chapter  2, “The Fortune Teller” was published in The Iowa Review in 1986. In her 1984 commentary on the cuts made to H.D.’s text in the New Directions edition, DuPlessis argues that they diminish the book’s “spiritual politics,” reducing the gift of its title to a mere means of “individual illumination.” Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “A Note on the State of H.D.’s The Gift,” Sulfur 9 (1984): 180, 179. 6  Adalaide Morris, “A Relay of Power and of Peace: H.D. and the Spirit of the Gift,” Contemporary Literature 27.4 (1986): 524. Morris does, however, make note of The Gift’s history and, in the course of her reading, quotes from both the final typescript and the scattered sites of the text’s partial publication. 7  Adalaide Morris, How to Live/What to Do: H.D.’s Cultural Poetics (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 143. 8  Morris, “A Relay of Power and Peace,” 500. 9  Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 2007), xxi–xxii.

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murky thought.”10 This chapter argues that H.D.’s faith in just two or three people to effect large-scale change translates into an inchoate theory of not just the gift but also kinship—kinship being, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, the archetypal product of gift exchange. More specifically, I want to suggest that Notes articulates, and The Gift narrativizes, a theory of queer kinship. No doubt the term “queer kinship” most immediately recalls the family unit formed by H.D., Bryher, and Perdita, whom H.D. conceived with Cecil Gray while still married to Richard Aldington and whom Bryher legally adopted in 1928. In using the language of queer kinship, I mean to build on the work of critics who have reflected on H.D.’s and Bryher’s complex gender identifications, sexual relationships, and familial arrangements.11 Citing Bryher as her primary example of the “queerness of lesbian figures in modernism,” Susan McCabe has argued that use of the term “queer” to describe such earlier figures is not, as we might at first suspect, anachronistic.12 Given that “modern sexual taxonomies” were more multiplicitous and shifting than the “homo/hetero divide” that dominates later twentieth-century epistemology, “queer” is actually “more appropriately a modern or modernist category than a contemporary one.”13 The term “queer kinship” can seem like, and in some respects is, a contradiction. Whereas queerness tends to connote anti-normativity, kinship, particularly in the work of Lévi-Strauss, corresponds to a set of norms such as marriage rules that govern social relations. In  some respects, the tension between these two categories mirrors the tension between the small scale (two or three people) and the large scale (the whole tide of human thought) in H.D.’s writing. Then again, this tension is precisely what kinship theory works to resolve. As Elizabeth Freeman has stressed, one of the things kinship theory has done historically is to elaborate “the process by which smallscale relationships become thinkable, meaningful, and/or the basis for larger social formations,” hence, in her view, its interest for queer theory.14 In this chapter, then, kinship theory offers a means of conceptualizing this process in H.D.’s writing—of making sense of her efforts to abstract from her personal experience a generalizable model of relation—without, however, resorting to an opposition between gifts and the market that, in my view, simply does not apply. Queer kinship designates not the possibility of an escape from market society but rather a form of relation that is already immanent to the latter’s organization, hence queer kinship’s transformative potential. 10 H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1982), 27. Hereafter cited in the text as NTV. 11  Morris, for example, describes the family that surrounded Perdita thus: “In many groups outside the white middle-class hegemonic norm, child-keeping is a shared responsibility, part of the flux and elasticity of kinship networks. The adults who cared for Perdita (including, variously, Bryher and her parents, H.D.’s mother and Aunt Laura, Kenneth Macpherson, and Silvia Dobson) constitute H.D.’s chosen kin” (Morris, “A Relay of Power and Peace,” 499). 12  Susan McCabe, “Whither Sexuality and Gender? ‘What That Sign Signifies’ and the Rise of Queer Historicism,” Pacific Coast Philology 41 (2006): 28. 13 Ibid. 14  Elizabeth Freeman, “Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory,” in A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, ed. George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 297.

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The next section considers the ways in which the opposition between gifts and markets has underwritten H.D. scholarship, including both her canonization by feminists and the well-known critique of her canonization set forth by Lawrence Rainey. In order to push past this opposition, I then turn in the following section to Notes on Thought on Vision. Situating H.D.’s bizarre aesthetic treatise in the ­context of anthropological, feminist, and queer critiques of kinship, I argue that H.D.’s fantasy of two or three people with the power to transform thought offers a queer alternative to the heteronormative, Oedipal model of kinship and, indeed, of civilization that we find in the work of contemporaries such as Lévi-Strauss and Freud. As with so many things, when it came to the “familiar family-complex,” “the Professor was not always right” in H.D.’s view (TTF 13–14, 18). In turning to The Gift I argue that this alternative is actually at the heart of a wide variety of seemingly disparate relations. In The Gift, H.D.’s private life with Bryher, her matrilineal inheritance of an artistic gift, past exchanges between her Moravian ancestors and Native American groups, and the contemporary masculine war of all against all are all part of the same extended family history—a history that defies norms of heterosexuality, nationality, and progress while establishing the possibility of new cultural norms. Indeed, it is only because these various formations are rooted in the same queer desire that H.D. can imagine her own small artistic gift of the text, The Gift, bearing the weighty promise of cultural redemption. THE CASE OF H.D. REVISITED Surely no one has done more to redress H.D.’s early underrepresentation in the modernist canon than Susan Stanford Friedman. In her 1990 study of H.D.’s fiction, Penelope’s Web, Friedman acknowledges that H.D. had a hand in her exclusion. Contrasting H.D. with Woolf, Friedman argues that, whereas Woolf wrote guardedly about lesbian desire in order to avoid public criticism, H.D. wrote much more openly about the female body and sexuality, but “ended up repressing or suppressing much of what she had written from the public eye.”15 In “Who Buried H.D.?,” published fifteen years earlier in 1975, Friedman had already argued that H.D.’s poetry, fiction, and memoirs had been largely ignored or devalued by critics for much the same reason—that is, because she was a woman writing about women.16 Lawrence Rainey has since argued that the real mistake was not burying H.D. but exhuming her. The reason her writing was buried, he argues, was not because of her gender identity or sexuality, or because of the potential political value of her work, but rather because of its lesser aesthetic value, a form of value that is indissolubly tied, in his reading, to the material conditions of the work’s production. To the 15 Susan Stanford Friedman, Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 25. 16  To the question of why H.D. was buried, Friedman replies: “She was a woman, she wrote about women, and all the ever-questioning, artistic, intellectual heroes of her epic poetry and novels were women.” Friedman, “Who Buried H.D.? A Poet, Her Critics, and Her Place in ‘The Literary Tradition,’ ” College English 36.7 (Mar. 1975): 803.

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question of “whether she was a great poet,” Rainey’s answer is a definitive “no.”17 It is exceedingly clear that his primary grievance is with the institutional trends that fueled H.D.’s canonization as far more than merely “H.D. Imagiste”—with the apparent substitution of political correctness for aesthetic evaluation. Still, he does not let H.D. off the hook but rather takes care to diagnose the source of her subpar literary production. H.D., he surmises, was “a victim not of social prejudice,” whether on the part of her contemporaries or later critics, “but of something seemingly more benign—patronage.”18 With her work funded by Bryher, the sole heir of a wealthy shipping magnate, H.D. was spared having to address a reading public she considered “unworthy of being addressed” anyway.19 If she kept her writing from public view, Rainey argues, it was not because of anxiety about the content of her work so much as it was because she was a snob and Bryher’s wealth allowed her to be. While my assessment of H.D.’s literary merit is more positive than Rainey’s, I am less interested in defending her work than I am in the fact that, despite his criticism, Rainey shares a basic assumption with many of H.D.’s admirers: that H.D.’s work is part of a gift economy that, as Willmott puts it in his own critique of Rainey, “seems in some way authentically outside the market realm.”20 But for Rainey, being thus outside proves fatal to the work itself. More or less equating the market with the public sphere, Rainey argues that H.D. was “[b]ereft of a genuine public, deprived of critical give-and-take” that would have improved the quality of her work.21 In using the language of give and take, Rainey implies that, just as the only “genuine public” appears to be that of the market, the only genuine “give and take” is that which takes place in the context of the market. And, indeed, this is ultimately what he suggests in the context of his discussion of the gift of modernist patronage. Patronage, Rainey argues, is “an essentially premodern form of social exchange,” the modernist turn to which marked “a loss of faith in the efficacy and fairness” of the modern capitalist market.22 While the gift of patronage was supposed to serve as a meritocratic corrective to the caprices of capitalism, it was rarely presented as a gift, but rather tended to be framed in exchangist terms as an investment or royalties. In practice, then, patronage did not provide an external fix to the failure of the market so much as it reflected the “increasing penetration of market relations in every aspect of life, penetration that creates a tacit but pervasive consensus that the market is the sole arbiter and guarantor of value.”23 My concern is 17  Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 148. 18  Ibid. 149. 19  Ibid. 154. 20  Glenn Willmott, “Modernism, Economics, Anthropology,” in Disciplining Modernism, edited by Pamela L. Caughie (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 198. 21 Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 148. For a very different take on H.D.’s relationship to the public sphere, see Georgina Taylor, H.D. and the Public Sphere of Modernist Women Writers, 1913–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). In a “challenge to the dominant critical focus on her close private relationships and personal life,” Taylor argues that H.D. played a central role in an international network of women writers via her “criticism, theoretical writing, exchanges of letters, circulation of manuscripts, and, crucially, her commitment to her own experimental writing” (21). 22 Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 108. 23  Ibid. 71.

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that Rainey echoes this consensus by, on the one hand, casting the gift of patronage as a mere extension of market relations while also, on the other, discounting the value of gifts such as H.D.’s. Simon Jarvis, as we may recall from earlier chapters, identifies this kind of paradoxical, dual claim as a hallmark of the economistic “dogma that the real and fundamental unit of social ontology is the self-interested exchange, and that all other ways of thinking about exchange are myths, fantasies, ideologies or irrelevancies.”24 The problem is that, in dismissing the value and validity of other forms of exchange, Rainey, to quote Stephen Collis, “misses the point”—the possibility that there may actually be other economies at play in modernist literature and culture and in H.D.’s life and work in particular.25 I would add, however, that accounts of these other economies also risk missing the point when they presuppose a strict dichotomy between gift economies and market economies. Morris argues that “the gift stands in opposition to the marketplace” and its “competitive and even death-dealing dynamics.”26 Notably, Morris herself is highly sensitive to the way in which this opposition breaks down, noting that “gift rituals, like turn-of-the-century potlatches, can become extravaganzas of competition and conflict”; however, when it comes to H.D., as well as to Mauss and to Hyde, she maintains that the “contrast between the two economies is severe, perhaps, as Mauss, Hyde, and H.D. draw it, too severe.”27 While I would agree that this contrast is “too severe” as Hyde draws it, I would argue that H.D., like Mauss, knew only too well that gifts and conflicts could be coextensive. Indeed, it is in part because of their fluidity—because the gift could always give way to 24  Simon Jarvis, “The Gift in Theory,” Dionysus 27 (Dec. 1999): 204. 25  Stephen Collis, “Formed by homages: H.D., Robert Duncan, and the poetics of the gift,” in The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines, ed. Mark Osteen (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 218. Collis reads the relationship between H.D. and Robert Duncan as not only writers of different generations but also writers participating in an occult tradition as a relationship of gift exchange. Invoking Derrida’s characterization of the gift as a “figure of the impossible,” Collis suggests that the occult tradition, “like the gift, is unavoidably paradoxical, erasing itself in order to remain itself” (221). To remain occult, a work must be hidden—like H.D.’s The Gift was hidden in the archives and kept from publication—and yet the demands of tradition tug against this occultation, demanding the dispersion of occultism’s ancient wisdom. For Collis, then, H.D.’s not publishing The Gift in particular is a sign not of her elitism or of public disengagement, but rather of her investment in an occult tradition—an investment that Duncan shared and which made him an ideal recipient and reciprocator of her work. H.D.’s influence on not only Duncan but also a number of later poets has received fair attention. See, for example, Morris on the extension of H.D.’s “radical modernism” in the work of Nathaniel Mackey, Jack Spicer, and Leslie Scalapino in Part Three of How to Live/What to Do, 183–228. For a brief overview of H.D.’s influence on later female poets in particular (most famously on Adrienne Rich), see Jo Gill, “Reading H.D.: influence and legacy,” in The Cambridge Companion to H.D., ed. Nephie J. Christodoulides and Polina MacKay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 26  Morris, “A Relay of Power and Peace,” 502, 504. In short, Morris argues that H.D.’s peculiar and puzzling handling of three things in her life and work—money, names, and her child—make sense if we see them as circulating in a larger spiritual gift economy rather than an individualistic market economy. Glenn Willmott’s brief discussion of H.D. at the end of his study of modernism, primitivism, and the gift makes clear just how definitive Morris’s reading has been for scholars: “Fortunately, I need not argue again what Adalaide Morris has so influentially demonstrated, that the personal, poetic, and political project basic to H.D.’s life and work is the cultivation and maintenance of a modern gift economy.” Glenn Willmott, Modernist Goods: Primitivism, the Market, and the Gift (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 252. 27  Morris, “A Relay of Power and Peace,” 504.

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something deadly—that H.D. never ventured to put The Gift into wider circulation. Or, barring any such claims about H.D.’s intentions, I would at least argue that, in the case of The Gift, H.D.’s anxiety about her work’s reception reads not as an effect of elitism (as Rainey might suggest) or as a sign of protectiveness over her private life with Bryher (as Friedman might). Rather, her relegation of The Gift to the archives and insistence on keeping it largely to herself read as a symptom of her sensitivity to the isomorphism between the gift and its opposite—poison. The second chapter of The Gift, which is narrated from the perspective of H.D.’s mother as a young woman, notes the shared etymological roots of gift and poison. “Gift? Gift? That was the German for poison,” H.D. imagines her mother thinking.28 For H.D., as for Mauss, the German language codifies the fundamental impurity of the gift—its mixture of seemingly antithetical impulses. In the context of her memoir, the reference to the German language assumes additional personal and historical significance, pointing both backward in time to her mother’s Moravian heritage, which H.D. considers the source of her artistic gift, and forward in time to the present of writing, which is overshadowed by war with Germany. Just as “gift” can signify both a blessing and a curse, so the nominally peaceful past of the Moravian Church and the international conflict consuming modern Europe become part of the same transatlantic history of gift exchange via the signifier “German.” For Mauss, the history of certain groups was a history of gift exchange— a history governed by rules of giving, receiving, and reciprocating that, over time, shaped and sustained social relations. Mary Douglas, in her foreword to Mauss’s essay, sums up his rule of reciprocity thus: “the rule that every gift has to be returned in some specified way sets up a perpetual cycle of exchanges within and between generations . . . The cycling gift system is the society.”29 H.D. in effect broadens this “rule” to a transatlantic, if not world-historical, scale.30 Across generations and geographic divisions, by means both material and mysterious, Western civilization, the world now at war, is a single cycling gift system—and, more specifically, a single kinship system. Like Lévi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, H.D. in effect translates the Maussian rule of reciprocity into a rule of kinship. Yet whereas 28 H.D., The Gift: The Complete Text, ed. Jane Augustine (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), 70. Hereafter cited in the text as TG. 29  Mary Douglas, “Foreword: No Free Gifts,” in The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies by Marcel Mauss (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1990), viii–ix. 30  This is not to say that Mauss is not thinking transnationally. Liebersohn argues that Mauss “globalized” the gift, above all by extending systems of gift-giving to Western societies: “There was a danger for Mauss of exoticizing the gift by writing only about exotic societies. If he had limited himself to Polynesia, Melanesia, and the American Northwest, he would have left the reader imagining it as a curiosity from archaic societies, a practice that had nothing to do with the commerce and individualism of Europe. Yet one of his aims was to shake up just this kind of thoughtless distinction between the West and the rest of the world and to show instead that archaic practices of gift-giving were widespread human institutions.” Harry Liebersohn, The Return of the Gift: European History of a Global Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 156. The difference between Mauss and H.D.—at least with respect to their efforts at cross-cultural comparison—is that H.D. is thinking about not only formal similarities between different societies but also causal relations insofar as she casts the current world war as the effect of failed exchanges in the U.S. hundreds of years earlier.

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Lévi-Strauss insists that the archetypal form of reciprocity is the exchange of women in marriage and thus that exchange is fundamentally a transaction between men, H.D. establishes a continuum between masculine exchange and feminine exchange as coextensive forms of queer kinship. In making this argument, I take distance not just from other analyses of gift economies in H.D.’s life and work but also from some of the feminist analyses like Friedman’s that have helped to move H.D.’s work from the margins to the mainstream of the modernist canon. In keeping with her woman-centered approach, Friedman describes Notes on Thought and Vision as elaborating a “full-blown Eleusinian gynopoetic”—an occultist model of creativity rooted in the female body and H.D.’s personal experience of childbirth.31 As Friedman elsewhere argues, H.D.’s use of the “childbirth metaphor” challenges a patriarchal opposition between masculine creativity and feminine procreativity, yet in so doing it also risks a “dangerous biologism,” establishing an essentialist view of womanhood by binding femininity and maternity.32 My aim here is not to disregard the corporeal and even biological dimensions of H.D.’s aesthetics, but rather to reframe and reinterpret them by situating them with respect to kinship theory. More precisely, I aim to read H.D.’s short treatise as a kinship theory within which the relation between mother and child constitutes one among many kin-based forms of creativity. From its first lines, Notes makes claims about the physical and intellectual needs of “All reasoning, normal, sane, and balanced men and women” (NTV 17, emphasis added). In emphasizing H.D.’s concern with elaborating a general theory of creative men and women, I, like Miranda Hickman, see far greater “mutability and diversity” in H.D.’s representation of gender and sexuality than many earlier readings have granted.33 Yet I also see an urge to systematize this diversity—to identify kindred kernels of desire and rules of relation at the heart of heterogeneous cultural forms without, however, diminishing the specificity and value of those forms’ heterogeneity. In order to establish a framework for reading the system at the heart of Notes, we turn in the next section to recent critiques in and beyond anthropology of traditional kinship theory. Q U E E R I N G K I N S H I P : A N T H RO P O L O G Y, F E M I N I S M ,   Q U E E R T H E O RY As I have suggested of the Maussian concept of the gift, the concept of kinship is a European invention. In his influential 1984 volume, A Critique of the Study of 31 Friedman, Penelope’s Web, 9. 32 Susan Stanford Friedman, “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse,” Feminist Studies 13.1 (Spring 1987): 51. 33 Miranda Hickman, “’Uncanonically seated’: H.D. and literary canons,” in The Cambridge Companion to H.D., ed. Nephie J. Christodoulides and Polina MacKay, 13. On the limitations of gynocentric readings of H.D. and her writing’s break with various forms of orthodoxy, see also Eileen Gregory, “H.D.’s Heterodoxy: The Lyric as a Site of Resistance,” in H.D.’s Poetry: “The Meanings that Words Hide,” ed. Marina Camboni (New York: AMS Press, 2003), 21–33; Meryl Altman, “A Prisoner of Biography,” Women’s Review of Books 9.10–11 (July 1992): 39–40; and Diane Chisholm, “Pornopoeia, the Modernist Canon, and the Cultural Capital of Sexual Literary: The Case of H.D,” in Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers, ed. Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 69–94.

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Kinship, cultural anthropologist David Schneider counters the priority typically given to kinship—loosely defined as relations of descent and alliance—by declaring that “there is no such thing as kinship.”34 Of course, what exactly constitutes kinship and how it is defined vary from one study to the next, but that is part of Schneider’s point. Kinship is not an object found in the world—least of all in so-called primitive societies where it supposedly serves as the foundation of social organization in lieu of a state—but rather an analytic concept brought to bear on societies by anthropologists. The priority given to kinship reflects a Western notion that, as the saying goes, “Blood Is Thicker Than Water” and biological bonds are stronger and more important than others. This is not to suggest that early anthropology flaunted its biologism. On the contrary, by the late nineteenth century, anthropologists largely understood kinship in social terms as the recognition of, or the attribution of value to, certain kinds of relations rather than the relations themselves. The key point for Schneider is that, even when anthropology shifted its focus from nature to culture and from biology to society, the “ultimate reference remained biological.”35 The readiest example is adoption. Although typically understood as a form of “fictive” kinship rather than biological kinship, adoption is still conceptualized on the model of, and draws its cultural significance from, a biological parent–child relationship: “Without biological kinship as a model, adoption would be meaningless.”36 According to this logic, the reverse is also true: just as there is no kinship without biology, so there is no biology without cultural constructs such as kinship to give biology its meaning. In short, culture is what tells us that blood is thicker than water, or, as Schneider puts it, “Biological kinship is always and everywhere a set of cultural conceptions,” which raises the question of what, if anything, actually differentiates kinship from other forms of cultural relationship.37 Elizabeth Freeman finds an answer to Schneider’s question in Gayle Rubin’s landmark feminist materialist analysis of Lévi-Straussian kinship theory and Freudian psychoanalysis in “The Traffic in Women.” In Rubin’s reading, what distinguishes kinship is that it serves as “the alibi for biology itself, in a way that religion, politics, and economics are not.”38 More specifically, kinship is what she calls a “sex/gender system,” which she defines as “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.”39 They are the means by which a society “takes up females as raw materials and fashions domesticated women as products.”40 As Freeman further stresses, kinship “makes bodies” both via sexual 34  David Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1984), vii. 35  Ibid. 54. 36  Ibid. 55. 37  Ibid. 111. 38  Freeman, “Queer Belongings,” 301. Janet Carsten suggests that Schneider’s work could be taken one of two ways, as 1) implying that “the study of kinship had no future” because kinship, as traditionally conceived, did not reflect the actual values and activities of given cultures; or 2) “establishing a new tradition in the study of kinship” that looked beyond the identification of kinship and biology and built on his own analysis of culture and American kinship systems in particular as symbolic systems. Janet Carsten, After Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 20. 39  Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 159. 40  Ibid. 158.

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reproduction and via the gendering of some bodies male and other bodies female.41 Put somewhat differently, kinship entails not only sexual reproduction but also the reproduction of the conditions of sexual reproduction—the conventions of sex and gender that shape identities, regulate behavior, and channel desires toward reproductive ends (e.g., compulsory heterosexuality, the incest taboo, and the sexual division of labor). The question for Rubin and Freeman then becomes one of the usefulness of kinship for radical theory and politics. Rubin’s own take on this question has shifted over time. In “The Traffic in Women,” she argues that Lévi-Strauss’s account of the exchange of women very much applies to Western industrial societies. As we noted in our reading of Jean Rhys’s fiction in Chapter 3, if anything, the exchange of women, as a systematic means of sexual oppression, “seem[s] only to become more pronounced and commercialized” under capitalism.42 Though kinship has largely been stripped of its role in organizing society—in binding groups of men via marriage—it continues to play a central role in organizing gender and sexuality and oppressing women and sexual minorities. Both Lévi-Strauss’s and Freud’s works then furnish us with especially thorough descriptions of kinship’s regulatory role. Given kinship’s continued status as a powerful sex/gender system, Rubin concludes that “feminism must call for a revolution in kinship” if it hopes to liberate not only women but all of “human sexual life from the archaic relationships which deform it.”43 Now, “The Traffic in Women” was published in 1975, three years before the English translation of Michel Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality, a text that, it is no exaggeration to say, revolutionized the way theorists conceptualize sex in the modern age and paved the way for queer theory as we know it. In this early essay, Rubin speaks of sex and gender together, using the term “sex” to signify not just anatomy (the nominally natural ground of gender) or acts (reproductive or otherwise) but a whole range of phenomena that we, in the twenty-first century, would likely call “sexuality.” Thus, she will suggest, “Sex as we know it—gender identity, sexual desire and fantasy, concepts of childhood—is itself as a social product.”44 We find Rubin making a very different claim, however, in her no less groundbreaking 1984 essay, “Thinking Sex.” Following Foucault, she now claims that “it is essential to separate gender and sexuality analytically to reflect more accurately their separate social existence.”45 Kinship may continue to play a role in producing and regulating gender—and Freeman will stress that it continues to shape the modern family—but sexuality is generated and organized by an entirely different system of power. In The History of Sexuality Foucault argues that, since the eighteenth century, kinship, or what he calls the “deployment of alliance,” has given way in importance to the “deployment of sexuality.” Whereas the former aims to “reproduce the interplay of relations and maintain the law that governs them,” the 41  Freeman, “Queer Belongings,” 301. 42  Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” 175. 43  Ibid. 199–200. 44  Ibid. 166. 45  Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 33.

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latter “engenders a continual extension of areas and forms of control.”46 If the terms of these two regimes seem discordant—one speaks of maintaining law, the other of extending control—it is because they are relatively autonomous. The regime of sexuality “connects up with the circuit of sexual partners but in a completely different way.”47 It, too, makes bodies, so to speak, but bodies as sites of intensification rather than means of social and biological reproduction—as objects of knowledge, relays of power, and sources of polymorphous pleasures. From this perspective, sexuality is not, as kinship theory might claim, “an expression or violation” but rather is an “effect of discourses and institutions” that have traditionally fallen beyond the purview of kinship theory, perhaps most notably, but not exclusively, discourses and institutions of the state.48 While kinship theory and queer theory would therefore seem to have little to say to one another, Freeman warns that this presumption and the concomitant stratification of the two approaches to sex and sexuality have limited thinking about queer relationality in troubling ways. Queer theory’s lack, if not outright disavowal, of terms of affinity and descent to describe the extension and endurance of queer bonds across space and time “has often meant that sexual minorities are stranded between individualist notions of identity on the one hand and on the other a romanticized notion of community,” such as the normative, abstract ideal of the nation.49 For Freeman, imagining what she calls “queer belonging” first entails redefining kinship, as we have already seen her begin to do, less in terms of norms and their reproduction and more in terms of the limitations and possibilities of bodies in relation: “If kinship is anything at all—if it marks a terrain that cannot be fully subsumed by other institutions such as religion, politics, or economics— this terrain lies in its status as a set of representational and practical strategies for accommodating all the possible ways one human being’s body can be vulnerable to and hence dependent upon that of another, and for mobilizing all the possible resources one body has for taking care of another.”50 Thus understood in terms of corporeal dependency, kinship also entails an ethics of care, or what Freeman refers to as a “technique of renewal”—that is, “the process by which bodies and the potential for physical and emotional attachment are created, transformed, and 46  Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 106. 47 Ibid. 48  Freeman, “Queer Belongings,” 295. 49  Ibid. 297. 50  Ibid. 298. Similarly, Judith Butler writes: “If we understand kinship as a set of practices that institutes relationships of various kinds which negotiate the reproduction of life and the demands of death, then kinship practices will be those that emerge to address fundamental forms of human dependency, which may include birth, child-rearing, relations of emotional dependency and support, generational ties, illness, dying, and death (to name a few).” Judith Butler, “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13.1 (2002): 14–15. In a 1994 interview with Butler, Rubin distinguishes between this notion of kinship and Lévi-Strauss’s notion: “In a Lévi-Straussian sense, kinship is a way of generating a social and political structure from manipulations of marriage and descent. In a more vernacular sense, particularly in complex societies like this one [i.e., late twentieth-century U.S. society], kinship can mean simply the social relations of support, intimacy, and enduring connection. This use of kinship is very different from the Lévi-Straussian notion of kinship.” Gayle Rubin, “Sexual Traffic,” interview with Judith Butler, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6.2–3 (1994): 86.

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sustained over time.”51 It is as the study not simply of rules but of strategies for sustaining bodies and attachments across time that kinship theory has particular significance for queer theory and politics. Queer belonging registers a longing to “be long,” “to be bigger”—“to have something queer exceed its own time, even to imagine that excess as queer in ways that getting married or having children might not be.”52 As a form of kinship, queer belonging is tied to excess, and especially to temporal excess, in a way that distinguishes it from the reproductive aims of kinship as traditionally conceived. If, as Foucault claims, kinship primarily aims at “reproducing itself,” then queer belonging aims at producing something . . . else—something that does and does not belong to “its own time.” Building on Freeman’s own wordplay and casting an eye toward modernism’s and H.D.’s valorization of the new, we might surmise that the “something queer” that queer belonging aims to renew is above all the new itself, a future that extends yet also differs from the present and, in a sense, keeps differing from the present, continues to be excessive, to persist in its queerness. Notes on Thought and Vision is driven by just such an impossible desire to belong, both in the social sense of being part of a larger kin group and in the temporal sense of exceeding one’s own time by means other than marriage or children. That H.D. had both marriage and a child but continued to pursue extension by other means—means that were at once sexual, familial, literary, and spiritual—perhaps only underscores the queerness of what it means to belong in Notes. Moreover, while Notes is framed as a series of reflections on thought and vision, thus implying its disregard for the material world, it is equally about the body and bodies in relation—particularly bodies of the same sex, though what exactly is meant by “same sex” in this context will need to be unpacked. Suffice it to say for the moment, and as we will see in the next section, “vision,” which we might preliminarily define as the capacity to access a transcendental plane of consciousness and communication, is as much corporeal as it is cognitive. Thus, in situating Notes in the context of Freeman’s and other critiques of the study of kinship, I mean to make a case for H.D.’s participation in—indeed, her belonging to—a larger queer theoretical tradition. But I also want to be careful not to diminish the historical and formal specificity of H.D.’s project, not least because her project’s significance in this study derives in part from the fact of her contemporaneity with theoretical giants like Lévi-Strauss and Freud and, in the case of the latter, their eventual direct dialogue. While drawing out the sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit points of agreement and disagreement among the three, I stick closely, as I have in examining the language of the other writers in this study, to H.D.’s own quite self-consciously idiosyncratic terminology. Notes on Thought and Vision is, among other things, an attempt to invent a language to transmit both the uniqueness and potential universality of visionary experience. There is no mention of “kinship” per se. Rather, H.D. assembles a battery of religious and cultural references, metaphors (“jelly-fish,” “dots and dashes”), and neologisms (“over-mind,” “womb-vision”) to negotiate between the 51  Freeman, “Queer Belongings,” 298.

52  Ibid. 299.

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small scale and the large scale. The language of “gifts” is also fairly scant, having not yet assumed a central symbolic role in H.D.’s personal mythology. “Gifts” appear in Notes on just two occasions: first in reference to the “Attic dramatist” (who translated “eternal, changeless ideas” for “men of lesser or other gifts” in Ancient Athens) and later in reference to “relationship with another person—love” (NTV 23, 39). H.D. casts love as a gift given by life, and an especially ambiguous, unpredictable gift at that. In characterizing love as “the rarest, most subtle, dangerous and ensnaring gift that life can bring us,” H.D. anticipates the confluence of gift and poison in her later writing (NTV 39). But love may also enable one to “escap[e] the pain and despair of life” (NTV 39). As a gift of life, love can go one of two ways: it bears the risk of ensnarement (more of the same life) but also the promise of escape (a new life). Love, in other words, is the means by which life exceeds itself, by which life becomes something more and other than life as we know it— something queer. It is to the exact nature of this love and its role in renewing modern life according to H.D. that we turn in the next section. L OV E O F T H E S A M E : E RO S A N D C I V I L I Z AT I O N Written in the Scilly Islands in July 1919 after Perdita’s birth and the first of H.D.’s visionary experiences and published in 1982, the same year as the abridged New Directions edition of The Gift, Notes on Thought and Vision takes the form of a series of aphoristic meditations. It begins by identifying three “states or manifestations of life: body, mind, over-mind” (NTV 17). Over-mind is universal. It is “there for everyone,” at least in theory (NTV 40). In practice it is accessible only to those few initiates who can endure and even enjoy the agonizing “swing from normal consciousness to abnormal consciousness” (NTV 19). H.D.’s Hellenism is on full display here as she compares this process to passing through the “stages of the Eleusinian mysteries” (NTV 30). She also draws images from the field of telecommunications, further characterizing this process as one of receiving and translating signals à la Morse code. Reflecting on the “hypnotic effect” that the statue of the Charioteer at Delphi has on her, she speculates, “If we had the right sort of brains, we would receive a definite message from that figure, like dots and lines ticked off by one receiving station, received and translated into definite thought by another telegraphic centre” (NTV 26). In another tropological twist, she figures these stations as reserves “capable of storing up energy, over-world energy” (NTV 47).53 In his influential account of the impact of technological changes on cultural representations 53 Telegraphic metaphors were also common in occultist circles. Woodman notes that Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, and her followers “often used the image of wireless telegraphy” to figure the transmission of thought (“H.D. and the Poetics of Initiation,” 140–1). That said, Friedman argues that Blavatsky in particular, while a major influence on W. B. Yeats, “held little or no attraction for H.D.” despite their shared interest in occultism (Psyche Reborn, 160). Given our mention of Morse code, it bears noting that H.D. met the pianist Walter Morse Rummel, grandson of the inventor of the telegraph, during a trip to Paris in 1911. See Barbara Guest, Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World (London: Collins, 1985), 28.

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of time and space, Stephen Kern argues that the period leading up to the First World War experienced an energy crisis of sorts, although, unlike that in the 1970s, it was a “crisis of abundance.”54 The development of railroads and steamships and invention of the automobile and airplane led to the supply and distribution of fuel and electricity on a new, larger scale. H.D.’s postwar treatise invokes this sense of  energetic surplus, as well as the hopefulness that accompanied it according to  Kern, to describe the transformative power of art. Put somewhat differently, energy—with the full erotic charge that term carries—is the medium via which H.D. imagines the world of over-mind and, more specifically, the world of art effecting broader social change. “There is already enough beauty in the world of art,” she confidently claims, “to remake the world” (NTV 26). What is missing, at least in the present moment, is an audience to decode art’s message: “We want receiving centres for dots and dashes” (NTV 26). We might thus read Notes as a kind of S.O.S. call from H.D. to her fellow and especially future creators—a distress signal to “artists coming in the next generation, some of whom will have the secret of using their over-minds” (NTV 21). This secret, like over-mind energy itself, is erotically charged. By way of a reference to Socrates, H.D. proclaims, “We must be ‘in love’ before we can understand the mysteries of vision” (NTV 22). Certainly, love seems to have been what enabled H.D. personally to sustain the near madness of over-mind. In “Advent,” the journal she assembled in 1948, ostensibly from notes written during her 1933 sessions with Freud, H.D. credits Bryher’s love and companionship with enabling her experiences of vision, including the Scilly Isles vision that inspired Notes—a strange intra-uterine fantasy that Bryher called her “jelly-fish experience.” H.D. remembers feeling an “impulse to ‘let go’ into a sort of balloon, or diving bell” (TTF 130). Though she worried that “it might be something sinister or dangerous,” she recalls Bryher assuring her, “it is the most wonderful thing I ever heard of. Let it come” (TTF 130). With her encouragement, H.D. did, envisioning a “second globe or bell-jar rising as if it were from my feet . . . I felt I was safe but seeing things as through water. I felt the double globe come and go and I could have dismissed it at once and probably would have if I had been alone” (TTF 130). In Notes on Thought and Vision, H.D. adopts Bryher’s terminology for the bell-jars, characterizing them as two jelly-fish. The first she imagines situated like “a cap . . . over my head,” with its feelers extending “down and through the body” (NTV 18, 19). The second stems not from the feet, as she suggests in “Advent,” but from the womb. It is “centered in the love-region of the body or placed like a foetus in the body,” with its feelers “floating up toward the brain” (NTV 19, 20). There are other differences in Notes as well. The two jelly-fish are not part of a single experience of vision but rather represent two kinds of vision, “vision of the womb and vision of the brain” (NTV 20). Before experiencing childbirth, she tells us, she visualized the jelly-fish in the brain; now “the jelly-fish is in the body” (NTV 20). In the case of vision of the womb, childbirth is not just a gendered metaphor for artistic creativity but 54  Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 9.

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its actual physical precondition. Notably, however, the other factor that supposedly enabled H.D.’s jelly-fish experience—that is, the presence and support of Bryher— is altogether absent, at least in name, from Notes. In comparing Notes on Thought and Vision and “Advent,” I do not mean to suggest that one or the other is more authoritative. While the diary form and analytic context of “Advent” lend it an air of authenticity, the fact that it was penned at least fifteen years after Notes might suggest to some that it is the less trustworthy of the two. What interests me, however, is not which, if either, is more historically accurate—not least because historical accuracy seems like a poor measure for visions of jelly-fish, real and true though they may have been to H.D. Rather, what interests me, given our focus on kinship, is the tension between H.D.’s attribution of her vision to a procreative gift of life, on the one hand, and its attribution to a homoerotic gift of love, on the other. Crucially, we need not look so far as the autobiographical “Advent” to discover this tension. It is already operative in Notes on Thought and Vision, where, as we have noted, H.D. casts the gift of love as a gift of life—one that does not necessarily appear to be procreative—and claims that we must be “in love” to access vision. If the quotation marks around “in love” seem to imply H.D.’s discomfort with or distance from this phrase, she immediately takes care to further clarify what exactly she means, writing, “A lover must choose one of the same type of mind as himself, a musician, a musician, a scientist, a scientist, a general, a young man also interested in the theory and practice of arms and armies” (NTV 22). To be “in love” is to “choose one of the same type of mind.” I want to suggest that, while Bryher goes unmentioned in Notes, H.D. nevertheless registers the influence of their relationship—and the importance of queer bonds more broadly—in her representation of the love that grounds vision as a love of the same. What, then, does it mean to be of the same type of mind? Most immediately, having the same type of mind means sharing an interest in the same discipline—music, science, arms. That only one of these examples— music—is a fine art is noteworthy. While “artists especially” have access to vision, vision itself is not exclusive to artists per se (NTV 17). Rather, vision, or, more precisely, over-mind, is accessible via the vast realm of human creativity, or what we might call “culture,” though the route one takes appears to be determined by one’s discipline. Not unlike Mauss, H.D. is concerned with the “whole tide of human thought,” although, also not unlike Mauss, she continues to conceptualize that whole in terms of Western institutional distinctions (NTV 27). Nevertheless, the fact that she places music, science, and militarism on the same plane is important in the context of her disagreements with Freud and widely presumed pacifism. Far from opposing art to science or to militarism, H.D. renders them comparable as forms of intellectual production rooted in the same amorous impulse. The man of arms and the scientist are no less visionary and capable of love than the musician. Just as striking is H.D.’s gendering of these different types. In later works, H.D. will associate music with her mother and science with her father, rendering the former feminine and the latter masculine. Here, however, her examples all appear to be male, most explicitly the “general” and “young man” but not exclusively. Her mention of Socrates, to whom she initially attributes the idea that love precedes

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vision, lets us know that her use of a masculine pronoun (“same type of mind as himself ”) is not just incidental. She is clearly drawing inspiration from a masculine, Hellenic model of tutelage and initiation. “We begin,” H.D. writes, “with sympathy of thought,” yet such sympathy also presupposes the shared gender identity of the thinkers (NTV 22). From this perspective, the roots of culture are not just erotic but also homoerotic. The question then becomes: is this homoeroticism necessarily male as H.D.’s immediate Hellenic examples suggest? Somewhat surprisingly, the example of the general and the young man—the most explicitly gendered of her couples—suggests that the answer is yes and no. In discussing H.D.’s debt to the Hellenism of Walter Pater and his peers, Gregory argues that, among other traditions, H.D. inherited her Victorian forebears’ idealization of the Spartan state. Sparta, she notes, combined a practice of pederasty with “severe military discipline” and a “warrior ideal”; in so doing, it enabled admirers like Pater to embrace male homoeroticism while also avoiding the “charge of effeminacy.”55 While the Spartan model in turn provided H.D. with an alternative to other heteronormative cultural models, it also, in Gregory’s view, presented “serious constraints for the woman writer,” leaving H.D. little language in which to articulate a specifically female homoeroticism.56 Taking a cue from Gregory, we might read H.D.’s silence about her relationship with Bryher in Notes on Thought and Vision and the apparent substitution of their relationship by a relationship between two military men as an instance of her self-censorship and effort to comply with a masculine tradition. If in part a symptom of misogyny, practically speaking, the masculine drag of H.D. and Bryher in Notes nevertheless has the effect of undermining the fixity of gender and sexuality. In other words, by rendering male couples and female couples interchangeable, Notes affirms the sexual fluidity between different forms of homoeroticism as varieties of love of the same, as well as gender fluidity between and women—or, at least, between men and women of vision. H.D.’s aqueous metaphors notwithstanding, claims of gender and sexual fluidity may spark suspicion in the context of a treatise that is, as Friedman emphasizes, “anchored in the maternal” and, more specifically, in the reproductive female body.57 Indeed, the very use of the term “gender,” with its suggestion of social and cultural roles, may feel inaccurate given how thoroughly H.D.’s vision is tied to anatomy and biology. But while H.D. roots her personal vision in childbirth, the distinction between feminine vision of the womb and masculine vision of the brain—and between femininity and masculinity more broadly—turns out to be remarkably unstable. For example, the term “womb” is used interchangeably with “love-region,” effectively neutralizing its anatomical specificity without mitigating 55 Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism, 92. 56  Ibid. 91; see also 105–7. For her part, Diana Collecott argues that the solution to this problem was Sapphism: “By creating her own female Hellas, H.D. was not only laying claim to the discourse of male homoeroticism but also challenging masculine privilege and reclaiming Greek literature from a misogynist tradition.” Diana Collecott, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 131. On H.D.’s debt to the aestheticism and decadence of her Victorian forebears, see also Cassandra Laity, H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 57 Friedman, Penelope’s Web, 11.

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its erotic charge. Like women, men are capable of amorous vision, if not of the womb per se then of the “corresponding love-region of a man’s body” (NTV 20). Moreover, while the love-region and the brain are initially conceived as separate seats of over-mind consciousness—the first being feminine and corporeal and the latter masculine and intellectual—H.D. will also refer to the excited love-region as a “womb-brain or love-brain,” thereby undercutting a gendered mind–body dualism (22, emphasis added).58 In other words, vision of the womb is also a form of vision of the brain. Not only may the love-region be masculine or feminine but this region has both corporeal and intellectual components. Or, to put the matter in Freudian terms, the anatomical distinction between the sexes would seem to have psychological consequences. The type of mind one has is inseparable from the type of sex one is—the implication being that, in choosing one with the same type of mind, you must also choose one with the same love-region (i.e., one of the same sex), or not. In other moments, H.D. reaffirms a gendered mind–body dualism, as when she describes the two jelly-fish as two seeds that together serve a reproductive function like that of the male and female sexes: “as it takes a man and a woman to create another life, so it takes these two forms of seed, one in the head and one in the body to make a new spiritual birth” (NTV 50). Creativity is understood here on the model of procreativity, except that a heterosexual union takes place not between individuals of different sexes but within an individual of two sexes—an individual who, in mind and in body, is both a man and a woman. Here, H.D. suggests that one accesses vision not as a man or as a woman; rather, one must be both a man and a woman. To be a visionary one must be bisexual in the Freudian sense of maintaining dual identifications. During her later analysis with Freud, H.D. took a certain pride in having a “perfect bi-sexual attitude,” writing to Bryher, “I have tried to be man, or woman, but I have to be both.”59 In Notes, the implicit bisexuality of the visionary gives a further twist to what it means to choose one of the same type of mind. To do so would mean choosing a lover who identifies as both a man and a woman. Homoerotic love of the same would actually be a love of difference—a love of the self-difference and, even more specifically, of the sexual difference that one recognizes in oneself and the other. Notably, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud describes homosexuality (or “inversion”) in precisely these kinds of terms, rooting it in the innate bisexuality 58  Hickman also makes a case for gender fluidity in H.D.’s life and work. Pointing to H.D’s question in Notes, “Is it easier for a woman to attain this state of consciousness than for a man?,” Hickman remarks that H.D. leaves it “notably unanswered, deliberately refraining from privileging a woman-centered vision” (“ ‘Uncanonically seated,’ ” 14). 59  H.D., letter to Bryher, November 27, 1934, in Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle, ed. Susan Stanford Friedman (New York: New Directions, 2002), 503. Both H.D. and Bryher manifested complex gender identifications. McCabe notes Bryher’s childhood wish to be a boy and donning of masculine garb but resists reducing her to a male-identified woman, arguing that “the way her sexuality might have crossed with her gender identifications remains difficult to disentangle” (“Wither Sexuality and Gender?” 29). Claire Buck has made the most of H.D.’s apparent embrace of the concept of bisexuality, arguing that H.D. made significant “structural use” of it in her writing, linking subjectivity, sexual difference, and language in ways that allowed her to occupy shifting “positions of desire.” Claire Buck, H.D. and Freud: Bisexuality and Feminine Discourse (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 11.

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of the individual. Like H.D., his primary example is Hellenic. In Greek pederasty, he argues, “the sexual object is a kind of reflection of the subject’s own bisexual nature.”60 The man is attracted to the boy not because the latter is “someone of the same sex but [because he is] someone who combines the characters of both sexes,” though it “remains a paramount condition that the object’s body (i.e. genitals) shall be masculine.”61 So in Notes, the homoeroticism of vision seems to presuppose a certain notion of innate bisexuality. More precisely, if there seems to be some fluidity between male homoeroticism and female homoeroticism and thus between gender identities even as H.D.’s biological grounding of vision can smack of essentialism, it is insofar as both men and women of vision seem to share with H.D. the feeling that they have to be both. In stressing this fluidity, however, I do not mean to diminish H.D.’s emphasis on the embodied nature of thought or the role of same-sex love in social and cultural production. The latter is particularly significant considering the privilege given to heterosexual marriage as the basis for larger social formations in kinship theory (even as kinship theory maintains that society gives marriage its meaning). We see this privilege in an essay by Lévi-Strauss called “The Family,” where he argues that marriage is indispensable across a wide range of societies, not for sexual or moral reasons but rather for economic ones. The near universal sexual division of labor makes marriage between the sexes imperative. The way labor is divided from one society to the next may vary significantly and this division may not always accord with our own gender norms, but “the fact of the division” is consistent.62 This division serves, in Rubin’s words, “to insure the union of men and women by making the smallest viable economic unit contain at least one man and one woman.”63 A household requires one of each to function. The supposed complementarity of men and women—in the context of both structural anthropology and contemporary debates over non-heterosexual forms of legal alliance—has prompted Judith Butler to ask: “Is kinship always already heterosexual?” Crucial though this question may be, especially in addressing the asymmetrical state recognition of different forms of relation, it also somewhat misrepresents what is at stake in Lévi-Strauss’s grounding of kinship in marriage.64 Even as he underscores the economic interdependence of man and woman, he repeatedly insists that marriage is never between a man and a woman. Rather, as the exchange of a feminine gift within a much broader, or “total,” system of exchange, marriage always takes place, 60  Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 10. 61 Ibid. 62 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Family” in The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 52. Needless to say, he does not feel a need to specify that marriage is “heterosexual.” 63  Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” 178. 64  Of course, Butler knows this and, in posing the question of whether kinship rather than marriage is always already heterosexual, she means in part to challenge the conflation of kinship with normative heterosexual unions in marriage, particularly in recent debates over non-heterosexual legal alliances and adoption. Judith Butler, “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13.1 (2002): 14–44.

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as Eve Sedgwick has stressed, between men. This is the case, Lévi-Strauss claims, even in “our own society, where marriage appears to be a contract between persons” (ESK 115). Thus, while the smallest viable economic unit may consist of one man and one woman, the smallest viable social unit—the primordial group—consists of (at least) two men. While social in nature, their relation is modeled on a biological, fraternal relation. For example, Lévi-Strauss observes that, in New Guinea, “the aim of marriage is not so much to acquire a wife for oneself as to obtain brothers-in-law.”65 If anything, then, kinship is not always already heterosexual in kinship theory, as Butler worries, but always already, to use Sedgwick’s term, “homosocial.” Freeman helpfully sums up homosociality as “the way that sublimated erotic bonds between men that rival one another for a woman can found larger entities such as corporations and fraternities.”66 In making a case for the power of homoerotic love to “slash across and destroy the world of dead, murky thought,” H.D. similarly indexes the queerness at the heart of culture, while also casting men and women as equally powerful cultural players. Culture, as I have begun to suggest, should be understood here neither in strictly anthropological terms (as a whole way of life) nor in strictly aesthetic terms (as high art). Rather I use the term as Jameson does in the context of his discussion of modernist utopianism in A Singular Modernity— to name “the space of mediation between society or everyday life and art as such. Culture is the place where these dimensions interact in either direction: art ennobling everyday life (as Matthew Arnold wished), or social life on the contrary trivializing and degrading art and the aesthetic.”67 Culture is what H.D. refers to as the world of thought, which mediates between everyday life and the “whole world of vision,” or over-mind consciousness, which consists of “eternal, changeless ideas,” but which also has a physical, material, and, as we have seen, erotic component (NTV 23). As an elevated form of thought, vision marks not a transcendence of the body but rather the overcoming of a metaphysical mind–body split. It is a practice of sorts, a form of labor: “All this was no ‘inspiration,’ it was sheer, hard brain work”—though we may also recall that, for H.D., there are multiple “brains,” undermining our capacity to distinguish between material and immaterial forms of labor (NTV 26). More specifically, vision is a form of exchange—although not a rivalrous exchange of women. Rather, vision rests on an exchange of love and effects social transformation via an exchange of messages—the reception and translation of telegraphic dots and dashes by a mere two or three people. But how exactly are we to understand the nature of the bonds between these two or three people if, as I mean to argue, these people have the potential to found larger social formations? In Sedgwick’s formulation, homosociality consists of sublimated erotic bonds, but H.D. seems to diminish, if not to eliminate, the role of sublimation in mediating between the sexual life of the subject and the social life of the group— or, as Freud (and later Marcuse) might have it, between eros and civilization. 65  Lévi-Strauss, “The Family,” 47. 66  Freeman, “Queer Belongings,” 300. 67  Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 177.

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In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud suggests that civilization has a “two-fold foundation” in Ananke, or Necessity, with its “compulsion to work,” and Eros, “the power of love”; Love and Necessity are the “parents of human civilization.”68 Notably, Freud’s account of love is anything but idyllic. It is jealous, voracious, and ultimately violent. Thus, one of the ways it helped to found civilization was by driving the primal horde to come together as a band of brothers and murder the father so that they could have all the women for themselves—the catch being that man was subsequently burdened with guilt and compelled to channel his energy into other socially and culturally productive ends. Though necessity reigns, love persists, both in its “original form,” which aims at “direct sexual satisfaction,” albeit behind closed doors, and in its “modified form,” either via sublimation, as in the production of art, or aim-inhibition, as in the forging of friendships, about the homosocial bonds of which Sedgwick writes (CD 57). Still, as civilization advances, its relationship with love is increasingly antagonistic: “On the one hand love comes into opposition to the interests of civilization; on the other, civilization threatens love with substantial restrictions” (CD 58). As Freud’s representation of Eros and Ananke as parents begins to suggest, his theory of civilization is also a theory of kinship—of the way society invests biological relations with meaning. Like love, the family occupies a paradoxical position with respect to civilization in Freud’s theory. It provides a foundation for civilization only to find itself excluded from civilization. For Freud, as for Lévi-Strauss, society initially takes the form of a band of brothers. While society is thus modeled on the family, as both civilization and its modern hero, the individual, mature, the demands of the family and the demands of society become antithetical. Freud will therefore suggest that the conflict between love and civilization “expresses itself at first as a conflict between the family and the larger community to which the individual belongs” (CD 58). In the modern world, however, the real culprit, the greatest bugbear of civilization—and vice versa—is not love or the family per se but the women who “represent the interests of family and of sexual life” (CD 59). Incapable of undertaking the sublimations required to execute the “ever more difficult tasks” imposed by civilization, “the woman finds herself forced into the background” and civilization becomes “increasingly the business of men” (CD 59). We cannot forget, however, even if Freud never says as much, that the business of civilization is also, in a sense, familial. Not only are its bonds fraternal but, in its obedience to the “laws of economic necessity,” civilization is very much the child of Ananke, the practical, productive Father to Eros’s more erratic Mother (CD 59). Thus, civilization is not antagonistic to the family so much as it is antagonistic to certain forms of family relation—namely, feminine forms. Or, to make the same point from the opposite angle, only certain familial forms are recognized as having social and cultural value beyond the bounds of the private sphere. In ascribing cultural value to the discontents of modern civilization—to women, to sexual love, and to feminine forms of kinship—Notes on Thought and Vision 68 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1961), 55. Hereafter cited in the text as CD.

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troubles what is already a tenuous distinction between the family and the larger community in Freudian psychoanalytic theory and Lévi-Straussian anthropology. For H.D., as for these thinkers, eroticism founds and fuels civilization. Yet Notes also suggests that, if anything, civilization is not erotic enough. It is because eros has been redirected, inhibited, and repressed that Western civilization is in a state of decay. Or, to use H.D.’s own language, if thought has become “dead” and “murky,” it is because sex has been expelled from social life. Vision in turn promises a solution to cultural decadence precisely because it is so expressly sexual, suffused with libidinal energy, and dependent on the direct satisfaction of bodily needs. Far from being “dissipated in physical relation,” this energy finds its full expression in the fusion of body and mind and the transformation of the “love-region” into the “love-brain” (NTV 22). Given H.D.’s emphasis on the role of childbirth in her own visionary experience, the question remains: For all of her apparent blurring of metaphysical boundaries and mixing of metaphors, how ineluctably gendered is this erogenous zone and the vision to which its satisfaction gives rise? Is maternity the original source of all eros and therefore all desire, to use DuPlessis’s term, matrisexual?69 T H E G I F T O F L I F E : C R E AT I V I T Y W I T H O U T P RO C R E AT I V I T Y Critics such as DuPlessis and Friedman have used H.D.’s supposed matrisexuality and gynopoetics to establish comparisons between her aesthetics and the later French feminist theories of Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray.70 Given such comparisons, it is tempting to give the mother–child dyad priority in reading H.D.’s Notes—to see this dyad as the archetype of erotic relationships in general and, even more specifically, to see the love between mother and child as the primordial instance of love for another who is also the same. Irigaray in particular characterizes “love of same” in both atavistic and maternal terms as an “undifferentiated attraction to the archaic” and “love for that which primevally and necessarily has conceived, given birth, nourished, warmed. Love of same is love of indifferentiation from the earth-mother, the first living dwelling place.”71 Certainly H.D.’s relationship with her own mother assumed archetypal status in her analysis with Freud, where a pre-Oedipal maternal fixation was presented as the key to interpreting her later relationships. In a 1933 letter to Bryher during her initial sessions, H.D. recounts how Freud “cheered me up one day by saying that my special kind of 69  DuPlessis uses this term in her reading of H.D.’s later epic, Helen in Egypt, which “shows that all desire is matrisexual; that all polarities . . . can be sublated through the mother.” Rachel Blau DuPlessis, H.D.: The Career of that Struggle (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 114. 70  For a comparison to Kristeva, see Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Language Acquisition,” Iowa Review 16.3 (Fall 1986): 252–82. Friedman makes comparisons of H.D.’s poetics to the écriture féminine of Irigaray and Cixous throughout her study of H.D.’s prose; see, for example, Penelope’s Web, 6, 11. 71  Irigaray, “Love of Same, Love of Other,” in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 97.

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‘fixation’ was not known till three years ago . . . F. [Freud] says mine is the absolutely FIRST layer, I got stuck at the earliest pre-OE {pre-Oedipal} stage, and ‘back to the womb’ seems to be my only solution. Hence islands, sea, Greek primitives and so on.”72 H.D. seems to take a certain comfort and even pride in being among the first to receive this diagnosis and marvels at how “all the other, later diverse-looking manifestations fit in somehow” to the same pre-Oedipal pattern.73 Yet we can also detect of a hint of resistance to Freud’s reading as H.D. continues, “Its [sic] all too queer and at first, I felt life had been wasted in all this repetition.”74 To reduce the apparent diversity of her personal relationships to a mere repetition of her maternal attachment would be a waste not only of her life but also of her desire to give life. At least, this is what she implies in further writing, “I went on and on, repeating, wanting to give life or save life.” The desire to give life here is not merely a maternal desire, a desire to be a mother. Rather, in lamenting the seeming waste of her own gift for giving life, H.D. seems to me to want to maintain some difference between a maternal desire to give life and an artistic desire to give life. Why? Because, her letter implies, differences matter. And, more specifically, the appearance of difference in all those “diverse-looking manifestations” matters. In other words, H.D. here resists Freud’s pre-Oedipal diagnosis on aesthetic grounds. Apparent differences between this relationship and that ought not to be diminished but rather have significance and value in their own right. We see H.D. manifest a similar urge to preserve those differences and details that might otherwise seem excessive and which Freud is quick to dismiss in Tribute to Freud. When H.D. relates in “over-careful detail” the tale of some “none-too-happy friendships,” Freud “waved it all aside” and seemed “a little wistful . . . as if we had wasted precious time . . . on something that didn’t matter,” when it was clear to him that what mattered was not the friendships themselves but rather that, in telling Freud about them, H.D. had actually “wanted to tell [her] mother” about them (TTF 30). “Those two didn’t count,” she recalls Freud saying of the friendships—the implication being that another two, mother and child, did count and that in H.D.’s case they were the only two that counted (TTF 30, emphasis in original). Frustrated by what felt like a “too simple” reading on Freud’s part, H.D. responds, as she does throughout her tribute, by appropriating his language at the time of their sessions in order to stage a counterargument in the present of writing (TTF 30).75 At the start of the next short numbered section, she repeats his phrase, “Those two didn’t count,” only then to count the myriad twos that in fact made up her life: “There were two’s and two’s and two’s in my life” (TTF 31). She gives a detailed list: two brothers, two half-brothers, two graves for two dead sisters, two 72  H.D., letter to Bryher, March 23, 1933, in Friedman, ed., Analyzing Freud, 142. 73  Ibid. 143. 74 Ibid. 75  The most notorious example of this is her much-discussed play with Freud’s remark, upon showing her a small statue of Pallas Athené, “ ‘She is perfect,’ he said, ‘only she has lost her spear’ ” (TTF 69). She further took up—and took issue with—his paradoxical assessment of femininity in her poem, “The Master,” written in 1934–5 and published posthumously in 1981. See “The Master,” as well as Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Susan Stanford Friedman, “ ‘Woman is Perfect’: H.D.’s Debate with Freud,” Feminist Studies 7.3 (Fall 1981): 407–30.

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houses, two biblical towns where her family lived in Pennsylvania, and “in later life, there were two countries, America and England” (TTF 32). All of these twos, she implies, count. Their diversity matters. Moreover, H.D. suggests that counting by two may not be the best way to account for her, noting, “There were two of everybody (except myself )” when she was a child (TTF 32). The mother was one of “two parents in their room” and one of the “two wives” her father had married, “though one was dead” (TTF 32). H.D. was alone. At the same time, her sense of individuality and isolation clearly stem from her certainty that she is herself two—a split subject, suffering from a “wide gap in consciousness” between her childhood in America and the postwar European present (TTF 32). If in Notes the duality of the subject, in the form of her innate bisexuality and two states of consciousness, is a condition of creativity, in Tribute, duality becomes a traumatic source of strife—hence her turn to Freud in the first place. H.D. went to Vienna because she knew that she “was drifting,” uncontrollably swept along by the twin currents of history and of consciousness (13). In undertaking analysis, H.D. sought to bridge the gap in her own consciousness (to turn two into one) as well as to find her match (to turn one into two). Arguably she did, although even in those moments where her kinship with Freud (transferential or otherwise) is most pronounced, we can detect a tension between their interpretations.76 Given our own focus here on gifts, H.D.’s remembrance of a gift she gave Freud is especially noteworthy in this regard. In 1938, after Freud’s escape to London from Vienna, H.D. sent him gardenias, his favorite flowers, to celebrate the safe arrival of his treasured antiquities. In his thank you note, which H.D. reproduces in the text, Freud quotes the words that had accompanied the flowers and parenthetically remarks on others’ misreading of the text: “‘to greet the return of the Gods’ (other people read: Goods)” (TTF 11). Morris argues that Freud’s distinction between goods and gods corresponds to “the rift between a market economy that works through reason and egotism and a gift economy animated by imagination and love”; as H.D. knows and Freud recognizes in his response, “the gift entails gods, not goods.”77 As we have seen, however, Freud typically did not share H.D.’s reading of the gods, dismissing her spirituality as a symptom. Indeed, their tendency to disagree about the gods makes her presentation of his note in the text seem somewhat suspicious and even barbed—as if it were proof that she had been right about the so-called transcendental issues all along. Contra Morris, Ariela Freedman argues that the tension between gods and goods corresponds to a tension between “the spiritual and material elements of objects, and that this tension manifests itself in H.D.’s relationship to what she sees as Freud’s materialism.”78 76  Friedman argues that H.D. had both paternal and maternal transferences, oscillating between resistance to Freud (as representative of the Law of the Father) and desire for Freud (as substitute for the pre-Oedipal, phallic mother). Penelope’s Web, 293–329. 77  Morris, “A Relay of Power and Peace,” 499, 500. 78  Ariela Freedman, “Gifts, Goods and Gods: H.D., Freud and Trauma,” ESC 29: 3–4 (Sept./Dec. 2003): 190. Though feminist scholars have tended to ignore the “more aggressive and less savoury elements” of Tribute to Freud, opting instead to focus on ways H.D. seems to contest and correct

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Freedman is right to challenge Morris’s “romanticization of the gift” and I certainly share her view that H.D.’s gift is always an “object limned with danger,” as we see even in the fairly innocuous example of other people’s misreading of H.D.’s note to Freud.79 There is no guarantee against the gift to and for gods being mistaken for goods—particularly by Freud himself. As Claire Buck also stresses, for Freud, gifts were primarily symbols of one “good” in particular—namely, the phallus. From a Freudian perspective, the gifts that circulate in Tribute to Freud would foremost figure not as spiritual tokens or material things but rather as substitutes for the organ that H.D., as a woman, lacks. For her part, Buck does not challenge the psychoanalytic identification of gift and phallus so much as she challenges what exactly the phallus signifies. In H.D.’s case, she argues, the phallus is “not tied to masculinity and femininity in any simple way.”80 It cannot simply be linked to masculine wholeness or to feminine lack, but rather, via its pre-Oedipal association with the phallic mother, signifies “self-completion and sufficiency as a woman.”81 By contrast, I see a somewhat stronger challenge on H.D.’s part to the Freudian equation of gift and phallus, at least implicitly. By linking the phallus to the preOedipal mother, Buck effectively counters a Freudian narrative of feminine lack, but a phallic conception of the subject as either having or lacking—as relating above all to the object rather than, say, other subjects—remains firmly intact. But this dichotomy cannot quite capture the logic of the gift and of what it means, as a subject, to be gifted in H.D.’s writing. In Tribute to Freud, H.D. explains that she entered analysis in order to “take stock of my possessions. You might say that I had—yes, I had something that I specifically owned. I owned myself. I did not really, of course. My family, my friends, and my circumstances owned me. But I had something” (TTF 13). In tacking between these positions—owning, not owning, being owned, and owning again—H.D. strains against the limitations of both language and phallic notions of property when it comes to characterizing her gift. This “something” that she does and does not own is not a thing so much as a desire, as she elsewhere puts it, to give or save life, fraught as it inevitably is in her writing with danger and death. Thus, H.D.’s gift is best conceived not in terms of a phallic Freud’s theories of gender and sexuality, H.D.’s opposition to Freud, as Freedman argues, is often framed in quite troubling anti-Hebraic terms. For example, H.D. will describe Freud as possessing a “precise Jewish instinct for the particular in the general, for the personal in the impersonal or universal, for the material in the abstract” (TTF 71). In a related vein, Victoria Harrison suggests that, “[u]nable to contradict [Freud], because she respects him too entirely, she challenges instead the Jew in him: his Jewishness is what makes him stubbornly resistant to her visions and her different faith.” Victoria Harrison, “When a Gift Is Poison: H.D., the Moravian, the Jew, and World War II,” Sagetrieb 15.1 & 2 (Spring & Fall 1996): 81. 79  Freedman, “Gifts, Goods and Gods,” 191. 80  Claire Buck, H.D. and Freud: Bisexuality and Feminine Discourse (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 109. H.D. was well attuned to Freud’s tendency to treat the biological organ and the unconscious symbol interchangeably. In a letter to Bryher she acknowledges—with skepticism—the phallogocentric view that for a woman to be a writer she must identify as a man: “I keep dreaming of literary men, Shaw, Cunninghame Grahame, now Noel Coward and [D.H.] Lawrence himself, over and over. It is important as book means penis evidently and as a ‘writer,’ only, am I an equal in uc-n [unconscious], in the right way, with men. Most odd.” H.D., letter to Bryher, May 15, 1933, in Friedman, ed., Analyzing Freud, 280. 81 Buck, H.D. and Freud, 109.

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hermeneutic of wholeness and lack but rather in terms of a sort of aesthetics and ethics of excess—an abiding appreciation of the inexhaustible details that give life its value. With this sense of excess in mind, we might return once more to my larger claim that Notes on Thought and Vision can be read as, among other things, an alternative to psychoanalytic and anthropological theories of kinship. As we have seen, according to H.D., “Two or three people gathered together in the name of truth, beauty, over-mind consciousness could bring the whole force of this power back into the world” (NTV 27). From an autobiographical standpoint, her vision of two or three people most immediately recalls the family unit recently formed by H.D., Bryher, and the newborn Perdita, who may or may not count as a third. In light of H.D.’s analysis with Freud, we might also propose a pre-Oedipal reading. In letters to Bryher, H.D. explains that her archetypal love triangle is “mother-brother-self,” with Bryher serving as a substitute for the brother.82 Although, in her childhood, H.D. experienced her brother as barring access to her mother and her mother in turn as showing more love to her brother, Bryher performs the opposite role, sharing in and facilitating access to maternal substitutes. H.D. describes their trip to Corfu as a trip “back to womb WITH, the brother, hence you and me in Corfu (island = mother).”83 The same model would seem to apply to H.D.’s jelly-fish experience based on her rendering of it in “Advent,” where she avers, “It was being with Bryher that projected the fantasy” (TTF 130). As I have argued, though, H.D.’s writing also cautions against reducing this family of two or three people to a single pattern without appreciating the diversity of the twosomes we find in her text—the two musicians, the two scientists, the two men interested in arms, the two jelly-fish, the two brains, the two love-regions.84 All these twos, as H.D. might say, count. And all of these amorous twosomes might in effect serve as a model for a larger social formation. What matters most, in my view, is not the question of whom exactly the original two or three people might be—not pinning down an archetype—but rather the fact that so few people are imagined as being somehow receptive and generous enough for their thought to ramify across space and time.85 82  H.D., letter to Bryher, March 23, 1933, in Friedman, ed., Analyzing Freud, 142. Of course, the brother could also be a competitor for the mother’s love. In Tribute to Freud, H.D. recalls sitting with her brother on the curb after he has defied their mother who in turn pretends that she is going to leave them there: “And their mother has walked away. He knows that she will come back because he is older and is admittedly his mother’s favorite. But she [i.e., the child Hilda] does not know this. But though her brain is in a turmoil of anxiety and pride and terror, it has not even occurred to her that she might throw her small weight into the balance of conventional behavior by following her mother and leaving her brother to his fate” (TTF 29). 83  H.D., letter to Bryher, March 23, 1933, in Friedman, ed., Analyzing Freud, 143. 84  It should be clear that I do not mean to idealize H.D. and Bryher’s actual relationship or the family they formed with Perdita. Willmott, drawing on a talk by Julie Vandivere, cautions against “rush[ing] to idealize such a family as happier, more caring or more egalitarian for its members” (Modernist Goods, 252). I am making no such gesture. I am, however, interested in how H.D. represents—and, indeed, idealizes—her relationship with Bryher in Notes and The Gift. 85  In her more recent work on H.D., Morris similarly describes H.D.’s poetry as bearing a “pressure of ongoingness, of generativity,” one manifestation of which, I would say, is Morris’s own ongoing interest in H.D.’s life and work. Morris, “Introduction: H.D.’s Ongoingness,” in How to Live, What to Do, 1.

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Admittedly, H.D.’s valorization of a few gifted people smacks of a familiar elitism—one that might be traced to her modernism, her mysticism, or both.86 In the context of the kinship theory we have been exploring here, though, it also reads as an attempt to identify the lowest common denominator of culture, an elementary structure of kinship. “Two or three people” is H.D.’s formula for the smallest viable social unit—a unit we find at the heart of different phenomena and fields, all of which provide access to what she calls “over-mind” early in her career and later, following Freud, would generally call the unconscious.87 Art, as I have stressed, provides a privileged “line of approach” to over-mind, but it is just one of many such cultural lines (NTV 24). Indeed, it seems to me that one of H.D.’s most striking insights is that, in order for art to turn the tide of human thought, it must be confluent with that tide. Art can only transform the social universe if they share some common ground. I have tried to suggest that, for H.D., this ground is queer kinship—an erotically charged exchange between equally gifted individuals that may serve the gods or goods, depending on its reception. What should be clear, in turning to The Gift, is that the term “queer kinship” in my usage does not necessarily designate some sort of ideal relationship, though it does, I think, assume that valence in the context of my reading of The Gift’s representation of the mutuality between H.D., Bryher, and their friends, who collectively serve as the mutable third person in their little circle of two or three people. But “queer kinship” also refers to the surprisingly queer dynamics that are already at play in sometimes competitive, sometimes compassionate, but always seemingly normative exchanges between men. Part of my claim is that their shared queerness is what makes it possible for H.D. to imagine that small-scale exchanges might yield enduring techniques of renewal (to use Freeman’s term)—of extending and multiplying physical and emotional attachments across time and space. The Gift is, among other things, an attempt to unearth from the past, and to transmit to future generations, such a technique. FA M I LY P O RT R A I T S A N D S T R A N G E A F F I N I T I E S The Gift, as we noted earlier, was written in London during the Blitz and consists of seven chapters and an extensive Notes section designed, as H.D. writes, “to confirm . . . or enlarge” the main text via personal reflections, historical details, and 86  Arguing that H.D. sees the “poet as a spiritual worker in a secular world, walking the earth and not the halls of an ivory tower,” Matte Robinson and Demetrios P. Tryphonopoulos suggest that H.D.’s elitism in Notes and elsewhere “has less to do with an audience’s education and more to do with a special kind of sensitivity.” Matte Robinson and Demetrios P. Tryphonopoulos, “HERmione and other prose,” in The Cambridge Companion to H.D., ed. Nephie J. Christodoulides and Polina MacKay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 128, 127. 87  Contra my focus on the two or three, DuPlessis suggests that for H.D. the magic number was four. In a reading of Helen of Egypt, DuPlessis argues that H.D.’s poem seeks alternatives to hierarchical male–female relationships. The solution she finds is the “sufficient family”—“mother and child, flanked by father and brother.” DuPlessis, “Romantic Thralldom in H.D,” Contemporary Literature 20.2 (1979): 201. Like Rubin in her work from this same period, DuPlessis concludes her reading by claiming that changes in kinship are the root of larger cultural changes: “Since psychocultural patterns are learned within the family, it must surely be recast in order to change our images of women, culture, and society” (203).

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scholarly references (TG 257). The first six chapters flash back to scenes from H.D.’s Moravian childhood in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with the exception of the second chapter, which projects an even earlier moment, imagining her mother’s girlhood trip to see a fortune teller. Throughout these chapters, the perspective is that of “the Child,” Hilda, who watches the world around her “like a moving picture,” narrating what she sees.88 At times, the tone is child-like and questioning, marked by uncertainty about how to interpret the world around her. At others, it is more reflective and prophetic, refracted through the psychoanalytic hindsight and fascination with myth of the adult H.D., who occasionally takes over the narration to address the “turmoil of present-day events” and the mysterious psychic processes they set in motion (TG 53). The last chapter shoots us back to the present, during an air raid, in the London apartment H.D. shared with Bryher (and which they refused to leave despite the danger). Newly perceiving the present as a traumatic repetition of past events, both personal and historical, and even a result of the intergenerational and cross-cultural encounters recounted in the foregoing chapters, H.D. casts herself as the bearer of the “super-human task” of restoring a lost gift—“a Gift of Vision . . . of Wisdom [and] of the Holy Spirit”—and thereby revitalizing a world at war (TG 214). Thus, while vision remains, as it was in Notes on Thought and Vision, a privileged metaphor for artistic consciousness—though not, as we will see, the only metaphor—the earlier text’s notions of love and sexuality are now inseparable from notions of spirituality and, moreover, are often mediated through the language of kinship. In The Gift, kinship terms are the medium via which the memoir establishes a continuum between small-scale and large-scale exchanges, bridging the divide between the personal and the political, between the feminine domestic sphere and masculine public sphere. Of course, The Gift is largely about H.D.’s own family. In “H.D. by Delia Alton,” a series of ruminations composed from 1949 to 1950 at the prodding of Norman Holmes Pearson, her friend and literary executor, to help to explain her unpublished, largely pseudonymous works, H.D. characterizes The Gift as “a series of familyportraits, but more particularly of the Child’s mother and the grandmother”—that is, H.D.’s maternal grandmother, whom she called “Mamalie.”89 This characterization is only partially accurate, for the book’s matrilineal portraits are intertwined with portraits of the larger spiritual “family” to which these women belonged— that of the Moravian Church, officially known as the Unitas Fratrum, or United Brethren—and of the Moravians’ contentious relationship with indigenous groups. These portraits converge in The Gift’s fifth chapter, entitled “The Secret.” In this chapter, which H.D. considered the book’s “key-chapter,” Mamalie tells the Child Hilda about her first husband Christian’s discovery of an encrypted scroll documenting a secret meeting between early Moravian settlers and Native Americans at a nearby island, Wunden Eiland, or Island of the Wounds, in 1741, the same year 88  H.D., “H.D. by Delia Alton,” The Iowa Review 16.3 (Fall 1986): 192. Chisholm characterizes the narration as “cinematobiography.” See Diane Chisholm, H.D.’s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 91–101. 89  H.D., “H.D. by Delia Alton,” 188.

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as Bethlehem’s founding by Count Zinzendorf.90 According to the scroll, which Mamalie helped to decode but which had since been lost, the Moravians and Native Americans, including Paxnous, “the famous Shawanese chief,” had come together to perform a dual initiation (TG 156). Paxnous’s wife, Morning Star, was baptized by the Moravians and, in exchange, the Native Americans took Anna von Pahlen, wife of the missionary John Cammerhof, “into their mysteries” and gave her the name, Morning Star (TG 171). Peace between the two groups was thus forged by “exchanging names” and, indeed, by exchanging women, not in marriage per se but rather in a sort of spiritual war: “They were exchanging hostages, like in war but it was a different kind of war. It was a war of the Spirit or for the Spirit” (TG 163). This spiritual war turned violent when “the stricter Brethren of the church said it was witchcraft” and local tribesmen were incited by false propaganda (TG 171).91 For H.D., as for Lévi-Strauss, “a continuous transition exists from war to exchange and vice versa” (ESK 67). It is worth quoting H.D.’s summary of “The Secret” in “H.D. by Delia Alton” at length for it exemplifies H.D.’s seamless movement between fantasy and history and between small-scale relations—including the intimate exchange between Mamalie and the Child—and large-scale relations: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was named by Count Zinzendorf on Christmas-eve, 1741. It was one of a number of Moravian settlements, having to do with a mysterious Plan of “peace on earth.” [In “The Secret,”] The Child [Hilda], only half a “Moravian” [i.e., on her mother’s side] and mystified by inscriptions on some old tombstones, perceives a strange affinity in the tiny, dark creature who is her mother’s mother. Mamalie is not like anyone else. She is very old but she plays games with them and answers all their questions. Through Mamalie, the Child traces back her connection with the Jednota [the original Moravian community] in Europe and with the vanished tribes of the Six Nations in America, with whom Zinzendorf had made a curious, unprecedented treaty. In fantasy or dream, the grandmother tells the story of Wunden Eiland, an actual island which was later actually and symbolically washed away in the spring-floods. On this island, certain of the community met delegates of the Six Nations, who planned together to save the country (and the world) from further blood-shed. Through the grandmother’s submerged consciousness, runs the fear and terror of the arrow that flieth, torture and death by burning.92 90  Ibid. 196. It is not entirely clear which Native groups had members at the Wunden Eiland ceremony and, as I will discuss further in the chapter, H.D.’s representation of the event itself is highly fictionalized, if, that is, it even occurred at all. In The Gift, as we will see, she focuses on the presence of Paxnous, the Shawnee chief, and his wife. In her “Notes” to the text and “H.D. by Delia Alton,” she writes about an earlier treaty between Zinzendorf and delegates of the Six Nations, or Iroquois, even implying in the latter text that delegates of the Six Nations were also at Wunden Eiland. As Gavaler notes, “H.D. offers little detail in her Native descriptions, referring only to generic ‘Indians’ and ‘savages,’ sometimes ‘bad’ or ‘friendly,’ which is consistent with the pre-adolescent perspective of her fragmentary narration.” Christopher P. Gavaler, “ ‘I Mend a Break in Time’: An Historical Reconstruction of H.D.’s Wunden Eiland Ceremony in The Gift and Trilogy,” Sagetrieb 15.1 & 2 (Spring & Fall 1996): 101. On the “cultural intermingling” among Native groups in Pennsylvania during this period, see Gavaler, 101–103. 91  On the dissolution of the peace between them, see Jane Augustine, introduction to The Gift by H.D., ed. Jane Augustine (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), 16–17. 92  H.D., “H.D. by Delia Alton,”188–9.

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The mention of arrows and death by burning foremost refers to the massacre of Moravians by Native Americans in the town of Gnadenhuetten in 1755—an actual historical event that H.D. casts as the outcome of the broken promise of peace between Zinzendorf and the Six Nations and an antecedent of the current world war. That the Child feels a “strange affinity”—or, we might say, a queer kinship— with Mamalie, who is “not like anyone else,” recalls H.D.’s claim in Tribute to Freud that, when she was younger, there were “two of everybody (except myself ).” What paradoxically makes Mamalie and the Child a proper twosome is their respective singularity—the fact that neither is like anyone else. They are both exceptions. Not only is the affinity between them strange but their strangeness— their fascination with mysterious inscriptions and stories—is the source of their affinity. They are kin both by blood and in their queerness, the erotic dimensions of which we will discuss further later in the chapter. For the moment, I want to stress that theirs is not the only “strange affinity” to which H.D. refers in the foregoing passage. Zinzendorf ’s treaty with the Native Americans is similarly described as both “curious” and “unprecedented.” The exchange between them is also a form of queer kinship, both in its homosociality and insofar as the Moravians’ acceptance of the Native Americans into the “Brotherhood” traverses religious and cultural boundaries. Together, these strange affinities suggest that family, for H.D., is at base a spiritual phenomenon and a symbolic phenomenon (recall, for example, the exchange of names) rather than a biological one, although, as in kinship theory, biology remains, as Schneider would put it, the ultimate reference, particularly via the language of fraternity. In The Gift, the Child Hilda intuitively, if unintentionally, registers the role of language in uniting this strange spiritual family. As Mamalie shares her story, the Child reasons, even though Paxnous and Mamalie’s first husband “weren’t related to me at all,” as fellow members of the Brotherhood, they were all nevertheless part of a single family: “if we were United Brethren and I was one of them, then it was really in the family” (TG 157). “It” most immediately refers to the Secret of the chapter’s title about which Mamalie has been “talking like something in a book” (TG 156). According to Mamalie, the Secret “was simply belief in what was said [by Christ to his disciples]—and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (TG 157). Mamalie further explains to the Child, “You see, those words were taken literally, I mean” (157). The Child in turn takes Mamalie’s words literally. In other words, the Secret, to her ears, is that, whatever their actual bloodlines and identities at birth, members of the United Brethren are literally brothers— above all because they are all called and identify as “brothers.” Mamalie further claims that the initiates at Wunden Eiland, European and American, “spoke the same language” and “worshipped the same Spirit, the Sanctus Spiritus” (TG 170). Thus, here, too, it is important that the different groups worshipped the same Spirit insofar as they called the Spirit the same thing—Sanctus Spiritus. A shared language and a shared method of reading that language are what allow for the reconciliation of the “Holy Ghost of the Christian ritualists and Great Spirit of the Indians” (TG 168). Language is the key to the Moravian settlers’ plan for “a secret powerful community that would bring the ancient secrets of Europe and the

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ancient secrets of America into a single union of Power and Spirit, a united brotherhood, a Unitas Fratrum of the whole world” (TG 14). In emphasizing the language of brotherhood and its role in grounding the fantasy of world peace, I do not mean to diminish H.D.’s own explicit emphasis on matrilineal relations. Rather, I mean to put these different kinship terms on equal footing and to make a case for the fluidity between them. This fluidity has important ramifications not just for our understanding of H.D.’s gender politics but also for our reading of The Gift as a sort of spiritual historiography and genealogy of her personal gift. Simply put, the gift of H.D.’s title is caught up in both maternal and fraternal, both masculine and feminine, networks of exchange, neither of which offers an especially idyllic template for her gift’s transmission to the reader in the present. Feminist critics (including the book’s editor, Jane Augustine) have championed The Gift as “a locus classicus of [H.D.’s] visionary and revisionary woman-centered poetics,” seeing this poetics as an extension of “the commitment made by her Moravian forebears . . . [to] universal peace, racial tolerance, and understanding among hostile cultures.”93 What we find in The Gift, however, is far more complicated with respect to gender and much less trustworthy as history of cross-cultural encounters than these readings suggest. H.D.’s representation of the Wunden Eiland ceremony—a ceremony that appears never to have happened—is a case in point. Christopher P. Gavaler points out that, while Paxnous’s wife was in fact baptized, her baptism did not occur until fourteen years after the founding of Bethlehem, in 1955. Moreover, there is no evidence that the Moravians offered one of their own in return or, for that matter, “that Moravians at any time altered their own religious practices in order to adopt or even tolerate Native American beliefs.”94 Not only does H.D. fictionalize the historical record but the fiction she generates is anything but a straightforward idealization of her maternal, Moravian heritage: the exchange at Wunden Eiland is, in her own words, a war, the ongoing fallout of which can be felt not just in the destruction that serves as the backdrop of her writing but also throughout H.D.’s memories of her childhood. In “manipulating a continuous parallel” between America’s violent origins, her matrilineal heritage, and the contemporary crisis, H.D.’s method might be called mythical, but this parallel does not, as T. S. Eliot claimed of the mythical method in the case of Joyce’s Ulysses, “giv[e] a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”95 In a sort of reversal of the mythical method, H.D. plunges beneath a “wave of memories and terrors, repressed since the age of ten and long before” (TG 219). Yet she does so only to discover, as Gertrude Stein did upon seeking out her childhood home in Oakland, California, that “there is no there there” (EA 298). H.D.’s family portraits do not offer access to the Gift of her title so much as they provide a mythical history of the 93  Augustine, introduction to The Gift, 1, 3. 94  Gavaler, “ ‘I Mend a Break in Time,’ ” 101. 95  T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in The Waste Land, ed. Michael North (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001), 130. By contrast, Robert Spoo suggests of The Gift, “In these pages, H.D. created what T. S. Eliot called a ‘mythical method,’ a means of ordering the anarchy and futility of contemporary civilization”; this means was her Moravian heritage, which “could be called upon to make bearable the nightmare of modern history” (quoted in Augustine, introduction to The Gift by H.D., 4).

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Gift’s repeated misdirection and loss. Reading against the grain of H.D.’s apparent atavism, I want to suggest that The Gift is at base a cautionary tale, one that turns to her personal and cultural past less to unearth a solution or “antidote to war’s destructiveness” than to track the origins of that destructiveness in the repeated failure of exchange and, more specifically, the failure of communication across generational and cultural lines.96 If the text is, as Morris argues, a “primer” in the laws of gift-giving it is above all a primer in the monumental importance of not losing the gift and, more specifically, the text of The Gift.97 “ T H AT S T R A N G E T H I N G T H E Y C A L L E D A G I F T ” : T R A N S L AT I N G M Y S T E R I O U S M E S S A G E S So what is the Gift? H.D., as we have seen, characterizes the Gift as a Gift of Vision, Wisdom, and the Holy Spirit. Most fundamentally, though, the Gift at stake in The Gift is a gift of language. Earlier we noted that, in her strange exchange with her grandmother, the Child registers the role of language in cementing the spiritual bonds of the Brotherhood. This is above all because she encounters the Brotherhood and Spirit as language and, more specifically, as speech. Crucially, in the book’s first chapter, the Child first comes into contact with the notion of the gift in the same way—in and as the speech of her elders. Thus, while H.D. consistently uses visual metaphors to characterize her gift, these metaphors stand in a sort of synesthetic tension with the role of hearing and especially of overhearing in her initiation into the secrets of vision—or, better yet, her failed initiation. In the first chapter, the Child remembers hearing family members remark of her and her siblings, “We were none of us ‘gifted’ ” (TG 42). Though they will not explain what they mean by this, she manages to piece together a partial narrative about her mother. As a musician, her mother had had a gift, but “she gave it away” at her father’s behest to her brother, their Uncle Fred, teaching him music rather than pursuing it herself (TG 43). The Child feels hurt and confused by this turn of events, initially blaming her mother for depriving her of the Gift: “Why didn’t Mama wait and teach us music like she did Uncle Fred when he was a little boy? Mama gave all her music to Uncle Fred . . . That is why we hadn’t the Gift . . . she gave the Gift to Uncle Fred, she should have waited and given the Gift to us” (TG 43). But she also vaguely discerns the role that gender norms have played in her mother’s sacrifice and, upon discovering that “a gift isn’t just music” and that all kinds of artists are gifted, including writers, asks if women can be “just the same as men”—if they can have gifts equal to men’s (TG 43).

96  The book jacket of the complete 1998 edition reads: “As an antidote to war’s destructiveness, H.D. invokes the mystical Moravian heritage of her mother’s family to convey an ideal world peace and salvation that would come through the spiritual power of women.” In her introduction, Jane Augustine similarly describes the text as a “narrative of female empowerment [that] embodies H.D.’s belief in an eternal creative feminine spirit continually manifesting as the living bearer of peace to the world” (1). 97  Morris, “A Relay of Power and Peace,” 518.

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Not only does the Child first receive this “strange thing they called a Gift” in the form of speech but she also senses that whatever this thing is it has something to do with sex (TG 42). The “Gift” thus serves as what Jean Laplanche refers to as an enigmatic signifier—a hidden, erotic message that is presented by an adult to a child. In developing this concept, Laplanche builds on Lacan’s definition of a signifier as what represents a subject for another signifier, stressing that, unlike, say, a puzzle or problem, “[an] enigma is necessarily posed by someone, and not something just difficult to understand.”98 Moreover, for Laplanche, the enigmatic signifier is “doubly enigmatic”—that is, “the meaning remains hidden, not only for the one who receives the message but also for the one who sends it.”99 Laplanche takes care to humanize the Other who delivers this message, but he also maintains that its communication is one-way, asymmetrical. Only the adult has the unconscious knowledge to freight this message with latent sexual meaning, though this meaning is not intended as such by the adult or experienced as such at the time by the child. Now, importantly, Laplanche will insist that enigmatic signifiers need not take the form of language and criticizes Lacan for “overestimat[ing] the role of language” (for example, in positing that the unconscious is structured as a language).100 While I want to maintain an emphasis on the role of language as the medium of enigmatic messages in The Gift, Laplanche’s revisions to Lacanian and especially Freudian psychoanalysis remain helpful in illuminating H.D.’s memoir and her broader challenge to psychoanalytic and structural theories of kinship. Crucially, the usual building blocks of (masculine) subjectivity and sexuality—the Oedipus complex, castration, and the phallus—do not have the same priority for Laplanche. They are symbolic functions, but these functions are secondary. They are “ways of binding”—of giving form and sense to—the otherwise “unbound,” incomprehensible feelings that attach to enigmatic messages.101 The Oedipal myth of incest and murder is one way of explaining a feeling of culpability—even, as Laplanche says, “the main way, in our civilization”—but it is not the only way and the feeling itself is what is primary.102 In a similar vein, I have tried to displace the pre-Oedipal paradigm as the primary way of reading H.D. both in her original analysis with Freud and, more recently, in feminist criticism. The various lines of approach she charts to the world of vision—from her experience of childbirth and the homoeroticism of the Ancient Greeks in Notes to the phantasmatic exchange at Wunden Eiland in The Gift—are all ways of binding excess energy, of giving form to an enigma or, as H.D. would say, the Secret. In The Gift as in Notes, the Secret is sexual in nature and unconscious knowledge of it is universally shared. Showing a clear debt to Freud, she proclaims, “The store of images and pictures is endless and is the common property of the whole race. But one must, of necessity,” she adds, “begin with one’s own private inheritance” (TG 50). Yet as we have 98 Jean Laplanche, “Interview: Jean Laplanche talks to Martin Stanton,” in Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation and the Drives, ed. John Fletcher and Martin Stanton (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992), 11. 99 Jean Laplanche, “The Kent Seminar,” in Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation and the Drives, 22–3. 101  Laplanche, “The Kent Seminar,” 31. 102 Ibid. 100  Laplanche, “Interview,” 11.

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already begun to see, beginning with one’s own inheritance is easier said than done, for one must first determine what one has inherited and if one has inherited anything at all. “The gift was there,” the adult H.D. remarks of her childhood,” but the expression of the gift was somewhere else” (TG 37). It is in the context of H.D.’s proliferation of new images and pictures (as well as narratives and metaphors) to express the gift—a property that she is sure everybody owns but which continually escapes her grasp—that another of Laplanche’s revisions to Freudian psychoanalysis becomes especially relevant. Laplanche’s concept of the enigmatic signifier is in part an alternative to, and reaction against, Freud’s pseudo-biological notion that the childhood of the individual and the childhood of the race are one and the same. For Freud, this notion provides a solution to the persistent question of whether the primal scenes reconstructed in analysis actually took place or were fantasies of the patient by providing a third option: these scenes are actually inherited memories. Thus, events such as the child’s seduction by the parent or the murder of the father happened in Freud’s view, but they happened in a “mythic pre-history.”103 As Freud concludes in Totem and Taboo, “in the beginning was the Deed.”104 Laplanche, however, preempts the question of what did or did not actually happen by casting the child’s experience as a process of translating enigmatic messages—a process that always entails some loss. The child translates the message at the time of transmission “as best he can, with the language at his disposal,” but he represses its erotic excess.105 This excess is then “reconstructed” in analysis, but this “reconstruction relates to something other than an history of pure events.”106 In other words, what is reconstructed is not the original message but the process of receiving a message, trying to make sense of it, and to some degree failing. In “H.D. by Delia Alton,” H.D. acknowledges her debt to Freud in composing the “reconstructed scenes” that make up The Gift, making clear that without psychoanalysis she “would hardly have found the clue or the bridge between the child-life, the memories of the peaceful Bethlehem, and the orgy of destruction, later to be witnessed and lived through in London.”107 That H.D. depended on Freud’s notion of inherited memories to build this bridge is, I think, undeniable. In Tribute to Freud, she admires the way he “had brought the past into the present with his the childhood of the individual is the childhood of the race” (TTF 12). And, in mythically weaving together different places and periods in The Gift, she conflates individual memory and cultural memory in a way that, as Morris notes, “sets off alarms for a reader schooled in postcolonial theory.”108 My intention is not 103  John K. Fletcher, “The Letter in the Unconscious: The Enigmatic Signifier in the Work of Jean Laplanche,” in Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation and the Drives, 106. 104  Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1950), 200. 105  Jean Laplanche, “Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics: A Restatement of the Problem,” trans. Philip Slotkin, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 73 (1992): 441. 106  Ibid. 443. Laplanche suggests that even when Freud uses the term “construction” (e.g., in his essay of that title or in “The Wolf-Man” case) he always means a “reconstruction of the past” (443). 107  H.D., “H.D. by Delia Alton,” 192. 108 Morris, How to Live, What to Do, 139. Brenda S. Helt argues that the relationship between psychoanalysis and history in The Gift is “symbiotic”; drawing on her work with Freud, H.D. “links

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to ignore H.D.’s quite explicit conception of her gift as a “racial and biological inheritance” or to undermine the validity of the alarms such a conception triggers (TG 50). “I was the inheritor,” she writes in The Gift’s first chapter, even wondering in a spiritualist vein—one that would have surely set off Freud’s own alarms—if she might in fact be her deceased Aunt Fanny, her mother’s older sister, “come back” to life (TG 37). What interests me, though, is all the ways in which the actual process of inheritance repeatedly goes wrong, thus bringing into relief the practical limitations of interpreting H.D.’s reconstructions of her childhood solely in terms of her Freudian primitivism. The messages the Child receives from adults around her are lost in translation and retranslated from the perspective of the adult H.D. such that the gift we as her readers receive—the text of The Gift—is inevitably something other than the gift to which H.D. imagines she is the heir. The Child’s experience of loss, as we have already begun to see, is twofold: she does not understand what a “gift” is and fears that, whatever it is, she does not have it, even though, according to her mother, she was supposed to. When her mother went to see a fortune teller, the latter foresaw that she “would have a child who was in some way especially gifted” (TG 51). Though the Child feels “as if we had failed [her]” in not being gifted, the adult H.D. recognizes that her mother’s “apparent disappointment” is really an extension of her own feelings of “inadequacy and frustration” for having squandered her own gift (TG 51). Intriguingly, however, for all the stock that the mother seems to place in the fortune teller’s words—“the Gift would come to a child who would be born under a Star”—she seems not to have taken them seriously at all when she first heard them (TG 79). When, in the next chapter, we actually see the mother’s trip to see the fortune teller, what we find is another scene of failed communication and enigmatic signification. Her mother discounts the fortune, thinking to herself, “A child born under a star? But that didn’t mean anything. Why, every child was born under a star. Hadn’t Bishop Leibert said at little Fred’s christening—she could remember as if it were yesterday—that every child was born under the star of our Redemption” (TG 79). Apparently, failing to get the gift—in the sense of both failing to inherit the gift and failing to understand the language of the gift—runs in the family, particularly among its female members. If anything, losing the gift seems to be H.D.’s matrilineal inheritance. Her language of biology notwithstanding, H.D. points to a sociohistorical explanation for generational failure, one that is not unlike Woolf ’s account of women’s failed gifts in A Room of One’s Own: within patriarchal culture, where women are treated as gifts, as in the exchange at Wunden Eiland, women’s own gifts are not cultivated, as we saw in H.D.’s grandfather’s insistence that her mother surrender her gift to H.D.’s uncle Fred. Mamalie’s transmission of the story of Wunden Eiland constitutes another scene of failed feminine address from one generation to the next. For her part, Mamalie addresses the Child Hilda as a number of other women: first as H.D.’s mother, her personal psychological history with what she understood as the universal spiritual unconscious of humanity in general and women in particular.” Brenda S. Helt, “Reading History in The Gift and Tribute to Freud,” in The Cambridge Companion to H.D., ed. Nephie J. Christodoulides and Polina MacKay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 159, 166.

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Helen (i.e., Mamalie’s daughter), then as H.D.’s Aunt Laura, then as her Aunt Agnes, and finally as another woman, Lucy, to whom they are not related. Hilda assumes each role, thinking to herself “Now I am Aggie” when Mamalie confuses her with her Aunt Agnes, and calling her grandmother “Mimmie,” as Agnes would so as not to be discovered (TG 150–1). She also takes care to crawl under the covers so that Mamalie cannot see her and “will not remember that I am only Hilda” (TG 151). In the context of Mamalie’s account of Anna von Pahlen and Morning Star’s exchange of names at Wunden Eiland, Hilda’s inhabitation of these different personae assumes a spiritual, mystical character, as if she were also exchanging names with her elders. We are told in “The Secret” that, in Native American traditions, “the name a person had . . . was somehow another part of him” (TG 163). For Hilda to take on the names of these other women is for them to be a part of her personhood and vice versa. As the titular heroine of H.D.’s HERmione repeatedly proclaims, “Names are in people, people are in names.”109 Yet there is also an element of deception on Hilda’s part that, together with her inability to understand much of what her grandmother is telling her and Mamalie’s own delirious misrecognition of her addressee, troubles such an idealistic reading of their exchange. Despite H.D.’s claim in the passage from “H.D. by Delia Alton” quoted above that her grandmother would answer all the children’s questions, the opposite seems to be the case in The Gift. Here, Mamalie does not answer questions but incites them, prompting the Child to think to herself, “Wait Mamalie, there are a thousand questions that I want to ask you . . . Mamalie, Mamalie, you have told me nothing at all, really; did they ever find the papers that were lost? Mamalie, this is  all frightful, I could cry with sorrow and grief that you won’t tell me more” (TG 180–1). Not only is Mamalie’s story itself a story of loss—of lost papers, of a lost plan for peace—but the meaning of this story, the Secret, is also lost in translation. We noted earlier that the Secret, according to Mamalie, corresponded to the belief that Christ was literally with his followers. Count Zinzendorf in particular believed that Christ was part of the union between a husband and wife. It was— and is—not uncommon to draw a metaphorical link between Christ’s love and marriage. As Augustine notes in her introduction to H.D.’s text, “the collectivity of Christian souls, the Church, has been traditionally called the Bride of Christ because Christ loves it as a husband loves a wife.”110 Where Zinzendorf was unorthodox, and in the eyes of some heretical, was in “preaching that the sexual union of wife and husband should be regarded as a sacramental enactment of the union of the soul with its Savior.”111 Christ was part of their sexual union— literally. As Augustine also acknowledges, in the Notes accompanying the chapter entitled “The Secret,” H.D. comments on the ramifications of Zinzendorf ’s reading for not only wives but women in general: “[Zinzendorf ] is said to have offended many by regarding every woman as a symbol of the Church, as literally Christ’s bride” (TG 263). But this doctrine, which Augustine argues H.D. used “to support her vision of valorized womanhood and redeemed sexuality,” is not the same as 109 H.D., HERmione (New York: New Directions, 1981), 178. 110  Augustine, introduction to The Gift by H.D., 9. 111  Ibid. 10.

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the Secret that Mamalie shares and which the Child hears—a secret that is not specifically about womanhood and sexuality but rather about taking words literally.112 The adult H.D., too, takes words literally in suggesting that woman is literally Christ’s bride, but now supplements the sexual meaning of Mamalie’s Secret. Put somewhat differently, Mamalie does not tell the Child the Secret so much as she creates the Secret, initiating the Child into the discovery of a sexual beyond of conscious knowledge. In short, The Gift is a postlapsarian series of portraits of a family whose gift has always already been lost. “There was a Promise and there was a Gift,” H.D. writes in the last chapter, “but the Promise it seems was broken and the Gift it seems was lost,” and were so long before the Child arrived on the scene and at least since the original sin of colonialism and failed peace between the European settlers and Native Americans (TG 212). As their spiritual war makes clear, men, too, are wont to lose the gift in H.D.’s mythic prehistory and were even the first to lose it, though that does not mean that, in her eyes, men alone are to blame for the current “orgy of destruction.” Rather, in linking small-scale and large-scale, maternal and fraternal, scenes of communication within a single genealogy of enigmatic and misbegotten messages—the same “cycling gift system”—H.D. in effect holds both men and women responsible for the gift’s disappearance and restoration. Refusing to think of the war “in terms of nation against nation,” she invokes metaphorical language of light and darkness to describe their—and our—shared guilt: “Light and Darkness have unfurled their banners, and though we take our place beside the legions of Light, we must never forget how each one of us (through inertia, through indifference, through ignorance) is, in part, responsible for the world-calamity” (TG 109–10). As a chronicle of H.D.’s ignorance, The Gift is also an attempt to warn us, her readers, of the costs of our own ignorance. It is not only a new translation of old enigmatic messages, both real and imagined, but also an enigmatic message in its own right, posed by the adult H.D. to her unknown future readers. L A S T C A L L : T E L E P H O N I N G T H E B E YO N D The Gift concludes on a redemptive note. The date is January 17, 1943. After a harrowing raid during which death seems certain, H.D. feels revived, as if miraculously “able to rise again” (TG 219). With the thunderous sound and immediate threat diminishing, she rather surprisingly imagines the foregone terror as a kind of party, wondering to herself, “Well hadn’t this been a sort of party on a grand scale, on, you, might say, almost a cosmic scale” (TG 219). The experience of having been cloistered in the apartment in the dark with Bryher, unable to move, now reminds her of a childhood game of hide-and-seek or of sitting in a circle telling ghost stories. The unbearable excess of war—“We had had too much . . . We had endured too much”—is thus reconfigured as a kind of gift, a festive potlatch (TG 217). This party of sorts culminates, finally, in what Anderson calls a “spiritual 112 Ibid.

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hearing.”113 The main text concludes with H.D. hearing a cacophony of voices: Christian Renatus, the son of Count Zinzendorf, recites the litany of the wounds; a choir hums and speaks in dialect; Anna von Pahlen and the head of the Native American priests “call together” to the Spirit (TG 223). As the “sound accumulates,” Bryher and H.D. add their voices: “‘It’s the all-clear,’ says Bryher. ‘Yes,’ I say” (TG 223). Thus, like Stein’s Ida A Novel and Joyce’s Ulysses before it, H.D.’s The Gift ends with a feminine—and, to most critics’ ears, enthusiastic and erotically charged— “Yes” in a private, domestic space. If The Gift is, as H.D. suggests, a quest to retrieve “what had been lost, so the Promise might be redeemed and the Gift restored,” then this quest would seem to be complete (TG 214). Certainly Anderson argues as much in claiming that H.D. realizes a “sacred plenitude”; having revisited her past, she is at last able to “recover the wisdom hidden in childhood for the benefit of the war-torn present.”114 Chisholm similarly reads the book’s ending as a triumphant recovery of a lost plenitude. She draws on Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit, or “deferred action”—an antecedent of Laplanche’s notion of enigmatic signifiers—whereby a past event that, “because of the subject’s affective and sexual immaturity, could not be assimilated” is revived by a later event that, with the “input of sexual fantasy and imagination,” reactivates the repressed sexual content of the first.115 In The Gift’s final chapter, Chisholm argues, H.D. “occults” Freud’s concept, lending it a further spiritual dimension: “Mamalie’s story comes back to the war-besieged adult Hilda with all the heat and passion of mystical erotism” that she could not appreciate or absorb as a child, turning her “mortal fear into mystic, orgasmic joy.”116 While these readings—particularly Chisholm’s—share elements with my own and help to describe the gift that the adult H.D. finally receives, I am not quite convinced that they fully account for the gift given to us, H.D.’s readers, in the form of The Gift. Though the adult H.D. may enjoy a sacred, sexual plenitude, what the book gives to us carries other valences as well. By its very title, The Gift reads as an extension of the gift of which H.D. writes throughout the text, a gift of language that is repeatedly lost and later received with new meaning. Thus, the book, too, is bound to follow this trajectory. It is sure to suffer some loss—and arguably must suffer some loss if it is to count as the Gift. Earlier I argued that The Gift above all reads as a cautionary tale against the danger of losing it. I would now add that it takes these precautions precisely because some loss is not only inevitable but also necessary. In her reticence to publish, H.D. comes across as having been fairly committed to carrying on a long family tradition of losing the gift—at least temporarily.117 After all, the existence of texts such “H.D. by Delia Alton” indicates that she very much imagined some kind of future readership, if a limited one, who 113 Anderson, H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination, 72. 114 Ibid. 73, 44. 115 Chisholm, H.D.’s Freudian Poetics, 119. 116  Ibid. 120. 117  Of H.D.’s experience of writing The Gift, DuPlessis poignantly suggests, “Written with the nightly bombings of the Battle of Britain reverberating . . . this work must have seemed at all moments to be potentially H.D.’s last work, possibly even a lost work (lost to fires and rubble).” DuPlessis, The Career of that Struggle, 77.

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would need to be initiated—educated in the various methods, frameworks, and references that went into writing The Gift so that they might, belatedly, make sense of its message. Though written over twenty years earlier, Notes on Thought and Vision also serves as a critical companion piece to The Gift, particularly its final chapter. If “The Secret” is the key to the Gift given to H.D. and thus the key to identifying her long family history of loss, then the final chapter, entitled “Morning Star,” is the key to receiving the Gift given to us. The chapter’s title identifies H.D. with Paxnous’s wife and Anna von Pahlen, who adopted her name at Wunden Eiland, and like these women, she serves as a medium, a potential means of creating a “Unitas Fratrum of the whole world.” Via this identification and her role as a spiritual medium for the various voices of the dead, she is both bride and brother, Native and Moravian, American and European. Thus, the innate bisexuality of the visionary in Notes coincides with a number of other internalized forms of difference: national, religious, generational. As in Notes, assuming this role, serving as a receiving station of sorts, requires an additional something—and, more precisely, an additional someone. If the adult H.D. is able to translate the sexual and spiritual content of her family’s message anew it is, in The Gift, as in Notes, because of the actual physical presence and intellectual sympathy of another of the same type as herself—namely, Bryher. “Bryher was my special heritage as I had been hers,” H.D. thinks to herself, half-hoping that she might die so that Bryher could “go on” (TG 217). Their mutual belonging not only enables the gift’s renewal in the form of The Gift but also provides a sort of model for its further renewal in the hands of the reader—a model that, as I have argued, is continually lacking in H.D.’s reconstruction of past scenes. H.D. gives further form to this model by turning, as she so often does in Notes, to the field of communications technology and another receiving station, so to speak—the telephone. After the raid, H.D. tells Bryher that she hopes their friends across London “didn’t get it” and were safe (TG 221). At H.D.’s request, Bryher goes into the other room and rings them on the telephone. Afterward, she assures H.D., who seems only to be half-listening, that “it was all right, everyone was all right. Everything is all right” (TG 222). She then hears Bryher say that one friend in particular, who goes unnamed, “thanked you for suggesting that we ring her” (TG 222). H.D. replies, “But you rang them,” to which Bryher responds, “But you suggested it” (TG 222). H.D. then leaves the kitchen, where she has been making tea for them, and, as she looks at herself in the mirror, imagines herself “face to face” with eternity, as if having “crossed the chasm that divides time from timeout-of-time” (TG 222). It is in this moment that she hears Christian Renatus reciting the litany, the voices build, symphonizing with the sirens outside, Bryher announces the all-clear, and H.D. confirms it, in effect welcoming this diverse chorus as her spiritual kin: “Yes.” While the appearance of the telephone builds on H.D.’s long-standing fascination with telecommunications, it assumes particular significance in the context of her engagement with spiritualism—that is, the use of a medium to communicate with the dead—while writing The Gift. During World War II, H.D. attended

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lectures on spiritualism, participated in weekly group séances, and even conducted a number of table-tapping sessions alone on a William Morris table she inherited from the daughter of one of his Pre-Raphaelite peers—although, as Helen Sword notes, H.D.’s solo sessions took a “negative turn” when, weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, H.D. received ominous messages from dead Royal Air Force pilots about its cataclysmic environmental effects.118 But the experience of receiving the messages continued to absorb her attention. In “H.D. by Delia Alton,” she writes that the tapping of one of the William Morris table’s tripod feet was “as natural as receiving a letter or a telegram.”119 As if to further underscore its naturalness, she modifies her analogy, shifting from technologies of writing to technologies of speech: “it was more like a telephone, the speaker or speakers were connected by some chord, some spiritual device that was to me no more mysterious than the working of a telephone. I don’t know how a telephone does work, nor wireless nor radio. I didn’t know how this worked, the point was, it went on working.”120 H.D.’s indifference to the actual mechanism by which the telephone works echoes in the epigraph to The Gift’s first chapter, an excerpt from the astronomer Camille Flammarion’s early twentieth-century investigation into the immortality of the human soul, Death and Its Mystery: “The brain comes into play, yes, but it is only the tool . . . the telephone is not the person speaking over it. The dark room is not the photograph” (TG 33, ellipsis H.D.’s). How these tools work is beside the point. It simply matters that they work—that they make present what is otherwise absent, distant, or even deceased. What is especially striking about the calls that Bryher and H.D. make at the end of the text is that any uncertainty about the question of how the telephone works is displaced onto the question of who is responsible for making the calls. H.D. prompts Bryher to make the calls and receives thanks for them but she passes the credit on to Bryher: “But you rang them.” It is as if, in their belonging to one another, both and neither of the women are responsible—as if it is in fact the relation between them that initiates the call. Recalling H.D.’s wish in Notes that a mere two or three people might remake the world of thought, we might suggest that, when H.D. and Bryher phone their friends, it is impossible to say whether there are two or three people on the line. Indeed, I would argue that the telephone’s appearance at the end of The Gift allegorizes an ongoing fantasy on H.D.’s part of a mere two or three people with the power to remake the world. In other words, H.D. and Bryher’s use of this mysterious tool to communicate with their friends, “scattered over different parts of this huge and battle-scarred town of London,” figures the consistent role of queer kinship in her aesthetics and her continued investment in the potential of small-scale erotic exchanges to ramify on a large scale (TG 221). While the eruption of voices that follows the phone calls arguably 118  Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 128. Sword argues that, while H.D.’s involvement with spiritualism was relatively limited, virtually all she wrote during the World War II years “bears witness to an abiding obsession with otherworldly communication, ghostly return, and the spectral phenomenology of memory” (123). 119  H.D., “H.D. by Delia Alton,” 199. 120 Ibid.

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serves as proof of this potential—and certainly has garnered the bulk of critical attention—the calls themselves should not be too quickly glossed over. It bears recalling that H.D. begins hearing voices while standing in front of a mirror, as if to suggest that the act of hearing mirrors the prior act of calling. Both H.D. and Bryher are involved but their roles have been reversed. In hearing the voices, H.D. is now the one who rings, but Bryher makes it possible. As H.D.’s special inheritance— indeed, as H.D.’s gift—Bryher enables her finally to receive the long-lost Gift of her ancestors but also to give The Gift in turn. Just as Bryher places the calls at H.D.’s behest in order to hear the voices of their friends, so in hearing the various voices of the dead, H.D. and Bryher place a call to us—a call that, à la Laplanche’s enigmatic signifier, is enigmatic both to its donors and to its recipients. In other words, whether or not H.D. intends for it to, her strange affinity with Bryher reads as the force behind the erotic excess born by The Gift—as the thing that turns the text into a gift in its own right. It should be clear that, in reading H.D.’s representation of their relationship in this halcyon light, I am not making an argument about the actual, historical relationship between H.D. and Bryher and its role, whether emotional or economic, in H.D.’s literary production. Rather, I mean to trace the evolution of a general theory of queer kinship across her work, a theory capable of accounting for diverse modes of traversing normative separations— separations between the sexes, between religions, between cultures, between nations, between disciplines, between time periods, and, most fantastically, between the living and the dead. In The Gift, the central figure for queer kinship is the telephone. Indeed, if Ulysses was panned by early reviewers for its monstrous resemblance to a telephone book then H.D.’s The Gift is modernism’s long unplaced—and then terribly garbled—telephone call.121 This call is not just for us, her future readers, and might even be read as never having been for us, not only because the book was published posthumously and so comes to us, as the voices of H.D.’s ancestors came to her, from the beyond, but also because the text is explicitly framed as a gift to the beyond, foremost to her deceased mother. The first part of The Gift’s dedication reads, “To Helen who has brought me home” (TG 30). It is thus a return gift, a gesture of gratitude, but a paradoxical one insofar as it also figures as a substitute for the Gift her mother gave up. Thus, while The Gift thanks Helen for bringing her home, she in effect brings the Gift home to Helen. The second part of the dedication further situates the text as a gift to the past from the present, while also drawing a parallel between these different moments: “for Bethlehem Pennsylvania 1741 from Chelsea London 1941” (TG 30). Earlier I suggested that we might read 121  On early reviews comparing Ulysses to a telephone directory, see Joseph Brooker, Joyce’s Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 28–9. Notably, Jacques Derrida, in his reading of Ulysses, describes Molly’s final yeses as a telephone call of sorts. This term, yes, “always inaugurates a scene of call and request: it confirms and countersigns”; Molly is “at the telephone, even when she is in bed, asking, and waiting to be asked, on the telephone (since she is alone) to say ‘yes, yes.’ ” Jacques Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” Acts of Literature, trans. Tina Kendall with Shari Benstock, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 288, 274.

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Notes on Thought and Vision as H.D.’s S.O.S. call to future generations. The Gift reverses this gesture, in effect offering the “all clear” for a war that, from H.D.’s perspective, started not just in 1939 or in 1914 but at least two hundred years earlier, on another continent. In the final chapter, as the raid winds down, she thinks to herself, “Europe and America had at last been reconciled in the very depth of my subconscious being” (TG 219). The Gift’s fantasy is that the opposite might also be true—that the resolution of its author’s own psychic strife might magically travel, like a telephone call, slicing across what she refers to in Notes as the world of dead, murky thought. As a call home to her mother, The Gift constitutes yet another pre-Oedipal voyage “back to the womb” on H.D.’s part. The acoustic “chord” (to use H.D.’s homonymic misnomer) that connects London and Bethlehem is in part, as the telephone cord was for Freud, a substitute for the umbilical cord. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud reflects on the remarkable prosthetic power of the telephone in enabling one to “hear at distances which would be respected as unattainable even in a fairy tale” (CD 43). The telephone combines, while also improving upon, the properties of writing and of the house. Writing substitutes for the voice of the absent person; the house substitutes for the mother’s womb. In impossibly traversing the distance between self and other, and collapsing the boundary between inside and outside, the telephone represents “the perfectibility of the womb”—the womb, in its structural and sonorous resemblance to the tomb, being a doubly charged spatial figure, always wired for both birth and burial.122 It brings the subject unimaginably close to its first and its final resting place, a place to which H.D. was consistently lured. As I have so often suggested here, however, I think it would be a mistake to reduce the desire at stake in The Gift’s phone call home to a pre-Oedipal desire— not least because the doubling of address in the dedication reproduces the same fluidity between maternal and fraternal forms of kinship that runs throughout the text. If The Gift is for the mother it is also for the Brotherhood that founded Bethlehem and nominally sought peace with the Native Americans in 1741. Provocatively—if coincidentally—the cultural history of the telephone also straddles a line between maternity and fraternity, as well as between the living and the dead. While, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the telephone opens up a line to the mother, it was, as Ronell reminds us, born between brothers and is historically tied to spiritualism. Alexander Graham Bell’s brother, Melly, suffered from poor health and, in 1868, sensing his decline, made a deal with Bell, “a solemn pact that whichever of us should die first would endeavor to communicate with the other if it were possible to do so.”123 After Melly’s death, Bell’s attempts to reach his brother via séances were unsuccessful. Still, Ronell argues that, in “putting up lines between invisible disembodied voices,” Bell was able to honor their agreement in another way, “according to a somewhat different, more down-to-earth or globalized apparatus 122  Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 87. 123  Quoted in Ronell, The Telephone Book, 393.

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of conjuring.”124 In her reading, then, the telephone figures as an extension and displacement of an original fraternal, spiritual pact. As a telephonic fantasy of a Unitas Fratrum of the whole world—or at least the whole Western world insofar as H.D hardly escapes the ethnocentrism of traditional kinship theory—H.D.’s The Gift constitutes a further extension and displacement of the Bells’ pact. To be fair, the telephone is far from the only technology H.D. invokes to imagine her connection to her extended family, living and dead. She describes her flashbacks to childhood as moving pictures and her first chapter is titled “Dark Room,” a reference to the dark room in which photographs are developed as well as a figure for the mysteries of the human mind. Nevertheless, the telephone’s appearance as an everyday medium of communication—one that continues to work in mysterious ways even as the walls threatened to fall—is a telling index of the impact of sound and aural technologies on the modernist imagination and on H.D.’s aesthetics in particular. The latter have, quite understandably, tended to be associated with the image and visual technologies for a number of reasons, including not only her own exalted rhetoric of vision and projection, of course, but also her identification with Imagism, her appearance in the 1930 film, Borderline, and her writing about film for the journal Close Up.125 In the third of her trio of Close Up articles devoted to the topic of cinema and the Classics, H.D. even seems definitely to rank the image above sound, famously issuing a battle-cry against Movietone and the talkies. The problem with the talkies turns out, however, not to be the sound so much as it is the combination of image and sound. H.D.’s criticism of the talkies recalls Stein’s criticism of the comma, which, as we saw in Chapter 4, she describes as a form of excessive and thus “artificial aid.” Much like the comma, the talkie, to H.D.’s senses, gives the audience too much, thereby robbing us of our potential to give: “I want to help to add imagination to a mask, a half finished image,” H.D. writes, “not have everything done for me. I can’t help this show. I am completely out of it.”126 Also calling attention to the influence of acoustical technologies on H.D.’s work, Morris argues that, for H.D., “concentration of attention in a single sense—eye or ear—facilitates access to the layers of the mind identified with myth, dream, and the unconscious.”127 Yet her criticism of 124 Ronell, The Telephone Book, 393, 395. 125  See the chapter on H.D. in Susan McCabe, Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Goble proposes a similar shift in emphasis from film to the phone in his reading of Gertrude Stein. Though interested in situating Stein’s popular writing with respect to Hollywood film and the ways in which Stein herself suggests the comparison, he also focuses particular attention on the symbolic status of the telephone in Everybody’s Autobiography: “the telephone is a symbolic technology in several senses of the word, for it is not only a means of communication but also a metonymic figure for deeper historical and economic transformations . . .  [In Everybody’s Autobiography] phone calls are the very symbol of all that is modern because they symbolize nothing in particular, a telling background noise that consumes as much meaning as it transmits.” Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 114. 126  H.D., “The Cinema and the Classics III: The Mask and the Movietone,” in Close Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus (London: Cassell, 1998), 116. 127 Morris, How to Live/What to Do, 71. Morris also points to a link between the telephone and pre-Oedipal desire: “the territory of the voice is a preoedipal ghostland or dreamland, at once sensuous and dematerialized, erotic and disembodied” (72).

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talkies suggests that as important as what the isolation of a single sense reveals is what it conceals, what it withholds and resists giving at all. The appeal of the silent film is that, in being half-finished, it requires, quite simply, help—a gift to enable its completion. Arguably, then, the appeal of the telephone call is that it, too, is half-finished. To read The Gift as a sort of telephone call would mean reading it not as a revelation of some buried wisdom or plenitude but rather as a half-finished, occulted call for help in its own right, an S.O.S. from the beyond. Yet, as writing, The Gift cannot help but appeal to both the eye and the ear. And, in mingling visual and auditory metaphors, the book, like the propagandistic talkie, threatens to give too much, to leave us “completely out of it.” Indeed, with the “all clear” both given and received in the closing passage of the main text, it is not especially evident that H.D. felt a need for an audience or that she, like Gertrude Stein, was doing much more than “talking to herself.” I have tried to offer a more generous reading, seeing a love of difference in her love of the same, a desire to save life in all of its diverselooking manifestations, without letting any detail go to waste. Then again, this attention to detail, her persistent drive to synthesize different religions, cultures, nations, disciplines, and time periods into a single system, into one vast extended family, can be the very thing that suggests our generosity is not needed. From this perspective, her decision to bury The Gift in the archives, to keep it half-hidden if not half-finished, was not an attempt to prevent the loss of her gift but rather an attempt to ensure that we, as her readers, would have something to give in turn. Either way, the fact that The Gift was initially published in half-finished form, and so much of the text was more or less lost to the public for so long, suggests that, if H.D. was concerned about her message falling on deaf ears, she had good reason to be. When it comes to the history of her eventual publication and reception, she was in some ways remarkably prophetic after all.

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Coda For New York 1941 from London 1941 Our Coda’s title—“For New York 1941 from London 1941”—draws inspiration from two sources: H.D.’s dedication at the start of her World War II memoir, The Gift, and a short autobiographical essay by Claude Lévi-Strauss. H.D.’s dedication, as we noted in Chapter 5, in part reads “for Bethlehem Pennsylvania 1741 from Chelsea London 1941.” Her text is thus framed as a gift from the war-torn, Blitz-beleaguered present to the past and, more specifically, to Bethlehem’s founding by Moravians and their failed peace with Native Americans. Thus, contra the critical commonplace that H.D. developed her own brand of mythical method, plumbing the past for solutions to both personal crises and the collective trauma of two world wars, The Gift’s dedication suggests precisely the opposite. It is the past that is lacking and in need of a redemptive gift that only the present—a time of war but also of writing for H.D. in London in 1941—can supply. The second source to which our title refers was written decades later but is also about this period and, in more coded ways, about the role of writing during this period—Lévi-Strauss’s “New York in 1941,” an essay that looks back, with nostalgia and a heavy literary hand, to his early impressions of New York City during World War II as a refugee “fresh off the boat” from Europe.1 As James Clifford has argued, Lévi-Strauss characterizes the metropolis as “an anthropologist’s dream, a vast selection of human culture and history” that makes for “unexpected juxtapositions” that are not only cultural but also, given the temporalization of cultural differences, temporal.2 As the essay’s original French title, “New York post-et préfiguratif,” more plainly suggests, New York City presents Lévi-Strauss with an “unbelievably complex image” of old and new, brimming with relics to be salvaged (the stuff of post-figurative New York) as the city, the country, and the rest of the world barrel toward the future (the stuff of pre-figurative New York).3 New York City is also where, as Clifford reminds us, structural anthropology was “conceived 1  Claude Lévi-Strauss, “New York in 1941,” in The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 266. 2  James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 237. 3  Lévi-Strauss, “New York in 1941,” 266. “Prefigurative” and “postfigurative” are also terms that the American anthropologist Margaret Mead used to describe future-oriented and past-oriented cultures, respectively, in her collection of essays, Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap (New York: Natural History Press, 1970).

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and written.”4 Indeed, Lévi-Strauss conducted research for what would eventually become The Elementary Structures of Kinship, first published in French in 1949, at the New York Public Library, where, at the end of his essay, he recalls going every morning during those early heady days in the metropolis. In yoking together Lévi-Strauss’s English title and H.D.’s dedication and thus juxtaposing these two scenes of writing—New York in 1941 and London in 1941— I mean to underscore, as I have from the start, the contemporaneity of efforts in the fields of literature, the social sciences, and well beyond to tackle questions about the nature and role of gifts. Throughout the interwar period, we see writers across disciplines turning to the gift in response to widespread social, economic, and political crises—although not necessarily by turning away from capitalist modernity. Quite the contrary, these crises (including World War I itself and the ensuing unemployment and economic depression), plus the new policies and social movements they set in motion, are what make new moralities of giving and forms of relation imaginable for these writers. Staging an interdisciplinary dialogue between literature and other fields has meant reassessing both sides of this dialogue. On one side, it has meant situating diverse texts from sociology, anthropology, philosophy, economics, and politics within their material and intellectual historical contexts and reinterpreting their relationship to literature and their significance for literary criticism. On the other, it has meant further appreciating the ways modernist ­literature, particularly writing by women, contributes to and counters a much broader discourse on gifts and a host of related concepts. Hence the second implication of our Coda’s title: H.D.’s work is from London 1941 (as Woolf ’s, Rhys’s, and Stein’s are from London and Paris in previous years) and for Lévi-Strauss’s in New York the same year (and Mauss’s in Paris sixteen years earlier). In other words, the writing of Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. is itself a gift. It has something for, and gives something to, not just the past (as H.D. wishes) or to us, its future readers, but also to its historical moment and, more specifically, to the body of writing about the gift generated by these writers’ male contemporaries. While the writing of H.D., Woolf, Rhys, and Stein is illuminated by the latter body of theoretical work, it also returns the gift in various ways. Above all, I have tried to suggest that the fact that they are women is important and comes into play—not because women are naturally inclined to give, of course, but rather because women have traditionally been identified with and as gifts, not just in gift theory but also in Western culture more broadly. Of course, on its own, the mere fact of their identification as women is not an automatic indicator of their politics or perspectives on gifts, gender, and sexual difference, as Stein’s reactionary call for a more patriarchal austerity makes clear. But the heterogeneity of their positions is also one of the reasons that their writing, in my view, has such theoretical interest and value—because their visions of what gifts are and ought to be vary. As important to these visions, if not ultimately more so, is their identification as writers and the characteristically modernist self-reflexivity of their writing about its status as writing. Indeed, if these women writers effectively displace woman as the “supreme 4 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 241.

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gift” it is so that they can uphold writing as modernity’s most promising medium of exchange in her place. It is this gift—the gift of writing in lieu of woman—that the juxtaposition of H.D.’s The Gift and Lévi-Strauss’s “New York in 1941” in particular helps to bring into relief and with which I want to conclude. The sheer redundancy of our Coda’s title—“For New York 1941 from London 1941”—begins to point to what H.D. might call the “strange affinities” between her memoir and Lévi-Strauss’s essay. While entirely coincidental, these parallels (and, indeed, the disjunctions between their texts) are also quite suggestive. Both H.D.’s The Gift and Lévi-Strauss’s “New York in 1941” are portraits of transatlantic transplants during World War II, reckoning with their respective experiences of dislocation, senses of a temporal gap between Europe and the United States, and fears of imminent mass destruction. In addition, both texts represent encounters that take place across a European and Native cultural divide—a divide that, we must acknowledge, originates in settler colonialism but which neither H.D. nor Lévi-Strauss confronts in these terms. These encounters then become symbolic of a far larger contemporary crisis. In Chapter 5 we saw the way that, in H.D.’s text, the initial trauma of failed peace between the Moravians and Native Americans is repeated in the failure of the Child Hilda and her maternal ancestors to understand their spiritual inheritance. The Gift has always already been lost for them and its loss culminates in the terror of the air raids. “New York in 1941” also hinges on what seems to me to be a failed cross-­ cultural exchange of sorts. When, in the penultimate paragraph of his essay, LéviStrauss recalls his daily trips to the library, he notes sitting near a Native American: “There, under its neo-classical arcades and between walls paneled with old oak, I sat near an Indian in a feather headdress and a beaded buckskin jacket—who was taking notes with a Parker pen.”5 In his reading of this moment, Clifford suggests that what the anthropologist finds most arresting about this figure is the latter’s traditional garb against the backdrop of the modern metropolis. In this context, “the Indian can appear as a survival or a kind of incongruous parody.”6 Notably, however, the library’s interior is not quite of a piece with the modern cityscape outside. It, too, consists of survivals of various kinds. Thus, in entering the American room, Lévi-Strauss feels that he is going “back in time,” just as he does when watching the “traditions of Classical Chinese opera” recreated under the Brooklyn Bridge.7 While the Indian (to use Lévi-Strauss’s term) may not hail from the same culture as the room’s other vestiges—its neoclassical arcades and old oak-paneled walls—he nevertheless, to Lévi-Strauss’s eyes, appears to occupy the same temporality. What instead seems to belong to a different temporality, to mark modernity’s incursion into the chronotopic space of the library, is the Parker pen. Indeed, so shocked does Lévi-Strauss seem to be by its appearance and his neighbor’s notetaking that their mention merits a suspense-building dash: “I sat near an Indian in

5  Lévi-Strauss, “New York in 1941,” 266–7. 6 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 245. 7  Lévi-Strauss, “New York in 1941,” 266.

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a feather headdress and a beaded buckskin jacket—who was taking notes with a Parker pen.” It is the pen that introduces a pause, a typographical gasp—but why? For Lévi-Strauss, we may recall, writing is “the discriminatory factor between them and us,” between the “people we call, usually and wrongly, ‘primitive,’” and so-called civilized people.8 The former would better be described as being “without writing.”9 From this perspective, Lévi-Strauss’s shock derives from the discovery that the primitive is, to riff on Marlow’s description of Lord Jim in Conrad’s novel, one of us after all. In this moment in the library, however, the Parker pen does not signify civilization per se. Rather, as Lévi-Strauss’s ready recognition of the pen’s brand begins to suggest, it represents civilization’s barbaric underbelly in his eyes—that is, mass culture. Lévi-Strauss begins his next paragraph, the essay’s last, by wistfully remembering how he and his fellow Frenchmen in New York “sensed that all these relics [e.g., the Chinese opera, the Indian, fast-fading stories and customs] were being assaulted by a mass culture that was about to crush and bury them—a mass culture that, already far advanced in America, would reach Europe a few decades later.”10 Lévi-Strauss’s contempt for mass culture is a familiar late modernist stance. Viewed from this stance, the encounter in the library is cross-cultural in two senses: it takes place between a European and a Native American but it also takes place across a split within culture itself—a great divide, to use Huyssen’s term once more. In Lévi-Strauss’s short text, this divide falls between the culture collected by the modernist ethnographer, an artist of sorts, piecing together whole ways of life from aestheticized artifacts and fetishized fragments of disappearing differences, on the one hand, and, on the other, the oppressive, homogenizing mass culture that threatens to “crush and bury them.” Notably, the European and the Native do not line up along this divide where we might otherwise expect them to on the basis of their apparel. Though the latter is wearing traditional garb, it is the European Lévi-Strauss who is cast as the guardian of tradition against the threat of the pen. Of course, sustaining this fiction—the myth of the anthropologist’s privileged status as a preserver of authentic culture—requires that we, like Lévi-Strauss himself in the library, overlook the obvious: that he, like the other he encounters, is a writer. If the pen, as a commodified, branded tool of writing, stands in his eyes as a symbol of destruction, such a tool nevertheless remains the ethnographer’s primary means of cultural preservation. And yet, Lévi-Strauss in effect disregards this point of commonality, this potential means of communication and ground of crosscultural comparison. Indeed, we see him posit a very different point of comparison in the text he was in the midst of researching. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship what links disparate cultures is their shared foundation in the exchange of women. With respect to this exchange, writing may be more civilized—the very mark of civilization even—but it is also less authentic, many steps removed from the thing itself, the original means of communication and gift par excellence—woman. Woman is of 8  Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture (New York: Schocken, 1995), 15. 9 Ibid. 10  Lévi-Strauss, “New York in 1941,” 267.

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course also on the scene in Huyssen’s account of the great divide between modernism and mass culture. Mass culture, Huyssen argues, “is somehow associated with woman while real, authentic culture remains the prerogative of men.”11 Arguably, for Lévi-Strauss, mass culture and the writing with which it is identified via the Parker pen are similarly feminized in threatening to crush and consume the male ethnographer and infringe upon the sacred space of the library. Considered alongside the strict sexual divisions drawn in texts such as The Elementary Structures and “The Family,” his representation of mass culture in “New York in 1941” reads as an index of femininity run amok, overstepping the boundaries of the house and undermining the divisions of labor and spheres that are supposed to be universal cornerstones of culture. By the same token, we might read The Elementary Structures as an implicit extension of the late modernist logic of Lévi-Strauss’s response to the Native American with the pen in the library—as a definitive attempt to return woman to her proper place via the discovery of the universality of the incest taboo and the exogamic imperative to “give up my daughter or my sister” in exchange for a wife (ESK 62). In other words, it is as if Lévi-Strauss turns to a notion of structure in response to, and reaction against, the threat of an all-consuming mass culture, finding solace in a general theory or fantasy of masculine collectivity in which women are bound to function only as objects of exchange between men, never as exchangers in their own right. In his reading of “New York in 1941,” Clifford aptly suggests of Lévi-Strauss’s representation of his encounter, “Another historical vision might have positioned the two scholars in the library differently.”12 Drawing inspiration from his more speculative tone, I similarly want to suggest that their encounter—or, more precisely, Lévi-Strauss’s later representation of their encounter—reads as a missed opportunity, particularly when put in conversation with the work of the writers discussed in the foregoing chapters of this book. In remembering or perhaps even imagining this encounter between writers as he himself was writing the short essay, Lévi-Strauss might have imagined that writing rather than woman is the “supreme gift,” a fundamental medium of exchange across time, space, and lines of cultural difference. In many respects, this book has been an attempt to demonstrate the many ways that modernists imagined precisely this possibility and thus to join other recent scholars in demonstrating the existence of a modernism quite different from that reified in conventional understandings of modernism as hostile to the market and mass culture. The modernism recounted in Returning the Gift is instead one that capitalized on the conceptual and figurative resources of modernity’s various media of exchange to represent the particular gift that writing has to give. In the context of H.D.’s own historical vision in The Gift, writing constitutes a paradoxical means of perseverance and immortalization. During the air raid in the final pages of the main text, she thinks about the chapters on which she has been 11  Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 47. 12 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 245. Clifford offers his own alternative historical vision when he later addresses the suit brought by the Mashpee Wampanoah Tribal Council in 1976 to reclaim 16,000 acres of land in Cape Cod (277–346).

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working and which we, her audience, have just finished reading: “In the other room, my bed-room, were the chapters, but how could I see and be and live and endure these passionate and terrible hours of hovering between life and death, and at the same time, write about them” (TG 213). One cannot see, be, live, and endure and also write “at the same time.” Although, even in this moment of nominally not writing, H.D., it bears recalling, is in fact writing and is writing, in particular, about the danger of not writing. With the threat of death overhead, she “passionately regretted only this. That the message that had been conveyed to me, that the message that my grandmother had received, would again be lost” (TG 213). Writing— documenting the wayward and misbegotten history of the gift—is the only way to ensure the transmission of her message and foster a future in which she and others could see and be and live and endure. And yet, as Mamalie’s fear that “she might lose the papers” chronicling the peace between the Moravians and Native Americans makes clear, writing always bears the risk of loss, of going astray, of failing—a point further registered in Lévi-Strauss’s own failure, in a sense, to recognize his companion in the library as a fellow writer (TG 158). Whereas Lévi-Strauss represses this failure, translating their encounter into a distress signal on the part of a culture in need of saving, H.D. turns failure into an object of reflection, taking the past failures of masculine exchange—the calamitous effects of which were screaming overhead as she wrote—as an occasion to imagine a form of kinship capable of accounting for the vast community of queer twosomes that populate her personal mythology. In making this claim, I do not mean to idealize H.D.’s vision of the gift or to suggest that we get a less parodic picture of Native American life in her memoir than we do in “New York in 1941”; the Moravians are the clear heroes of her heavily fictionalized history. H.D.’s “gift” is not better or worse per se than any of the other gifts in the foregoing chapters from a political or ethical standpoint. Rather, what most immediately matters is that it is different from Lévi-Strauss’s in two ways that resonate across the various visions of the gift explored here: not only does H.D. imagine a form of gift exchange that includes women as subjects but also, in plotting the conditions of her gift’s reception, she works to account for the possibility of its failure, above all because she is so painfully aware that the gift has a history of failing to reach its destination— particularly the gift of women’s writing. Woolf ’s imperfect hospitality, Rhys’s reciprocal charity, Stein’s political favors, and H.D.’s queer kinship—all of the social possibilities set forth by these writers are tinged with uncertainty and, as we have seen in the cases of the less-than-felicitous fates of Rhys’s and H.D.’s writing, rightly so. Of twentieth-century anthropological theories of the gift, John Frow notes, “It is the question of the return on and of the gift that has preoccupied anthropology since Mauss.”13 At once proving and nuancing Frow’s point, Godbout and Caillé suggest that one of the gift’s crucial elements is the uncertainty of return: “a donor

13  John Frow, “Gift and Commodity,” in Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 103.

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risks an act whose reciprocation is never guaranteed.”14 Return, above all in the form of a return gift in and of thought, is equally a question for the writers here (even in the case of Stein’s fantasy of nominally free favors) but it arises in ways that are consistently tied across their work to gender. It is even tempting to suggest that Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. all exhibit a distinctively “feminine” sensitivity to the ways that gifts can go decidedly wrong, or, as in the case of Stein’s post-celebrity writer’s block, the ways in which they can go too right and garner too much of a return. Their sensitivity is due, I have argued, not to a biological or structural predisposition but rather to an historical one: it is because they are so well versed in the history of women’s gifts—of the creativity that is always in danger of being mistaken for madness or, when it does find an audience, might just give way, as it did for Stein, to over-exposure. The fact that Stein began to link her status as a genius to her status as a woman at the very moment when she gained celebrity ­status is no accident. Rather, this link in effect enabled her to have it both ways, to enjoy the novelty of her literary success while nevertheless ensuring the singularity and specialness of her “literary thinking.” Yet these writers’ shared sense of risk and uncertainty is also a mark of what we might think of as a sort of monetary imaginary. Clarissa’s disturbing comparison of Septimus’s suicide to her own wasteful toss of a shilling, Julia’s inability to garner a lasting symbol and not just money, Ida’s avoidance of thinking only of money, and even H.D.’s return again and again to the figure of “papers” getting lost or burned— all might be seen as products of the gap opened up by money between ideal and real, between symbol and thing. The work of Woolf, Rhys, Stein, and H.D. plays this gap in different ways, recognizing and at times even relishing the excess of meaning born of the disconnect between symbol and thing even as it manifests anxiety about its uncertain future—about the harm that might befall their writing or which, indeed, their writing might unintentionally cause in seeking only to help. While their conceptions of literature are therefore, in a sense, monetary, and their conceptions of money decidedly literary, these writers are also, and most importantly, in implicit agreement about the potential of literature to give. As a medium of exchange, its gift may not, in the end, be radically different from, or superior to, that of other disciplines, genres, or technologies, but at the very least, Woolf ’s, Rhys’s, Stein’s, and H.D.’s writing works, sometimes wishfully and sometimes worriedly to give it in a different way. What it gives may not be, as they sometimes hoped it would, the key to sweeping social transformation. The gift given by their writing tends to be more limited in its reach, though no less social for this reason. At base, their shared gift is akin to the effect of Lévi-Strauss’s use of a dramatic dash to signify his surprise at encountering a Native American using a Parker pen. That is to say, their writing gives us pause. It gives us a rest, room to really do nothing— or at least to do nothing but think.

14  Jacques T. Godbout with Alaine Caillé, The World of the Gift, trans. Donald Winkler (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 62.

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Index Adorno, Theodor  150 aesthetics: aesthetic autonomy  50n80, 147, 155n24, 169 aesthetic value  44, 155, 164–6, 202 concepts of the gift in  17, 19–20, 42–8, 199 distinction 24 of immediacy  85–6 Kantian  85, 169–70 literary value  17, 44–51, 157, 175 of money  154, 156, 160, 191 see also economics (art and); genius; the gift and literature; modernism; Romanticism Agamemnon (Aeschylus)  93–4 Aldington, Frances Perdita, see Perdita (H.D.’s daughter) Aldington, Richard  201 almsgiving  18, 131–4, 137, 141, 145; see also charity altruism  15–16, 54 and egoism (or interest)  18, 21, 57–8, 61–2, 66, 69–74, 103–4 Anderson, Elizabeth  198n2, 199n4, 234–5 “Angel in the House”  7, 50, 90, 93, 108 Angier, Carole  115, 124, 126nn69, 70, 143n101 L’Année sociologique 26–8 anthropology  4, 243 British 51–2 concepts of culture in  46–7, 217 concepts of the gift in  19–23, 41, 42n52, 46, 49–51, 97n76, 129–30, 199, 247–8 feminist  33, 49, 89, 113 kinship theory in  206–10, 219, 223 modernism and  26, 36, 39n46, 49–51, 110n19 primitivism in  8, 35–6 sociology and  11, 27–8 structural  7, 216, 242–3; see also Lévi–Strauss, Claude Appadurai, Arjun  21–3, 33 Aristotle  41n48, 70, 179 Armstrong, Nancy  93 Arnold, Matthew  46, 217 Ashbery, John  188 Ashton, Jennifer  184n101, 188 The Atlantic  149, 153n18, 157n33 Augustine, Jane  226n91, 228, 229n96, 233 Banfield, Ann  86 Bataille, Georges  3–4, 123n61 Baudelaire, Charles  7, 15, 123 “La fausse monnaie” (“Counterfeit Money”)  7, 18, 123, 131–4, 179 “Les foules” (“Crowds”)  116, 123

Beach, Sylvia  112 Beckett, Samuel  24 Beer, Gillian  77n40, 83, 100–1 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library  176n87, 200 Bennett, Arnold  57n106, 75n37, 92–3, 103n86 Benstock, Shari  112 Bentham, Jeremy  69–70; see also utilitarianism Berman, Jessica  9n19, 56, 85, 101–2, 176, 186 Berry, Betsy  119n44, 120, 128n73 bisexuality  215–16, 221, 236 Blair, Emily  93, 97n75 Bloomsbury Group  3, 17, 63, 65, 67, 85, 126 Boas, Franz  34, 41, 46–7 Bonney, Therese  177 Boone, Joseph  100, 103 Borderline (film)  240 Borinsky, Alicia  144 Bourdieu, Pierre  24, 29, 44 Bridgman, Richard  178 Bryher  19, 199–203, 205, 212–15, 219, 222n80, 223–5, 234–8 Buck, Claire  215n59, 222 Burke, Kenneth  94 Butler, Judith  209n50, 216–17 Caillé, Alain  24, 35n25, 41n48, 84, 247–8 capitalism, see commodities; economics; modernism (and modern market society); money; utilitarianism Carson, Luke  151n17, 154, 162, 195 charity  2, 7, 24, 31, 73, 145, 179, 247; see also contract (and charity) Cheah, Pheng  122 Chessman, Harriet  183–4 Childers, Mary  59, 61n119 Chisholm, Diane  206n33, 225n88, 235 Christianity  130n84, 198, 227 Christmas  1, 226 idea of grace in  168–9 Jesus Christ  70, 168, 227, 233–4 political economy and  168–9, 191, 194 see also Moravian Church Cixous, Hélène  50n82, 219 Clifford, James  39n46, 242–4, 246 Close Up (journal)  240 Clytemnestra  93–4, 101 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  44 Collège de Sociologie  3–4, 39n46 Collis, Stephen  204 colonialism  16, 40, 65, 110, 111n22, 120n50, 244; see also imperialism; postcolonialism

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264 Index commodities  90n65, 112, 155n28, 245 fetishism of  174, 191 gendering of  49 and gifts  22n3, 23, 29, 33n22, 36–7, 77–8, 83, 174–5 and money  159, 168 see also capitalism Conrad, Bryce  149, 155, 157n33 Conrad, Joseph  75n37, 84, 245 Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” 15, 44, 46–8 contract  8–9, 25, 29, 32, 37, 151 and charity  7, 18, 114–17, 121–2, 128, 167 failure of  21–2, 134 gift as form of  1, 3, 21–2, 121, 129–30 marriage  133–4, 217; see also marriage masochistic 141–2; see also masochism paradoxes of  127–34 sexual 133–4 war and  129–30, 140 Cooper, John Xiros  10–11, 68n13 cooperative movement, see social movements (cooperative) Cope, Karin  173n81, 174 credit  10, 22, 68, 71n28, 132–3, 151n17, 155; see also debt Culler, Jonathan  13 Davidson, Arnold  117n43, 119–21 Davidson, Jo  188 Davies, Margaret Llewelyn  56–8; see also Women’s Co-operative Guild debt: international  4, 68, 72 gifts and  5, 22n4, 77, 97, 121, 151n17, 182–3 normalization of  155 symbolic  18, 131, 140 see also credit deconstruction  13, 15, 33, 50n82, 115, 121–2; see also Derrida, Jacques; Gasché, Rodolphe DeKoven, Marianne  158, 165n63, 192 Deleuze, Gilles  85, 141, 144n105 Dell’Amico, Carol  109n17, 121n51, 125, 141–2, 144n105 Derrida, Jacques  12, 15, 45n63, 46, 169, 184, 238n121 “Economimesis”  169, 184 impossibility of the gift for  46, 204n25, 122 Given Time  7, 15, 18, 32, 50n82, 68–9, 121–3, 131–4, 137, 167 don (French word)  26, 29–30, 42–5, 199 Doré, Gustave  198 Douglas, Mary  6n15, 35n25, 128, 130, 205 Du Bois, W. E. B.  4–5 Dunning, Ralph Cheever  106 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau  200n5, 219–20, 224n87, 235n117

Durkheim, André  27 Durkheim, Émile  3, 6, 12–13, 27–8, 40n47, 51, 91n66, 123n61 Dydo, Ulla  183 economics  4, 28, 33n22, 66, 207, 209, 243 art and  154, 159–60 doctrine of laissez–faire  69, 71–4, 94, 101–2, 154, 187 economism  11, 13, 19, 108–12, 115, 121, 127, 152, 168–9, 204 law and  5, 21, 25, 30 limitations of economic theory  3, 8, 10–11, 14, 17, 37–8, 41–2, 67–8, 71–4, 120–1 “new economic criticism”  13–14 short sell  22 see also capitalism; Keynes, John Maynard écriture féminine  16, 219n70 Eleusinian mysteries  206, 211 Eliot, T. S.  15–16, 154n24, 228 Ellerman, Annie Winifred, see Bryher Emerson, Ralph Waldo  15, 42–3 Emery, Mary Lou  107, 109–10, 112, 113n30, 117n43, 119n44, 139n92, 143n101 Esdale, Logan  176, 177nn90, 92 ethnocentrism  33, 89–90, 206–7, 240 excess: erotic  98–100, 230–1, 238 of meaning in market society  11, 38–9, 174, 220, 223, 248 as queer  210; see also queer kinship as trait of gifts  11, 16, 50–1, 80, 120n50, 121–2, 134, 137–8, 240 as trait of literary criticism  67 as trait of money  195 as trait of subjectivity in general  6, 14, 16, 86–7, 102, 111, 139–46 as trait of women in particular  6, 14, 16, 18, 50–1, 80, 89, 107–8, 119n44, 124, 136–8, 181 of war  139–40, 234 Fabian, Johannes  8, 36 Fabian Society  54–6 Faÿ, Bernard  154n24, 164 feminine sexuality  88, 101n83, 112, 202, 206–9, 219, 233–4 feminism  16, 49, 59, 64, 105, 133, 158, 176n88 critiques of gift, contract, and kinship theories  6–7, 18–19, 33, 49, 89, 113, 115, 133, 202, 207–8 “feminist” (word)  64, 104–5 French  16, 50n82, 219 and literary criticism  19, 57n105, 61n116, 103n86, 111n22, 113n28, 119, 158, 202, 206, 221n78, 228, 230 see also the gift and gender Flammarion, Camille  237

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Index Ford, Ford Madox  15–16, 18, 106n2, 125n66 Forster, E. M.  14–15, 65, 112n28 Foucault, Michel  208–10 Fournier, Marcel  26–8, 40, 52 Fraser, Nancy  113–15, 121–3, 145, 167n66 Frazer, James  51, 111 Freedman, Ariela  221–2 Freeman, Elizabeth  201, 207–10, 217, 224 Freud, Sigmund  13, 76n39, 112n27, 141, 187, 195, 210, 224, 230–2 analysis of H.D., see H.D. (analysis with Freud) Beyond the Pleasure Principle 3–5 Civilization and Its Discontents  217–18, 239 on female sexuality  101n83 on “inherited memories”  231–2 on Massenpsychologie 12 model of kinship  19, 202, 207–8, 218–19, 230; see also kinship on Nachträglichkeit (“deferred action”)  235 on the telephone  239 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 215–16 Totem and Taboo 231 Friedman, Susan Stanford  202, 205–6, 211n53, 214, 219, 220n75, 221n76 friendly societies  52 friendship  14, 39, 59, 64–5, 72–3, 94, 131, 179–80, 191–2, 197, 218, 220, 222, 224, 236–8 Froula, Christine  73n33, 86, 97 Frow, John  33, 83n44, 247 Fry, Roger  85 Gasché, Rodolphe  33 Gavaler, Christopher P.  226n90, 228 gender, see feminism; the gift and gender genius  2, 80, 153, 194 analogous to marriage  190–1 analogous to money  19, 157, 169–70, 191 analogous to saint  169–70, 190–1 artistic  19, 148–9, 155–6, 158, 164–6, 174, 178, 184 and audience  170–3, 184–5, 189 gendering of  196–7, 248 Gide, André  164 the gift, forms and aspects of, see almsgiving; charity; contract; credit; debt; friendship; genius; gratitude; hospitality; kinship; kula ring; money; poison; potlatch; reciprocity; sacrifice; symbolic thought the gift and gender: exchange of women  6, 49n76, 88–9, 112–13, 132–3, 189, 206, 208, 216–17, 226, 245–6; see also kinship feminine gifts  10, 51, 74, 80, 104–5, 114, 120, 126, 133, 187 figure of female beggar  18, 132, 134, 137, 141, 167, 169 figure of the hostess, see hospitality

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gift as “female property”  49, 109 the house as space of gifts  36, 49–51, 93, 110n19, 123n61, 246; see also “Angel in the House” maternal gifts  16, 115, 220, 213, 228, 234; see also pre-Oedipal desire sexual division of labor  6, 48–9, 109, 115, 134, 137, 143, 158, 208, 216, 246 symbolic function of women  88, 181–2; see also symbolic economies; symbolic thought woman as “supreme gift”  6, 20, 88, 90, 246 The Gift (H.D.), see H.D. gift (German word)  42, 107, 205 the gift and literature: analysis of gifts in literary studies  22n4, 25, 37n38 focus on writing by men in gift theory  15–16, 42–3 gifts in modernist writing by men  14–16, 44–9 literary fiction as a gift  44–51, 57–64, 145–6, 183–6 writing as a gift  2, 170–3, 199–201, 203–5, 238–41, 245–8 The Gift (Mauss), see Mauss, Marcel Glass, Loren  151 Goble, Mark  10, 240n125 Godbout, Jacques  35n25, 41n48, 84, 247–8 Goldman, Jonathan  150–1, 153n18, 155, 185 Gordon, Linda  113–15, 121–2, 167n66 Goux, Jean-Joseph  14, 159–60, 164–5 Graeber, David  21–3, 32–3, 35n25, 38, 41, 52n85, 55 gratitude  12, 60, 75n37, 77, 85, 97–8, 116, 131, 182–5, 238 Gray, Cecil  201 Great Depression  4, 6, 38–9, 52n87, 151–2, 162, 167, 192, 243; see also New Deal; unemployment Greenberg, Clement  47, 150 Gregory, Eileen  198, 199n4, 206n33, 214 Guillory, John  24, 44 Guyer, Jane I.  26–7, 28n13, 43, 63n1 Hägglund, Martin  86, 122n55 Harrison, Jane Ellen  8, 51, 199n4 hau  81–2, 87–8, 129 H.D.  7–8, 14, 16, 19–20, 23, 35, 40, 48 analysis with Freud  8, 198–9, 212–13, 215, 219–23, 230–1 aesthetic and anthropological notions of the gift in the work of  19–20, 198–9 canonization and critique of  24, 202–6 challenge to Freudian equation of gift and phallus 221–3 on cinema  240–1 Hellenism of  198, 199n4, 211, 213–14, 216, 200, 230

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266 Index H.D. (cont.) investment in transformative power of small-scale relations  200–2, 212, 217, 224, 236–7 “jelly-fish experience”  212–15 limitations of a pre-Oedipal reading of her life and work  219–21 The Gift: dedication to the past  238–40, 242–4 “enigmatic messages in”  230–1, 234–5, 238 fluidity between small-scale and large-scale relations in  224–9 gift as language in  229–35 loss of gift in  228–34, 237, 241, 244, 247 publication history  199–200 reflection on gift’s potential failure  246–8 telephone call as model for  9–10, 13, 234–41 Notes on Thought and Vision: bisexuality in  215–16 childbirth and  206, 212–14, 219, 230 gender and sexual fluidity in  214, 216 language of “gifts” in  211 as a theory of queer kinship  206, 210–19, 223–4 other works: “H.D. by Delia Alton”  225–6, 231, 233, 235, 237 HERmione 233 “The Master”  220n75 Tribute to Freud (“Advent” and “Writing on the Wall”)  8, 198–9, 202, 212–13, 220–4, 227, 231 see also Bryher; kinship; Perdita (H.D.’s daughter); queer kinship Heffernan, James  94, 97n75 Hegeman, Susan  46–7 Heidegger, Martin  4, 12 Hickman, Miranda  206, 215n58 Hite, Molly  39, 66–7, 96, 112n28, 117nn42, 43, 119n44 Hobbes, Thomas  129–30, 140 Hogarth Press  69 homoeroticism  19, 73n33, 99, 213–7, 230; see also bisexuality; queer kinship; queer theory hospitality  2, 7, 39, 94, 106–7, 108n12, 247 the hostess  49, 74, 77, 79, 89, 92–5, 97n75, 99, 169, 182, 188 and modern fiction  18, 63–5, 67, 90, 92–5, 101–2 Howells, Coral Ann  109n17, 112n27, 115–16, 119n44, 133n85, 143–4 Hubert, Henri  51, 187 Humanité (newspaper)  52 Hussey, Mark  57 Huyssen, Andreas  10, 50, 150–1, 245–6 Hyde, Lewis  15–16, 33–5, 46, 48–50, 83–4, 109, 129, 157n37, 165n64, 200, 204

imperialism  13, 35–6, 49, 79, 90, 96–7, 107–8, 144n103 British  23, 49, 56, 75, 79, 90, 96–7, 120n50, 158 role in anthropology and sociology  35–6, 40–1 see also colonialism; postcolonialism incest: Oedipal myth of  230 taboo against  187, 208, 246 individualism  8, 17, 30–2, 34, 39n46, 43, 54, 69–74, 114n34, 142, 205n30, 209 Institut d’Ethnologie  28, 40 Irigaray, Luce  50n82, 219 James, Henry  76n39, 157n33 “The Art of Fiction”  15, 44–8, 154 James, William  148 Jameson, Fredric  39n44, 47–8, 50, 217 Jarvis, Simon  23, 45n63, 108–9, 115, 121n51, 122, 168–9, 204 Joyce, James  15–16, 76n39 Ulysses  10, 14, 49n76, 75n37, 185, 228, 235, 238 Kant, Immanuel  39, 85, 90n65, 130n84, 169 Karl, Alissa  68n13, 120–1 Kern, Stephen  212 Keynes, John Maynard  3–5, 17–18, 67–73, 120n50 The Economic Consequences of the Peace 3, 63, 72 The End of Laissez-Faire  69–73, 94, 101 Kineke, Sheila  106n2, 109n17, 125 kinship  2, 39, 213, 223 biologism and  206–7, 218, 227–8 fate of traditional kinship in the modern age  112–14, 208–9 homosociality and  217 as relations of caretaking and corporeal dependency  201n11, 209–10 as rules of marriage and descent  201, 207, 209n50, 216–18 and scale  201, 216, 224–6 as “sex/gender system” (or Oedipal model)  202, 207–8, 216–18, 230 see also Freud, Sigmund; gifts and gender; Lévi-Strauss, Claude; marriage; queer kinship Knapp, Bettina L.  178 Krauss, Rosalind  164–5, 178 Kristeva, Julia  219 kula ring  1, 41n49 Labour Party  56, 73 Lacan, Jacques  15, 141–2, 230 Laplanche, Jean  230–1, 235, 238 Le Bon, Gustave  12 Lee, Hermione  57, 73n33

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Index Lenglet, Jean  106n2, 124, 126 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  9, 33n22, 49, 50n82, 123n61, 209n50, 210, 218–19 The Elementary Structures of Kinship: composition history  7, 20, 243 gender norms in  6, 19, 88–90, 113, 132–3, 187, 189, 201–2, 205–8, 216–17, 226, 245–6 relation to Mauss  7, 12, 18 “The Family”  216–17, 246 Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss 18, 81–2, 84, 87, 99, 129, 143 “New York in  1941” 20, 242–8 see also kinship; symbolic thought Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien  8, 28 liberalism  73n32, 128, 154, 166, 187; see also economics (doctrine of laissez-faire) Liebersohn, Harry  2–3, 26, 28, 41–3, 52nn85, 86, 205n30 Lopokova, Lydia  73 Macassey, Lynden  53 MacDonald, Ramsay  73 “Madwoman in the Attic”  50, 108 magic  81, 111 magical thinking  82, 87, 90–1, 104, 190 Malinowski, Bronislaw  4, 30, 40–1, 51–2, 89 mana  82, 87–8 Mandeville, Bernard  42–3 Manganaro, Marc  26, 39n46 Maori, see hau Marcuse, Herbert  217 Marion, Jean-Luc  12, 45n63 the market, see capitalism marriage  7, 88–9, 94, 113n30, 117n43, 177, 187–92, 201, 209n50, 210, 216–17, 233; see also contract (marriage); gifts and gender (exchange of women); incest (taboo against); kinship; queer kinship Marshall, Alfred  69 Marx, Karl  13, 39, 90n65, 121n51, 156, 170–1, 191 masochism  109, 124–5, 133, 141–2, 144n105 mass culture  10, 47, 144n103, 173 Lévi-Strauss and  245–6 modernism and  1, 10, 68, 150–2, 246 as woman  50, 246 Mauss, Marcel  1, 2, 20, 74, 83n44, 107, 137, 142, 182, 185, 187, 199, 204–5, 243, 247 Essai sur le don (The Gift): aesthetic phenomena and  15, 41–51 British social movements and  9, 17, 51–5 call for “new morality” in  7, 17, 25, 29–34, 55, 63–4, 94, 113–14, 147–8 Derrida’s reading of, see Derrida, Jacques difference from Keynesian economics  68–72 gift exchanges as total social phenomena  28, 31, 43, 66, 151n17

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and institutionalization of French sociology  3, 12, 14, 17, 21, 25–9 intellectual debts of  5, 27, 53 labor as a gift in  21 Lévi-Strauss’s reading of, see Lévi-Strauss, Claude and modern market societies  5, 8–9, 21–4, 37, 109, 168 motif of mixture in  5, 17, 25–6, 30, 31–4, 37–8, 55, 65, 125 patriarchal assumptions of  6–7, 48–9, 89 “spirit of the gift” in  30, 81, 128–30; see also hau see also anthropology; ethnocentrism; “primitive”; social movements; sociology McCabe, Susan  201, 215n59, 240n125 McLaughlin, Kevin  157 McNulty, Tracy  89 Meyer, Steven  12 Mill, John Stuart  69–70; see also utilitarianism Miller, J. Hillis  77n40, 86 Miller, Tyrus  48 Mitchell, Timothy  38–9 modernism: as giving form to the “society” in market society  9–11, 17, 37–40 “late”  47–8, 50n80, 245–6 of Mauss  5, 25–6, 32–4 “new modernist studies”  1–2, 13, 25, 151 presumed “hostility to the market”  39, 67–8, 151–2, 246 representation of modern life as a mixture of gifts and exchanges  48, 55, 60, 62, 65, 67, 74, 76, 79, 95, 110, 124–6, 148, 205 and theory  13–14 utopianism  10, 20, 47–8, 51, 192, 200, 217 see also aesthetics; anthropology; the gift and literature; mass culture; money; sociology (and literature) money: coinage  13, 44n57, 96–7, 104–5, 131, 158, 160, 168, 248 and gifts  5, 104, 110–11, 118–21, 128, 130, 133–4, 136, 168–70, 192–7 as general equivalent  153–4, 159–60, 162, 164, 170, 187, 194 gold standard  18, 38, 155–6, 164–5, 190 and media of modern life  9–10, 19, 37, 151 and modernism  157–8, 164–6 paper  44n57, 157, 168 symbolic aspects of  84, 96–7, 124–5, 128, 130, 136, 154–6, 248 see also almsgiving; capitalism; charity; symbolic economies Moravian Church  202, 205, 225–8, 229n96, 236, 242, 244, 247

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268 Index Morris, Adalaide  35n29, 200, 201n11, 204, 221–2, 223n85, 229, 231, 240 motion pictures  10, 134–5, 139, 151, 225, 240–1 Native Americans: in ethnographic writing  8, 20, 22, 34, 244–8 in H.D.’s writing  40, 202, 225–8, 233–5, 239, 242, 244, 247 New Deal  5, 19, 38, 48, 113, 147–9, 156, 166–7, 178, 190 Social Security  68, 113, 147 Works Progress Administration  161 see also Great Depression; unemployment; welfare state New Directions (press)  199, 200n5, 211 New York Herald Tribune 167 New York Public Library  7, 20, 243–7 Nietzsche, Friedrich  13, 187 Osteen, Mark  2n3, 13, 41n48, 49, 50n82 Outka, Elizabeth  37 Parry, Jonathan  130 Pateman, Carole  133–4 Pater, Walter  214 Patmore, Coventry, see “Angel in the House” patronage  18, 42n52, 203–4 Pearson, Norman Holmes  225 Perdita (H.D.’s daughter)  199, 201, 211, 223 Perelman, Bob  155, 169, 178n94, 183, 185 personhood: femininity and  88–90 intermingling of persons and things  25, 125, 130 legal separation of persons and things  5, 21, 23, 30–1, 125, 130, 182 phenomenology  11–12, 38, 78, 188, 237n118 Picasso, Pablo  155n28, 164–6, 173–5, 188; see also Stein, Gertrude (Picasso) Pindar 42 Poe, Edgar Allan  15, 157–8 poison  10, 42–3, 107, 167, 205, 211 Polanyi, Karl  37–8, 41 Poovey, Mary  10, 44–5 Post, Emily  48–9 postcolonialism  106, 109–10, 231; see also colonialism, imperialism poststructuralism 158; see also deconstruction potlatch  6, 22–3, 33, 41n49, 204, 234 Pound, Ezra  16, 48, 84, 154, 157–8, 164–5 pre-Oedipal desire  101n83, 219–20, 221n76, 222–3, 239, 240n127 “primitive”: gift as primitive form of social contract  21, 129–30 drives 3–4 “primitive mentality”  8, 28 primitivism  8, 26n10, 28, 35–7, 49, 58, 110–11, 124–5, 127–9, 163, 174, 232 as “without writing”  20, 245

psychoanalysis, see bisexuality; Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques; kinship (Oedipal); Laplanche, Jean; pre-Oedipal desire; “primitive” (drives) Pybus, Percy John  52–3 queer kinship  10, 19, 201–2, 206–11, 213, 216–17, 224, 227, 237–9, 247; see also kinship queer theory  3–4, 13, 201, 208–10 Rainey, Lawrence  24, 202–5 reciprocity  2, 10, 24n8, 39, 41n49 in “archaic” societies  3, 25, 28–34, 43, 81–2, 128–9, 151n17, 182, 205, 208 capitalist exchange as form of  23 and class division  59–61 exchange of women as archetypal form of  6, 88–9, 205–6 and gender in modern market society  18, 108, 115–16, 120–1, 123–4, 134, 137, 247–8 impossibility of  59–61, 117, 121–24, 137, 142–3, 183 masochism as form of  125 noncontractual 115 and symbolic law  130 Rhys, Jean  4, 13, 50, 55, 208, 247–8 and Caribbean culture  9, 107, 109–12 ideology of economism challenged in fiction of  18, 55, 106–12, 182 masculine contract versus feminine charity in fiction of  7, 113–17 outsider status in a post-kinship world 112–13 postcolonialism of  106, 109–10 unhappiness as condition of sympathy in fiction of  106, 112, 139, 143 After Leaving Mr Mackenzie: as an act of charity  145–6 biographical and historical context of 126–7 desire for reciprocity in  115–16, 118–21, 133–4, 136, 142, 144 experience of excess and dispossession generalized in  140–6, 169 maternal loss in  144–5 money economies and gift economies in 117–24 myth of feminine excess in  50, 137–40 paradoxes of contractual relations in 127–34 time as a gift in  135–7, 181 Smile Please: feminine fantasy of reciprocity in  124–6 similarity with and difference from After Leaving Mr Mackenzie  126–8, 133, 136, 142 other works: “Discourse of a Lady Standing a Dinner to a Down-and-Out Friend”  115

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Index “In a Café”  116 “In the Rue de l’Arrivée”  106 The Left Bank and Other Stories 106 Quartet  106–8, 110–11, 126n70 Smile Please  124–8, 133, 136, 142 Voyage in the Dark  18, 109, 112, 120n50, 128n73, 135 Wide Sargasso Sea 106–10 see also almsgiving; charity; contract; reciprocity Rivet, Paul  28 Rogers, W. G.  177–8 Romanticism  44, 49, 148, 166, 170 Ronell, Avital  239–40 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano  5, 18–19, 38, 147–9, 151, 155, 158–9, 161–4, 166–7, 170, 173, 179, 186, 190 Rubin, Gayle  113, 207–8, 209n50, 216, 224n87 Ruddick, Lisa  158, 187 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von  141; see also masochism sacrifice  34, 56, 58, 75, 77, 78, 91, 94, 86, 102, 104, 108, 151n17 patriarchy and  162, 187 Sahlins, Marshall  21, 129–30 The Saturday Evening Post  159, 164 Saussure, Ferdinand de  14 Savory, Elaine  109n17, 111–12 Schmitt, Carl  4, 180 Schneider, David  66, 207, 227 Secor, Cynthia  176, 190 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky  217–18 Seligman, Brenda and Charles  51–2 semiotics  13, 159–60 sexual contract, see contract (sexual) sexuality, see bisexuality; excess (erotic); feminine sexuality; homoeroticism; incest; masochism; pre-Oedipal desire; queer kinship; queer theory Shell, Marc  156–60, 168, 187, 191 Sieburth, Richard  157–8 Simmel, Georg  12, 15–16, 156, 182, 185 Simpson, Kathryn  35nn26, 29, 51, 99–100, 103 Smith, Lancelot Grey Hugh  124, 126 Smith, Leslie Tilden  126 Smith, Stevie  172–3 socialism  4, 59, 68, 103, 122 in “archaic” societies  8 British  17, 54–5, 56n104, 69–70, 73–4 of Mauss  9, 12, 21, 52 social democracy  19, 31, 34, 35n25, 52 see also social movements; unemployment; welfare state social movements  4–5, 21, 31, 52–3, 68, 243 cooperative  9, 21, 23, 52, 54, 56, 68, 72n30 see also Fabian Society; Webb, Beatrice and Sidney; Women’s Co-operative Guild sociology  11–14, 25, 29, 49n77, 74, 81, 243 French  3–4, 6, 12, 17, 21, 27–9, 40

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and literature  12, 14–17, 25–6, 34, 40–5, 47, 51 and socialism  52 as study of the “share of the social in thought”  12, 31 see also Collège de Sociologie; Durkheim, Émile; Mauss, Marcel; Simmel, Georg Socrates 212–13 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred  90n65, 156 spiritualism  8, 20, 198, 232, 236–7, 239 Stein, Gertrude  7, 11, 13, 18–19, 199, 228, 235, 240n125, 247–8 call for more patriarchal governance  161–3, 243 commercial success of  149–50, 153–4, 175–6 concern over breakdown of art–politics boundary under New Deal  5, 38–9, 48, 147–53 conservatism of  147, 154–5, 158 criticism of government generosity as aesthetic violation  5, 166–70 criticism of punctuation as “artificial aid”  171–2, 178, 240 figuration of art as a free gift  170–6, 240–1 gift of Picasso’s portrait of Stein  173–5 ideology of economism in late writing of  152–3, 157, 168–70 non-representative aesthetics and non-representative money in writing of  14, 164–6 view of money as a troubling link between art and politics  153–64 Ida A Novel: conceptual debt to money  192–7 favors in  19, 152, 180–3, 187–8, 190–4 friendship in  179–80, 191–2, 197 gift of “rest” in  180–3, 185–92, 195–7 as a gift  183–6 Ida as “publicity saint”  177–8 movement as an American trait in  176–7 as New Deal Künstlerroman  5–6, 12, 178–9, 198 the redemption of patriarchal politics in  9, 186–91 other works: “All About Money”  159n40, 163 “And Now”  155, 167 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 18, 149–50, 153, 155n28, 157–8, 164–5, 173, 175 “The Capital and Capitals of the United States of America”  167, 179 Everybody’s Autobiography  149–50, 153, 154n20, 161, 166, 170, 172, 175–6, 190, 195, 228, 240n125 Four Saints in Three Acts 170 The Geographical History of America 153–4, 156–8, 163–4, 172, 196 “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans”  148, 170–1, 177 Lectures in America  148, 165–6

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270 Index Stein, Gertrude (cont.) Lifting Belly 179 The Making of Americans  148, 172, 178 “Money”  161, 175–6, 187 Narration  177, 189 A Novel of Thank You 12 Picasso  166, 174–5, 195–6 “Poetry and Grammar”  171–2 “Portraits and Repetition”  170–1 Stanzas in Meditation  155n28, 179, 188 “The Story of a Book”  149 Tender Buttons  149, 165, 175, 187, 191 “A Transatlantic Interview”  190 “What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them”  163–6 “What is English Literature”  9, 154n20, 169 see also genius; money; New Deal Strathern, Marilyn  33 structuralism, see anthropology (structural); Lévi–Strauss, Claude; semiotics; symbolic economies; symbolic thought Sutherland, Donald  178 symbolic capital  24, 30, 149, 153n18, 174 symbolic economies  19, 159–60, 164, 166, 191, 194; see also money symbolic thought  9, 18, 81–4, 86–8, 90, 101, 189 zero symbol  82, 87, 99 see also anthropology (structural); Lévi-Strauss, Claude; semiotics Szalay, Michael  148, 154n24, 161, 163 technology, see motion pictures; telecommunications telecommunications: Morse code  211, 212, 239 telegraph  9–10, 37, 211, 217, 237 telephone  9–10, 13, 20, 37, 236–41 Thurnwald, Richard  41 trade unions  56n104, 68; see also social movements Tratner, Michael  68–9, 72n30 unemployment  4, 18, 23, 39, 48, 68, 127, 192–3, 195–6, 243 insurance  5, 52–3, 113, 147, 166–7 see also Great Depression; New Deal; welfare state University of Chicago  177, 189 utilitarianism  3, 23, 25, 39, 69–73, 94, 96, 130; see also economics (doctrine of laissez–faire) value: virtual  19, 155, 157, 171 see also aesthetics (aesthetic value; literary value); money; symbolic capital Vestal, Donald  161, 167 Vogue 177

Webb, Beatrice and Sidney  9, 17, 56 A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain 54–6 Weiner, Annette  33, 49, 89, 97n76 welfare state  3–4, 23, 68, 73n32, 147 gifts and  3, 5, 19, 31, 38, 113–14, 167–70 United States  5, 19, 113–14, 147–9, 151, 155, 166–8 see also New Deal; socialism; unemployment (insurance) Whitman, Walt  16, 48, 157n33 Wicke, Jennifer  67–8, 71–2, 76 Will, Barbara  154, 158, 169 Williams, Raymond  31–2 Willmott, Glenn  15, 35–6, 49–50, 97n76, 110n19, 203, 204n26, 223n84 Women’s Co-operative Guild  56–9, 62, 64, 66, 103n86 Woodmansee, Martha  13 Woolf, Leonard  9, 52, 54, 56, 69 Woolf, Virginia  8, 13, 17–18, 35, 38, 44, 115, 148, 199, 202, 232, 247–8 characterization of modern mind as a mixture 64–7 failed feminine gifts in the work of  104–5 on fiction and social relation  7, 11, 17, 59–62 the hostess as a figure for character  92–6, 159 the hostess as a figure for modern writer  63–4, 94–5 indirect ties to Marcel Mauss  20, 26, 51–2, 54–5 relation to British social movements  9, 17, 56–9 resonance of work with Mauss’s call for a “new morality”  63–7 Mrs. Dalloway: biographical and historical context of  73 feminine subjectivity and social relation in  87–92, 108, 116, 181–2 as gift of social criticism to the reader  74–5, 100–5 the hostess as a figure for modern subjectivity in  87–92 Keynesian economics and  3, 67–74, 120 overview of language and forms of gift-giving in  75–9 sacrifice in  95–7 symbols of imperialism in  90–1, 96–7, 156–7 symbolic thought as social relation in  79–87, 90, 96–100, 124, 158 other works: Between the Acts  97n76, 104 “Character in Fiction”  9, 18, 63–4, 92–4, 101–3 “How Should One Read a Book?”  102 “Introductory Letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies”  57–9, 61, 66, 103n86

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Index “Poetry, Fiction, and the Future”  65–6 A Room of One’s Own  60–1, 93, 232 “Speech to the London and National Society for Women’s Service”  90 “Street Haunting: A London Adventure”  7, 60–1, 65 To the Lighthouse  85–6, 104 Three Guineas  72n30, 104–5 see also economics (doctrine of laissez-faire); hospitality; symbolic thought

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Wordsworth, William  44 Works Progress Administration, see New Deal World War I  2–4, 15, 23, 26n10, 27, 29, 50, 53, 73, 112, 139, 147, 212, 243 World War II  1, 4, 7, 16, 19, 23, 39, 47, 177, 199, 205n30, 227, 237n118, 242, 244 Žižek, Slavoj  141–2 Zola, Émile  18