Women Writers and Experimental Narratives: Early Modern to Contemporary 3030496503, 9783030496500

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Women Writers and Experimental Narratives Early Modern to Contemporary Edited by Kate Aughterson · Deborah Philips

Women Writers and Experimental Narratives

Kate Aughterson  •  Deborah Philips Editors

Women Writers and Experimental Narratives Early Modern to Contemporary

Editors Kate Aughterson School of Humanities University of Brighton Brighton, UK

Deborah Philips School of Arts and Humanities University of Brighton Brighton, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-49650-0    ISBN 978-3-030-49651-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration © Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo, Image ID: G15D7T This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to the memory of Sandi Russell 16 January 1946–23 June 2017

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Kate Aughterson and Deborah Philips 2 ‘Unlink the Chain’: Experimentation in Aphra Behn’s Novels 21 Kate Aughterson 3 Experiment in Prose: Authority and Experience in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters 43 Diana G. Barnes 4 Experiment on a Dissected Reading: Maternal Absence in Frankenstein’s Gothic Gravidity 63 Emily Blewitt and Emma Bell 5 Genre-Bending and Experimentation in Sensation Fiction: The Case of Mary Braddon and Ellen Wood 87 Peter Blake 6 The Ironic Strategies of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening105 Richard Jacobs

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CONTENTS

7 Realms of Resemblance: Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir and Maï Zetterling125 Maggie Humm 8 1966 and Wide Sargasso Sea: The Climate that Made Jean Rhys Legible139 Helen Carr 9 Neo-Victorian Experimental Narrative: Writing the Absent Objects of History in Affinity and In the Red Kitchen151 Claire Nally 10 Troublesome Reading: Story and Speculation in African-­ American and African-Originated Women’s Writing. Resurrecting the Past, Re-imagining the Future171 Gina Wisker 11 Working from the Wound: Trauma, Memory and Experimental Writing Praxis in Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?189 Sonya Andermahr 12 Helen Oyeyemi at the Vanguard of Innovation in Contemporary Black British Women’s Literature205 Elisabeth Bekers and Helen Cousins 13 ‘She’s a Fine Girl’: Early Experiences of Sexuality and Selfhood in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands227 Emer Lyons 14 ‘Daring to Tilt Worlds’: The Fiction of Irenosen Okojie245 Suzanne Scafe Index265

Notes on Contributors

Sonya Andermahr  is Reader in English at the University of Northampton, UK. She has written widely on contemporary women’s writing in Britain and the United States. Her publications include Jeanette Winterson (Palgrave 2009), Trauma Narratives and Herstory (with Silvia Pellicer-­ Ortín; Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Angela Carter: New Critical Readings (with Lawrence Phillips; Continuum, 2012), and A Glossary of Feminist Theory (with Terry Lovell and Carol Wolkowitz; Edward Arnold, 2000). She has recently edited a special issue on Brigid Brophy for Contemporary Women’s Writing (2018) and is currently working on a book on traumatic spaces in Young Adult fiction. Kate  Aughterson is Principal Lecturer for English Literature at the University of Brighton, where she specialises in teaching women’s writing and early modern drama. She is one of the editors on the Cambridge University Press complete works of Aphra Behn, co-editing The Luckey Chance (2020/1). She is author of Renaissance Woman (1995), The English Renaissance: An Anthology (1998), John Webster: The Plays (2000), Aphra Behn: The Comedies (2003), Shakespeare: The Late Plays (2013), has contributed entries on early modern women writers for the DNB, and written articles on Feminist Utopian writing, the rhetoric of plain style and gender, gender and drama in the early modern period, and in  Shakespeare’s late soliloquies. She has co-edited two volumes of the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice on place-based writing, co-­edited Jim Crace: Into the Wilderness (2018), and is the general editor of the series on Performance and Communities for Intellect Publishers. ix

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Diana G. Barnes  is a lecturer at the University of New England. She is a scholar of early modern English literature with ongoing interests in gender, genre, and intellectual history. She has written a book Epistolary Community in Print, 1580–1664 (2013) and various articles on the poetry of Andrew Marvell, manuscript letters, history of emotions, early modern women’s writing, and Shakespeare. Elisabeth  Bekers  is Professor of British and Postcolonial Literature at Vrije Universiteit, Brussels. Her research focuses on authors of African descent, with a particular interest in image/knowledge production and canon formation. She is working on experimental black British women writers and, as part of an international network, on marginalised literary imaginings of Europe. She is the author of Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision, 1960–2000 (U Wisconsin P, 2010) and has co-edited City Portraits (JLIC 2019), Critical Interrogations of the Interrelation of Creativity and Captivity (Life Writing 2018), Imaginary Europes (Routledge 2017 & Journal of Postcolonial Writing 2015), Brussel schrijven/Ecrire Bruxelles (VUB Press 2016) and Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe (Matatu 2009). She is co-director of the Platform for Postcolonial Readings for junior researchers and editor of an academic website on Black British Women Writers (www.vub.ac.be/TALK/BBWW). Emma Bell  is Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of Brighton. Her research focuses on the Gothic, Art History, and women’s history. Peter Blake  is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Brighton. His monograph George Augustus Sala and the Nineteenth-­ Century Periodical Press was published by Ashgate in 2015 and he has written articles and reviews for Dickens Quarterly, The London Journal, 19; Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century and Victorian Literature and Culture. Emily Blewitt  is the author of This Is Not A Rescue (Seren, 2017). She has written poetry in The Rialto, Poetry Wales, Ambit, and The North, among others, and was Highly Commended in the 2016 Forward Prizes. She obtained her PhD in English Literature at Cardiff University in 2016, which specialised in poetic representations of pregnancy in nineteenth-­ century and contemporary women’s writing. She has appeared at Hay Festival, on Radio 4, and participated in the Weird and Wonderful Wales project. One of her poems appears on public transport in three Chinese

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cities as part of a British Council initiative. She is the recipient of a Literature Wales bursary, and is currently working on her second collection of poetry. Helen Carr  is Emeritus Professor in English and Comparative Literature at the Goldsmiths, University of London. Her books include Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions, 1789–1936 (Cork University Press), The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and The Imagists (Jonathan Cape, 2009) and Jean Rhys (Northcote House 2011). She is a founding editor of Women: A Cultural Review. Helen  Cousins is Reader in Postcolonial Literature at Newman University, Birmingham. Her research interests are in contemporary Black British writing around themes of Englishness, belonging and aesthetics. Recent publications include ‘Lindsey Collen’s narrative gift: a challenge to the commodification of African literature’ in  Research in African Literature (2018); ‘As white as red as black as … beauty, race and gender in the tales of Helen Oyeyemi, Angela Carter and Barbara Comyns’ in S. Ilott and C. Buckley (eds.) Telling It Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press (2017); and ‘Black British Writing and an English Literary Belonging’ in K.  Andrews and L. Palmer (eds.) Blackness in Britain. Routledge (2016). She was a Guest editor for African Literature Today 34 special issue ‘Diaspora and Returns in Fiction’ (2016, with P.  Dodgson-­Katiyo) and is co-editing a Special Issue of the journal Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature on Black British Women’s Writing (2022). She is on the advisory board for Postcolonial Interventions: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Studies and an editor for The Literary Encyclopedia (Anglophone African literature and culture desk).. Maggie Humm  is Emeritus Professor in Cultural Studies at the University of East London. She has written extensively on Modernism, women writers and feminist theory. Her academic books include Border Traffic (Manchester University Press); The Dictionary of Feminist Theory (Routledge, selected as ‘outstanding academic book of 1990’ by Choice); Modern Feminisms (Columbia University Press); Feminism and Film (Edinburgh University Press); Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema (Edinburgh University Press); Snapshots of Bloomsbury: the Private Lives

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of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Rutgers University Press); and editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press). Her novel Talland House was shortlisted for the Impress Prize, Fresher Fiction Prize, Retreat West Prize, and Eyelands Prize. The heroine is Lily Briscoe from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Richard  Jacobs  is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Brighton, School of Humanities, where he was subject leader for literature and Principal Lecturer for many years and where he received teaching excellence awards. His publications include A Beginner’s Guide to Critical Reading: An Anthology of Literary Texts (2002,  Routledge), Teaching Narrative (2018, Palgrave), chapters on The Twentieth-Century Novel (Penguin and Palgrave), editions for Penguin Classics, articles and reviews on literature and the teaching of  literature. His collection of lectures, Literature in Our Lives: Talking About Texts from Shakespeare to Philip Pullman, was published by Routledge in February 2020. Emer  Lyons  is a creative/critical PhD candidate in the English programme at the University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ, and originally from Cork. Her critical work looks at the manifestations of shame in lesbian poetry and has been published in Studi irlandesi and The Journal of New Zealand Literature. Her poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in journals such as The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review, The Tangerine, Headland, Mimicry, takahē, Southword, The Cardiff Review, London Grip, and Queen Mob’s Tea House. Claire  Nally is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Northumbria University, UK, where she researches Irish Studies, Neo-Victorianism, Gender and Subcultures. Her first monograph, Envisioning Ireland: W.  B. Yeats’s Occult Nationalism, has been published in 2009, followed by her second book, Selling Ireland: Advertising, Literature and Irish Print Culture 1891–1922 (written with John Strachan). She has co-edited a volume on Yeats, and two volumes on gender, as well as the library series ‘Gender and Popular Culture’ for Bloomsbury (with Angela Smith). She has written widely on subcultures, including goth and steampunk, and her most recent work looked at the development of steampunk in literature, film, music, and fashion. Her monograph on this subject, Steampunk: Gender, Subculture and the Neo-Victorian, was published by Bloomsbury

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in 2019. Her next research project will address the phenomenon of the death positive movement in literature and wider culture. Deborah Philips  is Professor of Literature and Cultural History at the University of Brighton. Her books include Writing Romance: Women’s Fiction 1945-Present (Bloomsbury, 2006, second edition, 2015), Fairground Attractions (Bloomsbury, 2014), with Garry Whannel The Trojan Horse (Bloomsbury, 2015) and with Ian Haywood Brave New Causes (Continuum, 1999), And This is My Friend Sandy: Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend, London Theatre and Gay Culture Methuen Drama, 2020. Suzanne  Scafe is Associate Professor of Caribbean and Postcolonial Literatures at London South Bank University. Her work includes essays and book chapters on black British women’s autobiographical writing, black British fiction and drama, and Caribbean women’s writing. She is the co-editor with Aisha T. Spencer of a Special Issue for the journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice entitled ‘Caribbean Women’s Short Fiction: New Voices, Emerging Perspectives’ (2016); co-editor of a collection of essays, I Am Black/White/Yellow: The Black Body in Europe (2007), and of two Special issues of Feminist Review, Creolization and Affect (2013) and Black British Feminisms (2014). She was the Principal Investigator (2016–2018) of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) Network grant: AfricanCaribbean Women’s Mobility and Self-Fashioning in Post-­Diaspora Contexts. Scafe was a co-author with Beverly Bryan and Stella Dadzie of the seminal Heart of the Race, as members of OWAAD (Organisation of Women of African & Asian Descent), which was among the earliest texts to explore the collective experience of black women in Britain. Gina  Wisker is Professor of Contemporary Literature & Higher Education with principal research interests in contemporary women’s Gothic and postcolonial writing at the University of Brighton. She has written Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction (2016); Margaret Atwood, an Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction (2012); Key Concepts in Postcolonial Writing (2007); and Horror (2005). Other interests are postgraduate study and supervision: The Postgraduate Research Handbook (2001, 2008); The Good Supervisor (2005, 2012); Getting Published (2015). Gina edits online dark fantasy journal Dissections, the poetry magazine Spokes, and is a member of the World Horror Association, board member of Femspec and the Katherine Mansfield Association and past chair of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association.

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

‘Fore-view of the womb opened, full three months’, William Hunter, The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus: 3 Months Foetuses. Engraving by Jan van Rymsdy, Chapter 4, by kind permission of the Wellcome Collection, under creative commons licence (https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ tygek9x2#licenseInformation. Hunter, Plate XXVI, ‘3 months foetuses: 1. Fore-view of the womb opened, full three months; 2. A longitudinal section of the womb; 3. Back-­view of the whole contents of the pelvis, consisting principally of the retroverted womb; 4. The womb opened to show the secundines and their contents’, in Anatomia Uteri Humani Gravidi)72 The child in the womb, in its natural situation’, in William Hunter, (1774) Anatomia Uteri Humani Gravidi (The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus). Birmingham: John Baskerville, Engraving by Jan van Rymsdy, Plate VI. (https:// wellcomecollection.org/works/feawnte3#licenseInformation. Hunter, Plate VI, ‘The child in the womb, in its natural situation’, in Anatomia Uteri Humani Gravidi)75

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Kate Aughterson and Deborah Philips

In late 2019 the fact of women’s experimental writing as simultaneously part of the literary mainstream and yet unusually was momentarily national news when the Booker prize was won jointly by two women—Bernadine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood. Whilst Atwood’s work has a global audience, partly fuelled by the 2018 adaptation of her Handmaid’s Tale, Evaristo’s, despite numerous smaller awards, did not yet have that global profile. Yet their work shares similarities: focusing on women’s diverse voices, histories and experiences, both authors open up debates about and notions of gender, sexuality and intersectional identities in a world where both climate and capitalist emergencies are of urgent concern to many writers and artists. Both Evaristo and Atwood’s work locate a faultline in contemporary global capitalism which dates back to the early modern period’s appropriative intersection of the Atlantic Slave trade, the origins

K. Aughterson (*) School of Humanities, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] D. Philips School of Arts and Humanities, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Aughterson, D. Philips (eds.), Women Writers and Experimental Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_1

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of capitalism and the early days of the industrial revolution, in which notions of both mastery and competitive individualism informed economic, political, ideological and social movements (see Singh 2018), including those of gender and sexuality. Atwood’s aesthetic response to such crises has been a career-long engagement with ecofeminism, through experiments in style ranging from the poetic through the lyrical novel to the harder-edged satire of her more recent work. What has been described as ‘her willingness to experiment’ (Slettedahl Macpherson 2010, i), both in form and content over her long career, enables her to continually make (a)new. Evaristo’s work is often regarded as ‘difficult’—a critical judgement at odds with the reading experience of her writing, which is often immersive and joyful. Evaristo has described her work as recuperative: ‘I want to put the presence into absence’ (Sethi 2019)—acknowledging simultaneously the political and aesthetic choices she makes as an author— voice and writing are political acts. In an interview since the prize she has expanded on this insight and practice, arguing that her multivoiced intersectional novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019) necessarily weaves the aesthetic and political: ‘multiplicity and variety are weapons against stereotyping and invisibility’ (Evaristo quoted in Donnell 2019, 99). Her explicitly experimental style and form are political feminist acts: I describe it as ‘fusion fiction… The dialogue eschews traditional punctuation, which liberates it and creates the impression of voices floating quite freely around the text. The overall effect of so many protagonists and voices is one of polyphony’. (Evaristo, quoted in Donnell 2019, 101)

Experimental women’s writing is at the forefront of political commitment, a re-assessment of past histories that ‘challenge dominant paradigms of power and privilege but do not embody their political content in conventional forms’ (Berry 2016, 4). This collection argues that an urge to challenge gender boundaries is intrinsic to women’s writing; a woman writing or reading can be in itself a subversion, as Atwood’s The Testaments demonstrates so vividly. In a Gilead in which the majority of women are raised to be illiterate, Aunt Lydia’s written testimony is explosive. Evaristo in particular sees intersectional feminism, in its acknowledgement of different oppressions, experiences and voices, as politically and aesthetically interdependent with experimental writing (implicit in Donnell 2019). Recent developments in feminist ethics (Khader 2018) suggest

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that only by questioning and contesting notions and representations of a false universalism can we be ethically human. An Experiment of Her Own builds on a debate begun at a panel on women writers at a C21 conference in Brighton in 2015 on the legacies of the avant-garde—at a conference where most papers were about male avantgarde writers the panel members drew on a strand within feminist theory, emerging from French Feminism, which has theorised and evaluated modernist and postmodernist women’s writing as both avant-garde and experimental (Friedman and Fuchs 1989; deKoven 1983, 2006; Berry 2016; Mitchell and Williams 2020). These theorists rightly problematise the issue of a formal gendered aesthetic as a masculine construction—a problem often implicit in writings about feminist and women’s writing, including the tradition of écriture féminine. This problematisation of the nature of ‘experimentalism’ builds incrementally on Felski’s clear-sighted critique: the political value of literary texts from the standpoint of feminism can be determined only by an investigation of their social functions and effects in relation to the interest of women in a particular context, and not by attempting to deduce an abstract literary theory of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘subversive’ and ‘reactionary’ forms in isolation from the social conditions of their production and reception. (Felski 1989, 2)

This well-timed warning about the importance of ideological context is a crucial reminder that in using the term ‘experimental’ we can so easily succumb to the values hierarchy that is so damaging to women writers and to women. Felski reiterates the important reminder that ‘women’s writing’ is not an essentialist identifiable writing mode—but is a situated historical practice (Felski 1989, 6–7). As this collection proceeds, this sense of a historical practice is always to the fore. Arendt’s view that ‘the sign of the political is not invested in the character of our stories, but rather in the mode or form in which they come into existence’ (cited in Berry 2016, 342) reconfigures for postmodern and contemporary audiences the very political nature of form and mode and hence experimentalism itself. Experimentalism—in aesthetic or political form—is the very essence of political engagement, and the chapters in this book demonstrate precisely this insight amongst both writers and critics, not only for relatively contemporary literary practice but historically. In a world where the value of an understanding of the intersections between rhetoric, ethos, pathos and affect has become politically and

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economically acute, this collection is a timely re-consideration of how speech, writing and culture (both now and in the past) negotiates through, against, with and aside from, dominant modes of representation, thought and politics. An Experiment of her Own suggests that women’s writing and reading against the grain of dominant ideologies, gendered, racialised and sexualised assumptions, must often be experimental in order to be both heard and authentic. Moreover, we suggest that this experimentalism is one which has a history that is anchored not to modernism and postmodernism but rather to experiences women writers have had as outsiders to the literary or cultural establishment. Paradoxically, by being outsiders, women became innovators. There has been no serious reevaluation of a tradition of women’s writing as one of necessary experimentalism as a method of questioning dominant stories, identities and rhetorical modes. This focus on a long tradition is one which has been missing until relatively recently from feminist critical accounts of women’s writing. Showalter’s seminal A Literature of Her Own developed Virginia Woolf’s assertion that any woman writer ‘is an inheritor as well as an originator’ (Woolf 1992, 143) and traced a distinct matrilinear tradition of women’s writing. Showalter argues that: ‘women themselves have constituted a subculture within the framework of a larger society’ (Showalter 1977, 11). Nevertheless, Showalter’s revisionary history of the novel, including her understanding of women writers as a ‘subculture’, did not develop an account of how the marginalisation and ‘othering’ of women in a patriarchal society puts them into a different relationship with the forms and language of a dominant culture and its ideologies—and so into a different relation with the novel form. Showalter’s division of canonical nineteenthand twentieth-century women writers into three generations (the ‘Feminine, Feminist and Female’ Showalter 1977, 13) maps the period of the Brontës and George Eliot (who all wrote under male pseudonyms) as ‘feminine’, that of the Suffragettes as ‘feminist’ and the period after 1960 as one in which women writers were ‘entering a new stage of self-­awareness’ (13). This teleology seems to suggest that only a period of explicitly post-­ feminist writing can be self-consciously simultaneously radical and authentic. Even allowing for the fluidity to which Showalter admits, these categories appear problematic. Mary Wollstonecraft (who only merits two mentions in A Literature of One’s Own) and her daughter, Mary Shelley, were informed by distinctly feminist ideas in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while the writings of women modernist writers, such as

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Woolf, Richardson and Katherine Mansfield, were suffused with ‘self-­ awareness’ decades before the 1960s. Both Moers’ Literary Women (1976) and Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own established feminist literary criticism as a significant academic field, although both had their limitations in their narrow focus on white and heterosexual writers, which, even given the context of the 1970s, represented a significant blind spot (see Todd 1988, 37) and in the limited historical range of their argument which is largely rooted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moers begins with George Sand and ends with Sylvia Plath, while Showalter begins with the Brontë sisters and ends with Doris Lessing. Both critics foreground mainly women writers who work within realism, although they  do include sensation writers, and while Moers does discuss the female gothic, the genre is another notable absence in A Literature of Their Own—albeit one later  taken up by Gilbert and Gubar’s The Mad Woman in the Attic (1979). Moers betrays her assumptions about literary ‘value’ in her Preface: ‘The subject of this book is the major women writers, writers we read and shall always read’ (Moers 1976, xi). Moers, Showalter and Gilbert and Gubar effectively established a female Western canon, a Leavisite—if claimed as  feminist—‘Great Tradition’ for women writers, which evaluated women writers alongside very similar formal, aesthetic and a-political criteria that their male critical counterparts were using to confirm the male European canon. In neither case was their concern with the marginal, whether of languages, dialects, identities, writers or of genres. The indirect result was to reinforce the marginality of women writers who did not fit the Moers/Showalter/ Gilbert and Gubar model of a woman writer, or the teleology of aesthetic and historic judgement. Friedman and Fuchs’ Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction (1989) represented an important intervention in this feminist critical debate, with their focus on experimental women writers opening up a space for an exploration of an alternative tradition, in which experimental writing challenges the language and forms of fiction. They argue that their work is: ‘archaeological and compensatory … in line with one of the most important and active projects of feminist literary criticism, the recovery and foregrounding of women writers’ (xi). However, their collection is archaeological only to the extent that it uncovers under-represented writers from the twentieth century; their understanding of ‘experimentation’ is rooted in modernism, citing Dorothy Richardson as the ‘First Generation’ of women experimentalists’ (301) and nodding in their title

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(‘Breaking the Sequence’) to Woolf’s 1929 injunction to women writers in A Room of One’s Own (55). Through their linking of the textual experimentalism of modernism to ‘feminine’ writing, they suggest that there is both a formal and ideological connection between gender oppression and experimental expression: the textual practice of breaking patriarchal fictional forms; the radical forms – nonlinear, non hierarchical, and decentering – are, in themselves, a way of writing the feminine. (Friedman and Fuchs 1989, 4)

However, neither their theoretical frame nor the texts discussed acknowledge that all those practices have historical precedents and generic sisters. Gray’s Language Unbound (1992) maps the trajectory of women’s experiments in fiction from the modernism of Gertrude Stein, Woolf and Richardson to what she describes as ‘Communities of Diversity’ in the late twentieth-century work of Ntozake Shange, E.M. Broner and Monique Wittig. Gray problematises from the outset the notion of a common language, ‘No woman has a language of her own… among language users, it is women and slaves who have been outlawed’ (1992, 1): as Evaristo (2019) and Singh (2018) also show, only experimentalism, speaking from the outside and as ‘other’ can be valid modes of representation. Although Gray suggests that modernism is largely a masculine phenomenon, women writers have long been acknowledged as central to the modernist movement and in the forefront of its challenge to conventional forms of narrative prose. For Gray, ‘Traditional narrative patterns can only repeat the fictions; they reproduce the cultural script’ (11), and so she searches out writers who challenge the conventions of patriarchal linguistic and cultural structures. Her selection of women writers is, however, like that of Friedman and Fuchs, historically limited to the twentieth century. Mezei’s Ambiguous Discourses: Feminist Narratology and British Women marks a significant shift in identifying ambiguity as a specifically feminist narratological strategy: ‘how feminist narratology locates and deconstructs sites of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and transgression in aspects of narrative and in the sexuality and gender of author, narrator, character, and reader’ (1996, 2). She includes in her collection several essays on Austen in a revaluation of Austen’s experimental style. Hinton and Hogue’s We Who Love to be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics (2002) finds great richness in contemporary women’s writing and

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its experimental focus: but they do not look at a longer history of this kind of narratology. Contemporary feminist scholars and theorists have been in the vanguard of experimentation with forms of critical writing as a means of politically and aesthetically demonstrating that binaries of gendered and sexualised identity are often dependent on modes of thought and representation in which reason, realism and logic intersect with masculine mastery. Julia Kristeva, Monique Wittig, Donna Harraway, Gloria Anzaladua, Cherry Moraga and Hélène Cixous all use creativity and alternative modes of representation as means of collapsing binary oppositions between man and woman, self and other, reason and madness, as well as between theoretical and creative writers. Kristeva and Wittig (with the novel) and Cixous (largely in drama) (Kristeva 2014; Wittig 1971; Cixous 2005) have redefined what critical feminist work is by both arguing theoretically and demonstrating in their creative work that the critical/creative binary so beloved of masculinised philosophy and critical institutions only reinforces notions of woman and femininity as other. In their critical and creative work, they are continuing experimentalists, a philosophical and practical enterprise which has informed most feminist writers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Although The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012) focuses on twentieth-­ century and contemporary literature, its definition of experimental is a timely reminder of what women writers have arguably been doing over this period of 400 years: All literary experiments share… their commitment to raising fundamental questions about the very nature and being of verbal art itself. What is literature, and what could it be? What are its functions, it limitations, its possibilities? These are the sorts of questions that “mainstream” literature, at all periods – commercial bestseller literature, but also the “classics” once they have been canonized, domesticated and rendered fit for unreflective consumption – is dedicated to repressing. Experimental literature unrepresses these fundamental questions, and in doing so it lays everything open to challenge, reconceptualization and reconfiguration. Experimentation makes alternatives visible and conceivable, and some of these alternatives become the foundations for future developments, whole new ways of writing, some of which eventually filter into the mainstream itself. Experiment is one of the engines of literary change and renewal; it is literature’s way of reinventing itself. (Bray et al. 2012, 1)

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Building on this tradition, this collection argues that ‘experimentalism’ in feminist theory and canon formation, which has been hitherto restricted to modernist and postmodernist women’s writing as both avant-garde and experimental (Friedman and Fuchs 1989; deKoven 1983, 2006; Berry 2016), has both a broader and longer herstoriography—the ‘archeological and compensatory’ (Friedman and Fuchs 1989, xiii) critical and creative enterprise that is feminist writing. We go further back than the conventional models of experimental ‘archaeologising’ which Friedman and Fuchs advocate, and suggest we must extend back beyond the twentieth century, and into divergent generic experiments as well. While these critics rightly problematise the privileging of a formal gendered aesthetic as a sole marker of literary value, building instead on Felski’s view that it is the combination of social functions and effects with formal modes (1989, 2) that produce radical or experimental writing, their focus remains both simultaneously relatively contemporary and concerned with a narrow conception of the ‘literary’. Arendt’s view that ‘the sign of the political is not invested in the character of our stories, but rather in the mode or form in which they come into existence’ (cited in Berry 2016, 342) reconfigures for contemporary audiences the very political nature of form and mode—a view replicated in the work and interviews of Evaristo, as we have seen. This collection contends that the gendered nature of writing and culture (still, and 350 years ago) has necessitated experimentalism in a variety of forms and modes by women writers. Berry’s definition of experimentalism usefully illustrates our approach to the intersection of formal and rhetorical experimentalism with political purpose: Emphasis falls on disruption of narrative hierarchy, causal structures, clear teleology, and realist characters. In their place are techniques that stress fragmentation, indeterminacy, dispersion, randomness, contradiction, ambiguity, irony, extremity; an emphasis on performative modes and reflexive structures; a valuing of hybridity and multiplicity as in hybrid genres, subjects, worlds. Thematic emphases on radical difference, heterogeneity, multimodality, instabilities of identity—suggest a breakdown in “the official story” as formerly repressed voices (of women, minorities, queers, outlaws of all kinds) emerge into the mainstream. (Berry 2016, 8)

In other words, experimentalism is not an empty formalism (as Armstrong 2000 also argues) but a deeply political engagement with cultural context by writer and reader.

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There has been no serious revaluation of a tradition of women’s writing as one of necessary experimentalism as a mode of questioning dominant stories, identities and rhetorical modes. This collection draws together chapters on women writers (from Behn and Cavendish to McBride, Zetterling and Winterson) to argue that discursive, formal and ideological experimentalism—a not-belonging—has always been a self-conscious, perhaps necessarily so, rhetorical mode and affect for the woman writer because she is always the ‘other’, outside dominant models and modes of representation. Braidotti’s views on nonlinearity as a model for mapping ‘cartographies of power’ (Braidotti 2011, 4) suggest that experimentalism both has a longer history than conventional histories of experimentalism offer, and that by archaeologising and mapping practices which open up and problematise power ideologies, we can find both commonalities and differences across and through that history. One of the problems of—and accusations made against—any account of ‘women’s writing’ is the supposed opposition between a political stance and aesthetic ‘value’, a problematic in theories of culture and art that refers back through Kant to Plato. Yet as feminist theorists, from Cixous to Butler, from de Beauvoir to Harraway and from Caverero to Braidotti, have argued, feminist theory is—if about nothing else—about transgressing and questioning binaries of identity and culture and value. The question of whether identity politics render ‘inaudible and invisible formally innovative work’ (Hinton and Hogue 2002, 3) is therefore based on a false (and arguably patriarchal) binary: instead, identity politics is implicated in narrative experimentalism—there is nothing more political than rhetoric—as the recent work of the Italian philosophy Adriana Caverero asserts. Voice, body, narrative through female embodied experiences give us a window into truths about ourselves and our histories that ask us to look anew at history and self (Caverero 2000, 2005). Such an approach not only re-evaluates the contents of the canon but the nature of the aesthetic judgements applied to and within that canon. This collection does that in a number of ways: firstly, through an emphasis on historical range; second through a consideration of genre fiction as a mode and voice for both formal and ideological experimentation; thirdly, by considering voices still marginal to the canon of women writers—including women of colour and queer writers; and, finally. in some critical experimentation with content and voices. From Aphra Behn to

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Eimear McBride, women writers have pushed genres, language and form in new directions but—apart from modernist and later twentieth-century writers very recently (Berry 2016; deKoven 1983, 2006; Mitchell and Williams 2020)—their work has often been denigrated as ‘genre fiction’, rather than acknowledged as either ‘literary’ or experimental, or, if recognised as experimental, underestimated for that very reason. This gendered approach to literary history is here challenged both theoretically and historically through close contextualised readings of women writers over the past 350 years. Contemporary feminist philosophical and epistemological debates about identity and narrative (pace Butler 1990; Braidotti 2011, 2020; Caverero 2005)—which offer multi-vocal and intersectional models of identity and voice—have as yet not been fully incorporated into accounts of the literary history of women’s narratives. This collection provides an opportunity to fuse contemporary and emergent feminist narratological debates and insights with a recognition of literary history. This book shows that experimentalism, as both radical narrative and epistemological strategy, has a continuous history amongst women writers in English since the late seventeenth century. The origins of professional writing by women in English lie in the late early modern period and are explicitly associated with the emergence of an epistemological and generic experimentalism: Cavendish argues, for example, that a woman writer untrained in classical genres is forced to experiment, and consequently her first efforts may not be readable. Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn both translated and dabbled in the new philosophy influenced by Hobbes, Lucretius and Boyle: their prose writings literally ‘tried’ out new discourses, new structures and new ways of articulating the self and points of view. Mary Shelley’s novels emerged out of the political and philosophical experimentalism of the Enlightenment. All three women articulated an intersection between revolutions in language and form and the unstable categories of identity and gender in an emergent modern world. The sensation novels of the mid-nineteenth century and the work of Kate Chopin also experiment with content and form to challenge notions of female and feminine voice and self. As Showalter argues, nineteenthcentury fiction ‘forced women to find innovative and covert ways to dramatize the inner life, and led to a fiction that was intense, compact, symbolic, and profound’ (Showalter 1977, 27–28). The first five

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chapters of this book explicitly address this historical emergence of women writers in conjunction with literary, ontological and epistemological experimentalism. For reasons of space, this volume restricts itself to the writing of prose.1 Experimentation has been a trajectory in women’s writing from the beginnings of the novel as a form. Kate Aughterson (Chap. 2) takes women’s experimentation in fiction right back to the beginnings of the novel form and challenges the conventional account of ‘the Rise of the Novel’. She argues that Aphra Behn’s prose writings were intellectually and aesthetically bound in with contemporary ideas and practices of experimentalism and that her work offers a counter to the received idea of the novel as a form that emerges with the rise of individualism. Aughterson points to the connections between Behn’s libertarian position, her gender politics and her aesthetic practice, and reclaims her as someone who should be recognised as a foundational figure in the history of women’s writing and her writing as in itself experimental. Diana G. Barnes (Chap. 3) argues that English prose was radically transformed over the seventeenth century, particularly in the way in which experience came to confer authority across a wide spectrum of genres and writing styles. Scientists and philosophers turned away from the patronage system in which they had served a prestigious individual or family and increasingly turned to self-authorising societies, such as the Royal Society which had its own imprint and journal and means of witnessing of scientific experiments. The success of the scientist, philosopher or journalist in reporting their observations, and in claiming the truthfulness of their deductions, depended upon the capacities of new discourses, genres and modes of publication to confer authority upon experience, and, whilst largely populated and promulgated by and for men, these changes represented a window of opportunity for women writers from the Restoration and on into the eighteenth century. Barnes shows that Mary Wortley Montagu represents a radical experiment in what could be said and circulated by a woman writer. Her public success depended upon her capacity to claim the authority of their experience. Montagu adapted the epistolary form to document her travels to the East in her Turkish Embassy Letters, taking advantage of the discursive flux to claim the masculine prerogative of disseminating new truths grounded in the authority of experience, gaining notoriety and renown in simultaneously critiquing the implicit gendering of prose conventions, and of public authority, in terms that continue to resound.

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Emily Blewitt and Emma Bell (Chap. 4) consider Frankenstein as an experimental text, multivoiced in its use of framing devices, epistolatory form and content—breaking with established patterns of narrative. They argue that in Frankenstein the fictional experiment and the scientific experiment that is its subject interrelate: Shelley draws attention to the fact that both are composed of fragments, the fragments of different accounts and the fragments of bodies that compose the figure of the Creature. The preoccupation with science in the text is, they suggest, also a preoccupation with motherhood and with the body: Frankenstein is haunted by the pregnant body, which itself leaks into the text. The text as a whole thus resists any straightforward reading in its disruption of established ideas of authorship and in demonstrating the process of the creation of an experimental text. Thus these three opening chapters locate the origins of conceptions of experimentalism with ideological, economic and political changes in the late seventeenth century and eighteenth century: a coincidence which Behn, Cavendish, Montagu and Shelley explicitly exploit for both aesthetic and politically gendered ends. Experimentalism was both a new way of knowing and a new way of being and offered a theoretical freedom to women, which Behn and Montagu simultaneously skewer and celebrate. Blewitt and Bell’s argument that Shelley’s ruptures of form explicitly analogise scientific and literary experimentalism enables us to re-theorise what we mean by literary experimentalism. These chapters establish a gendered tradition of self-conscious aesthetic experimentation as grounded in political and ideological functionality: each traces a rhetorical model in which language and form continually disturb and disrupt reading positions— affect is crucial to their experimentalism. Chapters by Blake and Richards (Chapters 5 and 6) take an aslant position on the major feminised genre of the nineteenth century: demonstrating that  generic and ideological aesthetic experimentation is integral to the struggle for an individualised voice, and that the nature of representation (even in neo-realist fiction) was always self-consciously provisional. The knowingness of such voice(s) acknowledge aesthetics as a space for experiments in style, identity and reading. Elaine Showalter does include the Victorian sensation novelist in her tradition of women writers, but, while suggesting that they subvert Victorian gender roles, she sees also them as ‘brash’, speaking witheringly of the ‘high spirits and comic exuberance of the sensationalists’ (Showalter: 181). Peter Blake (Chap. 5) takes Mary Braddon and Ellen Wood rather

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more seriously, arguing that in bending genres they radicalise notions of femininity and voice through challenging dominant forms of realism. This intermixing of genres enables both writers to engage both formally and polemically with the ‘uncertainty of the new urban society’ of the late nineteenth century and do so with a new focus on women and femininity. Popular genres, particularly those associated with women writers, such as sensationalism and the gothic, precisely because they have been read as ‘feminine’ genres, have been underestimated in their challenges to the conventions of form, language and contemporary gender roles. The subversion of popular fictions is a tradition that has continued into the work of contemporary feminist writers. Fay Weldon first published The Hearts and Minds of Men as a magazine serial romance, Angela Carter rewrote the fairy tale, and Atwood has experimented with science fiction (although she prefers the term ‘speculative fiction’), romance and the adventure narrative. Like Blake, Richard Jacobs reads Kate Chopin’s The Awakening as a text that goes beyond the conventions of its genre and reads it as a far-­ reaching, proto-modernist and radically experimental text (Chap. 6). Kristeva’s notion that ‘Literary creation is the adventure of the body and signs that bears witness to the affect – to sadness as imprint of separation and the beginning of the symbol’s sway’ (Kristeva 1987, 22) posits the text as body/body as text and understands radical writing as an exploration of this indeterminate interface. Jacobs suggests that Chopin’s writing playfully crosses and recrosses those boundaries. In a close reading of the novel, Jacobs identifies a number of daring and innovative strategies which take the novel beyond the surface ‘adultery plot’ of a ‘fallen woman’, to suggest Edna’s awakening sexuality as auto-erotic, amounting to a critique of the hetero-normative romantic conventions of the period. As Maggie Humm puts it, to say that ‘Virginia Woolf is an experimental writer is now a truism’ (Chapter 7). A study of Woolf’s experimentation would require a collection to itself, and has indeed been much debated,2 but Humm approaches the significance of Woolf from an oblique angle, in tracing an alternative women’s tradition of reading and identifying ‘the historical ties and resemblances’ between Woolf and two women not usually directly associated with her, Simone de Beauvoir and Mai Zetterling. In tracing the connections between these three women  writers and in identifying ‘realms of resemblance’ between them, she argues that recognising an unacknowledged history of women’s reading can enhance and enlarge our understanding of Woolf’s legacy: the work of feminist critics is

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thus archaeological and compensatory in unearthing new connections and possibilities between women writers we think we know well. Helen Carr (Chapter 8) here  re-evaluates Jean Rhys, whose reputation  now largely rests on the 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea. She argues that Rhys’ pre-war fiction is experimental in a way that unsettled contemporary readers, and that it was only with the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea that feminist critics caught up with her concerns with gender and racial identities. Carr argues that the ‘searing social critique’ of Wide Sargasso Sea, so valued by 1960s feminists, were already present in the earlier pre-war novels. She links Rhys to a new generation of women’s fiction which explored similar territory: Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1967) and with Caribbean writers, such as Sam Selvon and George Lamming. Carr argues against an autobiographical reading of Rhy’s earlier fiction and suggests instead that her writing is deeply political and that those politics are always embodied in individual lives in her narratives. Claire Nally debates contemporary texts which make use of a traditional genre form—the ghost story—arguing that contemporary women writers have explicitly subverted and drawn attention to the conventions of that genre (Chap. 9). She reads the novels of Sarah Waters and Michèle Roberts as texts which, while making use of tropes of the gothic, simultaneously deploy narrative strategies that serve to undermine patriarchal structures of language and form and the conventions of reading. She argues that, in their experimental Neo-Victorianism, Waters and Roberts write a form of ‘radicalized historical fiction’, encompassing fragmented multivoicedness, which in their dialogic writing raises questions about the discipline of history and its relation to gender and to fiction. Both narratives are correlated with the traumas of patriarchy (the ghost, sexual abuse, mental illness) and textually play out and make visible the repressed, the unsaid. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983), Maya Angelou’s I know why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) rewrote the silenced histories of African American women’s lives, troubled complacent reading practices and permanently changed the landscape of why and how readers engage with writing. Gina Wisker (Chap. 10) suggests that their work challenges scant, received knowledge and conventional views of black women’s lives through forms of experimentation which revive and revalue folklore and folk expression, oral storytelling, music and the worth of the imaginary, in the form of the supernatural. Latterly these forms have been further developed by Nalo Hopkinson and Tananarive Due who, like

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Morrison in particular, use the power of the speculative to imagine forwards into other ways of being, through afrofuturism. This essay situates these authors’ work in testimony and considers the afrofuturist rewriting of controlling tales and the magical possibilities of Nalo Hopkinson’s work. Sonya Andermahr examines Jeanette Winterson’s experimental writing praxis in her 2011 memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Chapter 11). Focusing on the intersection between trauma, memory and experimental narrative forms, it locates the text as a ‘limit-case autobiography’ (Gilmore 2001, 1), which transgresses the boundaries of autobiography, historical discourse, myth and fiction. The text draws on a range of narratives as a framing device for conveying Winterson’s account of her traumatic childhood experiences of abandonment, adoption and emotional neglect. Acknowledging the radical provisionality of memory, the text provides a version or reconstruction of events and Winterson’s shifting responses to them. In revisiting the experiences explored in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson presents her earlier work as a ‘cover story’—usually seen as postmodern device to foreground the artifice of fiction, the memoir reconfigures the cover story as a narrative strategy to ‘cover over’ material which is/was unspeakable. Thus, the memoir encourages us to reread Winterson’s fiction in the light of traumatic omission and textual survival strategy. As in limit-case autobiographies, the memoir has no clear-cut resolution: although Winterson is reunited with her birth mother some 50 years after her adoption, there is no unambiguous healing of wounds. Moreover, while Winterson acknowledges the power of stories to mitigate suffering, she adopts a more ambivalent model of ‘working from the wound’ in which trauma is acknowledged as an aspect of self. For her, trauma carries a double legacy as something which motivates her work but which writing can never entirely ‘heal’. Andermahr argues that textual experimentation replicates, shadows and plays out experiences and feelings of loss and dislocation, which themselves echo our human desire, and search, for the mother. Elisabeth Bekers and Helen Cousins offer a counternarrative of African and Afro-Caribbean women as in the vanguard of experimental writing in Britain (Chapter 12). They chart the work of key figures from Buchi Emecheta writing in the 1960s to contemporary novelists such as Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith and Bernadine Evaristo, acknowledging how far their work is now recognised and celebrated in the literary establishment, to the extent that writing by black British women is now acknowledged as a field in its own right. However, they challenge such evaluations for their

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emphasis on politics at the expense of aesthetics and form: their foregrounding of aesthetics refocuses the more common critical assessments of black British women’s literature, which are concerned predominantly with the authors’ thematic commitment to issues of gender, ethnicity and race. Rather than reading the texts as ‘ethnographical’ or sociopolitical, Bekers and Cousins pay tribute to the willingness to innovate that permeates much writing by black British women in the twenty-first century— particularly their penchant for such strategies as linguistic experimentation, hybrid cross-genre writing, intertextuality and metafiction, for which they draw on diverse heritages, including myth, literature and history from Africa, the Caribbean and Europe. Black British women writers’ formal and generic experimentation is a crucial act of reclamation and political activism. Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed thing and Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands are both avowedly experimental novels, and critically recognised as such, and Emer Lyon’s reading is in itself experimental (Chapter 13). Her reading explicitly utilises postmodern feminism to authenticate a criticism that leans ‘towards the critic’s own female experience or herstory’, both in terms of her use of autobiography and in choosing to write ‘An Autotheoretical’ account of the novels. Experimentalism lies not only in the linguistic and formal playfulness of both novels but in the intersections between critical and auto-fictional voices. Response and reading are necessary affective parts of the reading and knowing process of the woman reader/writer. Lyons argues that McBride and Roche write about ‘that which many would prefer to be kept quiet’ forcefully claiming that ‘Literature needs more filthy girls written by filthy women … packs of them’. Like Jacobs’ chapter on Chopin, this call to refocus on female bodies as performed and speaking positions echoes and updates Cixous’ rallying cry in 1976 in ‘the Laugh of the Medusa’: ‘woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies’ (Cixous 1976, 875). Suzanne Scafe focuses on Irenosen Okojie (Chap. 14) as a writer who comes from the space of ‘communities of diversity’ that Gray identifies, a writer who breaks ‘from within the multi-othered spaces of Western patriarchal culture that are so vulnerable to silence’ (Gray, 135). Scafe reads Okojie as a woman who ‘dares to tilt worlds’, as the epigraph to one of her novels puts it, and celebrates her as a writer whose work challenges readers and refuses straightforward readings that could ‘normalise the strangeness … of different realities’. Okojie, Scafe argues, will not allow for any

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Westernised exoticisation of her work as a black woman writer: instead her fiction provides new perspectives which ask for a ‘rereading’ of British fiction. In her fictional practice, Okojie develops a space in which black women writers can experiment with language, form and content, in a way that challenges Western convention, but which sustains its own logic. Figuring as the final chapter in our book, this account opens up debates about how ‘black lives matter’ can be sustained and debated in literary texts, groups and departments in the years to come. A collection of this kind can only ever be partial, and this is by no means a comprehensive account of the enormous range and variety in women’s experimentation with the novel form. The selection of writers and texts here is intended to be suggestive and to point to a lineage and a history of interconnections that we would suggest has remained largely unacknowledged in feminist literary criticism. We have pointed to key moments in which women writers stretched the possibilities of prose writing, in ways that may not have been recognised. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of course represent the moment of formal and self-conscious experimentation across the arts, and no feminist writer after Woolf can ignore the impact of her work on our understanding of what a novel can be. The experimentation of the modernist women informs contemporary women writers; Jeanette Winterson in particular identifies herself as a successor to Woolf. Women writing in the shadow of modernism are aware of the significance and formal aesthetics of their own experimentation in a way that earlier writers could not have been. There is therefore inevitably a predominance of chapters in this collection that focus on the fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We hope that readers will make connections and be prompted to engage with the writers and work that precedes the rich vein of contemporary experimental writing. Our collection itself is an experiment in critical collections—Kristeva and Cixous have consciously challenged the boundaries between the creative and the critical in their careers and their theoretical writings, Cixous in her work on theatre, Kristeva in moving into fiction, and both make use of poetics in their critical work. In our collection, Lyons employs auto-ethnography and brings her own memory to bear in her analysis of two contemporary experimental novels, and Humm brings archival and oral history into the writing in her discussion of imaginaries between Woolf, Zetterling and de Beauvoir, enabling her to draw previously unrecognised connections between women not usually associated with one another. Existing, as they do, alongside more conventionally critical essays, these chapters act as

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evidence of a continuing challenging of critical, conceptual and formal boundaries in women’s writing and feminist theory. Our aim is also to open up an account of ‘experimental women’s writing’ that goes beyond formal literary modernisms to address texts and authors which exist outside the conventional canons. We argue that experimentation with language and form is not just a formal aesthetic strategy that is restricted to ‘literary fiction’ but that it is also to be found in genre fiction and in other forms of prose writing. Science fiction, melodrama, sensation novels and the gothic are all genres in which women writers have excelled, and all are forms which challenge and subvert the conventions of realist narrative. A refusal to marginalise genre fiction is important in establishing that there is a strong and feminist tradition in the subversion of the novel form that goes back long beyond the modernist period. Feminist criticism must challenge conventional canonical understandings of literature and of history, especially when those readings have come from feminists themselves. This has been a difficult collection to edit, not because of the difficulty of the texts or of the contributors but because of circumstances. Over the course of compiling the collection, two of our contributors left academia, and two were unable to submit because they were overburdened with work commitments. Our position as women has also impacted on the collection, two other contributors had to drop out because of their responsibilities as carers for husbands, parents and children, and one has died—this collection is dedicated to her. We would like to thank all those stalwart women who stepped into the breach and who, despite the challenges of being a contemporary woman writer and/or academic, believed that it was important to assert an alternative tradition of women’s writing and to share in developing its herstory.

Notes 1. We hope that this is the first in a planned series of three volumes, with the two following to focus on women’s experimental writings in drama and poetry. 2. See Fernald (2015) for a summary of the critical history.

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Works Cited Armstrong, Isobel. 2000. The Radical Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell. Anzaldua, Gloria. 2012. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Berry, Ellen E. 2016. Women’s Experimental Writing: Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique. London: Bloomsbury. Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2019. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2020. Posthuman Feminism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bray, J., A.  Gibbons, and B.  McHale, eds. 2012. The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge. Caverero, Adriana. 2000. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. London: Routledge. ———. 2005. For More than One Voice: Towards a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1976. The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs 1 (4): 875–893. ———. 2005. Stigmata: Escaping Texts. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. deKoven, Marianne. 1983. A Different Language. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2006. Jouissance, Cyborgs, and Companion Species: Feminist Experiment. PMLA 121 (5): 1690–1696. Donnell, Alison. 2019. Writing of and for Our Time. Wasafiri 34 (4): 99–104. Evaristo, Bernadine. 2019. Girl, Woman, Other. London: Hamish Hamilton. Felski, Rita. 1989. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fernald, Annie E. 2015. Virginia Woolf and Experimental Fiction. In A Companion to British Literature, ed. Robert de Maria, Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacker, vol. 4, 246–259. Oxford: John Wiley. Friedman, Ellen, and Miriam Fuchs, eds. 1989. Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. 1979. The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New  York: Yale University Press. Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Gray, Nancy. 1992. Language Unbound: On Experimental Writing by Women. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Harraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble (Experimental Futures). Durham: Duke’s University Press.

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Hinton, Laura, and Cynthia Hogue. 2002. We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Khader, Serene. 2018. Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. New  York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1987. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New  York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2014. Teresa My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila. New York: Columbia University Press. Mezei, Kathy. 1996. Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Mitchell, Kaye, and Nonia Williams. 2020. British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Moers, Ellen. 1976. Literary Women. London: Virago. Moraga, Cherrie. 2001. The Hungry Woman. New York: West End Press. Sethi, Anita. 2019. Interview with Bernadine Evaristo. The Guardian, April 27. Singh, Julietta. 2018. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Durham: Duke University Press. Slettedahl Macpherson, Heidie. 2010. The Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Showalter, Elaine. 1977. A Literature of Their Own: from Brontë to Lessing. London: Virago. Todd, Janet. 1988. Feminist Literary History: A Defence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wittig, Monique. 1971 The Guérillères. Trans. David le Vey. London: Peter Owen. Woolf, Virginia. 1992. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 2

‘Unlink the Chain’: Experimentation in Aphra Behn’s Novels Kate Aughterson

The founding of the Royal Society in 1660 epitomised the philosophical adventurism of early modern England: aiming to harness Baconian experimental philosophy with entrepreneurial economic or colonial development, the Royal Society has often also been associated with what became known as a Whiggish political ideology of individual liberty, in opposition to the potential absolutism of Stuart monarchicalism.1 However, this version of historical and cultural ideas is itself intrinsically Whiggish: it assumes both a progressive trajectory of political developments and a binary association between theories of political individualism and scientific experiment (Webster 1975).2 The very fact that the society which espoused experimental thought was patronised by the monarch, and had fought for recognition under the protectorate, is evidence enough of the more complex relationships between politics, experimentalism and individualism (Webster 1975, 484–522). Experimentalism was not only a means of trialling new ideas and technical inventions but also a mode of being, a way of thinking. Robert Boyle wrote in 1690:

K. Aughterson (*) School of Humanities, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Aughterson, D. Philips (eds.), Women Writers and Experimental Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_2

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[the virtuosi] consult Experience both frequently and heedfully; and not content with the Phaenonmena that Nature spontaneously affords them, they are solicitous, when they find it needful, to enlarge their Experience by Tryals purposely devis’d; and ever and anon Reflecting upon it, they are careful to Conform their opinions to it; or, if there be just cause, Reform their Opinions by it (Boyle 2000, 292).

Thomas Sprat’s magisterial and influential History of the Royal Society (1667) particularly celebrated the necessary intersection between the development of experimental ideas and new knowledge alongside an appropriate experimental style: Thus they [the men of the Royal Society] have directed, judg’d, conjectur’d upon and improved Experiments. But lastly, in these and all other businesses, that have come under their Care; there is one thing more, about which the Society has been most solicitous; and that is, the manner of their Discourse; which, unless they had been very watchful to keep in due Temper, the whole Spirit and Vigour of their design had been soon eaten out, by the luxury and redundancy of Speech. ... They [The Royal Society] have therefore been more rigorous in putting in Execution the only Remedy that can be found for this Extravagance; and that has been a constant Resolution to reject all Amplifications, Digressions, and Swellings of Style; to return back to the primitive Purity and Shortness, when Men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal Number of Words. (Sprat 1667, Part II, section xx, 112–3)

Aesthetics and thinking were equally and explicitly experimental in the period following Charles II’s Restoration to the monarchy in 1660. But, crucially, this radical insight was gendered as both a masculine pursuit (Margaret Cavendish was famously denied membership of the Royal Society)3 and experimental style as an explicitly masculinised practice. Spratt goes on to proclaim: This conclusion [should] be made: that if ever our Native Tongue shall get any Ground in Europe, it must be by augmenting its experimental Treasure. Nor is it impossible, but as the Feminine Arts of Pleasure and Gallantry have spread some of our neighbouring Languages to such a vast Extent; so the English Tongue may also in time be more inlarg’d by being the Instrument of conveying to the World the Masculine Arts of Knowledge. (119)

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Feminist re-readings of science and masculinism in the late seventeenth century have contributed much to our knowledge of the ways in which the philosophy of science, methodologies and language have been complicit from the early modern period in the solidification of a bourgeois binary gender system.4 Equally, recent work on the intersection of the discourses of mastery in the practices of science, slavery and proto-capitalism has proved illuminating (Singh 2018). I argue here that Behn’s prose fiction and translations were intellectually and aesthetically engaged with these contemporary ideologies and practices of experimentalism. Ian Watt’s classic text The Rise of the Novel (1957) linked the emergence of the new genre to the rise of bourgeois individualism, reifying Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as the archetypal novel. This historiography has been rightly challenged by materialist and feminist critics, who variously acknowledge Behn, Manley and Haywood as Defoe’s contemporaries or predecessor practitioners of the novel, as well as complicating an exact equation between individualism, style and form (Todd 1987; Armstrong 1987; Spender 1988; Spencer 1986; Ballaster 1993; Carnell 2006). Nevertheless, there remains a critical consensus that a new genre emerges in the early modern period, recognised by contemporary readers, writers and booksellers by the unstable noun ‘novel’ (news/new thing), which gradually came to refer to the genre. Aphra Behn’s prose publications from 1684 until her death in 1689 were dominated by experiments in this new form. By particularly locating Aphra Behn’s experiments of the 1680s within the context of her political and dramatic career and contemporary philosophical experimentalism, this chapter both acknowledges those feminist re-calibrations of the history of the novel and develops a more explicitly aesthetic account of that experimentalism through close textual analysis of Behn’s experimental prose techniques. I suggest that a binary classification of experimentalism with liberal or left-leaning politics is a simplification of the relationship between aesthetics and politics and, conversely, that the recent critical commonplace that Behn’s Tory politics dominate all her political thinking and writing is a reductive simplification of both her political views and her aesthetic practice.5 Through such analysis, we can return to larger questions about how we might describe experiments in the novel form, as well as Behn’s status as an innovative writer and thinker. Behn ‘s writing career follows a trajectory which partly mirrors political pressures: between her first staged play in 1670 and 1682, she wrote and produced 11 plays for the public stage, as well as one collection of poetry.

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In the early 1680s two separate events affected theatrical production for all playwrights: the two theatre companies merged to form a single monopoly (due to financial pressures particularly on the King’s Company) and the attempted Whig rebellion to dethrone Charles II (known as the Rye House Plot in 1682–3) was discovered and defeated. The theatrical monopoly meant reduced commercial competitive pressure for the new United Company to produce new plays. The Rye House Plot generated genuine political anxiety about another civil war, and political plays (of whatever party) were not performed, as Behn’s Preface to her Luckey Chance in 1686 testifies. Perhaps Behn was already turning her aesthetic to prose fiction and translation, and the dearth of theatrical opportunities enabled her to concentrate on these. For the next seven years, until her death, her output was extraordinary. In addition to three plays (The Luckey Chance in 1686, The Emperor of the Moon in 1687 and the posthumous Widow Ranter in 1689) and some poetry collections, Behn wrote and published a huge range of prose, both original and translated. In 1684 she produced the first part of Love Letters from a Nobleman to His Sister. In 1685, she followed with the second volume and her translation of Rochefoucauld’s Maxims as Seneca Unmasqued or Moral reflections from the French. In 1686, she produced her translation of Bonnecourse’s The Lover’s Watch. In 1687, she translated a version of Aesop’s Fables and produced the third part of Love Letters. In 1688 she produced further experiments in the novel with Oroonoko, The Fair Jilt and Agnes de Castro and the translation of Fontanelle’s A Discovery of New Worlds and in 1689, the year of her death, the novellas The History of the Nun, or the Fair Vow Breaker and The Lucky Mistake. It is impossible in a short chapter to do credit to these individual works—instead I shall identify how Behn is explicitly experimenting with modes of prose fiction and forging the lineaments of the British novel. In the second volume of Behn’s three-part novel Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1685) Silvia writes a letter to Octavio (her lover’s confidant) protesting her feelings about her recent discovery that her lover Philander has been betraying her whilst abroad on supposed political business. Using the contemporary language of mutual contractual obligations, she claims ‘if he unlink the Chain I am at perfect liberty’6 (Love Letters, 201). Here Silvia, the novel’s heroine, invokes both the language of contract (‘unlink the chain’) and the language of libertinism (liberty as sexual freedom) in one short phrase. The previous letters between the two lovers debate the question of sexual freedom heatedly in

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the conventional carpe diem terms of the seventeenth century, particularly through Philander’s active and aggressive courtship of Silvia, from his first letter onwards (Love Letters, 11–12). In defending the superiority of erotic love over the social conventions of marriage, Philander invokes all the tropes of the Restoration Libertine: and during the course of the novel, Silvia comes to mirror this language and even to find a female version of it in her described gaze over his body. The language of obligation (often associated with Tory political monarchical theory in the early modern period) is juxtaposed with the language of libertinism. In particular, Silvia’s voice in a letter to Philander, whilst celebrating her delight in his physical appearance and her erotic feelings towards him, also urges him to remain faithful to his monarch, and not to follow the rebels (Love Letters, 37–43). This particular letter implies two versions of ‘liberty’: for Philander, sexual and political liberties are mutually co-extensive and consequent upon a philosophical belief in Hobbesian individualism. However, for Silvia sexual liberty does not connote political individualism: alongside her female libertinism, she retains an attachment to political and social theories of obligation. Many critics have seen this position as indicative of Silvia’s confusion or innocence, or have cited it as proof of Behn’s political Toryism (and therefore implied conservativism), arguing that Behn suggests Silvia’s folly, or fall into sexual experience, is because she cannot connect the personal to the political, sexual libertinism to political libertinism and disentangle Philander’s arguments (Behn 1993, vol 3, notes; and Carnell 2006, 44–73). But Silvia emerges as a shrewd linguistic operator by developing and working through an intertwining of these two opposed discourses. Silvia’s sense of what ‘obligation’ means evolves into her implicit evocation of a contract (‘if he unlink the chain’) between a man and a woman, in which each can mirror the other’s actions and language, in which a man and woman have equal obligations. Silvia’s character consistently focuses on how language works to represent and construct emotion, action and response. For example, in one letter to Philander, she writes: The Rhetorick of Love is half-breath’d, interrupted words, languishing Eyes, flattering Speeches, broken Sighs, pressing the hand and falling Tears. (Love Letters, 33)

Despite her expressed desire in this letter to argue logically against such rhetoric, she admits its overwhelming power: she sees it both as a discursive

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construction and yet succumbs to it; she is both inside and outside the language. I suggest that Behn’s novels are equally compromising. Behn both uses dominant rhetorical models and genres and supersedes them: she thus can be said to resonate both within and beyond her cultural contexts (and perhaps this is a definition of the experimental feel of women’s writing). She ‘unlinks the chain’ of conventional generic and discursive representations and referents through both aesthetic (formal, grammatical and linguistic, technical) experiments and a validation of the female voice and gaze. Behn’s translation of Rochefoucauld’s Maxims (1686), with their philosophical emphasis on sceptical engagement with the social and political world, alongside a formal commitment to a Senecan aesthetic of an abrupt, pointed style, suggests that at the very time of writing and experimenting in novel writing, Behn was intellectually engaged by this sceptical and aesthetic philosophy. The Maxims set forth a relativist philosophical stance (‘interest that blinds one is the light of another’, Behn 1993, 4, 307) and a materialist philosophy: The humours of our bodies have an extraordinary course, which unperceivably turns and moves our wills, they roul and rove together and usurp successively a secret empire within us in so absolute a manner, that they tyrannize over all our actions, almost without our knowledge. (350)

Historians of the plain style have argued that seventeenth-century prose style drew inspiration both from Seneca and scientific experimentalism (Jones 1953; Williamson 1951; Fish 1972), but this argument has not hitherto been applied to Aphra Behn’s novel writing and thinking as experiment. Behn’s first such experimentation7 lies in the form of this first novel and the development of that form through the subsequent two parts. The formal construction of a novel as a series of letters originated in the translated Letters of a Portuguese Nun (published in 1669) and, combined with the popularity of Madame de Lafayette’s La  Princesse de Clêves (1678, translated into English in 1679), helped to generate and foster an audience of readers who would buy fictions which were both more domestic and more contemporary than the conventional romance, from which they arguably evolved (Ballaster 1993). Behn’s voracious reading in both French and English enabled a creative engagement with this tradition, which blossomed in these novel experiments. The first volume of her Love

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Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister consists solely of juxtaposed letters, with no overt third-person narration. The epistolary form validates the ‘I’ as a narrative voice through first-person letters (the grammatical use of the first person dominates most of Part 1); whilst Behn adapted this from The Portuguese Letters, she is the first English writer to use the formal ‘I’ as foundational to a novel (Gervitz 2012). However, Behn is additionally experimental in the formal organisation of letters. For example, the domination of the male voice over the female character is formally echoed by opening with Philander’s letters, showing how Silvia’s voicing of libertine ideas (and acquiescence in her seduction) echoes his words and phrases. Equally, the insertion of additional voices through letters, including those of Silvia’s sister, her maidservant and Philander’s friend Cesario, enables a broadening of perspectives on the action (unlike later ‘bourgeois’ novels which find it difficult to filter multiple perspectives) and helps raise narrative tension by postponing our knowledge of a resolution of, or response to, the previous letter from Silvia or Philander. The second part of Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister displays a new formal experiment, mixing letters with third-person narrative, while the third part of the novel (published in 1688) consists predominantly of third-person narrative with a few letters acting as bridges. Behn thus uses the stage of the three-part publication to explore different formal methods to represent character, plot and voice: the formal shifts across the six years of the three-novel series illustrate her formal experiment with divergent modes of representation and voice. Although it has been argued that the epistolary form is a naïve form of prose fiction (Watt 1957), Behn exploits its radical potential in at least six ways. Firstly, the formal juxtaposition of letters to generate narrative gaps; second, the use of the present tense; third, the emergence and manipulation of free indirect prose; fourth, radical and formalised plotting; fifth, the articulation of an individual voice, perspective and identity through character; and finally, the emergent focus on an internalised sense of self in that character’s apparently unmediated voice. Let us consider each of these in turn. The formal juxtapositions of the letters enable the explicit insertion of a reader as part of the process of writing and reading. The form naturally invokes the initial letter reader and the market of readers who buy the novel. The gaps between letters (of time, space and person) are self-­ consciously widened, utilising the natural cliff-hanger effect of juxtaposed letters to enable a number of narrative effects, including a readerly sense of the narrative organisation of the letters (and therefore indirectly of an

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over-arching authorial structure) and a narrative arc which builds on two linked tensions—that of Silvia’s self-knowledge and internalised feelings and our readerly desire for erotic consummation. These formal juxtapositions (of letters, speakers, readers and timeframes) echo and mirror experimental data and data sets which Royal Society scientists recommended (pace Bacon) as suitable to both the new experimental method and its representation as data without the overlay of distracting interpretative language. Behn’s literary style is aesthetically a mirror of Royal-Society science. Love Letters Part 2 uses the epistolary form to re-focalise the reader’s critical reading on voice: the first seven letters are written by men, and thus male voices and desires are literally seen to circulate and contain the voice and body of Silvia. The solitary nature of Silvia’s voice in Part 2 emphasises her singularity and her aloneness, so the nature of femininity is seen formally as both singular and ‘between men’. These first seven letters establish an explicit homosocial bond based on shared discursive and social practices between the men who desire Silvia. Equally, these new letters throw the reader backwards into the first volume of the story: Philander’s letters destabilise our reading of his previous motivation and practices. He frankly admits his libertine self-interested motivations in seducing Silvia, as well as his desire for other women. Reading new letters thus becomes an act of re-reading old letters and of  re-interpreting them. Reading (and writing) is thus quickly figured as critical, partial and subjective. This meta-narrational insight is generated by Behn’s formal manipulation (and flagging up) of the epistolary form. It is also a radical political and philosophical stance on representation and truth: one more closely allied to the scepticism of Rochefoucauld and Lucretius (and later novelists such as Sterne) than the absolutism of Stuart monarchalism or the more monologic forms of the eighteenth-century novel as practised by Defoe or Richardson. Behn engages in a different kind of formal experimentation in Oroonoko. Its political content is self-evident: a story about a royal black slave who is executed had resonances both in Stuart cultural memory and in relation to the more contemporary practices of slave owners in Surinam. The elision of two such motifs (blackness and royalism) is arguably experimental enough; however, Behn’s formal innovation lies in the juxtaposition of a number of genres and discourses. The novel’s opening paragraph simultaneously claims an eyewitness account and acts as a generic marker

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of what have often been described as unique features of Defoe’s early novels. It is worth looking at Behn’s opening in detail: I do not pretend in giving you the history of this royal slave to entertain my reader with the adventures of a feigned hero whose life and fortunes may manage at the poet’s pleasure, nor in relating the truth , design to adorn it with any accidents, but such as are arrived in earnest to him; and it shall come simply into the world , recommended by its own proper merits and natural intrigues, there being enough of reality to support it, and to render it diverting, without the addition of invention. I was myself an eyewitness to a great part of what you will find here set down and what I could not be a witness of I received from the mouth of the chief actor in this history (Oroonoko, 9).8

Here, the narratorial ‘I’ dominates our encounter with text and its referents: like Robinson Crusoe, this narrator claims both personal experience and eyewitness testimony (a validating tactic which Behn repeats in both part 3 of Love Letters and in The History of the Nun (Behn 1993, 140). This fictional eyewitness function enables the new novel to access a present-ness in an exciting new way which neither drama (because of licencing laws on performance) nor romance (because set remotely) allowed. Most histories of the novel establish realism as one of the key determiners distinguishing the new form from romances (McKeon 1987; Watt 1957). Behn’s initial narrative framing self-consciously positions her novel as ‘novel’ through the narrator’s voice and manifesto. In a related way, the novel was celebrated because it focused primarily on the lives of the more ordinary character within a broader but less specified political framework (unlike the romance);9 the eyewitness discursive frame enables the romance and political referents that follow to be read as interconnected. There are a number of additional ways in which Behn enhances and complicates this generic self-consciousness. Behn’s opener explicitly sets itself against the established Romance genre, which tended to cite historical sources and remote settings in time and place, and insists instead on personal and geographic immediacy. Even though the story is set in Africa and Surinam, the story’s connection to London is made explicit through the narrator’s claimed physical presence in Surinam and back in London. This is validated through concrete evidence; feathers she imported from Surinam were presented to the King and then used as a stage property in Dryden’s Indian Queen (Oroonoko:7).

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Present-ness evokes the discourse of traveller’s tales (just as Defoe does) and is associated with the assertion of a simple unadorned prose style: content and aesthetics are intertwined, a conventional critical prerequisite for the discursive features of the early novel (Watt 1957, 31). Yet, despite the insistence on ‘truth’ and ‘reality’, the subsequent plot weaves elements of the exotic romance into the narrative arc: the idealised description of Oroonoko’s nobility echoes that of many a romance tale from the occident; the description of his grandfather’s harem and the tale of the two star-­ crossed lovers shift us into the world of idealised aristocratic romance. The bounce back into a narrative of war, slave trading and the broken oaths of plantation owners and traders, alongside anthropological accounts of the indigenous people and flora and fauna of Surinam, generate jarring discursive juxtapositions. These narrative disruptions and discursive eruptions have often been read critically in a dismissive manner, as evidence of Behn’s naïve prose narratives, because they do not precisely sit with a critical sense of the eighteenth-century novel’s evened out representational style and mode (Todd 1998, 73–4).10 However, like the experimental style of the Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, these generic and discursive juxtapositions generate interpretative gaps into which the reader inserts herself: by thinking about the character of Oroonoko as both Westernised romance hero and black slave, the reader is forced to reflect both on how we judge heroism and on political behaviour. By showing how slave traders literally disrupt the romance society, and that the values of oath-keeping in one discourse are meaningless in another, Behn suggests and displays a radical way in which the novel can use formal means to generate political readings. Such a formal self-consciousness is absent from the novels celebrated by Watt and others as foundational: Behn is part of that alternative tradition through Sterne to Kundera and Rushdie who, in playing with genre and discourse, disrupt the notion of genre as a fixed model of representation and bourgeois identity formation. The second arena of aesthetic experimentation is Behn’s strategic use of the present tense. The letters of Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister Part 1 utilise the immediacy of the present tense, which Behn then carries over into the prose narrative of Parts 2 and 3. This present-ness echoes the immediacy of scientific data sets, which present evidence as present. The evolution of the voice of the third-person omniscient narrator and the invention of free indirect discourse (see Love Letters Part 2, 135, and Love Letters Part 3, 224) anticipate the later work of Richardson or Austen. Behn engages in grammatical experimentation (of both tense and

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pronouns) to try out alternative models of character representation and readerly response. The intersection of letters creates a sense of immediacy of action: although recent past events can be referred to and narrated, the letter also enables the expression of present-tense feelings and insights, as well as the expression of future desires and anxieties. The letter as present-­ tense fulcrum for experience thus presents itself as the perfect formal equivalence to the data set of scientific experimentalism. These features can be seen in any one example of the letters: To Philander I have sent Brilljard to see if the Coast be clear that we may come with safety, he brings you instead of Silvia, a young Cavalier that will be altogether as welcome to Philander, and who impatiently waits his return at a little Cottage at the end of the Village. (Love Letters, 106, my emphasis).

Personal experience is focalised through the intersection and control of grammatical tenses: the ‘I’ organises and accounts for experience; the experiential (experimental) is formally and grammatically foregrounded through a simulation of presence and of character. Focalisation through the letter and the present-tense experience of writing and reading explicitly also places the authorial voice at one remove from the reader’s immediate experience—a formal parallel to the dramatic form at which Behn was so adept. In her novel The Fair Jilt11 (1688), this grammatical experimentation extends into a free indirect prose style to represent action, character and internalised emotion, Behn’s third arena of experimentation in her prose. For example, Behn writes: Some moments she fancies him a lover, and that the fair object that takes up all his heart has left no room for her there; but that was a thought that did not long perplex her, and which almost as soon as born, she turned to her advantage. She beholds him a lover, and therefore finds he has a heart sensible and tender; he had youth to be fired as well as to inspire … . Now she revolves a thousand ways in her tortured mind to let him know her anguish, and at last pitched upon that of writing to him soft billets, which she had learned the art of doing; or if she had not, she had now fire enough to inspire her with all that could charm or move. These she delivered to a young wench who waited upon her… which letter were all afterwards, as you shall hear, produced in open court. (Fair Jilt, 88–9)

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The central narrative voice throughout the later novels (particularly in The Fair Jilt and The History of the Nun) moves—as here—between the immediate present and the past historic to suggest simultaneous connection and separation between authorial voice, the  character’s focalisation and the representation of consciousness. This grammatical and pronoun elision (now labelled ‘free indirect discourse’) is often seen as a sophisticated technique developed to its fullest in Austen and later novelists;12 here we can see that Behn’s formal experimentation in the Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister has enabled the evolution of this flexible representational discourse in a prose non-epistolary novel. Such moments are not isolated examples: throughout the novel, the tensions between authorial commentary and Miranda’s individual voice, actions and motivations are what generate readerly engagement and critical judgement. This prose style acts as a conduit for the reader to experience divergent perspectives on action and experience, placing the interpretative burden firmly on the individual reader. Behn’s plotting is the fourth arena of aesthetic experimentation, and yet it has been dismissed as either aspirationally aristocratic (McKeon 1987; Carnell 2006, 44) or as lacking the immediacy and urgency of Defoe’s (Mckeon 1987, 27). However, the consistent modelling of triangular relationships belies this reductive criticism. For example, it is clear that the consistent narrative arc of her novels focalises on the intersection between a (sometimes) explicitly female narrator and her characters: situating a set of relationships between writer, character and reader. Equally, in Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, triangular relationships between characters are continually asserted and explored. The title itself figures female identity as ‘between’ relationships defined by masculine primogeniture: Silvia’s identity is defined by her status as sister-in-law to Philander and daughter to her father. This between-ness continues to be formally figured throughout the plot. I have already argued that the ordering of letters (particularly in the opening to the second book) figures Silvia’s literal entrapment ‘between men’ (Kosofsky-Sedgewick 1985).13 This plot modelling continues through the way Silvia’s voice is used to disrupt such comfortable homosocial discourses. Thus, for example, in her early letters (Love Letters: 21 and 24ff), Silvia voices questions about the fine line between the easiness of brotherly love and erotic attraction, which Philander crosses. By blurring the distinction between fraternal and erotic love through the narrative plot, and drawing attention to it as discourse through Silvia’s voice, Behn

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suggests that woman is an object of exchange within that discourse. Much of the plot of the three novels focuses on the pursuit of Silvia by the two male friends, Philander and Octavio, as well as her submission first to Philander and then Octavio. Whilst the two men compete for Silvia, their friendship remains their predominant bond. Even when the plot is further complicated by the fact that Philander’s second major erotic conquest turns out to be Octavio’s married sister, the men reconcile (‘a friend’s above a sister’, Love Letters, 377). This modelling of women as ‘between men’ is additionally illustrated in book 3 when Octavio’s uncle and Octavio negotiate for Sylvia’s body between them. Thus, parallel plots reinforce the narrative outcome that women are subject to arrangements between men, forming the apex of a triangle. There is one especially comic moment in the third book: They both advanced and made about twenty passes before either received any wound ... In this condition (still fighting) Silvia (who had call’d ‘em back in vain, and only in her Night-Gown) in a Chair pursued ‘em, that Minute they quitted her Chamber) found ‘em thus imployed , and without any fear she threw herself between them. (Love Letters, 357)

Behn’s narrative style typically imagines scenes through visual semi-­stage directions, and the visual modelling illustrates female lives as literally (and comically) between men. The plot functions between men as both a structural and ideological model, but it is put under pressure by the actions and voices of women characters and (implied) readers. Contemporary ideology is thereby challenged through formal experimentation. In volume 2 of Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, Behn reports Silvia’s critical responses to the literal and lettered correspondence between Philander and Octavio in this reported speech: Pray tell me, continued she, when you last writ to him, was it not in order to receive an answer from him? And was I not to see that answer? And here you think it no dishonour to break your word or promise; by which I find your false notions of Vertue and Honour, with which you serve yourselves, when int’rest, design, or self-love makes you think it necessary. (Love Letters, 2, 194–5)

The combined effect of female narrator and female voice explicitly challenges political and social patriarchal practices.

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Behn’s fifth area of aesthetic experimentation lies not just in the voicing and plotting of these challenges but in validating female and feminised voices as explicitly active intellectual and sexual agents. I have already discussed how the epistolary form of Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister enables and invites readers into the process of the narrative. This active engagement extends to an acknowledgement of critical reading as key to identity, particularly in the case of women readers, with Silvia as a proxy for other female readers. Silvia’s disquisition on ‘the rhetorick of love’ is one such case in point. This intellectual activity is not only part of the process delivered by the formal arrangement of letters and content, when Silvia re-examines past conduct and words through each letter. In book 2, there is a point where Octavio forwards on to Silvia a letter of Philander’s which he has read in one way as safe to pass on (‘where he speaks of Silvia sure he disguises the lover’, 140), but which Silvia suspects, reading it more critically and actively, means that Philander has found another lover (Love Letters, 140–1). Silvia then doubts her own reading skills and asks Briljard (her nominal husband by now) to read Philander’s letter: . . . and told him (while he read) her doubts and fears; he being thus instructed by her self in the way how to deceive her on, like Fortunetellers who gather peoples Fortunes from themselves and then turn it back for their own Divinity; tells her he saw indeed a change! (Love Letters Part 2, 147–8, my emphasis)

Female critical reading thus informs not only the direction of the plot but also insights and perceptions of other characters. A careful critical reader will have reached the same conclusion as Silvia from reading Philander’s letter. Silvia’s strong political beliefs, voiced particularly in the first novel in her longest letter to Philander where she urges him not to succumb to an overly libertarian political credo (37–43), validate female engagement in public discourse as well. The sixth area in which Behn experiments is in the narrative arcs of her stories. Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister plots two narratives over the three volumes: the story of a fallen woman and the story of an emergent female agency, as Silvia increasingly manipulates sexual encounters for her own pleasure and reward. This double narrative is echoed in both The Fair Jilt and The History of the Nun or The Fair Vow Breaker, and arguably models later narratives of seduction and titillation

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which purport to be moralised tales (including Pamela and Clarissa). However, the balance of Behn’s narrative focus is on female agency in a domestic sphere as opposed to passivity in the eroticism of seduction.14 Thus, for example, the third-person narration of The Fair Jilt (the story of Miranda who happily and amorally manipulates family and lovers to achieve her own financial security) remains studiously uninvolved in any moral judgment of the heroine’s actions, echoed in the experimental flat prose style. In The History of the Nun, Behn again narrates the fall of Isabella in a flat, almost scientific, prose, with one exception of apparent psychological explanation. In an extraordinary narrative twist, Isabella decides she will have to silence both her current and her ex-husband (who has returned from presumptive death in battle, unbeknown to anyone else). The narrator tells us: She imagined that could she live after a deed so black, Villenoys would be eternal reproaching her, if not with his tongue, at least with his heart, and emboldened by one wickedness, she was the readier for another, and another of such a nature as has, in my opinion, far less excuse than the first. But when fate begins to afflict, she goes through stitch with her black work. (Behn 1993, 186)

The third-person narrator provides this sole moral steer on Isabella’s actions, nevertheless simultaneously giving a psychological justification for them. The voice of female desire and decision-making in Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister is validated by the epistolary form, but framed in the early letters by the way in which its discourse (‘the rhetoric of love’) echoes Philander’s language and expression (which we read first). Nevertheless, the reader shares with Silvia her sexual awakening through her own voice and eyes. Compare: I have no Arts Heav’n knows, no guile or double-meaning in my Soul, ‘tis all plain native simplicity, fearful and timorous as Children in the Night, trembling as Doves pursu’d; born soft by Nature, and made tender by Love. (Love Letters, 24)

with her longest letter a few pages later: Approach, approach you sacred Queen of Night, and bring Philander veil’d from all eyes but mine! Approach at a fond lover’s call, behold how I ly

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panting with expectation, tir’d out with your tedious Ceremony to the God of day; be kind of lovely Night, and let the Deity descend to Thetis’s Arms, and I to Philander’s; the sun and I must snatch our joys in the same happy hours! ... I grow wild and know not what I say : Impatient Love betrays me to a thousand folly’s a Thousand rashnesses: I dy with shame, but I must be undone, and ‘tis no matter how, whether by my own weakness Philander’s charms or both. (37–8)

Silvia (and the reader) learns how to express erotic desire (‘what though I lay extended on my Bed, undrest, unapprehensive of my fate, my Bosom loose and easie of excess, my Garments ready, thin and wantonly put on’, Love Letters, 68). Yet, simultaneously, Sylvia’s inner doubts and passions are explored through the ‘I’ of the letter’s address, validating the experience of female sexual desire. Behn is the first British writer to give extended vocalisation to this experience, in what feels like an authentic manner; the domesticity of the private space of the woman’s letter, written in her closet, generates both authenticity and titillation and provides a model for later writers such as Richardson. However, unlike Richardson’s later enclosure of female desire within the formal closure of patriarchal marriage, Behn’s female characters retain agency and voice outside such social and moral ideologies. This is equally evident in the developmental voicing of a female gaze. Philander’s very first letter is a paradigm of the early modern discourse of the libertine objectification of the female body through the gaze (Love Letters, 11–2, 15–9 and 34–6), a set of referents which recur throughout the three volumes as men describe and encounter women. Silvia’s long ecstatic letter to Philander (After the Happy Night, Love Letters, 87–9) acts as a reprise of this language and of her responses to and engagement with it, including her knowledge of the fine line between fraternal and erotic love in a world where women are always subordinate to male desire(s). However, the letter also voices her anatomisation of his body: It was necessary that Philander shou’d be form’d... just as he is, that shape, that face, that height, that dear proportion; I would not have a feature, not a look, not a hair alter’d, just as thou art, thou art an Angel to me. (89)

This learned objectification of the object of her desire informs Silvia’s later encounters and descriptions of men (Love Letters Part 3, 386–8). Behn’s narrated account of Miranda’s obsession with Prince Tarquin in The Fair

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Jilt (particularly Behn 1993, 97–8) similarly intersects sexual physical admiration with aspiration to royal status. Behn dedicates The History of the Nun15 to the Duchess of Mazarine, explicitly invoking a female readership: and her narrator moves straight into a reflection on women’s compromised discursive and ideological positioning, in which a system of sexual grooming of young women by men inequitably establishes a poisonous sexual dynamics: I verily believe, if it were searched into, we should find these frequent perjuries that pass in the world for so many gallantries only to be the occasion of so many unhappy marriages and the cause of all those misfortunes which are so frequent to the nuptialled pair. For not one of a thousand but, on his side, or on hers, has been perjured and broke vows to some fond believing wretch, whom they have abandoned and undone. What man that does not boast of the numbers he has thus ruined, and who does not glory in his shameful triumph? Nay, what woman, almost, has not a pleasure in deceiving, taught perhaps, at first by some dear false one, who had fatally instructed her youth in an art she ever practised in revenge on all those she could be too hard for and conquer at their own weapons? For, without all dispute, women are by nature more constant and just than men, and did not their first lovers teach them the trick of change, they would be doves that would never quit their mate. (History of the Nun, 139–40)

The critique of the ‘rhetorick of love’, voiced in Silvia’s letters, is shared by her alter-ego, the narrator (and author) of these other novels. Behn’s anatomisation of contemporary erotic discourse as gendered, ideological and politicised is rendered through not only this kind of narratorial commentary, but through the formal reading experience. Radical sexual politics are articulated as a critical reading and interpretative process. Reading and writing is experimental discovery of new ideas and insights. Feminist critics acknowledge Behn’s novelistic experimentalism (Villegas Lopez 2012; Bachscheider 1993; Ballaster 1993)16 in both form and content, although, by focusing on the novel as amatory fiction, they arguably write Behn into a corner where content (i.e. the erotic) still erases formal experimentation. Margaret Doody’s re-calibration of the novel barely mentions Behn’s work,17 and Carnell acknowledges Behn’s experimentation but situates it firmly within a Tory political framework which runs the risk of reducing Behn’s writing to that of a hack (Carnell 2006).18 By contrast, I have shown that Behn’s aesthetic experimentation with the emergent form of the novel meta-fictionally foregrounds both formal

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and discursive representational modes. In doing so, Behn explores and tests representation and language in a way which is analogous to the data-­ driven experiments of her contemporary scientists in the Royal Society. As Philander self-consciously acknowledges, in his echoing of Orlando from As You Like It, when he says he will paste Silvia’s name on all the trees in the forest: writing is a substitute for sex, and the exploration of sexual identity. Just as later feminists (such as Kristeva and Cixous) have argued that ‘writing from the body’ against dominant patriarchal representational modes would challenge ideological and gendered politics, so Behn’s meta-­ narratives about language, identity and sex alert us to the double standards of sexual representation via formal experimentation, whilst simultaneously finding a voice through which to articulate multiple (female) perspectives. Her prose arguably invents the dialogic novel and challenges genre and gender in both political and linguistic ways. Her erasure from literary history until the twentieth century models the critical history of radical women; even where she is revived or re-published, Behn’s work is analysed in terms of gender rather than her experimental innovations. This chapter has more radically argued that the intrinsic connection between her philosophic libertarian stance, her gender politics and her aesthetic expression should be more widely celebrated and acknowledged as foundational to the history of women’s writing.

Notes 1. Across histories of political thought, literary developments and the history of science. See Weber (1905), Watt (1957, 9–34), McKeon (1987). 2. See Webster’s (1975, 1–27) re-inscription of Macaulay’s (1849–61) original magisterial account and McIntire’s (2004, 205) critique of this stance. 3. For Cavendish’s clashes with the Royal Society, see Day (2007, 422), and for Cavendish’s own formal experimentation, see Ress (2003, 1–23). 4. See Merchant (1990), Fox Keller (1993), Scheibinger (1991), and Aughterson (2002). 5. For this consensus on the intersection between Behn’s political beliefs and her dramatic and prose works, see Todd (1998 and 2004) and Pacheco (2002). For a more recent discussion of how Behn’s political views were both more nuanced and subject to changing political debates, see Villegas Lopez (2012). 6. All references to Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister are from Behn, The Works, ed. Behn (1993), volume 2.

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7. Gervitz (2012) argues that formal experimentation in the Love Letters can be allied to changing notions of the self, emergent out of the Royal Society. Although I am greatly indebted to Gervitiz’s insights, I argue that Behn’s experimentation is more broadly linguistic and formal than solely about point-of-view narratives. See also Villegas Lopez (2012) and Todd (1987). 8. All references to Oroonoko are to Oroonoko and Other Works, edited by Salzman (Behn 1993). 9. See McKeon (1987) and Todd (1987, 139) ‘the novel that women did write did not pursue verisimilitude for its own sake’. 10. Unbelievably, Behn’s name does not appear in either McKeon (1987) or Watt (1957) in their accounts of the novel. 11. All references to The Fair Jilt are to Oroonoko and Other Works, edited by Salzman (Behn 1993). 12. Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, credits Austen with its invention. 13. Kosoksy Sedgwick’s (1985) study of how homosocial literary narratives echo and reinforce the homosocial political practices of aristocratic and bourgeois societies does not look back further than nineteenth-­ century novels. 14. Ballaster (1993, 33) argues that Behn and Manley’s plots are ‘written out of’ the history of the novel in an attempt to make it ‘respectable’. 15. All references to The History of the Nun are to Oroonoko and Other Works, edited by Salzman (Behn 1993). 16. Bachscheider (1993) argues that Behn discovers ‘a new means of expression... a new way of viewing men, women and social relationships’; and that the Love Letters are ‘dialogic and open ended....[in a novel] that could capture ambiguities and contradictions and construct a psychological realism that pleased people’ (122); see also Ballaster (1993, 3, 33) and n. xiv. 17. Doody (1996) has only six single brief references to Behn and her work in the index. 18. Carnell (2006, 44) writes: ‘[Behn’s] experiments with fiction are crucial to understanding the formative stages of the British novel, especially its connection to partisan politics’ (my emphasis).

Works Cited Armstrong, Nancy. 1987. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aughterson, Kate. 2002. ‘Strange Things So Probably Told’: Gender, Sexual Difference and Knowledge in Bacon’s New Atlantis’. In Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Bronwen Price, 156–179. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Bachscheider, Paula. 1993. Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Ballaster, Ros. 1993. Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction 1684–1740. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Behn, Aphra. 1993, 2017. The Works of Aphra Behn. 7 Vols. ed. Janet Todd. London/Oxford: Pickering and Chatto. ———. 1994. Oronooko and Other Writings. Ed. Paul Salzman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Booth, Wayne. 1983. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Boyle, Robert. 1690, 2000. The Christian Virtuoso. In The Works of Robert Boyle, eds. Michael Hunter and Edward B Davies. 14 Vols. London: Pickering. Carnell, Rachel. 2006. Partisan Politics: Narrative Realism and the Rise of the British Novel. London: Palgrave. Day, Rosemary. 2007. Women’s Agency in Early Modern Britain and the American Colonies: Patriarchy, Partnership and Patronage. London/New York: Routledge. Doody, Margaret. 1996. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Fish, Stanley. 1972. Self-Consuming Artefacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-­ Century Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gervitz, Karen. 2012. From Epistle to Epistemology: Love Letters and the Royal Society. Women’s Writing 22 (1): 84–96. Jones, R.F. 1953. The Triumph of the English Language. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Keller, Eve Fox. 1993. Feminism and Science, Oxford Readings in Feminism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kosofsky-Sedgwick, Eve. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 1849–61. The History of England from the Accession of James II. 5 Vols. Leipzig: Bernard Tauchnitz. McIntire, C.T. 2004. Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter. New Haven: Yale University Press. McKeon, Michael. 1987. The Origins of the English Novel 1660–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Merchant, Carolyn. 1980, 1990. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. Rev. edn. New York/London: Harper and Row. Pacheco, Anita. 2002. A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing. Oxford: Blackwell. Ress, Emma. 2003. Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Scheibinger, Londa. 1991. The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Boston: Harvard University Press. Singh, Julietta. 2018. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Durham: Duke University Press. Spencer, Jane. 1986. The Rise of the Woman Novelist from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Spender, Dale. 1988. Mothers of the Novel: One Hundred Good Women Novelists Before Jane Austen. London: Pandora Press. Sprat, Thomas. 1667. History of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge. London: J. Martin and J. Allestree. Todd, Janet. 1987. The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660–1800. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1998. The Critical Fortunes of Aphra Behn. Rochester: Camden House. ———. 2004. The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Villegas Lopez, Sonia. 2012. The Conscious Grove’: Experimentation in Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–7). Women’s Writing 22 (1): 69–83. Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Chatto and Windus. Weber, Max. 1905, 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons. London: George Allen and Unwin. Webster, Charles. 1975. The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660. London: Duckworth. Williamson, G. 1951. The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose Form from Bacon to Collier. London: Faber and Faber.

CHAPTER 3

Experiment in Prose: Authority and Experience in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters Diana G. Barnes

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was known as an innovator during her lifetime. Voltaire singles her out as ‘one of the most intelligent women in England, and with a powerful intellect into the bargain’ (Voltaire 1980, 55), citing her preparedness to disregard religious superstition to trial smallpox inoculation on her young son while in Turkey, and subsequently to promote the practice in England (by introducing it to the Princess of Wales who then championed the practice). Voltaire identifies Montagu as a supporter of new knowledge and innovation, well positioned in society to ensure that her endorsement had impact beyond her own circle. Significantly her knowledge derives from a process of experiment, observation and proof. The notion of experiment was entrenched in intellectual circles and promoted by the Royal Society, and it was recognised that such experimentation was charting new frontiers of knowledge about

D. G. Barnes (*) University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Aughterson, D. Philips (eds.), Women Writers and Experimental Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_3

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the natural world to the benefit of wider society. Men of a certain class dominated such circuits of knowledge by society membership, university education and access to publication (Shapin and Schaeffer 1995; Sutton 1995), but as conceptual horizons were expanding, other modes of intellectual culture that did not formally exclude women were taking shape. Women participated in the intellectual culture associated with the court, and beyond that they frequented the theatres and were members of literary circles. Voltaire promotes the idea that the experimental life can be conducted in the world, away from the formalities of laboratories, societies and universities, but it requires the kind of intelligence, prescience and bravery exemplified in Montagu. Montagu’s conception of herself as living an experimental, innovative life was particularly invested in her writing. She wrote poetry and prose, but her most experimental contribution to English literature was arguably her innovative use of epistolary form in manuscript and print. Montagu’s oeuvre comprises a range of epistolary forms—manuscript, a newsletter published anonymously,  and a collection edited and shaped for public circulation—which comprise her evolving, yet coherent, experiment with how to use epistolary form to social and political ends. This formal experimentation parallels her notions of an experimental life. Montagu’s experimental life was often conducted  directly under the public eye. She was ‘a comet of the Enlightenment’ as the title of Isobel Grundy’s definitive biography proclaims (Grundy 1999).1 At every turn she was prepared to question attitudes and beliefs held ‘From time immemorial’ ‘without any hesitation’ (Voltaire 1980, 53). She was born Mary Pierrepont in 1689 to an aristocratic family with a long history of titles, prestige, political involvement and intellectual tradition on both sides. In her infancy her father, Evelyn Pierrepont, inherited the title of ‘Earl of Kingston’, and Montagu became Lady Mary Pierrepont. Her father was a member of the Whig party in parliament which emerged in active opposition to the succession of Charles II’s openly Roman Catholic brother, the future James II. Arguably, her father’s commitment to Whig politics created a family environment in which political questioning was entrenched. Political critique occurred within official government fora and processes, supported by a broader cultural movement against authority: Whig sympathies were nourished by clubs, such as the Kit-Cat Club, whose membership extended from a group of politicians (including her father) to writers and artists (Field 2008). A number of these men were part of her family circle including playwright John Congreve, poet and

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medical doctor Dr Samuel Garth and fashionable journalists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Although membership was restricted to men, some women were honoured by a special toast, as young Lady Mary was at the age of seven thanks to her father (Stuart 1993, 9). Montagu inherited a tradition of privilege, a high-minded commitment to questioning the political status quo, a sense of the importance of social debate and the literary culture that supported such debate, and respect for, and, affiliation with, the writers who did so. Montagu’s independent spirit was expressed in her writing and life. She learned Latin and read widely in the classics available to her in the family library. The fact that she sent her translation of the stoic Epictetus to another family friend, the respected Whig intellectual Bishop Burnet, suggests that she saw her writing always in a broader context (Stuart 1993, 9–11). Her reading also included contemporary poetry and romance, and her juvenilia includes writing in both of these  genres. She met, and determined to marry, Edward Wortley Montagu, and when her father could not broker satisfactory terms for a marriage settlement (involving the entail of the estate on the first son), Montagu eloped and cut ties with her family. Evidently seeing eye to eye with his fiancé, and recognising their defiance of Montagu’s father not simply as personal, but as progressive opposition to age-old restrictions designed to maintain êlite class privilege, Wortley supplied details about the marriage negotiations to Steele to publish in society journal the Tatler on 12 September 1710 (Bond 1987, 3, 230). This advertised the ‘experimental’ foundations of Montagu’s married life, that is, the degree to which she and Wortley were prepared to defy authority to chart a new way forward. From her marriage in August 1712 onwards, freed from the strictures of her family, Montagu more vigorously embraced the experimental life. She sought to enter the public discussions that shaped societal and political values. She was constrained by the widely held view among her contemporaries that it was vulgar and unseemly  for a lady of quality to publish. She endorsed this attitude in her own comments on the publication of Lady Vane’s memoir in Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle in which are included the Memoirs of a Lady of Quality in 1751 (Montagu to Lady Bute, [16 Feb. 1752], Collected Letters, III, 2). Yet it was at odds with her sense of social responsibility, her commitment to certain enlightenment ideals and emergent proto-feminist attitudes (Barnes 2015, 579). When Voltaire cites Montagu, he stresses the influence she exerted through her access to the court and to royal favour. Both men

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and women shaped public opinion via unofficial access to those in power and participation in social networks intimately connected to politics, but over the centuries this had been women’s predominant modus operandi (Chalus 2000). Certainly, Montagu took advantage of her access to court and her position in êlite society, but she also experimented with other means. She wrote scurrilous poems and released them for manuscript circulation without attribution (Montagu to Lady Mar, May 1723, Complete Letters, II, 23). Her contemporaries described her as a wit, signalling their awareness of this activity (and acknowledging her sharp tongue), although it was often difficult to attribute anonymous satirical poems to her (or any other author) with certainty. She left England in July 1716 to accompany her husband to Turkey to take up the ambassadorship in Constantinople, and from that distance she viewed high society critically. In a poem entitled ‘Constantinople’, she compares ‘Our frozen Isle’ to the ‘summer [that] reigns with one Eternal Smile’ in Constantinople (Montagu 1977a, b, ll. 10, 20). Distancing herself from the vicious gossip networks intrinsic to aristocratic political culture, she writes: ‘Even Fame it self can hardly reach me here, /Impertinence with all her tattling train, /Fair sounding Flattery’s delicious bane, /Censorious Folly, noisy Party rage’ (Montagu 1977a, b, ll. 106–9). The words ‘tattling’ and ‘fair’ direct her disavowal of the culture of influence particularly at women. Like other literate women, and men, of her generation, Montagu wrote letters throughout her life (Lowenthal 1994; Halsband 1965); she did so to take practical communicative action. Letter writing was an important means of establishing, and holding together social, intellectual and political communities as it had been in earlier times, but over this period the place of letter writing changed decisively.2 This was partly because as literacy rates increased, and broadened in class and gender terms (Cressy 1980; Cowan 2012), many more letters were being written, but it also relates to the shifting place of the letter within print culture. The letter was both a practical everyday mode of writing and an intellectual and literary form with classical  precedent, and was adapted to myriad purposes over the period (Barnes 2021; Brant 2006). The eighteenth century is often characterised by this burgeoning ‘republic of letters’ (Goodman 1994; Warner 1990). Classical letters, such as Cicero’s to his friends, had been a staple in Latin pedagogy from medieval times, and editions continued to be published in English and Latin through the eighteenth century. From the mid-seventeenth century, print letters had become a key genre in the developing culture of news and information. Early newspapers incorporated

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letters, both as anonymised reportage and by named correspondents, to present news in a multivocal multi-perspectival format (Randall 2008). The letter was common in occasional news pamphlets published to address a particular situation; often authorship was attributed simply to ‘a friend’, ‘a lady’ or an interested party. Letters were also important in the print circulation of new ideas, in the form of epistolary dedications that precede a philosophical or scientific tract, and the letters of notable intellectuals published in the Philosophical Transactions (from 1665). Such letters served the reassuring function of tying new ideas to a familiar community.3 The letter’s recognised capacity to bring private business into the public world gave it a special connection to the secret negotiations, affiliations and passions that underpin public events. Epistolary fiction exploiting these different modes become popular, and Aphra Behn’s Love Letters of a Nobleman to His Sister (1688) with its reference to the elopement of Lady Henriette Berkeley and Lord Grey of Werke, supporter of James II in the Monmouth rebellion, is a good case in point. This active and immensely varied publication context modelled and popularised ways that letters could aid writers to extend their social, intellectual, literary or political engagements. Letter writing of all kinds, and the emerging republic of letters, also offered women particular advantages, not least, by enabling their participation in circuits of information, intrigue and politics from which they may have been barred otherwise (Heckendorn Cook 1996; Pal 2012; Hannan 2016). Women had participated in such epistolary activity throughout the century prior as evidenced by extant letters that engage in political scheming and factionalism, intellectual debate, literary exchange, minority or sectarian religious affiliations and  to maintain and extend familial networks. What shifted was the place of women’s letters in print, and this went hand in hand with shifts in the kind of letters that circulated in manuscript. Letters, many attributed to women, became integral to fashionable society periodicals, in particular the Tatler and the Spectator. Some of the letters by ladies, and the discussion of them, published in these journals advocated women’s education and criticised traditional social mores that constrained women (Tague 2002). Such letters exploited the traditional connection between letters and civility—established in earlier medieval and early modern epistolary manuals—to push for new modes of social, political and intellectual behaviour (Tavor Banet 2005; Mitchell 2007). In stressing seemliness, that is, respect for the social proprieties that should govern certain kinds of social relationships and

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exchanges, letter writing manuals also modelled civil modes of behaviour and functioned as a species of conduct literature. In the Tatler and the Spectator the connection between the print epistle and the teaching of civility is acknowledged albeit in the wry tone of critique. Montagu’s experimentation with epistolary form in manuscript and print is informed by this context. She wrote a handful of anonymous letters addressing public events for publication, but most of her letters were not published during her lifetime. In her manuscript letters, she experimented with the idea that women’s letter writing could offer a counter history to the public historical record. She prepared a selection of her letters, documenting her travels through Europe to Turkey, known as the Turkish Embassy Letters, for posthumous publication. Montagu’s first deliberate epistolary intervention in print ‘A Plain Account of the Inoculating of the Small Pox by a Turkey Merchant’ (1722) was published in the midst of a hot debate over smallpox inoculation that erupted during an epidemic in the early 1720s. On returning to England in 1718, Montagu continued to exert influence in the traditional ways available to aristocratic women, but she also began to experiment with alternative means of using her writing to shape public opinion. Her involvement with popularising smallpox inoculation is a case in point (Miller 1981; Grundy 2000; Shuttleton 2007, 115–36). She had encountered the practice in Turkey and had her son inoculated there, but it caused a stir when she enlisted Dr Charles Maitland to inoculate  her daughter on English soil. Maitland agreed, providing three members of the College of Physicians witnessed it. Afterwards Montagu discussed inoculation in êlite drawing rooms (often accompanied by her daughter as radiant evidence of the success of the experiment) and at court (Stuart 1993, 36). After speaking with Montagu, Princess Caroline was persuaded of the merits of inoculation, ordered a public experiment and engaged Maitland to inoculate some prisoners at Newgate. These activities all became part of Montagu’s public reputation, and there was much social ‘tattling’ on the subject: in 1721–2 the Whig newspaper The Post Boy published a letter written by Dr Emmanuel Timoni to the Royal Society describing the Turkish practice of inoculation in favourable terms, and Dr Maitland’s Account of Inoculating the Small Pox was published. Both Timoni and Maitland had worked for Montagu. Timoni does not mention Montagu, but Maitland acknowledges that he followed her instructions when he inoculated her son in Turkey and then her daughter in England. Maitland describes ‘the Ambassador’s ingenious Lady, who had been at

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some Pains to satisfie her Curiosity in this Matter, and had made some useful Observations on the Practice, was so thoroughly convinced of the Safety of it, that She resolv’d to submit her only Son to it’, but this brief acknowledgement of his respect for knowledge, gleaned through ocular proof and investigation, sits somewhat obliquely within his 35-page account of his own experience, observations, expertise and argument against religious superstition (Maitland 1722, 7–9). Although Montagu is not named in Dr William Wagstaffe’s anti-inoculation polemic, A Letter to Dr Friend, Shewing the Danger and Uncertainty of Inoculating the Small Pox (1722), the disparaging references to ‘the Fashion of Inoculating the Small Pox [that] has so far prevail’d as to be admitted into the greatest Families’ point to her: Posterity perhaps will scarcely be brought to believe, that a method practised only by a few Ignorant Women, amongst an illiterate and unthinking People, shou’d on a sudden, and upon slender Experience, so far obtain in one of the most Learned and Polite Nations in the World, as to be receiv’d into the Royal Palace. (Wagstaffe 1722, 4)

Wagstaffe’s credulity is directed at the idea that feminine knowledge and experience might gain credence, recognising that it stands in opposition to traditional English experience, learning and politeness sanctioned by medical men such as himself and the College of Surgeons and Royal Society of which they are members. At this point, motivated by the public good, Montagu undertook an experimental foray into the raging debate. She wrote a letter attributed to a ‘Turky merchant’ which was published in the 11–13 September 1722 issue of the Whig newspaper The Flying-Post: or, Post-Master. Montagu recognised that that inoculation was not only disparaged for the religious reasons Maitland addressed, but, as Wagstaffe had intimated, because it was a practice originally conducted by women and supported by ‘old wives tale[s]’, that is, ratified by female-dominated circuits of information. Accordingly, she assumed the more authoritative mask of a male writer. Sensitive to the debate over the credibility of the testimony, she assumed the role of a merchant who had witnessed inoculation first hand. The Turkish merchant was a member of neither the College of Physicians nor the Royal Society, but, as a European who travelled abroad for trade and observed other cultures, merchants’ reports were regularly tabled by the

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Royal Society, and the merchant  was a stock figure in the inoculation debate (Barnes 2012). The letter opens: Out of compassion to the Numbers, abus’d and deluded by the Knavery and Ignorance of Physicians, I am determin’d to give a true Account of the Manner of Innoculating the Small Pox, as it is practis’d at Constantinople with constant successe.

Montagu goes on to graft the aristocratic pose of disinterestedness onto the merchant declaring: ‘I shall sell no druges, nor take no Fees, [ …] that is, I shall get nothing by it, but the private satisfaction of having done good to Mankind, and I know no body that reckons that satisfaction any part of their Interest’ (Montagu 1977a, b, 95). The merchant’s claim to act for the common good and not to profit rings a little hollow from a man who travels for trade, however. Although some questioned the veracity of the letter and declared it a ‘sham’, her contemporaries did not identify her authorship.4 The letter did little to stem the surging critique against inoculation, and in that regard, her attempt to make an authoritative intervention in public debate via a letter published under the mask of a ‘Turky Merchant’ could be described as a failed experiment. In the 1730s Montagu continued her experiment with anonymity in print with a short run of a weekly newspaper entitled The Nonsense of Common-Sense, and the third issue comprises an anonymous letter ‘To the Author’.5 The nine extant issues were published at uneven intervals from 16 December 1737 to 14 March 1738, each containing an essay addressing contemporary political issues. The journal was designed to promote the policies of the ministry of Whig Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole and was possibly written at his request. The title made it plain that it aimed to counter the popular periodical Common Sense, largely penned by Lord Chesterfield and George Lyttleton in support of  the Tories grouped around Frederick, Prince of Wales. The Nonsense of Common-Sense explicitly supported Walpole’s foreign policy and tax, both issues that were garnering some opposition. Interestingly, in this forum Montagu does not replicate her husband’s views. Only one issue, Number 3 (Tuesday January 3, 1738), takes an epistolary form. This mock letter by an Italian correspondent concerns the English love of castrati in opera and a scheme for saving English people the expense of travelling to Italy for the pleasure (Montagu 1977a, b, 114–20).

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In manuscript letters Montagu developed the idea that women’s correspondence represents a counter history to published histories. While living abroad from 1739 until 1761 (the year before her death), Montagu maintained her social networks and family relationships (including Wortley) by writing letters. The extant corpus comprises private missives, but she recognised that any letter she penned could be published with or without her permission. Following the 1725 English publication of the letters of French writer and socialite Madame de Sévigné to her daughter Madame de Grignan, Montagu wrote to her sister, Lady Mar, ‘I assert without the least vanity that mine will be full as entertaining 40 years hence. I advise you therefore to put none of ‘em to the use of Wast paper’ (Complete Letters, II, 66). She had this in mind when she wrote to her daughter, Mary Stuart, Countess of Bute (hereafter Bute), in the 1740s. In these letters (extant from 1746), she reviews books, gives her opinion on the education of girls and discusses society and family news. The impression is unstudied and conversational, as epistolary manuals recommended for familiar letters, and maternal, in the style of Madame de Sévigné. These effects were deliberately employed, a ‘diligent negligence’ if you will, and represent a formal experiment designed to intervene in the patriarchal discourse dominating the republic of letters in print. On 16 March 1752 Montagu asked Bute to send her a copy of Henry St James, Lord Bolingbroke’s Letters on the Study and Use of History (1751). Bolingbroke had been an outspoken Tory politician who served as Secretary of State and Secretary of War under Queen Anne, that is, until 1714 (Dickinson 2004; Prest 1998, 80). He was a talented and learned man with refined manners and a ready wit, also known for his mercurialism, libertinism and betrayal of friends. Montagu’s onetime friend the poet Alexander Pope dedicated his Essay on Man (1732–4) to him. Montagu’s review acknowledges her admiration for Bolingbroke as man and politician: I shall begin in respect to his dignity, with Lord B[olingbroke], who is glaring proofe how far Vanity can blind a Man, and how easy it is to varnish over to one’s selfe the most Criminal Conduct... He declares he allwaies lov’d his Country, thô he confesses he endeavour’d to betray her to Popery and Slavery, and lov’d his Friends, thô he abandonn’d them in Distress with all the blackest Circumstances of treachery. (20 July 1754, Complete Letters, III, 61)

Montagu focuses on the relationship between Bolingbroke’s social behaviour, his politics and his prose style.

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Montagu addresses Bolingbroke’s politics—agreeing with him that the war with France was short-sighted (Letters iii, 61)—but she equally considers his ‘florid and easy style’, and probes his political use of the letter form: Well turn’d periods or smooth lines are not the perfection either of Prose or verse; they may serve to adorn, but can never stand in the Place of good Sense…. Copiousness of words, however rang’d, is allwaies false Elloquence, thô it will alwaies impose on some sort of understandings. (61–2)

Montagu compares Bolingbroke’s laboured academic epistolary style to that of Madame de Sévigné. Somewhat ambivalently she acknowledges that Sévigné has countless ‘readers and admirers’ although she: only gives us, in a lively manner and fashionable Phrases, mean sentiments, vulgar Prejudices, and endless repetitions! Sometimes the tittle tattle of a fine Lady, sometimes that of an old Nurse, allwaies tittle tattle; yet so well gilt over by airy expressions and a Flowing Style… [however] She is so far to be excus’d as her Letters were not intended for the Press, while he labours to display to posterity all the Wit and learning he is Master of, and sometimes spoils a good Argument by a profusion of words. (62)

Montagu’s caveat casts the shortfalls of Sévigné’s style as the hallmarks of a distinctly feminine natural style. Her citation of Sévigné’s letters as unstudied feminine social reportage grounded in ‘good sense’ and a worthy, albeit private, alternative to Bolingbroke’s self-interested Tory history highlights her own writing aesthetic. Bolingbroke and Sévigné represent distinct epistolary types: the public essay and the intimate dialogue. Montagu compares them as species of familiar letters with an uneasy relationship to the ‘official’ story. In 1752, for example, Bolingbroke’s Letters represented a counter to the Whig ideology dominant since the 1720s, and women’s gossip had always been viewed as trivia marginal to important discussions and public events (Meyer Spacks 1983). For Montagu the fact that a serious discussion of the uses of history, such as Bolingbroke’s, took epistolary form itself, and gave gravitas to the variety of historical truth documented in the tatling ‘well gilt’ letters of women. In posing Bolingbroke against Sévigné, Montagu contests the view that Bolingbroke was ‘one of the best English writers’, a critical judgement of another of her contemporaries, John Boyle, Earl of Orrery, whose Remarks

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Upon the Life and Writings of Dr Jonathan Swift (1751), she had received in the same shipment of books from her daughter. Orrery’s Remarks were also in the form of letters to his son, modelled upon Sévigné’s letters to her daughter. In the opening letter, Orrery describes reading his son’s letters ‘not only with the fondness of a father, but the affection of a friend’, introducing the emotive terms which frame the subsequent biography of Swift and the literary judgements contained within. Orrery approved of Sévigné’s letters because they ‘contain nothing, except different scenes of maternal fondness; yet, like a classic, the oftener they are read, the more they are relished’ (Boyle 1752, 165). Although Montagu described Orrery as ‘a Poet, a Patriot, a Philosopher, a Physician, a Critic, a compleat Scholar, and a most excellent Moralist, shining in private Life as a submissive Son, a tender Father, and zealous Friend’ (To Lady Bute, Louver 23 June [1754], Complete Letters, III, 56), she contested his views on the status and effect of the epistolary style by identifying Sévigné’s feminine chatter as foundational to his discourse. Crucially, she highlighted the fact that the intimate discourse that gave credence to men in the republic of letters originated in a woman’s letters. Her own letters to her daughter, and Bute’s to her, provide an alternative history of communication, intelligence and history to which we should listen more acutely. Montagu makes it plain that history written from the perspective of women in conversational discourse would tell a very different story from that put forward by Bolingbroke and ratified by Orrery. However, she does not advocate the ‘secret history’ of Lady Vane. Rather domestic trivia and social ‘tittle tattle’ should characterise ‘The Historys of [her] Nursery’ that Montagu urges Bute to write. Her use of the word ‘History’ signals her sense that such letters had value as documents. She writes to Bute: ‘You will confess my Employments much more triffling than yours when I own to you (between you and I) that my chiefe Amusement is writeing the History of my own time’ (Complete Letters, III, 87). By ‘triffling’ she does not mean trivial or inconsequential, rather, like Shaftsbury, she employs it as a positive term. As she explains in another letter, her history will have particular value as: It has been my Fortune to have a more exact knowledge both of the Persons and Facts that have made the greatest figure in England in this Age than is common, and I take pleasure in putting together what I know, with an Impartiality that is altogether unusual. (Complete Letters, III, 18–19)

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In closing she reassures her daughter that she ‘burn[s]every Quire’ ‘as soon as it is finish’d’ (19). This experiment is ephemera that will never be brandished in public. Montagu returned to England from living on the Continent in 1761 and died August 1762. In 1763 a collection of her letters documenting her journey through Europe to Turkey and back to England was published posthumously, in spite of the vigorous efforts of her daughter, who was wary of scandal as her husband, John Stuart, Earl of Bute, was then Tory Prime Minister (Halsband 1956, 287–9). Each letter is dated to suggest that it was written en route, whilst some of the addressees are identified and others are anonymised. The collection known as the Turkish Embassy Letters and first published as Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M---y W-----y M-----e: Written, during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa to Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters &c., purported to be a faithful transcription of Montagu’s letters, but her surviving letter log suggests that in fact the letters were prepared for publication. This involved reassigning sent letters to appropriate recipients, and doubtless some refinement and rewriting (Montagu 1964–7, 1.xiv–xvii). The collection was an immediate publishing success: critical reception, then and today, focuses predominantly on specific sensational or topical letters, such as the one concerning smallpox inoculation, and the series describing Turkish customs (Hall et al. 2017). However, it is important to view the volume as a whole (Heffernan 2000). There is some political bravery in her preparedness to fly against the accounts of other travellers, and to counter attitudes prevalent in contemporary public discussions of smallpox and Turkey, but it is the design of the volume overall that is experimental. The collection begins with a prefatory letter by Mary Astell—author of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest (1694)—and its use as a foundational declaration situates a genealogical herstory of female communication. Astell  suggests that Montagu’s volume will show the world: to how much better purpose the LADIES travel than their LORDS; and that, whilst it is surfeited with Male-Travels, all in the same tone, and stuft with the same trifles; a lady has the skill to strike out a new path, and to embellish a worn-out subject with variety of fresh and elegant entertainment. (Astell in Montagu 1964, 466–7)

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This explicitly situates the volume as an intervention in the male-dominated print culture of the day and flags its engagement with ongoing debates about women’s position in society vis-à-vis their capacities. The aim of the posthumous collection is not simply to debunk myths circulated by other travel writers.6 It displays exemplary decorum, in the sense that the discourse, tone and argument of each letter fits the interests of the recipient. We find that Montagu addresses a letter on Turkish poetry to Alexander Pope, for example, and one concerning republicanism to Lady Mar, her Jacobite sister; and the smallpox letter is addressed to Sarah Chiswell, a childhood friend who died of the disease. Although the collection has become known as the Turkish Embassy Letters, only 22 of the 58 letters were written in Turkey. In many ways the letters describing Europe anticipate those on Turkey. Through these comparisons between Turkey and Europe Montagu uses epistolary form to develop fresh ideas about women’s decorum for a new age. The collection functions not as a series of discrete literary fragments but a whole bound together by this revisionary—even revolutionary—aim. The focus on female culture is established in a group of letters written from Vienna which precede the Turkish letters. In Letter 9 dated 14 September 1716, Montagu writes to her sister Lady Mar of a visit to the Viennese court. Montagu’s account of ‘being squeezed up’ into an ‘inconvenient’ yet becoming gown suitable to the occasion opens a lengthy description of conventions of women’s dress. She finds Viennese fashion ‘monstrous and contrary to all common sense and reason’, owing to the cumbersome head dresses which are ‘about a yard high consisting of 3 or 4 stories fortified with numberless yards of heavy riband’, and ‘This machine they cover with their own [heavily powdered] hair’. They also wear huge ‘whalebone petticoats [that] out-do ours by several yards Circumference and cover some acres of ground’. In spite of her negative impression of Viennese style, Montagu finds herself ‘perfectly charmed’ by the Empress Amelia, and the decorous homage given to her by her ladies at court (Complete Letters, I, 26). When the ladies sit down to play cards, as Montagu does not know the game, rather than join them, she takes the position of observer. Unlike England, ‘No Man enters it but the old Grand Master, who comes in to advertise the Empress of the Approach of the Emperor’. Yet the scene is far from ideal as these ladies ‘of Quality’ have no income, and ‘live in a sort of confinement, not being suffer’d to go to the Assemblys or public places in Town except in complement to the Wedding of a Sister Maid’. Montagu finds more to celebrate when she

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visits the Empress’s country house to attend an all-female shooting competition in which men can participate only as spectators. She reflects ‘I was very well pleas’d with having seen this Entertainment, and I don’t know but it might make as good a figure as the prize shooting in the Aeneid if I could write as well as Virgil’. Montagu’s invocation of Virgil’s Aeneid underscores her point that as the classical tradition does not memorialise or dignify such Amazonian activity, her own account is a first step into an alternative history. This letter is women’s mythology in the making, if she can pull it off. Evidently the women practise shooting regularly which ‘makes the young Ladys skilful enough to defend a fort, and they laughed so much to see me afraid to handle a Gun’ (Complete Letters, I, 265–69). Here Montagu emphasises that women are made not born, to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir. Montagu is fearful of handling a gun only because she has never done so before. Montagu was said to be able to recite Virgil’s Aeneid by heart, so she knew very well that in the Aeneid (V.485–544), the target for the archery contest is a dove tied to the mast of a ship.7 As such, it symbolises the restraint of the men from their heroic quest and foreshadows the Trojan women’s attempt to burn the fleet (V.604–663). As this leads Aeneus to sail for Italy without them (V.664–778), the incident also precipitates women’s exclusion from the epic narrative. Montagu crucially offers her letter as a decorous correction of the possibilities for women’s presence in myth and history, through a witty invocation of Virgil, within the decorous frame of the feminine epistle. Thus implicitly, she suggests that it is cultural regimes, habits of behaviour, convention, social mores and manners that naturalise conventions of feminine behaviour—a suggestion upheld in Astell’s Proposal of 1694. Her repeated stress on the great pleasure she took in observing these rituals conveys her approval of the scene. The letter models a world in which different expectations of women’s behaviour, demeanour and socio-political position are upheld with civility. Here she uses epistolary form to confer women’s assumption of equality with men with impeccable decorum. Montagu’s descriptions of the local customs and sensibilities specific to a range of European and Turkish sites draw attention first to the fact that such conventions are relative and not fixed; and second, that therefore, certain tenets of English decorum, specifically concerning women, should be questioned rather than blindly followed. In many ways Montagu holds the values of her age and class, as, for example, when she espouses the contemporary antipathy to Roman Catholicism, pitching the democracy

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of certain Protestant nations against the absolutism of others through gendered imagery: I can’t help fancying one under the figure of a handsome clean Dutch citizen’s wife, and the other like a poor Town Lady of pleasure, painted and riban’d out in her Head dress, with tarnish’d silver lac’d shoes and a ragged under petticoat, a miserable mixture of Vice and Poverty. (To Lady Bristol, Nieurenburg 22 August [1716], Complete Letters, I, 255–6)

Here she makes plain the connection she sees between women’s behaviour and the political system of government it  supports. Montagu pays particular attention to the effects of Roman Catholic ritual and belief on women. In Letter 12 she writes ‘To the Lady X—’ about an ‘agreeable a young Creature bury’d alive’ in a Viennese convent. She continues ‘I never in my Life had so little charity for the Roman Catholic religion as since I see the misery it occasions so many poor unhappy Women!’ (Vienna 1 October [1716], Complete Letters, I, 277). Thus in her European letters Montagu observes that in some ways English women have more liberty than Roman Catholic women, or those crippled by exaggerated headdresses, or financial dependence, yet in the female sphere of the— nevertheless Catholic—Viennese court she glimpses a female heroic tradition, the stuff of an alternative cultural mythology. The experiment of the Turkish Embassy Letters involves establishing—in both form and content—cross-cultural thinking about women’s lives and history as a basis for new ideals, myths and histories. The letters on the civilities governing European women’s behaviour set the terms for the Turkish letters. Montagu views Turkey through ‘her own culture’s vocabulary of sexual roles’ (Landry 1994, 78). Her most famous letter (number 27) describes her visit to the Turkish bathhouse. She enters to find the Turkish women ‘without any distinction of rank by their dress, all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked’ (‘To Lady —’, Adrianople, 1 April [1717], Complete Letters, I, 313). She stresses that stripped of the trappings of propriety—and she compares them to inhabitants of a Miltonic paradise—women of quality follow a civil regime ‘some in conversation, some working, others drinking Coffee or sherbet, and many negligently lying on their Cushions while their slaves […] were employ’d in braiding their hair’ (314). The women politely coax her to undress and join them and she reports:

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I was at last forced to open my shirt, and show them my stays, which satisfied them very well, for I saw they believed that I was so locked up in that machine, that it was not in my power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband. (314)

Although ‘charm’d with their Civility’, she cannot join them in the bathhouse ritual and so maintains her now well-established pose of observer. By comparison to the Turkish women, Montagu is trapped in the machinery of fashion. In Letter 30, addressed to Lady Mar, also dated 1 April [1717], Montagu provides a rich description of Turkish women’s dress, eye makeup and reddened nails. She observes pointedly ‘as to their Morality or good Conduct, I can say… the Turkish Ladys don’t commit one Sin the less for not being Christians’ (Complete Letters, I, 327). This is the more notable given the considerable liberty afforded by the veils that ‘hide’ their faces and the farace that conceals ‘their shapes’. What Montagu admires most about the anonymity conferred by this ‘disguise’ is ‘that there is no distinguishing the great lady from her slave’ (328). Needless to say, she idealises a code of civility that conveys such notions of liberty and equality for women of quality but does not extend such consideration to their slaves. Montagu uses the epistolary form to convey the relativist idea that civilities, decorum or manners embody religious and political values; this tenet underpins a potentially radical political philosophy, both in gendered and social terms. Such a point of view is achieved not only in terms of content but through the aesthetic form of snapshot reports of social scenes communicated with light or trifling conversational commentary. Montagu’s life itself was an experiment from beginning to end, but she always conceived of her writing as directed to the common good. This ideal of the common good was perfectly captured in her experiments in epistolary form. She manipulated the letter’s essentially dialogical mode, always conscious of its early modern and Enlightenment connection to theorising civility and of how behaviour fits into a larger social and political picture. By fusing content, function, form and projected audience, Montagu showed a sophisticated sense of how female writing can be simultaneously decorous and experimental, conservative and radical.

Notes 1. See also Halsband (1956). 2. On women’s letters in an earlier period, see Daybell (2006).

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3. Diana G. Barnes, ‘New Knowledge: An Epistolary Case Study’ presented at the University of Adelaide, September 2019. 4. Halsband (1953) identified Montagu’s authorship of the letter. 5. On the identification of Montagu’s authorship, see Halsband (1947). 6. On Montagu’s engagement with prior travel writing, see O’Loughlin (2018, 30–64). 7. Montagu’s juvenilia include a poetic imitation of Virgil with gender reversed: she had been thinking about this experiment for some time (Grundy 1999, 19).

Works Cited Astell, Mary. 1694. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest [...] By a Lover of Her Sex. London: R. Wilkin. ———. 1763. The Travels of an English Lady in Europe, Asia and Africa, Reprinted in Montagu. Complete Letters I: 466–7. Barnes, Diana G. 2012. The Public Life of a Woman of Wit and Quality: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Vogue for Smallpox Inoculation. Feminist Studies 38 (2): 350–352. ———. 2015. Tenderness, Tittle-Tattle and Truth in Mother-Daughter Letters: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary Stuart, Countess of Bute, and Lady Louisa Stuart. Women’s History Review 24 (4): 570–590. ———. 2021, forthcoming. Letters. In The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640–1714, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Henry Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Behn, Aphra. 1688. Love Letters of a Nobleman to His Sister. London: Randall Taylor. Bond, Donald, ed. 1987. The Tatler. Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boyle, John. 1751. Remarks Upon the Life and Writings of Dr Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patricks Dublin; In a Series of Letters from John Earl of Orrery, To His Son, the Honourable Hamilton Boyle. Dublin: George Faulkner. Brant, Clare. 2006. Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture. London: Palgrave. Chalus, Elaine. 2000. Elite Women, Social Politics and the Social World of Late-­ Eighteenth-­Century Politics. Historical Journal 43 (3): 669–697. Cowan, Steven. 2012. The Growth of Public Literacy in Eighteenth-Century English. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of London. https://core.ac.uk/ download/pdf/33678476.pdf. Accessed 6 Mar 2020. Cressy, David. 1980. Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daybell, James. 2006. Women Letter Writers in Tudor England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Dickinson, H.T. 2004. St John, Henry, Styled First Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004; Online edn, May 2008. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24496. Accessed 5 Apr 2013. Field, Ophelia. 2008. The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation. London: Harper Collins. Goodman, Dena. 1994. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. New York: Cornell University Press. Grundy, Isobel. 1999. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000. Montagu’s Variolation. Endeavour 24 (1): 4–7. Hall, Jordan, Annna K. Sagal, and Anna Hall. 2017. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Turkish Embassy Letters; A Survey of Contemporary Criticism. Literature Compass. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12405. Halsband, Robert. 1947. The Authorship of the Periodical. In Mary Worley Montagu, The Nonsense of Common-Sense 1737–1738, ed. Robert Halsband, ix–xii. Evanston: Northwestern University. ———. 1953. New Light on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Contribution to Inoculation. Journal of the History of Medicine 8: 390–405. ———. 1956. The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1965. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as Letter-Writer. PMLA 80: 155–163. Hannan, Leonie. 2016. Women of Letters: Gender, Writing and the Life of the Mind in Early Modern England. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Heckendorn Cook, Elizabeth. 1996. Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters. San Francisco: Stanford University Press. Heffernan, Teresa. 2000. Feminism Against the East/West Divide: Lady Mary’s “Turkish Embassy Letters”. Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (2): 201–215. Landry, Donna. 1994. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Historical Machinery of Female Identity. In History, Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin, 307–329. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Lowenthal, Cynthia. 1994. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-­ Century Familiar Letter. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Maitland, Charles. 1722. Dr Matiland’s Account of Inoculating the Small-Pox. London: J. Peele. Meyer Spacks, Patricia. 1983. Borderlands: Letters and Gossip. The Georgia Review 37 (4): 791–813. Miller, Genevieve. 1981. Putting Lady Mary in Her Place: A Discussion of Historical Causation. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 55: 2–16. Evanston: Northwestern University. Mitchell, Linda C. 2007. Letter-Writing Instruction Manuals in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England. In Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from

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Antiquity to the Present, ed. Carol Poster and Linda C.  Mitchell, 178–199. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Montagu, Mary Wortley. 1947. The Nonsense of Common-Sense 1737–1738. Ed. Robert Halsband. Evanston: Northwestern University. ———. 1964–7. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 1708–1762. 3 Vols. Ed. Robert Halsband. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1977a. Essays and Poems, and Simplicity a Comedy. Ed. Isobel Grundy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1977b. The Nonsense of Common-Sense: To Be Continued as Long as the Author Sees Fit and the Public Likes It 3 (3 January 1736) Repr. in Essays: 114–20. O’Loughlin, Katrina. 2018. Women Writing and Travel in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pal, Carol. 2012. The Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prest, Wilfrid. 1998. Albion Ascendant: English History 1660–1815. New  York: Oxford University Press. Randall, David. 2008. Epistolary Rhetoric, the Newspaper, and the Public Sphere. Past and Present 189: 3–32. Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaeffer. 1995. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. New York: Princeton University Press. Shuttleton, David. 2007. Smallpox and the Literary Imagination 1660–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stuart, Louisa. 1993. Biographical Anecdotes of Lady M. W. Montagu. In Mary Wortley Montagu, Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy, 6–54. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sutton, Geoffrey V. 1995. Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture and the Demonstration of Enlightenment. Boulder: Westview. Tague, Ingrid H. 2002. Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Tavor Banet, Eve. 2005. Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Voltaire, Francois. 1980. On Inoculation with Smallpox. In Letters on England, ed. Leonard Tancock, 53–56. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Wagstaffe, William. 1722. A Letter to Dr Friend, Shewing the Danger and Uncertainty of Inoculating the Small Pox. London: Samuel Butler. Warner, Michael. 1990. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Boston: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Experiment on a Dissected Reading: Maternal Absence in Frankenstein’s Gothic Gravidity Emily Blewitt and Emma Bell

Introduction Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein was conceived long before critics noted the twentieth-century emergence of the experimental and the avant-garde in literature. The story of Frankenstein’s conception is itself one of literary experimentation. The infamous ‘ghost story’ challenge set by Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati during the ‘Dark Summer’ of 1816 produced a Gothic science fiction that exploded many myths of the Enlightenment. Simultaneously, the novel traverses an increasingly medicalised discourse of pregnancy, gestation, childbirth, parenting, death, and afterlife. Indeed, Frankenstein began as an experiment in creative

E. Blewitt (*) Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK E. Bell University of Brighton, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Aughterson, D. Philips (eds.), Women Writers and Experimental Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_4

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co-operation in that Mary’s short 1816 text from the ‘Diodati experiment’ was nurtured into a novel by herself and her partner, Percy Bysshe Shelley.1 The term ‘experimental’, especially when applied to women’s writing, is hotly contested and does not often include such experiments of practice. Re-reading Frankenstein as an experimental text calls for a fresh approach that engages with the notion of experimentation-as-such. Let us ‘try, test, put to proof’ Mary’s text by carrying out a critical experiment in reading and resistance, enacting what Mitchell calls the ‘something unfinished, speculative’, the ‘license to try something the outcome of which is never assured’, inherent in experimental writing (Mitchell 2015, 5). In this way, what follows explores the ways in which Frankenstein fuses and parallels a venture into the unknown inherent in experiments in creation, and suggests that the literary experimental and the scientific experiment interact most obviously in the novel’s treatment of bodies as such, and maternal bodies in particular. To read Frankenstein as an experimental text is, initially then, to read against the grain, if one assumes that all experimental writing is entirely the product of a solitary, creative genius, or that experimental writing must always break utterly with traditions, convention, and genre. Notions of ‘experimental writing’ often include the repudiation of narrative authority and of formal or genre conventions (see ‘Introduction’ in this book). Yet Frankenstein is, in many ways, a genre text: a quasi non-supernatural Gothic novel in the tradition established by eighteenth-century Gothic writers such as Anne Radcliffe and the author’s own parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. In Caleb Williams, Godwin had shown that genre fiction could be utilised as social critique, and in Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft had used Gothic genre fiction to expose ‘the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society’ (Kelly 1996, 73). Yet her daughter’s experimental approach to the same genre succeeded in taking inspiration from its versatility and critical substance, whilst inventing an entirely new one: the modern science fiction novel. Models of scientific thought indicate that the purpose of an experiment is to test a particular hypothesis, seeking to prove, support, or disprove it. During the Enlightenment, the period in which Frankenstein is set, one of the characterising features of scientific discourse was ‘the replacement of the self-evident ‘experience’ which formed the basis of scholastic natural philosophy with a notion of knowledge demonstrated by experiments

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specifically designed for the purpose’ (Henry 2008, 34). In her biography of the author, Mellor argues that Frankenstein criticises the God-like hubris of the masculine Enlightenment, gesturing instead at the need for a more ‘womanlike’ and ‘Natural’ science that could nurture and raise up the human experience (Mellor 1988, 121–22). Scientific experiments are conventionally empirical, controlled, and methodical. They follow and establish set patterns and proceed in a rational fashion. This is all far from the fevered midnight labours of Victor Frankenstein, the dream inspiration of Mary’s original story, or the collaborative editing process that Frankenstein went throughout its conception and tending. Literary experimentation, meanwhile, innovates in order to break with established patterns. ‘Experimental writing’ has also been identified as the creation of alternative fictional spaces ‘in which the feminine, marginalised in traditional fiction and patriarchal culture, can be expressed’ (Friedman and Fuchs 1989, 4). Arguably, this is inextricably linked with resisting prescribed, male-dominated discourses, such as science. Frankenstein, then, offers us an opportunity to redefine the experimental in literary discourse, or at least to extend its margins. Mitchell (2015, 3) notes the connotations of the term ‘experiment’ if the science experiment and the literary experiment are related to one another etymologically. We may ask, then, what are the purposes of experimentation? Do literary experiments bear any resemblance to scientific ones? How do narratives of experimentation in literary and scientific texts intersect?

Experiments in Theory: Frankenstein and the Maternal Metaphor To begin with, it is helpful to review how Frankenstein has facilitated productive experiments in theory and criticism by way of essential readings that explore the novel’s interest in the creating and created maternal body. Indeed, the text is a ‘mother-lode’ of feminist, queer, and gender criticism, and, especially configured, ‘the development of feminist literary theory more than perhaps any other novel’ (Long Hoeveler 2004, 60, 45). In the ground-breaking Literary Women, for example, Ellen Moers reads Frankenstein as a ‘birth myth’, unique in its representation of childbirth as a Gothic fantasy embedded in the maternal body. For Moers, this ‘birth myth’ is deeply rooted in Mary’s own traumatic experiences of maternity:

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Frankenstein was ‘lodged in the novelist’s imagination [by] the fact that she was herself a mother’ (Moers 1978, 92). During the period of the novel’s composition, Mary was either pregnant or nursing (ibid, 95–6), and was surrounded by other pregnant women and by stories of failed maternity. Percy’s first wife, Harriet, was pregnant with their child when he eloped with Mary in 1814; Claire Clairmont, the Shelleys’ companion, became pregnant by Lord Byron in 1816. Mary suffered the loss of her baby daughter in March 1815, while Fanny Imlay, Mary’s half-sister, committed suicide in October 1816, and Harriet Shelley committed suicide while pregnant with someone else’s child in December 1816. The foundational tragedy, of course, being that Mary Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever following Mary’s own birth. Thus, ‘death and birth were [as] hideously intermixed in the life of Mary Shelley as in Frankenstein’s “workshop of filthy creation”’ (Moers 1978, 96). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there are many mothers in the Frankenstein text, either briefly as characters or recounted as memories, and all of them die: Each actual mother [in Frankenstein] dies very rapidly upon being introduced as a character in the novel. Frankenstein’s [own] mother was discovered, as a poverty-stricken orphan, by Frankenstein’s father. Frankenstein’s adoptive sister and later fiancée, Elizabeth, was likewise discovered as an orphan, in poverty, by Frankenstein’s parents. Elizabeth catches scarlet fever, and her adoptive mother, nursing her, catches it herself and dies of it... Justine, a young girl taken in by the Frankenstein family as a beloved servant, is said to cause the death of her mother; and Justine herself, acting as foster mother to Frankenstein’s little brother, William, is executed for his murder (Homans 1986, 101).

It has also been proposed that such biographical maternal details indicate that the text is ‘experimental’ in terms of processing real-life experiences— that Mary’s depiction of monstrous reproduction, failed maternal subjects, and dismembered bodies represents an artistic, ‘therapeutic’ response to acute and persistent suffering (Long Hoeveler 2000). Mary Jacobus and Barbara Johnson also read the novel in terms of its representation and elision of the reproductive female body. Jacobus focuses on parallels between Victor Frankenstein’s dead mother and the sacrilegious ‘un-mothering’ of his Creation, by which the absent mother ‘comes to symbolize to [the Creation] his loveless state. Literally unmothered, he fantasizes acceptance by a series of women but founders in

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imagined rebuffs and ends in violence’ (Jacobus 1982, 33). Johnson, however, situates the novel as present at ‘the very ‘primal scene of creation’, asking the essential question ‘where do babies come from? And where do stories come from?’’ (Johnson 1982, 7). Gilbert and Gubar (1979), likewise, read gravidity within Frankenstein as integral to its intertextual structures, placing especial emphasis on the novel’s retelling of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’. As a reiteration of Milton, Victor Frankenstein is a rehearsal of the roles of Satan and Adam, but also of  Eve. Like Eve, Victor iniquitously desires the ‘forbidden knowledge’ and power of life over death that generates the ‘hideous progeny’ that eventually destroys him. Thus, the text of Frankenstein is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley envisaging herself as a ‘monster’ and her experimental literary practice as a form of ‘creature-making’. The writing of Gothic literature, then, is, for Mary, ‘as for so many others, one way of denying the power of death’ (Long Hoeveler 2000, 52). The ‘absent-mother’ is, of course, a well-established trope of Gothic literature, suggesting that terror is something inevitable when the phallic Symbolic Order suppresses the feminine: ‘although all Gothic women are threatened, no woman is in greater peril in the world of the Gothic than is the mother. The typical Gothic mother is absent: dead, imprisoned or somehow abjected’ (Bienstock Anolik 2003, 25). In a trope that ‘literalises’ women’s experience (Homans’s term), it reveals ‘the horror implicit in two legal principles that governed the lives of women in England through the middle of the nineteenth century: coverture and primogeniture’ (ibid, 26). For Carolyn Dever, ‘the mother is constructed as an emblem of the safety, unity, and order that existed before the very dangerous chaos of the child’s Gothic plot’. Gothic novels, therefore, rely on the ‘fractured domestic structures’ produced by absenting the mother that subsequently haunts the Gothic novel (Dever 1998, 24). The Gothic mother’s absence/presence that destabilises the heterosexual family unit can also provoke male characters to synthesise the ‘female’ role in a narcissistic procreation. Motherhood, unsurprisingly, is a prominent feature of the psychoanalytical critical tradition around Frankenstein. Critical emphasis is placed on both Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s and Victor Frankenstein’s relationships to their mothers, and the Creation (in the text but also of the text) is often read as a desire to evade (the loss of) these mothers altogether. Margaret Homans (1986), for example, presents synthetic, scientific gravidity and birth in Frankenstein as a desperate attempt to evade the

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unremitting trauma caused by the loss of the mother. For Homans, Victor Frankenstein is desperate to cheat his mother’s death by making ‘dead people’, usurping maternal power, and this is represented as ‘an Oedipal violation of Mother Nature’ (Homans 1986, 102). Describing Victor’s usurpation of the mother, critics often focus on the crucial dream scene that occurs immediately after the Creation’s birth: I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror. (Shelley 1818, 2012, 36)

This dreamwork conflates Victor’s desire for procreation with the loss of his mother, suggesting that the profane spectre of maternal absence is fuelling both Victor’s creation of, and Oedipal abandonment of, his wretched ‘child’. Similarly, Marie Mulvey-Roberts draws on Julie Kristeva’s psychoanalytical formulation of the maternal as abject—the dreadful ‘not-­ I’ by which the subject is formed—to read the birth narrative in Frankenstein as an expression of the ‘abject’ maternal. The abject is, for Kristeva, ‘neither subject nor object’, which she associates with ‘our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity’ (Bienstock Anolik 2003, 25). In order to become a separate and linguistic subject, consciousness repels itself from anything associated with the mother’s body and places the maternal on one side of a boundary of what becomes ‘I’. But the abject still ‘exists’, and haunts the margins of self, threatening—as the Creation does in Frankenstein—to destroy the self. In the psychoanalytical critical tradition, Frankenstein has also been read as Mary articulating her ‘inability to accept her mother’s death, as well as her baby’s. In this formulation, the Creation in the text is Victor’s attempt to reverse his own Mother’s death—the Creation is ‘so to speak, the first run on an experiment that Victor intends to eventually undertake on his dead mother’s corpse’ (Long Hoeveler 2000, 52). Thus, as an experiment in reversing death-as-(re)birth, Frankenstein can also be interpreted as a dissection of the maternal metaphor itself. Another significant body of scholarship reads the novel as critically engaged with the dark and the spectacular within eighteenth- and

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nineteenth-century medical science: the dissection theatre, grave robbing, electricity, Galvanism, and expeditions to ‘new’ landscapes (see Botting 1991). Yet Frankenstein’s experiments, literary and critical, are sharply at odds with the patriarchal ideal of an isolated, lone, creative experimenter genius of Enlightenment—a figure caricatured by Victor Frankenstein, a man pathologically devoted to science who assumes sovereign authority over radical experiments that go so disastrously wrong. Yet what Frankenstein does so brilliantly is to de-romanticise the fantasy of the experimental creative genius, and it does so via the text’s relationship to the absent maternal body as a site of creation. Dissecting this absent-maternal-presence in Frankenstein offers us another way to interpret Mary as an experimental writer concerned with rupture, disruption, and innovation. The Creation—its birth—embodies all that is haunting, difficult, dangerous, and transgressive about both scientific experimental discovery and humanity itself. Victor’s experiment is unregulated and uncontrolled; it has disastrous consequences; but it is an experiment nevertheless. In its representation of both the scientific experimentalist, and the objects of his experiments—physical bodies, the social ‘body’ of the family, and the scientific ‘body’ of work that informs experiment—Mary’s novel shows us, in Friedman and Fuchs’s terms, alternative spaces, marginalisation, and the ‘exploding’ of traditional categories. The ‘marginalised feminine’ (Friedman and Fuchs 1989, 4) in Frankenstein is discernible in the text’s hidden maternal subjects who are arrogated, destroyed, dismembered, hidden and disappeared, and thereby haunt the novel’s spaces. Frankenstein’s spectacle of a hideously birthed corpse spasming on a laboratory table, agitated by the spark of life, opening a ‘dull yellow eye’, creates a spectacle of the absent maternal presence in Frankenstein. The absent-presence of Frankenstein’s maternal subjects invites the reader to interpret Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as an experimental writer, concerned with rupture, disruption, and innovation. These maternal subjects are spectral throughout Mary’s text, simultaneously corporeal and insubstantial, both seen and unseen: what Derrida called ‘a furtive and ungraspable visibility, or an invisibility [the] tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh, but still the body of someone or someone other’ (Derrida 1994, 6). This insight echoes the multiple ways of reading the novel, in which various interpretations of the text internally and externally form translucent layers to be negotiated between, and the various, nuanced meanings of ‘experiment’. The spectrality of the novel’s female

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subjects also echoes the (in)visibility of the woman experimental writer in the early nineteenth century. Highlighting Frankenstein’s experimentation is to highlight its proto-feminist influence, legacy, and to further the feminist project of ‘archaeological and compensatory’ recovery that Friedman and Fuchs began.

Frankenstein and the ‘Maternal Atlas’: An Experiment in Reading When read as an experimental text, Frankenstein reveals some discernible resistance to ways of seeing and reading female bodies as dissectible objects, questioning medical discourses that represent the reproductive female body as something to be exposed, dissected, and pathologised by male surgeons. In Frankenstein, female subjects-as-objects are represented in a way that recalls certain eighteenth-century scientific spectacles of experimentation on dissected maternal bodies and in anatomical ‘obstetric atlases’. ‘Birth figures’—illustrations of foetuses in utero—were popular in anatomical, midwifery, and surgical books from the sixteenth-century onward (Whiteley 2019; Massey 2005). William Hunter’s 1774 Anatomia Uteri Humani Gravidi (The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus) is especially influential in terms of its cultural representation of the maternal body. Hunter’s text claims to reveal the ‘secrets of life’ in its systematic exposure of the pregnant female body and its parts. This is not an attempt to claim any influence of such atlases on Mary’s text, or on her thinking about pregnancy. Rather, reading Hunter’s Anatomia alongside Frankenstein is offered here as a ‘critical experiment’ that provides a sympathetic way of thinking about, and through, the experimental. Hunter’s Anatomia ‘revealed’ the ‘secrets of life’ through its systematic exposure of the dead female body and its reproducing parts. Illustrated precisely by the Dutch artist Jan Van Rymsdyk, Hunter’s Anatomia comprises a systematic presentation of the gestation of the foetus in utero and the changes to the uterus during pregnancy. The Anatomia does not concern itself with a narrative of conception to birth, or with ‘birth figures’, and makes no attempt to disguise the fact of its three specimens’ deaths. The figure of the anatomist has long been gendered as male, whilst the objects of ‘his’ experiments are passive and feminised. Such gendering is particularly stark in the eighteenth-century anatomical atlas intended for

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‘male-midwives’. This (medical, male) reader is expected to engage with the visual morphology and piece together the process of gestation from the multiple images of different ‘specimens’—both the foetus and its mother are simultaneously and synchronously specimens—at various stages of pregnancy. The Anatomia, which begins with an illustration of a dissected pregnancy at full term (Fig. 4.1), records each body as an experiment: both an illustration of ‘known truth’ (that pregnancy involves gestation over a period of around nine months) and a discovery of something ‘unknown’ (what this gestation looks like). Whiteley has argued that former anatomical ‘birth figures’ (illustrations of the foetus in utero) were not presented as accurate representations of actual anatomised or dissected bodies, but instead were discursive images that explained the processes of pregnancy, particularly foetal presentation (Whiteley 2019, 247). Hunter’s illustrations, though, are of a very different genre, in that they were images of dissections of the bodies of women who died while pregnant. Medical specimens of pregnant women were very rare, and obtained usually only when very poor women died suddenly before or during labour, and the corpse ‘obtained’ by the physician. Hunter was even accused of being ‘The Real Dr Frankenstein’, suspected of conspiring to have ‘Burked’—murdered to order—the pregnant subjects of the Anatomia. These claims have since been discredited by both medical historians and professional midwives (King 2011), but they do highlight the illegitimate and Gothic status of anatomical specimens in the eighteenth century. Until the Anatomy Act of 1832 legalised the study of donated, retailed, and unclaimed cadavers, obtaining anatomical specimens, whether through picking up a graveless pauper, grave-robbing, or ‘Burking’, was a dark and disreputable business. Digging up bodies was not at that time illegal (a corpse was not considered ‘property’ or a ‘person’ with rights), but dissection was: the human body needed to remain intact in order to be resurrected in the afterlife (even the practice of autopsy was ethically questionable). Dissection was even used as a punishment following execution, with medical students and anatomist’s agents often competing for the bodies of recently hanged convicts (Tarlow and Battell Lowman 2018). The dissected corpse and its images were stratified as lower in class and in ‘value’ than those who gazed upon it. In Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein describes late-night clandestine visits to ‘[burial] vaults and charnel-houses’ as well as ‘dabbling among the unhallowed damps of the grave’ and taking ‘materials’ from ‘the dissecting room and the

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Fig. 4.1  ‘Fore-view of the womb opened, full three months’, William Hunter, The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus: 3 Months Foetuses. Engraving by Jan van Rymsdy, Chapter 4, by kind permission of the Wellcome Collection, under creative commons licence (https://wellcomecollection.org/works/tygek9x2#lice nseInformation. Hunter, Plate XXVI, ‘3  months foetuses: 1. Fore-view of the womb opened, full three months; 2. A longitudinal section of the womb; 3. Back-­ view of the whole contents of the pelvis, consisting principally of the retroverted womb; 4. The womb opened to show the secundines and their contents’, in Anatomia Uteri Humani Gravidi)

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slaughter-house’ (Chap. 4) to create life from the parts of those socially ‘deviant’ in both life and death. The Anatomia’s maternal bodies are similarly presented as ‘parts’— headless and limbless, anonymous and disarticulated. There are immediate pragmatic reasons for this: because dissection was illegal, the dissected subject’s anonymity—in case notes, pathologies, and printed illustrations—protected the anatomist’s supply of cadavers. Images in medical textbooks rarely showed faces, identifying scars or birthmarks, possibly lest the identity of the dissected person be revealed. Though painstakingly rendered, rather than fully educating the professional man-midwife in female anatomy, they solidify in images the gaps in this knowledge. These maternal subjects are also sanitised by the illustrator’s hand—they are not in colour, they do not bleed or rot, and they are perfectly preserved. By presenting these pregnant women subjects as ‘all body’, Hunter’s text also exposes the ways in which men—particularly, medical men—are, by comparison, all mind: an Enlightenment Cartesian model which separates the mind (res cogitans) from the corporeal body (res extensa). Descartes wrote ‘this self—that is, the soul by which I am what I am—is completely distinct from the body [and] even if the body did not exist the soul would still be everything that it is’ (Descartes 2003, 24–25). The Cartesian model is deeply saturated into the modern medical discourse by which doctors pathologise the malfunctioning female body (Shildrick 1997, 16). In Hunter’s Cartesianism, we do not see the pregnant subjects as subjects: as these bodies are exposed, the women are elided, dismembered, and hidden. The effect of this is simultaneously grotesque and spectral. On the other hand, the public spectacle of the body being dissected was crucial to the scientific validity of its visibility, as Hunter’s Preface shows: In the year 1751, the Author met with the first favourable opportunity of examining in the human species what before he had been studying in brutes, a Woman died suddenly when very near the end of her pregnancy; the body was procured before any sensible putrefaction had begun; the injection of the blood-vessels proved successful; a very able painter, in this way, was found; every part was examined in the most public manner and the truth was thereby well authenticated… [further specimens were obtained] and [the author] was able to exhibit, by figures, all the principle changes that happen in the nine months of utero-gestation. (Hunter 1774, Preface, n.p. our emphasis)

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Hunter’s Anatomia encourages its (medical, male) reader to actively participate in the ‘dissection’ of these images by presenting them as self-­ conscious aesthetic representations and processes. In a narrative that reflects his privileging of Enlightenment models of Reason and knowledge, Hunter takes pains to tell the reader that the engravings are a record of what happens when an artist enters the dissection theatre and is charged with the task of representing exactly what he sees. In the text accompanying one illustration, for instance, Hunter points out that Van Rymsdyk has included the reflection of the window that appeared on the membrane covering the foetus’s head: ‘the convex surface of the transparent membranes, reflected a distinct miniature picture, of the window which gave light’ (Fig. 4.1). Hunter thus draws our attention both to the light-giving window and to  the process of representation itself by which the image is captured, which he earlier presented as ‘almost as infallible as the object itself’ (Hunter 1774, Preface). However, the female bodies presented in these images are not ‘infallible’: Hunter tells us how each woman died and a keen sense of loss is intensified by the presence of the stillborn child in many of these images—babies beautifully rendered in delicate line engravings (Fig. 4.2.). It is ‘death itself that seems most present in Hunter’s atlas and this is why it conveys the sense that we are participating in an anatomical dissection’ (Massey 2006).

Spectral Maternal Subjects: Margaret, Caroline, and the Female Creation Tensions between seeing and knowing, between representation and truth, and between Enlightenment rationality and Gothic corporeality are very much at the heart of Hunter’s atlas—and, as we shall see, at the heart of Frankenstein. Frankenstein’s framing narrative positions an implicitly spectral maternal subject as its sole addressee. Robert Walton’s letters are addressed to his sister, Margaret Walton Saville, known both by her married name, ‘Mrs Saville’, and affectionately as ‘dear, excellent, Margaret’ (Shelley, M.W. 2009, 9). Margaret’s significance as a spectral maternal subject is meta-textual. In reading her as a subject whose position at the margins of the text reveals more than what is explicitly included, we engage in resistant, experimental reading. Robinson, (in Shelley, M.W., 2009, 22–3) notes that Margaret’s initials recall the ‘MWS’ of Mary Wollstonecraft

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Fig. 4.2  The child in the womb, in its natural situation’, in William Hunter, (1774) Anatomia Uteri Humani Gravidi (The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus). Birmingham: John Baskerville, Engraving by Jan van Rymsdy, Plate VI. (https://wellcomecollection.org/works/feawnte3#licenseInformation. Hunter, Plate VI, ‘The child in the womb, in its natural situation’, in Anatomia Uteri Humani Gravidi)

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Shelley and that both Walton’s narrative and the drafting of the ‘Fair Copy’ of the novel take place over a ‘gestation period’ of nine months. Both Walton and Margaret function as paratextual birth-giving authorial figures, with Margaret particularly read as an embedded cipher for Mary herself. Margaret’s latent authorial power is, however, disguised by a veneer of respectable domesticity. While Robert Walton’s shifting locations are mapped from St Petersburg to the Arctic, ‘Mrs Saville’ is established as a married woman: both her sexuality and her (potential) maternity are safely contained within the English home. In their recording and editing of Victor’s story, both Walton and Victor visibly operate according to a set of flawed assumptions which privilege male imaginative enterprise over female experience. Yet although frequently side-lined by Walton’s comments, Margaret nevertheless holds control over the final manuscript. Walton’s authorship is thereby exposed as a means of parenting the text which attempts to exclude maternal authority. This explicit narrative exposure marks Mary’s text as self-consciously experimental in its voices, aesthetics, and notions of birth and aesthetic ownership. Margaret, explicitly cast as wife and implicitly as a mother, through her care of Walton’s manuscript as much as her unspoken domestic circumstances, serves as a reminder of a distinctly female model of authorship which is located in marginalised feminine spaces. Metaphorically pregnant with narrative, she ‘authors’ the text in a domestic sphere far removed from the Arctic wilderness, a setting that has the potential to birth both babies and books. However, Frankenstein itself presents the domestic sphere and its maternal subjects as increasingly fragmented. The female characters who inhabit Victor’s home are consecutively destroyed and figuratively (if not literally) dismembered. Maternal subjectivity becomes a prerequisite to maternal death: mothers, both natural and unnatural, are born only to be destroyed. Once dead, they function as the means of another mother’s destruction. Victor’s mother, Caroline, for instance, is absent from the narrative but recurrently materialises in the form of a miniature portrait and a nightmare corpse. While Margaret both appears in, and has control over, the physical manuscript of the letters themselves, Caroline’s portrait is passed from character to character, changing ownership frequently and illicitly. In itself a signifier of Caroline’s death, it also provides a prop for the Creation’s murderous schemes and so becomes doubly significant as a symbol of death. When the Creation murders William, Victor’s young

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brother, he places the miniature in the folds of Justine’s dress to implicate her in the murder. Justine, a faithful family servant and caregiver, is later found guilty of this murder and executed. Frankenstein also repeatedly suggests a causal link between maternal subjectivity and death. Victor’s anxiety about a Female Creation’s potential for monstrous motherhood prompts him to violently destroy the pieces of her body that he has already assembled. Thus, the female reproductive body elicits anxieties about creation and monstrosity, while the experimentalist’s attempts to control it result in failure. Victor’s voice speaks out: Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I a right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? […] As I looked on him [the Creation], his countenance expressed the utmost extent of malice and treachery. I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and, trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged. The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness, and, with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdrew. (119)

The Female Creation is the experiment which most demonstrates the disturbing potential of the female reproductive body. Mary’s lexis for Victor suggests that the natural desire for companionship and domestic life will become evil when embodied in a female subject. Her use of the verb ‘thirsted’ in such close proximity to ‘children’ implies that the Creation’s desire for biological ‘devil’ children is all-consuming; the consumption of one race will result in the growth of another. To prevent such terror, Victor carries out an equally horrific act: he aborts the Female Creation before her birth. Victor’s response is to leave his laboratory and lock the door; he seeks refuge in his own apartment, a masculine domestic space from which female characters are conspicuously excluded. Victor’s strategy of dismemberment and confinement links him with the figure of the surgeon. Having destroyed his work in a fit of ‘passion’ and locked the laboratory door, he must return in order to retrieve his surgical implements:

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Yet, before I departed, there was a task to perform, on which I shuddered to reflect: I must pack my chemical instruments; and for that purpose I must enter the room which had been the scene of my odious work, and I must handle those utensils, the sight of which was sickening to me. The next morning, at day-break, I summoned sufficient courage, and unlocked the door of my laboratory. The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being. I paused to collect myself, and then entered the chamber. With trembling hand, I conveyed the instruments out of the room; but I reflected that I ought not to leave the relics of my work to excite the horror and suspicion of the peasants, and I accordingly put them into a basket, with a great quantity of stones, and laying them up, determined to throw them into the sea that very night; and in the mean time I sat upon the beach, employed in cleaning and arranging my chemical apparatus. (122)

While Victor spends time methodically ‘cleaning and arranging’ his apparatus, he does not have the ‘firm and steady hand’ of the author-­ surgeon whom Percy Shelley described in his Preface (Shelley 1840, 2003, 434). By contrast, the hand which picks up and moves the instruments is ‘trembling’, and the sight of the instruments themselves is ‘sickening’— the ‘relics’ of his work would ‘excite […] the peasants’. It seems that the reality of the spectacle of Victor’s ‘workshop of filthy creation’ has a deeply disturbing physiological effect on this surgeon and on anyone else who may encounter it, including the reader. Victor’s private laboratory lacks the precise control that the dissection theatre and its surgeons hold over their specimen bodies. Rather, he has ‘mangled’ the dead flesh of a human being in a manner both reminiscent of the dissection theatre and unlike it. The Female Creation’s remains are put into a basket to be submerged: ‘I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being’. Victor’s ‘almost’ echoes, and simultaneously evokes and abstains from, a fully empathetic response towards this almost ‘living flesh’. Neither fully embodied nor disembodied, the Female Creation is left to be taken up by readers and reanimated. Her potential as a monstrous maternal subject is never fully realised, but neither is it fully confined. It is simply submerged, with the potential to resurface beyond Victor’s narrative and the end of the novel. Both an examined extension of Hunter’s mapped but visually arrested mothers and simultaneously composed of multiple maternal bodies, the Female Creation is the novel’s most troubling failed experiment.

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Delivering the Text: An Experiment in Editing Tensions between seeing and knowing, such as described in Hunter’s Anatomia, are also played out in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 Preface to Frankenstein, which draws upon the figure of the Enlightened medical man in order to reassure the reader that they are in safe hands, despite Frankenstein’s disturbing content. Percy presents the process of reading Frankenstein as an almost unendurable trial: ‘we think we can bear no more, and yet more is to be borne’ (434). He claims that reading the novel, as he puns on ‘bear’ and ‘borne’, is like childbirth, and his use of compound sentences and repetition dramatically plays this out: ‘we are held breathless with suspense and sympathy, and the heaping up of incident on incident, and the working of passion out of passion… It is impossible to read [Frankenstein]… without feeling the heart suspend its pulsations with wonder, and the “tears stream down the cheeks”’ (Shelley 1818, 434–6). Indeed, for Percy the Prefacist, the emotional labour of reading Frankenstein is managed by its benevolent, (presumptively male) midwife who both induces this labouring and delivers the text safely. Percy implicitly presents Frankenstein’s author as a surgeon who conducts the novel ‘with a firm and steady hand’ (Shelley 1818, 434). By using the vocabulary of medical discourse here, in order to draw a link between Frankenstein’s author and the figure of the Enlightened medical man, Percy transforms the childbirth metaphor: this author is the accoucheur (man-midwife) at the forefront of medical advancement, who expertly delivers the novel in much the same way as he ‘delivers’ a baby. Percy’s use of the passive voice (‘We are held…’) reinforces this interpretation, positioning the reading process as an assisted delivery rather than an active labour. In an age before effective anaesthesia or analgesia in the operating theatre (let alone in the domestic birthing chamber), Percy presents Frankenstein’s author as someone who expertly manages to deliver this unbearable narrative. By echoing contemporary medical discourses that had ‘professionalised’ midwifery, making it the dominion of medical men rather than lay women, Percy here seems to be consciously shedding masculinised Enlightenment upon Mary’s horrifying birth myth. The increasingly medicalised experience of childbirth coincided with the

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rise of professional man-midwives, whom Moscucci terms ‘carriers of rational, scientific expertise’ (1990, 50). The ‘firm and steady hand’ of the author also evokes another aspect of this medical figure. The accoucheur is aligned with the surgeon: he has also dissected corpses and, like Victor Frankenstein, has learned that to ‘examine the causes of life we must first have recourse to death’ (Frankenstein, 31). Though Percy  Shelley’s Preface may not explicitly mention dissection, the connotations of his semantics do ally dissection with the impact Frankenstein has on its reader by which ‘the elementary feelings of the human mind are exposed to view’ (Shelley, P.B. in Shelley, M.W. 2009, 434). His use of the passive voice here positions him as a distanced external observer. The published novel, then, is rather like the eighteenth-century ‘theatre’ of dissection, effectively performative (Marshall 1995). Mary Shelley’s 1831 ‘Introduction’ to the revised edition, in which she recounts this experiment, reiterates the childbirth metaphor as literary creation: It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered. (6)

Mary’s metaphorical childbirth, taking place in a setting both rural and grand, is also, significantly, within touching distance of domesticity: ‘belonging to our house’. Mary’s grammar suggests that authorship—particularly female authorship—is born at home too. ‘Belonging’ to the domestic, and yet adjacent to it, female authorship is simultaneously reassuring and threatening because of its liminality. Neither properly feminine nor completely engaged with the sublime of a completely wild landscape, the female author gives birth to her ‘hideous progeny’ just outside the house (Shelley 2003, 10). This liminality recalls Percy’s careful positioning of the author-surgeon in his Preface and suggests a tentativeness in Mary’s novelistic experiment that belies the boldness of the text itself. Mary’s account of the summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva corroborates this, suggesting that the novel was the product both of collaboration and of her ‘possessed’ imagination: When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual

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bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. […] His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. (9)

At this point Mary Shelley’s characters are ‘half-vital’, conceived as insubstantial apparitions. Their ghostliness, however, seems fundamentally at odds with the ‘vividness’ of Mary Shelley’s vision. These characters and Mary  Shelley’s account of their creation problematise the material certainty of bodies both fictional and real, ghosting them in an echo of the ghosting of the pregnant body in Frankenstein. Percy Shelley also offered significant changes to the final lines of Frankenstein that sustain this discourse of ‘birth’. Mary Shelley’s 1816 story ends with the Creation voluntarily abandoning his pursuit of his Maker-Father and submitting to the wilderness, his ultimate fate unknown: He sprung from the cabin-window as he said this on to an ice raft that lay close to the vessel & pushing himself off he was carried away by the waves and I soon lost sight of him in the darkness & distance. (Shelley 1816, 429, our emphasis)

In this ending, the Creation is still ‘out there’ as a threat to humanity, possibly even proliferating; the reader is not given a satisfying or closed ending. This ending never reached its readers because Percy Shelley made a significant edit that foreclosed any ambiguity.2 By the time the novel is published in 1818, the Creation is involuntarily reclaimed by the wilderness; in a death-as-birth termination of the experiment, he is ‘borne away’ from humanity back to Nature: He sprung from the cabin-window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance. (Shelley 1818 and 1831, our emphasis)

The variance between ‘pushing himself off’ to be ‘lost from sight’ and ‘being borne away’ and ‘lost’ for good is between an experimentally open ending and a generically resolved one, indicating that Percy  Shelley felt the ending should be less inventive—and less troubling—than Mary Shelley had envisaged.

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Frankenstein’s paratexts present the novel as having a particularly complex and active function. The spirit of scientific enquiry informs Percy Shelley’s gaze and discourse, but, implicit in his account of the reading procedure, is the sense that reading and dissection cost bodies, both fictional and actual, their agency. Frankenstein thus acts as a kind of experiment to reveal the human condition, but it also prompts self-examination, transforming its readers into their own objects of experiment. Framing narratives both within and without the novel create a disruptive space, in which multiple meanings, readings, and outcomes arise and shift. The figure of the experimentalist, whether Victor Frankenstein or Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author or accoucheur, mediating and disruptive, is ever-present in the text’s margins. These margins are—supplementarily— also home to the marginalised maternal feminine, reinforcing Frankenstein’s function as an experimental text. Frankenstein’s ‘birth myth’ emphasises the absence of the real pregnant body, despite the aesthetic and linguistic connotations of labouring. The persistent artistry of the ‘pale student’, a man who births a monstrous being, marks him as both another author-cipher in the text and as an ‘Experimentalist’. Mary’s account of authorial conception also ghosts her own body, by looking instead towards apparitions, reveries, dreams, and spectres as sources of poetic inspiration. She downplays her active authorship, claiming that this creative vision was delivered by her imagination, rather than laboured. Indeed, Mary’s strategic positioning of herself as a passive receptacle of this novel’s monstrous birth allows her both to appropriate the childbirth metaphor (as previously utilised by male writers) and to explore the horrific consequences of her male maternal subject’s labours. The form of Mary Shelley’s ‘hideous progeny’, however, required what she calls ‘chaos’, the intertextual mass of circumstances, stories, and voices around the author, waiting to be shaped and moulded: Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. […] Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject: and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it. (Frankenstein, 8)

While Mary Shelley’s authorial body is rendered spectral, the body of the text is moulded from dark and shapeless substances, proleptically

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foreshadowing Victor Frankenstein’s late-night visits to the charnel house. Victor assembles his Creation from the corpses belonging to anonymous specimens, possibly sourced from executed criminals, paupers, and desecrated graves. Similarly, Frankenstein’s epistolary narrative constructs the novel from a series of documents and first-hand accounts: the text is composed of found material, collated and organised, ‘stitched together’, by its fictional benevolent author-surgeon. Yet the novel also shows us that the figure of the medical man is ultimately infertile. Even as it ghosts the pregnant body, Mary  Shelley’s Introduction reinforces the notion that creation is a highly visceral process, replaying the tensions between creation and dismemberment and the corporeal and the spectral, apparent in Hunter’s representations of female bodies and in the novel itself. Frankenstein resists straightforward reading and calls for an experimental reading; it disrupts established narratives of authorship and shows us the process of the generation of an experimental text.

Notes 1. Since its birth, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel has been subject to persistent unjust challenges to its authorship, with contemporaneous critics claiming it to be derivative of the work of her father, William Godwin, and/ or attributable to her partner, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and more recent voices claiming a ‘mere girl’ simply could not have written such a powerful book (see Wu 2015, 212–219). As is well known, the novel’s nurturing process did closely involve Mary’s partner, Percy, but he neither altered nor gifted much of Frankenstein’s fundamental ideas and images. Percy had an editorial role, supporting Mary to create a lengthier version of the short experimental text she had produced at Diodati in 1816. In her Preface to the 1831 edition, Mary explains: ‘At first I thought but of a few pages—of a short tale; but Shelley urged me to develop the idea at greater length. I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world’ (Shelley 1831). 2. In the 1816 draft Robinson publishes, Percy Shelley retains Mary Shelley’s original ending (Robinson, in Shelley, M.W. 2009, 245). However, Robinson states that the concluding text of the 1818 draft ‘is dominated more by PBS’s voice, for he fair-copied and embellished the last twelve-and-­ three-quarter pages of the Draft’ (Ibid, 2009, 252).

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Works Cited Anon. 1772. The Danger and Immodesty of the Present Too General Custom of Unnecessarily Employing Men-Midwives. London: Wilkie and Blythe. Betterton, Rosemary. 2006. Promising Monsters: Pregnant Bodies, Artistic Subjectivity, and Maternal Imagination. Hypatia 21 (1): 368–380. Bienstock Anolik, Ruth. 2003. The Missing Mother: The Meanings of Maternal Absence in the Gothic Mode. Modern Language Studies 33.1 (2): 24–43. Botting, Fred. 1991. Making Monstrous: Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge. Descartes, René. 1649, 2003. Discourse on the Method for Guiding One’s Reason and Searching for the Truth in the Sciences. In Discourse on Method and Related Writings. Trans. Desmond M. Clarke. London: Penguin. Dever, Carolyn. 1998. Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedman, Ellen G., and Miriam Fuchs. 1989. Contexts and Continuities: An Introduction to Women’s Experimental Fiction in English. In Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, 3–51. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale University Press. Godwin, William. 1794, 2005. Caleb Williams. Harmondsworth: Penguin Hanson, Clare. 2004. A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Medicine and Culture, 1750–2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Henry, John. 2008. The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science: Third Edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hodges, Devon. 1983. Frankenstein and the Feminine Subversion of the Novel. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 2 (2): 155–164. Homans, Margaret. 1986. Bearing Demons: Frankenstein’s Circumvention of the Maternal. In Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-­ Century Women’s Writing, 100–119. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hunter, William. 1774. Anatomia Uteri Humani Gravidi (The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus). Birmingham: John Baskerville. Jacobus, Mary. 1982. Is There a Woman in this Text? New Literary History 14 (1): 117–141. Johnson, Barbara. 1982. My Monster/My Self. Diacritics 12 (2): 2–10. Kelly, Gary. 1996. Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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King, Helen. 2011. History Without Historians? Medical History and the Internet. Social History of Medicine 25: 212–221. Knoepflmacher, U.C., and George Levine, eds. 1982. The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Long Hoeveler, Diane. 2000. Fantasy, Trauma, and Gothic Daughters: Frankenstein as Therapy. Prism(s) 8: 7–28. ———. 2004. Frankenstein, Feminism and Literary Theory. In Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. E.  Schor, 45–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marshall, Tim. 1995. Murdering to Dissect: Grave-Robbing, Frankenstein and the Anatomy Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Massey, Lyle. 2005. Pregnancy and Pathology: Picturing Childbirth in Eighteenth-­ Century Obstetric Atlases. The Art Bulletin 87: 73–91. ———. 2006. Dissecting Pregnancy in Eighteenth-Century England. The Anatomy of Gender: Arts of the Body in Early Modern Europe. https://www. blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/view/exhibitions/past-­exhibits/2006/the-­ anatomy-­of-­gender.html. Accessed June 2020. Mellor, Anne K. 1988. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Methuen. Mitchell, Kaye. 2015. Introduction: The Gender Politics of Experiment. Contemporary Women’s Writing. 9 (1): 1–33. Moers, Ellen. 1978. Literary Women: The Great Writers. London: Women’s Press. Moscucci, Ornella. 1990. The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800–1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. 2000. The Corpse in the Corpus: Frankenstein, Rewriting Wollstonecraft and the Abject. In Mary Shelley’s Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner, ed. Michael Eberle-Sinatra, 199–204. New York: Macmillan. Pon, Cynthia. 2000. “Passages” in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Toward a Feminist Figure of Humanity? Modern Language Studies 30.2 (Autumn): 33–50. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. 1816, 2009. The Original Frankenstein. Ed. Charles E. Robinson. Oxford: Bodleian Library; Repr. New York: Vintage. ———. 1818, 2012. Frankenstein. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. 1831, 2003. Author’s Introduction to the Standard Novel’s Edition. In Frankenstein, ed. Maurice Hindle, 5–10. London: Penguin Books. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1840, 2003. A Defence of Poetry. In Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill, 674–701. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Shildrick, Margrit. 1997. Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)Ethics. London: Routledge. Stanford Friedman, Susan. 1987. Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse. Feminist Studies 13 (1): 49–82. Tarlow, Sarah, and Emma Battell Lowman. 2018. Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Whiteley, Rebecca. 2019. Figuring Pictures and Picturing Figures: Images of the Pregnant Body and the Unborn Child in England, 1540–c.1680. Social History of Medicine 32 (2): 241–266. Winnett, Susan. 1990. Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure. PMLA 105 (3): 505–518. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1798, 1994. Maria, or, The Wrongs of Woman. New York: WW Norton Co. Wu, Duncan. 2015. Thirty Great Myths About the Romantics. London: John Wiley.

CHAPTER 5

Genre-Bending and Experimentation in Sensation Fiction: The Case of Mary Braddon and Ellen Wood Peter Blake

In the late 1970s two ground-breaking books of feminist criticism were published. Ellen Moers Literary Women: The Great Writers (1976) and Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1982) set out to recover women writers from the margins and to analyse the reasons for their neglect. Moers’ work had greater scope in terms of its time frame, but both texts focussed on the Victorian age, a period that Moers terms ‘heroinism’, and in the process brought to prominence for the first time the importance of a neglected aspect of Victorian culture, sensation fiction. Two writers in particular were brought from the margins to the centre of Victorian literature, Mary Braddon and Ellen Wood (the latter known throughout the Victorian period as Mrs Henry Wood). The subversive and rebellious nature of their writing appealed to Moers and Showalter’s idea of the suppressed woman writer who, by her forced silence, manifests rage with salacious dreams of revenge and escape.

P. Blake (*) University of Brighton, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Aughterson, D. Philips (eds.), Women Writers and Experimental Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_5

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More recent criticism has focussed on whether Braddon and Wood may be considered subversive at all, or whether their novels are conservative and adhere to dominant gender ideologies. In a collection entitled New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon (2012), Nancy Knowles and Katherine Hall outline the possibility for problematic feminist readings of the novels. While Lady Audley in Braddon’s novel Lady Audley’s Secret abandons her child and commits bigamy and attempts murder to solidify her status in the aristocracy, she is ultimately manacled at the hands of the patriarchal medical fraternity, labelled insane and committed to an asylum. In Wood’s East Lynne, Isabel Carlyle also abandons her child, due to an affair with an aristocratic lover, but suffers disfigurement and death as penance for her transgressions. However, in their introduction to the collection Beyond Sensation, Mary Braddon in Context (2000), editors Marlene Tromp, Pamela Gilbert and Aeron Haynie argue that ‘although many of Braddon’s novels may seem to capitulate to normative Victorian standards of morality … they ultimately provide a subversive variety of revision that . . . calls into question notions of gendered identity’ (xvi). This thinking is consistent with what Lynette Felber calls a ‘resistant though conflicted feminism’ (Felber 2007, 473) and Fetterley the development of a ‘resisting reader’ (Fetterley 1978). These recent feminist approaches, contextualized in cultural and historicist theory, build on Showalter’s assertion that sensation writers ‘could not bring themselves to undertake a radical inquiry into the role of women’ (1982, 180). Showalter argued that sensation novels reveal Victorian women’s grievances but fail to provide answers to the restraints placed on women’s roles within their contemporary society. For the modern reader, this can be a frustrating experience, but when we understand the context of the writing of these novels, and, particularly, the ways in which Braddon and Wood negotiate moral boundaries, melodrama and the realism of the domestic novel, we can understand that they were in fact undertaking innovative and challenging experiments in fiction. Kayman (1992, 10) acknowledges the genre as broadly experimental in its use of narrative viewpoints—and  this chapter argues that this experimentation extends to characterisation and the mixing of genres, in particular the blending of the domestic with the sensational. From 1850 to 1860 there was a change in middle-class reading tastes. Deborah Wynne has described how ‘the social problem and domestic

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novels of the 1850s were falling out of favour as readers sought more exciting plots which represented insecurity and danger temporarily disturbing the genteel home’ (Wynne 2001, 39). The new genre of literature that grew out of this desire for excitement came to be known as sensation fiction, a form of novel writing that shocked readers with outrageous and scandalous plots that depicted graphic, startling episodes, including murder, bigamy, madness and seduction. Two of its most prolific authors were Ellen Wood and Mary Braddon, who wrote their most successful novels, East Lynne and Lady Audley’s Secret in 1861 and 1862, respectively. In East Lynne, Lady Isabel Carlyle is married to her hard-working middle-­class lawyer-husband Archibald Carlyle. After wrongfully suspecting her husband’s friendship with Barbara Hare, she commits adultery with an aristocratic lover, Francis Levison. She elopes with Levison, abandoning her infant children. While on the continent with him, she realises that he has no intention of marrying her, despite her having borne their illegitimate child. Levison deserts her, Lady Isabel is disfigured in a train accident, and the child is killed. Isabel is able to take up the position of governess in the household of her former husband, Carlyle and his new wife, Barbara Hare, because of her facial scarring. Unbeknownst to Carlyle, she infiltrates the family to observe her children as they grow up. However, this proximity becomes difficult to maintain, and the pressure of preserving her anonymity becomes too great. Isabel becomes ill and on her deathbed reveals all to Carlyle, who graciously forgives her. At the beginning of Lady Audley’s Secret, Lucy Graham, a governess, marries a rich older man, Sir Michael Audley, owner of Audley Court. Lady Audley’s secret is that her real name is Helen, not Lucy, and that she has committed bigamy and faked her own death. Helen was already married to a dragoon named George Talboys, who left her (and their baby) to seek his fortune in Australia. George returns to track down Helen and the baby, only to discover that she has remarried and is now living as Lady Audley. In order to get rid of him and to keep her secret safe, Lady Audley pushes her first husband down a well. Unbeknownst to her, he survives largely unscathed, manages to escape from the well and flees to America. Robert Audley, Sir Michael Audley’s nephew and a friend of George Talboys, decides to investigate his friend’s mysterious disappearance. He notices, through careful analysis, that the handwriting of his step-aunt, Lucy Graham, and the handwriting of the woman ‘Helen’, who was married to his friend George, are eerily similar. Fearing that she is about to be exposed, Lady Audley burns down the inn at which Robert is lodging, in

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the hope of destroying him, but, as with her attempted murder of George, she fails and Robert reveals her secret. Lady Audley is presumed to be mad and is incarcerated in an asylum in Belgium. Both novels incorporate elements of melodrama; particularly in terms of complicated plots and reversals of fortune, overtly sensational incidents and excessive and exaggerated characterisations, and both novels were eventually turned into successful plays. These plot summaries suggest that Wood and Braddon were reacting against the realism of the contemporary domestic novel. Wynne has also noted that Ellen Wood owed much of the domestic aspect of her novels to popular authors of domestic realism such as Charlotte M. Yonge and Margaret Oliphant, although the latter would later launch an assault on all things sensational: Ellen Wood in particular promoted middle-class domesticity as an ideal to be protected, while even more radical sensationalists…like Braddon…invariably resorted to closing their novels with a triumphant middle-class family surviving all attacks. (Wynne 2001, 10)

Although sensation fiction could be described as a radical breaking away from contemporary Victorian fiction, sensation novelists were actually working within the dominant discourses of realism while simultaneously challenging those discourses. It is this precise marrying of the domestic and the sensational that makes these writers experimental: this chapter explores their subtle negotiations of genre as they analyse the pressures facing women in that decade of sensation, the 1860s. Sensation fiction harked back to the mystery and romance of the Gothic novel, which reached its apotheosis in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Writers such as Monk Lewis, Charles Maturin and Ann Radcliffe crafted novels that sought to thrill and shock in equal measure. Located in Catholic Spain or France and set in castles or monasteries filled with nuns and monks, they were a long way from the contemporary realities of London life. The sensation novelists wanted a more modern feel to their literature, but one which retained the excitement inherent in Gothic fiction. They dispensed with the continental settings and mysterious apparitions, replaced them with the domestic comfort of the English upper-­ middle-­class home and inserted contemporaneous crimes that were then being reported in the newspaper: ‘both modernity and domesticity are more than simply the mise-en-scène of the sensation novel, they are also

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among its main preoccupations’ (Pykett 2011, 6). Henry James makes a similar point: Those most mysterious of mysteries which are at our own doors . . . instead of the terrors of Udolpho, we are treated to the terrors of the cheerful country house; or the London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely more terrible. (James 1865, 594)

It was not until the late 1820s and 1830s that literature could be said to have become industrialised, which paved the way for the conditions for sensation fiction. New cheaper printing methods, allied with a rapidly increasing readership among the literate working class, meant that prices of books in these earlier decades decreased sharply with mass production (Harman, 38). Although it was still beyond the means of working people to buy a new novel, the advent of circulating libraries and the serialisation of fiction in cheap magazines increased access to fiction beyond the chattering classes. This new mass audience were particularly appreciative of sensational titles such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram (1832), or Charles Whitehead’s Lives and Exploits of English Highwaymen, Pirates and Robbers (1834). This desire for true-life crime committed by swaggering members of the lower classes became known as ‘Newgate novels’, after the gruesome compendium of crime and punishment detailed in The Newgate Calendar; or, Malefactors’ Bloody Register (first published in 1773). As Claire Harman has recently outlined: Alongside his crimes, a Newgate hero typically keeps displaying strains of noble feeling: Paul Clifford sacrifices his love for a spotless girl because he deems himself unworthy of her (unlike his corrupt, but outwardly respectable rival) while Eugene Aram (in Bulwer’s interpretation) is a positive model of scholarly rectitude, yearning for ‘chances of illuminating mankind’. It was the blurring of moral signals in these books that alarmed the critics, who thought they gave birth to something worse than bad taste: ‘We say, let your rogues in novels act like rogues and your honest men like honest men’, Fraser’s magazine urged. ‘Don’t let us have any juggling and thimble-rigging with virtue and vice, so that at the end of three volumes the bewildered reader shall not know which is which. (Harman 2018, 39)

It was this blurring of moral boundaries, this ‘thimble-rigging with virtue and vice’, that the sensation novelists of the 1860s would accentuate in their heroines. Lady Audley fakes her own death, attempts to murder her

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first husband and nearly kills 11 people in a failed act of arson. Isabel Vane commits adultery with an aristocratic rogue who also turns out to be a murderer. But Braddon and Wood write their novels in such a way that the reader cannot help but feel for these two wronged women. When William Harrison Ainsworth wrote his novel Jack Sheppard in 1839, the critic’s reaction was summed up by a review in the Athenaeum, ‘Jack Sheppard is a bad book, and what is worse, it is one of a class of bad books, got up for a bad public’ (quoted in Hollingsworth 1963, 142). When the throat of Lord William Russell was slashed by his man-servant François Courvoisier in Mayfair in 1840, supposedly after reading Ainsworth’s novel, the backlash against the Newgate Novel was complete and the genre died out. Sensation novelists learned from this backlash that the depiction of working-­class criminals as heroes was unpalatable to middle-class readers and critics; their ‘criminals’ would have to be of a more feminine, morally ambiguous and middle-class demeanour, and their ‘crimes’ committed in a more middle-class and domestic setting. The domestic novel was principally founded by William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847) in which the lives of Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley are considered against the background of the Napoleonic Wars. Thackeray’s subtitle, ‘Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society’, demonstrates his desire to chronicle ordinary lives, and although, as John Sutherland has argued, it was never considered a ‘school’ as such, the domestic novel thrived with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s popular novel The Caxtons, A Family Picture (1849), which was influential in making the domestic novel fashionable. Sutherland has shown that Charlotte Brontë’s declaration in her preface to Shirley (1849), in which she states her intention to write a novel that is as undramatic ‘as Monday morning’, encapsulates the domestic purpose of these writers. Thomas Hughes’ novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) opens with what Sutherland calls an ‘aggressive celebration of the unspectacular “Browns” of the world’ (Sutherland 1989, 193). A series of cultural and societal shifts meant that the domestic novel began to lose currency with its readers, who desired more exciting plots representing these changes. Charles Reade, a fellow sensationalist, sneered in a footnote to Love Me Little, Love Me Long (1859) that ‘“domestic” is Latin for tame’ (cited in Baker and Womack 2002, 209). The first of these transformations was the rise of a mass media, in the form of the British press. The repeal of the Stamp Act of 1712, otherwise known as the ‘taxes on knowledge’ in 1855, along with rising literacy rates, led to the flooding of the market with cheap publications, books, periodicals and newspapers.

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Newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph were founded at this time and, due to the lifting of stamp duty, were able to charge only two pence a copy and so became huge successes. It was in the pages of newspapers such as the Telegraph and the Times that readers were able to devour details of another important cultural shift, the increase in divorces facilitated by the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. Elisabeth Jay has noted that this act was ‘in part a reflection of the move to a more overtly secular society’ (Jay xi–xii). She notes that the sensation novelists were writing at ‘a moment of cultural transition. A society that, until the Religious Census of 1851, had thought of itself as Christian had been abruptly awoken to the fact that the working classes rarely attended church or chapel’ (Jay 2005, xxiv). Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published two years later in 1859, would further erode the hitherto impregnable religious and spiritual side of the Victorians, with its shattering pronouncements concerning evolution and the lack of a creator of the universe. The Act of 1857 shifted matrimonial jurisdiction from canon to civil law and opened divorce proceedings to those beyond the very rich, who previously had been the only group financially able to secure a private parliamentary bill. The newspapers were quick to highlight the scandalous details of these new divorce cases, and the eager public devoured news of upper-middle class society with its previously secretive world laid bare for all to see; what had once been a preserve of the élite became available to a far broader spectrum of society. Where once marriage had meant a union in the eyes of the Lord ‘until death do us part’, it now became an increasingly fragile accord. Both Wood and Braddon played on the anxieties of the Victorian middle classes who feared a breakdown of the social order as divorce became more readily available, and promiscuity threatened the sanctity of the family. In Wood’s East Lynne, the 1857 Act allows the middle-class Archibald Carlyle to petition his aristocratic wife Isabel for her uncondoned adultery and to marry his middle-class neighbour Barbara Hare, without having to sell his house East Lynne, thereby consolidating the rise of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the aristocracy. This is a theme that Wood returns to again and again in the novel and in her future career. Political critique and radical ideas are thus built into the structure of the sensation novel. Lyn Pykett has observed that ‘bigamy cases were another source of courtroom drama, between 1853 and 1867 there were 884 cases of bigamy heard in the English courts’ (Pykett 2011, 2). In 1861, the newspapers were reporting the ‘colourful and convoluted’ Yelverton bigamy case,

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in which Maria Theresa Longworth sought to annul the marriage of Major Charles Yelverton to a Mrs Forbes by proving that she was the major’s lawful wife. Pykett notes that this ‘long-running legal wrangle’ illustrated the ‘chaotic state of the marriage laws and marriage customs on England’ and ‘provided sensation novelists with many incidents for their plots’ (2–3). In East Lynne, Archibald Carlyle waits to remarry until he thinks his first wife is dead, but suspects he has committed bigamy when he discovers that the new governess employed by his second wife is actually his first wife in disguise. As Natalie Houston has shown: ‘in literary terms, bigamy plots destabilised the time-worn conventions of the domestic romance, and allowed English novelists the possibility of representing adulterous passion without the moral censure of directly treating extra-­ marital romance’ (Houston 2003, 25). In Lady Audley’s Secret, George Talboys abandons his wife and child to seek his fortune in Australia. His wife, Helen Talboys, acts as though her marriage has legally ended and also forsakes her child in order to marry Sir Michael Audley, in a stunning rise up through the class system. In fact Lady Audley, as she is now known, has simply undertaken the only economic path available to her, marriage. As Houston says: although abandoning her child and changing her identity to find a new life were antithetical to Victorian notions of proper femininity and maternal instinct, even Dr. Mosgrave has to admit that they were not in themselves signs of madness. After all, the novel demands our sympathy for George’s doing very nearly the same thing. (Houston 2003, 26)

At the heart of the sensation novel, and distinct from the domestic novel because of this, is a new concern with marriage and the family ‘as problematic institutions for both women and men’ (Pykett 2011, 45). In the sensation novel, domestic violence and domestic crime also take centre-stage. Pykett has noted that ‘The criminal courts also threw the spotlight on to the “secret theatre of home” with a number of sensational trials for crimes and passion and tales of domestic violence in the late 1850s and early 1860s’(2011, 2). Women who committed murder seemed to be everywhere during this period. Madeline Smith poisoned her lover by spiking his cocoa with arsenic in a high-profile case from 1857. Constance Kent was a 16-year-old who stabbed her 4-year-old brother to death in the road murder case of 1860. Pykett notes that ‘The details of all these cases of bigamy, divorce and murder were communicated to the

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ever-widening readership of a rapidly expanding newspaper press by the sensational reporting then enjoying a vogue’(2011, 2–3). One of the most important tropes of the sensation novel, the personal advertisement seen or placed in a newspaper by one of the protagonists, was a device used by both Braddon and Wood. Lady Audley is able to fashion a new identity for herself by faking her own death and placing an obituary in the Times. Helen Talboys thus becomes Lucy Graham, and Lady Audley’s machinations begin. Lucy Graham responds to an advertisement offering employment as a teacher at a school in Brompton and subsequently sees another advertisement for a governess in close proximity to Audley Court, where she goes on to become acquainted with, and then to bigamously marry, Sir Michael Audley. In Wood’s East Lynne, Isabel Vane’s reported death in a railway accident enables her to return to her former home as Madame Vine the governess. Two issues that are directly addressed in East Lynne, mostly from a woman’s perspective, are matrimony and the domestic: ‘[the novel is] pre-­ eminently the story of a mother, and of a mother’s sufferings’ (Pykett 2011, 61). In the domestic novel, theories of motherhood coincide with those of writers of conduct books such as Mrs. Sarah Stickney Ellis, whose influential books not only reiterated the perfection of the class system but also the importance of the duties of a wife to her husband and her importance in passing on moral judgements to her children. Certainly, no heroine could walk out on her children as Isabel Vane—and Lady Audley—do and still retain some sympathy with readers in a domestic novel. In East Lynne, Isabel Vane succumbs to her feelings, for her aristocratic lover in particular, while the middle-class Barbara Hare controls her feelings and thrives. Isabel’s lack of control leads to her abandonment of her children and to her self-torture for much of the second half of the novel, as she becomes their governess but has to watch on while the virtuous Barbara takes over the role of mother. Although Barbara’s ‘bourgeois prudence’ wins the day, the reader is far more inclined to sympathise with Isabel: ‘emotionally, however, the reader is allowed to enjoy and value the feelings of and for Isabel, feelings of aristocratic excess’ (Pykett 2011, 62). A contemporary review by Margaret Oliphant made it clear where her sympathies lay when she argued that ‘When [Isabel] returns to her former home under the guise of the poor governess, there is not a reader who does not feel disposed to turn her virtuous successor to the door, and reinstate the suffering heroine, to the glorious confusion of all morality’ (Oliphant 1863, 170).

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However, things are never quite as clear cut in the sensation novel. Wynne makes the point that many middle-class women readers would have relished the pain and suffering that Isabel goes through, the pain of usurpation as the bourgeoisie gain control over the aristocracy. Wynne believes that Wood’s major contribution to fiction is ‘her adaptation of a certain brand of popular melodrama for middle-class consumption, transforming and toning down the traditional working-class plot based on the downfall of the rich and mighty into a middle-class form’ (Wynne 2001, 66–67). She argues that Wood draws on this tradition of melodrama in order to ‘address the fantasies of class usurpation enjoyed by her middle-­ class readers, and her success in submerging fantasies of power within her plots has meant that many critics today have failed to read this aspect of her work’ (67). Pykett also notes that, despite her adultery, Isabel remains the novel’s heroine: She is represented as a sinner rather than a villain or criminal, and she retains the readers’. . . sympathies to the end. In many ways, sympathy for Isabel’s sufferings and for the complexities of her predicament actually increases as her social and moral standing declines ... East Lynne is not the straightforwardly simple tale of pious, conventional morality that it appears to be at first sight. (Pykett 2011, 62)

We are offered two different images of women’s domestic power in the novel: Carlyle’s half-sister Cornelia, who is a dictatorial quarrelsome old maid, and Barbara, the ‘epitome of modern domestic competence’ (Pykett 2011, 98). It is Cornelia who causes much suffering to Isabel, through her attacks on her youth and inexperience, attacks which Isabel’s husband fails to see and which cause Isabel’s isolation and embitterment at her situation. Isabel is described as being ‘entrapped, persecuted and suffering within the very space, the home, that was supposed to be both the temple over which women preside and their sanctuary’ (Pykett 2011, 98). Wood literally transposes elements of the melodramatic and the domestic novel to create a new type of fiction, one in which women’s role in the domestic project is questioned and found wanting. Wood here asks readers to read the conventions of each genre against each other, establishing for her mainly female readers a convention of reading against the grain for parts of the novel. Isabel’s loneliness and bitterness cause her to seek love elsewhere, as she wrongly suspects her husband to be in love with the moralistic Barbara.

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Her mistakes lead her to a doomed affair with Levison, but it is these mistakes that endow her with a sense of humanity at the expense of the rather grey character of Barbara. Algernon Swinburne wrote his ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ in 1866, in which he criticised Christian morality with the lines, ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean, the world has grown grey from thy breath’ (Swinburne 1873, 79). In East Lynne, we have the spectacle of Barbara representing the moralism of Sarah Stickney Ellis and her conduct book—which her middle-class readers would approve. The novel endorses the idea that a woman’s place is in the domestic home, supporting her husband through the travails of life in the outside world. But this perspective is distorted when we see Isabel’s life on the continent, which, although compromised by her actions, is at least seen to have some excitement and interest, albeit of a tragic nature. The novel thus makes the reader sympathise with Isabel’s sufferings and have some understanding of her lack of sexual control. Barbara’s bourgeois control of her morality and feelings is perhaps too akin to what was then expected of the middle-class wife and mother. Like Swinburne, the sensation novelists questioned the morality of their society, and the sensation novel plays on its readers’ expectations, as Pykett suggests: ‘this fracturing of the reader’s response replicates the contradictions in mid-Victorian ideologies of motherhood and womanhood’ (Pykett 2011, 97) and demonstrates the way in which sensation fiction incorporated and questioned the tenets of the domestic novel in order to raise the political consciousness of its readers. Although, on first reading, East Lynne appears to be a warning against marrying into the wrong class (the middle-class Carlyle’s marriage to the aristocratic Isabel fails when Isabel turns back to her own class for sexual gratification) and against falling into sexual temptation, it also seems to be a warning to women not to submit to the ideal of femininity as promoted by the conduct books. The constraints put upon Isabel by her husband, her new family and by society all contribute to her sexual downfall. While the sensation novel may end conservatively, Lady Audley is locked away at the end of the novel as transgressive women have to be contained, Carlyle and Barbara have a happy marriage while Isabel dies, but it is the excitement and thrill of witnessing women who turn against convention, who question how a woman should behave, that is at the heart of their popularity with readers and—arguably—the distrust of the critics. Showalter directly addresses this perceived anomaly and suggests that it was the limitations under which women writers worked that ‘forced women to find innovative and covert ways to dramatize the inner life, and led to a fiction

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that was intense, compact, symbolic, and profound’ (Showalter 1982, 27–28). Lady Audley is portrayed in the novel as a living embodiment of the feminine ideal: ‘wherever she went she seemed to take joy and brightness with her. In the cottages of the poor her fair face shone like a sunbeam…everybody, high and low, united in declaring that Lucy Graham was the sweetest girl that ever lived’ (Lady Audleys’ Secret, 47–48). Sir Michael Audley is as captivated by this exemplar of Victorian womanhood as everybody else: ‘He could no more resist the tender fascination of those soft and melting blue eyes; the graceful beauty of that slender throat and drooping head’ (Braddon, 48). In taking her for his wife, he has no idea that Lady Audley, as she becomes, is willing to do anything to maintain her new- found respectability, including murder: Lady Audley’s Secret pleases, thrills, shocks and undermines its readers with the fact that this personification of simpering, charitable, childlike, genteel femininity is, in fact, a cold, calculating, resourceful woman, who abandons her child and is capable of murder, all in the interests of self-help and self-­ preservation…. [yet the irony is that] all of Lucy’s actions are directed towards those goals which were recommended to all middle-class girls: achieving and maintaining a socially acceptable and financially secure marriage, and keeping up appearances. (Pykett 2011, 80)

This satirisation of the feminine ideal through exaggeration distorts and disturbs the readers’ preconceptions of conventional femininity and, like East Lynne, questions the dominant notion of womanhood. Braddon takes elements of the domestic novel, in particular the importance and necessity of a good marriage and moral behaviour, and mocks and shatters them with the actions of her heroine, who for contemporary readers must have been both beguiling and disturbing. Lady Audley will go to any lengths to protect her secret, and it will take the prolonged and tortuous efforts of a proto-detective to uncover her deeds. Almost 30 years before the advent of the greatest detective of them all, the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, the sensation novel teems with detection. In Lady Audley’s Secret, the detective figure is a reluctant type, Sir Michael’s nephew Robert Audley. At the beginning of the novel, Robert lacks a purpose or an identity; he is meant to be reading for the Bar but is actually whiling away his days reading French novels, a sign of overt sexuality and promiscuity in the Victorian novel. In this feminised state, he

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represents the indolent aristocracy; it is only when the disappearance of his friend George leads him to suspect Lady Audley that he finds his vocation as a detective and, through his actions, gains his masculinity. The sensation novel plays with the rigid gender codes of Victorian society through its characterisation: Lady Audley is a masculinised villain, while Robert is a feminised hero. Robert uncovers the clues that will lead to the downfall of Lady Audley through misplaced letters, telegrams, newspaper advertisements and labels on suitcases. The sensation novel sets itself in the contemporary world, a world where information is regulated and disseminated by these new forms of communication, a world that is moving at a bewildering pace. In this whirl of modern life, the sensation novel finds its metier, the confusing, disturbing and unsettling onrush of sensory overload. In this new urban landscape, identities can be altered; Helen Maldon can become Lucy Graham, who can become Lady Audley. The class system is upset and one can never entirely trust one’s neighbour. Once Robert has uncovered Lady Audley’s secret, he plans to have her imprisoned in a lunatic asylum, not for her own good but to prevent her sins being known in wider society: ‘Containing disruptive femininity is what the conclusion of the Lucy Audley plot is all about’ (Pykett 2011, 83). Lady Audley’s imprisonment aligns masculine medical knowledge with the political and marital containment of women, reaffirming women’s social role as submissive and contained. Houston emphasises the simultaneously conventional closure with the shocking content: Braddon’s novel both creates sympathy with Lady Audley’s predicament as a woman whose future depends upon her marriage and soothes those made anxious by social change by suggesting that criminals can be caught and punished. (Houston 2003, 26)

Just as the uncertainty of modern life is disturbing in the new urban society, the uncertainty of one’s own mental health, or that of one’s neighbour, is a consequence of the changes then taking place. Plot, characterisation, genre and marketing thus all complicate the ideological message(s) of sensation fiction—making it not the escapist frivolity for which it has often been castigated, but rather an exploration in the complexities of gender expectations and oppressions in a changing world. Contemporary critics at the time of publication of East Lynne and Lady Audley’s Secret focussed on the blurring of moral and artistic boundaries in

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the novels, effectively acknowledging the difficulty of making aesthetic and political judgements about the form. Margaret Oliphant felt that Isabel was clearly the heroine of the novel, at the expense of Barbara, ‘Her virtuous rival we should like to bundle to the door and be rid of, anyhow’, although in no doubt that liking Isabel is somehow wrong, ‘it is evident that nohow, except by her wickedness and sufferings, could she have gained so strong a hold upon our sympathies. This is dangerous and foolish work, as well as false, both to Art and Nature’ (Oliphant 1863). Fraser Rae stated that: Lady Audley is at once the heroine and monstrosity of the novel…Whenever she is meditating the commission of something inexpressibly horrible, she is described as being unusually charming. Her manner and her appearance are always in contrast with her conduct. All this is very exciting; but it is also very unnatural. The artistic faults of this novel are as grave as the ethical ones. Combined, they render it one of the most noxious books of our times. (Fraser Rae 1865, 104–105)

Fraser Rae suggests that Braddon knew too much about the life of the working classes and that her descriptions of drinking and fighting, ‘masculine’ topics, are not what a ‘proper’ woman should concern herself with. As Houston says, ‘For Rae, Braddon’s fiction disturbs his assumptions about feminine behaviour’ (2003, 20). Braddon was in many ways an easier target than Ellen Wood for the critics, because of her private life, her background as an actress and her unconventional relationship with Maxwell. In his review of her next novel, Aurora Floyd, Henry James implied that Braddon had ‘intimate knowledge of the disorderly half of society’ and specifically with that part that ‘ladies are not accustomed to know’ and are not expected to (James 1865, 745). Margaret Oliphant wrote in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine that sensation fiction threatened the ‘sanity, wholesomeness and cleanness’ of English fiction and blamed women writers particularly: Nasty thoughts, ugly suggestions, an imagination which prefers the unclean, is almost more appalling than the facts of the actual depravity…it is a shame to women so to write…a woman has one duty of invaluable importance to her country and her race which cannot be over-estimated – and that is the duty of being pure. There is perhaps nothing of such vital consequence to a nation. (Oliphant 1862)

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Houston notes that ‘Oliphant gives voice to a conventional Victorian belief that women were naturally more moral and chaste then men’ (Houston 2003, 20). In response, Braddon commissioned her friend George Augustus Sala to write an essay for her monthly periodical Belgravia, ‘The Cant of Modern Criticism’, in which he pointed out that English fiction had always contained elements of sensation. Sala links Braddon’s novels to Jane Eyre and Adam Bede, describing Braddon’s, Brontë’s and Eliot’s works as powerful representatives of ‘the modern, the contemporary novel of life’. He goes on to repudiate Oliphant’s claim that English novels from the time of Walter Scott until the emergence of sensation fiction were epitomised by ‘sanity, wholesomeness, and cleanliness’ (Sala 1867, 52). Sala cites the coarse language, crime and sensation prevalent in the novels of authors such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Benjamin Disraeli and Frances Trollope and dismisses the contemporary affection for wholesome literature and culture, stating that ‘prurient prudery is a distinguishing characteristic of modern cant and modern criticism’ (52). For Sala, sensation fiction is reality at its toughest and most unremitting, but he claims that this is what adults want, ‘… meanwhile we men and women who live in the world, and have, many of us, lived pretty hard lives too, want novels about that which is, and not about that which never was and never will be. We don’t want pap, or spoon-meat … We want meat: and this is a strong age, and we can digest it’ (54). Although, in many ways, Sala was correct about the significant role that sensational writing had played in literature, he, like many of his contemporaries, was slow to understand the experimental aspects of this new form of literature, not only the importance of the role of women but also the mixed nature of its modes (realism and sensation), combined with complex characterisation which engendered sympathy with women in unusual and unconventional circumstances. The sensation novel experimented—in content and form—with the uncertainty of the new urban society, but did so within an acceptable framework of the middle class, domestic, feminine and genteel. Both men and women wrote sensation fiction—Wilkie Collins was one of its finest proponents—but it was in the hands of Braddon and Wood that the roles of women in society, morality and the expectations of gender were raised and found wanting.

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Works Cited Baker, William, and Kenneth Womack, eds. 2002. A Companion to the Victorian Novel. London: Greenwood Press. Braddon, Mary. 2003. Lady Audley’s Secret. Ed. Houston Natalie. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Brontë, Charlotte. 1849. Shirley. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Bulwer, Edward. 1830. Paul Clifford. London: Henry Colburn et al. ———. 1832. The Trial and Life of Eugene Aram. Richmond: M. Bell. Cox, Jessica. 2019. Victorian Sensation Fiction. London: Red Globe Press. Felber, Lynette. 2007. The Literary Portrait as Centerfold: Fetishism in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Lady Audley’s Secret”. Victorian Literature and Culture 35 (2): 471–488. Fetterley, Judith. 1978. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fraser Rae, W. 1865. Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon. North British Review 43 (September): 180–204. Harman, Claire. 2018. Murder by the Book: A Sensational Chapter in Victorian Crime. London: Penguin. Hollingsworth, Keith. 1963. The Newgate Novel 1830–1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens and Thackeray. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Houston, Natalie. 2003. Introduction. In Lady Audley’s Secret, 18–29. Peterborough: Broadview Press. James, Henry. 1865. Miss Braddon. The Nation, November 9. Jay, Elisabeth. 2005. Introduction. In East Lynne, vii–xxxix. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kayman, Martin. 1992. From Bow Street to Baker Street: Mystery, Detection and Narrative. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Levin, Yisrael, ed. 2016. A.C. Swinburne and the Singing Word: New Perspectives on the Mature Work. New York: Routledge. Moers, Ellen. 1977. Literary Women: The Great Writers. New York: Doubleday. Oliphant, Margaret. 1862. Sensation Novels. Blackwood’s Magazine, 91: 567 ———. 1863. Novels. Blackwood’s Magazine, 94(August): 170. Pykett, Lyn. 2011. The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sala, G.A. 1867. The Cant of Modern Criticism. Belgravia, November 4. Showalter, Elaine. 1982. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. London: Virago. Sutherland, John. 1989. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. California: Stanford University Press. Swinburne, Algernon. 1873. Hymn to Proserpine. In Algernon Swinburne: Poems and Ballads. London: John Camden Hotten.

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Thackery, William. 1847. Vanity Fair. London: Punch. Tromp, Marlene, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Haynie Aeron. 2000. Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context. Albany: Albany State University of New York Press. Whitehead, Charles. 1834. Lives and Exploits of English Highwaymen, Pirates and Robbers. Philadelphia: E.A.Carey. Wood, Ellen. 2007. East Lynne. Ed. Elisabeth Jay. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wynne, Deborah. 2001. The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 6

The Ironic Strategies of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening Richard Jacobs

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, after years of neglect, began to receive its deserved critical attention from the 1950s, due to its many formal and stylistic qualities and its pioneering and sympathetic interest in the emotional needs and constrained circumstances of a young married woman in turn-of-the-century America. I want to argue here that Chopin achieves a far-reaching and proto-modernist text in a number of daring, innovative and strategic ways. These include a brilliantly subversive emphasis, despite the surface ‘adultery plot’ of a ‘fallen woman’, on Edna’s awakening sexuality as auto-erotic, amounting to a critique of the hetero-normative romantic conventions of the period; the novel’s poem-like patterns, repetitions of keywords and its rhythms; its foregrounding of its linguistic textures; its ironic mixing of modes, styles and narratives; the flaunting of its sources, especially from the French literature Chopin knew so well; and its startling recourse to para-textual elements, including a stylish pre-empting of the novel’s critical reviews, make it a radically experimental text.

R. Jacobs (*) University of Brighton, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Aughterson, D. Philips (eds.), Women Writers and Experimental Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_6

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Among the early reviews, nearly all of which were antagonistic, was one that symptomatically misread the novel, referring to its ‘detailed history of the manifold and contemporary love-affairs of a wife and mother’ (Chopin 1994, 173).1 This misreading (manifold love affairs?) is duplicated on the back cover of the recent Dover edition of the novel, which refers to Edna as someone who ‘seeks and finds passionate physical love’ in adultery (Smith 1993). That might refer accurately to Edna’s literary predecessor Emma Bovary, but certainly not to Edna who never makes love with Robert in the narrative and does only once, or at most twice, with Arobin, a man she does not even like. These misreadings are symptomatic in the sense that they are a response to the truly scandalous nature of the novel, which the reviewers could not bring themselves to see. The narrative, delivered as a carefully staged process, is the story of a woman waking up to her own autonomous and auto-erotically sexualised body. This process starts with a sense of Edna’s body letting go, releasing, as she cries uncontrollably in Chap. 3, after Léonce bullies her about her ‘habitual neglect of the children’; it is implied that he is cross because he has come back from gambling and wants sex while she does not. Such bullying scenes were ‘not uncommon in her married life. They seemed never before to have weighed much against the abundance of her husband’s kindness’ (8), but here the scale at last tips. The tears that fall, and Edna makes no attempt to quell them, bring a sense of ‘indescribable oppression’ (the word is used later about the church service from which Edna needs to escape); the feeling is characteristically gestured towards as ‘unfamiliar… vague… like a shadow, like a mist… strange and unfamiliar’ (8), before Chopin punctures the suggested impossibility of expressing these feelings at all by signing off with the deflating ‘she was just having a good cry all to herself’ (8). But something, bodily, has been released. The inexpressible feeling is only dispelled when Edna becomes conscious of mosquitoes ‘biting her firm, round arms’ (8), firm, round arms which re-appear, more erotically charged, in Madame Antoine’s cottage. Such adjectives more usually connote breasts: and this chapter shall argue that emerging semantic connotations and a playful but coded referential self-­ consciousness mark out Chopin’s critical articulation of a resistance to hetero-normative plots and representations. Two of the novel’s most subtle language codes—music and swimming—are deployed for the next stages in Edna’s auto-erotic awakening, in Mlle Reisz’s playing of Chopin and Edna’s immediate ensuing ability to

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swim, as if the first releases the second. Mlle Reisz’s playing ‘sent a keen tremor down Mrs Pontellier’s spinal column’. It was not the first time she had heard an artist at the piano. Perhaps it was the first time she was ready, perhaps the first time her being was tempered to take an impress of the abiding truth … The very passions themselves were aroused within her soul… She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her… The young woman was unable to answer; she pressed the hand of the pianist convulsively. Mlle Reisz perceived her agitation and even her tears. (26)

The language gestures clearly towards orgasm: the hand pressed ‘convulsively’ is later strategically echoed when Robert leaves for Mexico and Edna ‘bit her handkerchief convulsively’ with eyes ‘brimming with tears’ (44). Both incidents are echoed again, later still, when Edna, with a ‘spasmodic’ impulse, clutches Arobin’s hand with the worrying scar on his arm, a scar that ‘agitates’ her (73). The emphasis on the ‘first time she was ready’ is arguably one indicator of orgasmic sexuality. Chopin’s use of the word ‘tempered’ is more subtle. As a very experienced and talented pianist and composer, her pun on Bach’s ‘well-tempered’ keyboard suggests that Mlle Reisz creates the corresponding music (the very passions) in Edna’s body, itself an instrument, tuned properly at last. This newly responsive body can now—this same evening—swim properly at last. Earlier, in the rapt refrain that ends both Chap. 6 and the novel, we hear that the ‘seductive’ voice of the sea invites the soul to wander ‘in abysses of solitude’ and that ‘the touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace’ (14). Now, like a child who ‘walks for the first time alone’, Edna can at last overcome her earlier ‘ungovernable dread’ in the water. In a self-reflexive narrative gesture, Chopin doubles our attention to this moment when she writes that Edna, now swimming out alone, ‘could have shouted for joy. She did shout for joy’ (27). Chopin’s description of the swimming experience is worth quoting in full: She wanted to swim out far out, where no woman had swum before… / She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam, she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself. (27–28)

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Edna’s experience in the water is a coded orgasm, experienced ‘where no woman had swum before,’ and in solitude. The suggestion (only distantly suggested) is that it is only the woman who can teach herself and so release the most profound sexual feeling. Walker (2015, 251) argues ‘Edna’s awakening as an event entirely internal to her’ but that it also ironically anticipates critical attempts to attribute the awakening to ‘sources outside herself’. Chopin mocks the men who notice Edna’s sudden ability to swim: each of them ‘congratulated himself that his special teachings had accomplished this desired end’ (27). However, it is clear from Chopin’s narrative that the woman teaches herself and that if she has a lover apart from herself, it is the sea, as LeBlanc acknowledges (‘the sea serves as a metaphorical female lover for Edna’ (LeBlanc 2000, 251)). Chopin’s phrase ‘conveyed to her excited fancy’ is additionally a near homonym for the old slang word ‘fanny’, a connotation arguably used by Chopin in another story along similar lines. ‘The Story of an Hour’ tells the story of a woman rejoicing on the news of her husband’s death. Hearing that he has been killed in a train accident, Louise Mallard retires to her room, insisting on being alone, where she feels: something coming to her… subtle and elusive… this thing that was approaching to possess her…. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips… “free, free, free!”… Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body… She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. (Knights 2000, 260)

Her sister Josephine urges her to ‘open the door!’, saying ‘you will make yourself ill’. Louise replies: ‘Go away. I am not making myself ill’; Chopin adds ‘Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her’ (Knights 2000, 260–261). ‘Fancy’—whether connoting merely desire and imagination, or more concretely, her orgasmic body—semantically and thematically recurs at moments of autonomous bliss. In the next stage in Edna’s process of self-awakening, in the scenes in Madame Antoine’s cottage, Edna recuperates after feeling oppressed in church, returning the reader to the childhood scene described to Madame Ratignolle when she was ‘running away from prayers’ read by her gloomy Presbyterian father (17). The connection between the present and remembered scenes is strategic, implying that events in Madame Antoine’s cottage will mark another symbolic rejection of patriarchal power, but that

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this time such a rejection is the pre-requisite for the auto-eroticised moment. The bed is ‘snow-white’, and, after undressing and washing, she ‘stretched herself in the very centre of the high, white bed’. How luxurious it felt to rest thus in a strange, quaint bed, with its sweet country odour of laurel lingering about the streets and mattress! … She looked at her round arms as she held them straight up and rubbed them one after the other, observing closely, as if it were something she saw for the first time, the fine, firm quality of the texture of her flesh. She clasped her hands easily above her head, and it was thus she fell asleep. (17)

On waking she ‘looked at herself closely in the little, distorted mirror… Her eyes were bright and wide awake and her face glowed’ (36). The bed is her body, at and in whose centre she is at last at ‘luxurious’ rest, able to rub and know its intricacies ‘for the first time’. Chopin’s strategic and transgressive positioning of ‘quaint’ next to ‘country’ echoes the semantics of Marvell’s ‘quaint honour’ (‘To His Coy Mistress’) and Hamlet’s ‘country matters’ (Hamlet 3.2.113) and again positions Chopin’s referential playfulness as knowingly physical. ‘For the first time’ (and its variants) is one of many phrases or words that thread through the novel, shaping its form and texture. Other examples of keywords which recur are ‘penetrate’, ‘self’ and ‘desire’. ‘Penetrate’ is repeated five times in a little over 20 pages in the closing stages of the novel; referring to the effect of Mlle Reisz’s piano playing on Edna, the mandolin music at the dinner party, the memory of Robert’s glance that had ‘penetrated to the sleeping places of her soul and awakened them’ (93), to Edna’s intention not to ‘seek to penetrate [Robert’s] reserve’ (98); and finally to her kissing of him: ‘She leaned over and kissed him – a soft, cool, delicate kiss, whose voluptuous sting penetrated his whole being’ (101).The final two usages of ‘penetrate’ strategically gender-invert the earlier references: importantly, it is also the only moment where we suddenly inhabit Robert’s conscious body, as if we are part of the penetrative process. As the novella progresses, the word ‘penetrate’ gradually moves away from its usual male-genital meaning, dissolving into the figurations (Mlle Reisz’ music, Robert’s glance) and inversions, such as Edna’s voluptuous sting. This is equivalent to the way in which the novel’s plot, before Robert returns, seems, or rather pretends to be, moving towards the male-genital goal of sex with Arobin. But in the end, sex with Arobin is presented after

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the event and, in the novel’s shortest and most artfully phrased single-­ paragraph chapter, not as a goal for Edna at all, despite the previous chapter, on the brink of the sexual act, ending with his kiss being ‘the first kiss of her life… that kindled desire’ (80). The repetitions of ‘for the first time’ work in the same way; the phrase denotes a single and, as if by definition, unrepeatable event, but because it is repeated so regularly it suggests another deliberate strategy of subversion. The notion becomes loosened from its moorings in the singular and is dispersed into multiplicities of recurrence. The repetitions of ‘for the first time in her life’ connote a life not as linear and end-stopped but as cyclical, an always-already beginning. The final example of this phrase, like the final fairy-tale-charged, but conventionally inverted, use of ‘penetrate’, begins the process of shading into the mythological which characterises the novella’s very last paragraphs. Edna begins by casting off her ‘pricking’ bathing-clothes (the subtlest and last repudiation of the male-genital cover-story the novella pretends to be following) and: ‘for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air’, as if a ‘new-born creature’ (108–109). Perhaps most moving and artful of all is the open tautology of ‘for the first time in her life’ and ‘new-born’. This is language at the very edge of novelistic propriety. The deployment of ‘self’ in the novel has a strategically subversive effect on the conventional novelistic notions of identity. From childhood Edna is said to have ‘lived her own small life all within herself’, a life and a ‘self’ divided between ‘outward’ conforming and ‘inward’ questioning (14); at the end of the day with Robert at the Chenière, she perceives her ‘self’ as divided temporally: ‘she herself – her present self – was in some way different from the other self’ (39), an ‘other self’ shaded in obscurity. After Léonce stalks off to his club, complaining about the dinner, Edna recognises the familiarity of his treatment, but now, with face ‘flushed’ and eyes ‘flamed with some inward fire’, she goes to her room and looks out of the window. ‘She was seeking herself and finding herself’ (50), but the ensuing action of tearing off and uselessly stamping on her wedding ring, only to have it returned by her maid, shows how difficult and provisional that process of seeking and finding the self will be for her. Léonce wonders if Edna was becoming ‘a little unbalanced mentally’: ‘he could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self that we assume like a garment’ (55). But the opposition between the two selves is not a simple question of substitution. The becoming self is, in effect, an

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oxymoron, predicated on a notion of the self as a simple entity waiting to be adopted, rather than what the novel implicitly insists on, the self as process, always under construction and revision, always in question. From what part of her ‘self’, after all, does Edna voice those shocking words to Robert, words that make him leave her? From what part of an unknowable unconscious (to put the question another way) are these words willing herself to fail and lose him, as if wanting to return to the time when Robert left for Mexico and she felt ‘the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held’ (44)? ‘You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things… I give myself where I choose. If [Léonce] were to say, “Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours”, I should laugh at you both’ (102). Gilmore’s argument that Chopin subscribes to the notion of the fixed, inviolable self rather than the modernist ‘decentred, internally conflicted self’ (Gilmore 1988, 178) is too simple; the thinking and feeling ‘self’ that we read of on the last page is the opposite of fixed and inviolable, and is radically unknowable, as in many modernist texts to which this novel is so striking a precursor. The semantics of ‘desire’ (in the erotic sense) play out cumulatively through at least four key moments in the novel, strategically placed over a hundred pages, each about 25 pages apart. The first reference is to the ‘moments of silence’ between Robert and Edna, ‘pregnant with the first-­ felt throbbings of desire’ (30), where ‘pregnant’ carries acute pathos, given their unconsummated relationship. The second is the ‘subtle current of desire’ passing through her body, in effect from nowhere, or from ‘Nature’ (56). The third is Arobin’s kiss before they make love, ‘a flaming torch that kindled desire’ (80). They make love in the blank space between Chapters 27 and 28, where the latter single-paragraph chapter (considering what might have been its crucial structural significance in a more typical adultery plot novel) is a strangely disembodied and linguistically distancing experience for the reader. Treichler notes that the recurrence of ‘There was…’ or ‘It was…’ (10 times in this 14-line chapter) ‘displaces Edna’ from the ‘feelings and responses’ ascribed to her (Treichler 2000, 363), while Yaeger’s observations about Edna’s ‘limited linguistic possibilities’ pinpoint her lack of voice, but not Chopin’s adept aesthetic emphasis on how experience and knowledge evade language (Yaeger 2000, 314). The final occurrence of ‘desire’—in the last pages of the novel—develops the dull pang into something even more distressing:

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There was no one thing in the world that she desired. There was no human being that she wanted near her except Robert, and she even realised that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone. (108)

Here the repetition of ‘There was’ connotes exhaustion rather than displacement. Desire is revealed as objectless, or something even more vacant, ‘no one thing’; that ‘no one thing’ slides into the equally blank ‘no human being’, and ‘desire’ empties out into ‘wanted’. The language quickens a little, as if reviving, for the phrase ‘except Robert’ only to sink under the knowledge that ‘he, too, and the thought of him would melt’ (answering back to ‘would come’) ‘out of her existence, leaving her alone’ (108). The phrase’s inconsolable last word distantly echoes the rebellious Edna who tells Léonce to leave her alone. Although Edna thinks briefly of the children, in an extraordinary move, Chopin ends these insights into Edna’s thoughts and point of view, with ‘She was not thinking of these things when she walked down to the beach’ (108). The paragraph appears to have written itself, without Edna, without her thinking presence. Crucially the phrase ‘not thinking… she walked down the beach’ (108) makes an arc with a passage two paragraphs earlier: ‘Edna walked on down to the beach rather mechanically, not noticing… not dwelling on…’ (108). ‘No’ and ‘not’ act like the most muted of refrains in these moments and occupy a radically empty and non-referential space. Edna is being withdrawn from us: grammar and poetics occlude her from us and from herself. The process is enacted in the most economical way in the final paragraph: She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father’s voice and her sister Margaret’s. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. (108)

Chopin writes the synesthetic subject, without the subject. The logic of Edna’s final realisation that even if she was united (somehow) with Robert, he and the thought of him would ‘melt out of her existence’ has the far-reaching effect of making the novel a radical inquiry into the validity of romantic relationships, especially the most culturally normative of all, the heterosexual love relationship. For it cannot be the

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case, although some readers and critics have claimed it is, that Edna’s love for Robert and his for her are somehow inauthentic: Showalter argues that Edna is incapable of going beyond ‘adolescent emotions’ (Walker 2000, 216). It is the love they have for each other (certainly Mlle Reisz believes in Edna’s) that paradoxically collapses into the default position of elemental and inevitable solitude. Another way of putting this would be to say that the logic of this analysis is that if the hetero-normative romance must always be the fiction (in both senses), then the auto-erotic is the only bodily feeling that the novel can authentically validate. And it is in that logic that the novel is most daringly and innovatively experimental. At the mathematical centre of The Awakening (exactly halfway through its number of pages and at the end of its 19th of 39 chapters), a ‘subtle current of desire’ passes through Edna’s body. This follows Edna saying to her husband Léonce ‘let me alone. You bother me’ and going to paint in her atelier while singing the air ‘Ah! si tu savais!’. There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why, – when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead, when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium… She could not work on such a day, nor weave fancies to stir her pulses and warm her blood. (55–56)

This is exemplary of Chopin’s innovative, experimental novel in terms of language and style, both in its poem-like patternings (‘There were days’), rhythms and cadences (‘without knowing why… she did not know why’) and in its form. At the centre of the novel is the undecidable ‘happy’/‘unhappy’ (‘glad’/‘sorry’) dialectic, both states of mind shrouded in unknowing; there is the happiness in being alive and the unhappiness of not being ‘alive or dead’; there is the pleasure in dreaming in the ‘unfamiliar’ and being ‘unmolested’. At the centre of both the novel and this passage is Edna’s body. ‘Unmolested’ is a strategic word, and it is patterned paradoxically with ‘invaded’ later, when Edna is alone in her house. At the end of a day spent with a feeling that is ‘unfamiliar but very delicious’, she goes to bed where ‘a sense of restfulness invaded her, such as she had not known before’ (69–70). The wordplay implies that Léonce’s previous sexual attentions have been molestations and invasions of her body and that she relishes the ‘delicious’ feeling, as if it is an actual bodily taste, of her body as her own and not his. The word ‘delicious’, regularly attached in surprising contexts, appears 16 times in the text and is one of many words and phrases

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that thread throughout the novel and make up its texture. The body at the centre in this passage is attuned, in harmony with colours, odours, warmth, sung music, to register these in the breath, on the pulse and in the blood.2 This body is richly susceptible to subtle currents of desire, which come unannounced and, as if auto-erotically, attached to no human body but her own. This, as we have seen, is the boldest and the subtlest of Chopin’s experimental innovation with novelistic content, as well as form and style. That there is an auto-erotic element to Edna’s awakening has been touched on rather lightly by critics: Showalter acknowledges Edna’s ‘initial auto-­ eroticism’ (Showalter 2000, 212), but it is temptingly easy to read Edna’s awakening as more social than sexual. Chopin’s language and style both suggest and connote in coded form the auto-erotic but, crucially, also enact it in the texture of the prose. As early as 1956, Kenneth Eble admitted ‘frankly, the book is about sex. Not only is it about sex, but the very texture of the writing is sensuous, if not sensual, from the first to the last’ (189). This is a style not only clearly indebted to impressionist and symbolist poetry and painting (Verlaine, Mallarmé; Monet, Renoir) but self-­ knowing in an ironic and proto-modernist way, drawing attention to its material textures, its textuality, even with the effect of occluding Edna from us as much as revealing her, thus replicating Edna’s occlusion from herself. The novel’s early reviewers were famously hostile about the scandalous nature of the adultery story in what one called the ‘over-worked field of sex-fiction’. Another was so cross as to say he was ‘well satisfied when Mrs Pontellier deliberately swims out to her death’. They were also sceptical about what they considered the pointlessness of Chopin writing ‘a Creole Bovary’ (Culley 1973, 166, 168, 170.) I believe the debts to Flaubert are intended to be noticed and are indeed flaunted, as if to mockingly insist on the obvious correspondences while simultaneously hiding the one crucial difference (the auto-erotic). The novel is in an ironic dialogue with Madame Bovary: it follows, however idiosyncratically, the well-worn stages of the fallen-woman narrative as exemplified in Flaubert’s novel and, in his trial, gleefully excoriated. Equally, the novel is in implicit dialogue with the reviews Chopin would have expected. Finally, the novel is in ironic dialogue with other para-textual components published with the novel, her own witty ‘Retraction’ and the two letters (from ‘Lady Young’ and ‘Doctor Thomson’).

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The connections with Madame Bovary can be quickly demonstrated. The names are almost comically in collusion—Emma/Edna, Leon/ Léonce, Rodolphe/Robert-Arobin. Both Emma and Edna are impulsive and inattentive towards their children, let their household duties fall away, are coded as behaving like men (as in  Edna penetrating Robert with a kiss), and both are seen at crucial points looking into mirrors or out of windows. The same words are used about the two of them in futile expectation: Emma ‘was waiting for something to happen… She did not know what this chance would be [and] wondered that it did not come’ (trs. Marx-Aveling, Part 1, Ch IX); Edna ‘wanted something to happen  – something, anything, she did not know what… But there was nothing else for her to do’ (72). Emma’s beauty ‘blossomed in all the plenitude of her nature… something subtle and penetrating’, emerging in her adultery with Rodolphe (Part 2, Ch XII), while to Dr Mandelet Edna (missing Robert) seemed ‘palpitant with the forces of life’ and like ‘a beautiful, sleek animal waking up in the sun’ (67). Objects and phrases float between the two novels—the song words ‘Ah! si tu savais!’ that Robert sings to Edna and that she later stops Victor singing at her dinner party have an ironic source in Emma’s several plaintive uses of the phrase (sometimes ‘vous’) as she laments her unhappiness, as in ‘If you only knew…’. The fetishized cigar case that Emma keeps hidden and fantasises as being hand-sewn in silk by a would-be lover for the viscount, who dropped it in the road, is reprised by Chopin in a minor and more comic key as the hand-made silk tobacco pouch that a girl in Mexico gives to Robert, which Edna jealously notices and wants to hear more about; she later torments herself with a ‘transcendently seductive vision’ (97) of this girl.3 This mutedly lesbian suggestion underlying Edna’s awakened and auto-erotic sexuality is echoed earlier in Madame Ratignolle’s caresses on the beach at Grand Isle, is piqued by Edna’s attraction towards Mariequita’s charms and is further stirred in Mlle Reisz’s passion for Edna (Walker 2000, 237–256.) The intertextual relations with Flaubert are there to be noticed, as if in plain hiding, an ironic undermining of conventional notions of originality and of female sexuality. Chopin was formidably well read in French, and her debt to Maupassant, eight of whose stories she translated and borrowed freely from, is clear. Two stories, ‘Solitude’ and ‘Suicide’, are particularly relevant; when she subtitled her novel ‘A Solitary Soul’, and deployed the word ‘solitude’ (appearing seven times) as one of the many mini-refrains or motifs in the novel, she must have been expecting some of her readers to notice the

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ironic acknowledgement. These words from ‘Solitude’ are certainly and achingly appropriate, especially to the end of the novel: ‘Despite the embrace and transports of love… we are always alone… [in] horrible solitude… side by side but alone’ (Walker 2000, 202). The ‘self’ that we noticed earlier as always in a provisional and partial state of determination is particularly haunted by this realisation that Maupassant impressed upon Chopin. Crucial to the experimental strategies of the novel is the mixing and switching between and among genres, sources, modes and narratives: scenes of ‘lyricism and fantasy’ alternating with ‘realistic, even satirical scenes’ (Showalter 2000, 211). This happens so seamlessly that the effect on the reader is of an unconscious sense of disorientation, akin to and echoing Edna’s disorientating need to negotiate her attempt to read herself and her world as they unfold unpredictably before her. From Flaubert and Maupassant, the novel takes its skilful and delicate deployment of Edna’s states of inwardness, analysed with scalpel-like precision: but the novel simultaneously evokes the role played by what lies beyond analysis, no less important for giving us access to Edna’s interiority: imprecision, vagueness and the indefinable, the unfamiliar. Chopin’s awareness of the formative importance of what defies both understanding and expression (which she shares with Emily Dickinson) is yet more evidence of her recourse to the experimental in her project. Chopin also takes Flaubertian-free indirect style and disperses it among the other discourses so we hardly notice, only very rarely as overt, as when the narrative notes that, among Edna’s adolescent love passions, she had to face the fact that she was ‘nothing, nothing, nothing’ (18) to the oblivious engaged young man of her dreams. Perhaps the subtlest example of free indirect style is also the most ironic and self-reflexive, and it ends with a gentle nod towards the impressionism that informs the novel. Many chapters before she has sex with Alcée Arobin, Edna feels ‘a kind of commiseration’ for Madame Ratignolle’s life, ‘in which she would never have the taste of life’s delirium. Edna vaguely thought what she meant by “life’s delirium”. It had crossed her thought like some unsought, extraneous impression’ (54). Knights notes Chopin’s use of ‘delirium’ to connote adulterous sex in the Maupassant-style story ‘Her Letters’4 written a few years earlier, and, in a poem written a few months after finishing the novel, spoke of ‘A delirium of gladness / Too wild to tell’ (Knights 2000, 368). Chopin’s novel is an enactment of what Flaubert himself said he wanted to write, a book, in effect, about nothing, that ‘would be held together by

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the internal strength of its style’ (Steegmuller 1981, 154). Chopin’s novel is held together by an internal strength which is a deliberate and transgressive mix of types and modes of style. For example, she stirs comic-satiric deflation into her syntax, in a way that evokes Jane Austen (even Pope) as when we hear that Léonce ‘fell in love, as men are in the habit of doing’ or (two sentences later, also about Léonce) that Edna ‘fancied there was a sympathy of thought and taste between them, in which fancy she was mistaken’ (18). There are sharply deflating repetitions, as when Edna’s father tells Léonce that ‘coercion’ is ‘needed’ to ‘manage a wife’ and the narrator coolly adds that he ‘was perhaps unaware that he had coerced his own wife into her grave’ (68). There are alliterative barbs, as when Arobin, as he begins to work on Edna, is said to be ‘prolific in pretexts’ (75). There are also stretches of dialogue that resemble the verbal parrying of the theatre—the most extended of which is the two-page exchange, almost entirely without narrative intervention, between Edna and Mlle Reisz. “Let me see the letter.” “Oh, no.” “Have you answered it?” “No.” “Let me see the letter.” “No, and again, no.” “Then play the Impromptu for me.” “It is growing late; what time do you have to be home?” “Time doesn’t concern me. Your question seems a little rude. Play the Impromptu”. (60–61)

One scene mimics the inconsequentialities and fragmented exchanges of farce, complete with stage directions—the dialogue, with clattering sewing-machine, between Madame Lebrun and Robert. “Why didn’t you tell me so before, mother? You know I wanted – ” Clatter, clatter, clatter! “Do you see Mrs Pontellier starting back with the children? […] She never starts to get ready for luncheon till the last minute.” Clatter, clatter! “Where are you going?” “Where did you say the Goncourt was?” (22–23)

First-time readers are often struck by the very characteristically open or only minimally ended chapters, as they just stop or fade into reticence or

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silence. These function as ironic dialogues with classic-realist nineteenth-­ century cliff-hanging chapter endings.5 Other narratives, genres and modes are in play in the novel: for instance, half-serious Southern romance narratives (as with Robert and Madame Antoine) drifting into a verbal mist; the idioms and symbols of classical myth; and folktales. Two narratives are even placed in mutually parodic juxtaposition, at the Pontellier supper with Edna’s father and Dr Mandelet. The doctor tells a story, apparently learned in person from his own career and perhaps intended as a coded warning to Edna, of ‘the waning of a woman’s love, seeking strange, new channels, only to return to its legitimate source after days of fierce unrest’. In a typically ironic deflation, Chopin adds that ‘the story did not seem especially to impress Edna’ (67). But, as Showalter observes (although she does not make the link to the doctor’s story), there were many sentimental novels from conventional novelists before Chopin about ‘erring young women married to older men’ who give up their transgressions and return to enhanced marital love (see Walker 2000, 215). So, when Chopin wryly calls the doctor’s story ‘old, ever new and curious’, she is teasingly pointing to her novel’s ironic relations with those earlier sentimental novels. The doctor’s story is parodied in the story Edna tells immediately following it, of ‘a woman who paddled away with her lover one night in a pirogue and never came back… No-one ever heard of them or found trace of them from that day to this’. Chopin calls it a ‘pure invention… Perhaps it was a dream she had’ (67). Both stories are in parodic relations, of a more delicate and moving kind, with the novel we are reading, as becomes painfully clear at the end. Critics have noted the novel’s recourse to classical mythology, especially in relation to the end of the novel: for instance, to Eros and Thanatos (Woolf 1973) and to Aphrodite (Gilbert 1983), but Chopin’s use of folktales and fairy-tales has been less acknowledged. As a girl, Chopin and her closest friend Kitty Garesché devoured the Grimm tales, and these echoes cluster particularly in Chap. 13 when Edna and Robert go to the Chenière and Madame Antoine’s cottage, where Edna recovers after feeling oppressed in church. The scene is evoked in intensely sexualised terms, as we saw earlier, but the repeated folktale echoes, like the classical-mythic references, are an ironic allegiance, a wry and parodic intertextuality rather than a serious shift in generic registers. By drawing attention to themselves, they constitute a strategy of aestheticised and experimental style, not to be taken as a way of explaining the events and feelings in a different way. Our experience of reading these is more a matter of texture, of

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weaving, of language as material object. For example, within a couple of pages we read of an ‘immaculately clean’ cottage with a ‘snow-white’ bed, a sampling (as if in ritual) of bread and wine, the tossing of an orange to Robert (‘who did not know she was awake’) and his observation that she has slept for ‘precisely one hundred years’ (35–37). The stirring into the fairy-tales of a possibly Edenic fruit passed from the newly fallen (awakened) Eve to Adam, and the eating and drinking of Communion is a kind of authorial flaunting, perhaps tempting readers to an over-obvious solemnity of analysis. The playfulness is later confirmed in the scene when Edna is at last alone in the New Orleans house, with the accompanying ‘unfamiliar but very delicious feeling’. Here, the fairy-tale is Goldilocks with Edna walking through her own house ‘as if inspecting it for the first time’ and trying ‘the various chairs and lounges, as if she had never sat and reclined upon them before’ (69). The fairy-tale motif emerges again, as if in a final ironic and genderinverted grace-note, at the novel’s climax when Edna plans to return to the sleeping Robert and ‘awaken him with a kiss’ (106). There are echoes, too, of Milton’s Satan in ‘Paradise Lost’ when Edna is at Madame Ratignolle’s bedside in her painful childbirth: ‘With an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature, she witnessed the scene of torture’, which arguably positions Edna as Satan. These intertextual relations with fairy-tale and myth serve as yet another experimental strategy, one that gestures openly towards sources while at the same time ironically subverting the importance of the cultural reference points themselves. I want to end with two ways which mark what we might call the outer limits of Kate Chopin’s radical experiment as undertaken in the novel. The first is a possible clue as to how to recognise the role of the auto-erotic as coded at the centre of the novel’s meanings, and the second is the para-­ textual (even post-modernist) way the novel places itself into, in effect, a package that includes Chopin’s retraction and the two letters that strategically and ironically ‘answer’ the aggressive reviews. At the start of the novel, and as an example of how Edna feels isolated among the Creoles with their startling lack of prudery, it is said that ‘a book had gone the rounds of the pension’. Edna reads it with ‘profound astonishment’, feeling moved to read it ‘in secret and solitude’ and to ‘hide it from view’ when she hears ‘approaching footsteps’ (11). There have been no critical attempts to guess what this book might have been, presumably because Chopin may well have had no particular book in mind. But if she did have a book in mind, it would be characteristic of the coded language of the

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novel, in relation to the auto-erotic self-referencing we have discussed, as well as Chopin’s debts to French writers, for her to be referring to what was a notorious novel about masturbation, Paul Bonnetain’s Charlot s’amuse (1883). Chopin’s ‘Retraction’ was published in July 1899, shortly after the aggressive reviews, and is one of the most stylish and crafty things of its kind. Having, she says, ‘a group of people at my disposal’, she decided to ‘throw them together and see what would happen’. She ‘never dreamed’ that Edna would make ‘such a mess of things’ and ‘would have excluded her from the company’ had she done so. ‘But when I found out what she was up to, the play was half over and it was then too late’ (178). This is as openly mocking as it can be of conventional and gendered notions of the powerless author unable to control her work. The letters from ‘Lady Janet Scammon Young’ and ‘Dr Dunrobin Thomson’ of October 1899 compound the irony and suggest further the elaborate strategy on which Chopin was engaged, assuming, as I do, that she wrote them. The existence of the two writers has unsurprisingly ‘never been established’ (173). The name Dunrobin even suggests a witty blending of Arobin and Robert (as well as undressing). The letters place a frankly amazing emphasis on how a woman’s ‘passional nature’ (Dr Thomson’s cod-scientific term) can only be fully developed by ‘the arousing power of more than one man’, not just a husband. Lady Young (in a nicely literal answering back to the novel that Chopin must have enjoyed writing) tells Chopin in her letter that Dr Mandelet should have advised Léonce Pontellier that, despite having ‘possessed’ Edna ‘hundreds of times’, she is only ‘just becoming conscious of sex’ (174). He should trust Edna alone with Robert and Alcee and tell her tenderly and openly that he trusts the natural ‘influence of her womanhood over them’. Trusted, ‘she will never fail you’ (174, never fall), and the result will soon be that ‘you will have a new wife’ and will ‘be a new husband, manlier, more virile and impassioned with whom she will fall in love again’. The crucial lesson that Dr Thomson adds is that such a woman should ‘be taught by her husband to distinguish between passion and love. Then she is safe’ (177). Lady Young’s advocacy is for the wife to be awakened to ‘her whole nature… to the utmost short of actual adultery’, and she tells Chopin a story ‘from real life’ (Chopin’s fiction within the fiction of the letter to herself) to underline her case. A young wife is ‘disturbed’ by the presence of a certain Captain in her husband’s circle whom she asks him not to

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invite. Realising why, the husband gently gets his wife to agree that ‘some men make you passionate’, that—in her words—when a man like the Captain is ‘looking down into my bosom’ she feels ‘a guilty glow all through’, ‘conscious of my sex’, ‘animated’ and therefore making it ‘easy for them to look’. The Captain is secretly invited again, the wife is made to wear her most ‘décolleté’ gown, and, when the ‘glow’ came, she ‘yielded to it unafraid and unashamed. She had never seen her husband happier’ (174–176). What Lady Young claims Dr Mandelet should have said draws additional ironic attention to the story the doctor actually told at the Pontellier supper, which Edna thought so little of. But more pointed still, there is a muted version of Lady Young’s story in the novel. At musical evenings, Edna’s ‘fancy’ draws her to ‘one or two men’, though never to the point of attracting them by ‘any feline or feminine wiles’. Despite that, ‘often on the street the glance of strange eyes had lingered in her memory, and sometimes had disturbed her’ (66). Lady Young’s story’s use of ‘disturbed’ thus echoes back into the novel, offering readers intertextual clues about how to read both words and narratives. The logic of the two letters is as strategically provocative as the notion that Léonce Pontellier could be brought to think, let alone act, in accordance with the advice Dr Mandelet should apparently have offered. Equally absurd is the notion that Edna would agree to ‘feline or feminine wiles’, such as having men ogle her breasts in order to enkindle her married life. Chopin’s later composition of both letters and retraction functions as ironic outriders to, and comments on, her novel’s radical notions and representations of female autonomous sexuality. Chopin’s enacted prose seems to proleptically anticipate Irigaray’s radical notion of a future distinctively and oppositional female embodied speech: Woman has sex organs just about everywhere. She finds pleasure almost anywhere. Even if we refrain from invoking the hystericisation of her body, the geography of her pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle than is imagined – in an imaginary system rather too focussed on sameness. ‘She’ is definitely ‘other’ in herself. That is doubtless why she is said to be whimsical, incomprehensible, agitated, capricious, – not to mention her language in which ‘she’ sets off in all directions leaving ‘him’ unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them

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with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand. For in what she says too– at least when she dares to speak out – woman retouches herself constantly. She steps ever so slightly aside from herself with a murmur, an exclamation, a whisper, a sentence left unfinished. (Irigaray 1985, 28–9)

However, at the turn of the twentieth century, Edna, ‘disturbed’ by the glances of strangers lingering in her memory, gives us a picture of the genuinely disquieting and troubled woman so acutely explored throughout this richly experimental and daring novel: intensely aware of the unfamiliar feelings that her body is experiencing, only fitfully understanding them or knowing where they might lead: and alone.

Notes 1. All subsequent quotations from the novel and from critical sources are from this edition unless otherwise detailed in references. 2. Pinero Gil emphasises the ‘synesthetic experience’ that regularly affects Edna (Pinero Gil 2015, 89). 3. These two examples are also noted by Jean Ann Witherow in her doctoral dissertation (Witherow 2000). 4. This story might have another source in Madame Bovary when Charles Bovary discovers Emma’s love letters after her death. 5. Beer speaks of Chopin’s ‘refusal of endings’ (Beer quoted in Knights 2000, xxv).

Works Cited Beer, Janet. 1997. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Chopin, Kate. 1993. The Awakening. Ed. Philip Smith. New York: Dover. ———. 1994. The Awakening. Ed. Margo Culley. New York: Norton. ———. 2000a. The Awakening and Other Stories. Ed. Pamela Knights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000b. The Awakening. Ed. Nancy Walker. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s. de Maupassant, Guy. 2001. Bel-Ami. Trans. Margaret Mauldon, and Ed. Robert Lethbridge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eble, Kenneth. 1956. Excerpt from ‘A Forgotten Novel: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening’. In ed. Margo Culley, 188–193. Flaubert, Gustave. 1886. Madame Bovary. Trans. Eleanor Marx-Aveling. Wikisource.org.

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Gilbert, Sandra M. 1983. Excerpt from ‘The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin’s Fantasy of Desire. In ed. Margo Culley, 271–281. Gilmore, Michael T. 1988. Excerpt from ‘Revolt Against Nature: The Problematic Modernism of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening’. In ed. Nancy Walker, 178. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. New York: Cornell University Press. LeBlanc, Elizabeth. 2000. The Metaphorical Lesbian: Edna Pontellier in The Awakening. In ed. Nancy Walker, 237–256. Ostman, Heather, and Kate O’Donoghue, eds. 2015. Kate Chopin in Context: New Approaches. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinero Gil, Eulalie. 2015. The Pleasures of Music: Kate Chopin’s Artistic and Sensorial Synesthesia. In ed. Heather Ostman and Kate O’Donoghue, 83–100. Showalter, Elaine. 2000. Tradition and the Female Talent: The Awakening as a Solitary Book. In ed. Nancy Walker, 203–222. Steegmuller, Francis. 1981. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830–1857. Trans. and Ed. Steegmuller. London: Faber. Toth, Emily. 2015. ‘The “I Hate Edna Club”’. In ed. Heather Ostman and Kate O’Donoghue, 119–122. Treichler, Paula A. 2000. The Construction of Ambiguity in The Awakening: A Linguistic Analysis. In ed. Nancy Walker, Kate Chopin. The Awakening, 352–373. Walker, Nancy. (ed.) 2000. The Awakening. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Walker, Rafael. 2015. Kate Chopin and the Dilemma of Individualism. In ed. Heather Ostman and Kate O’Donoghue, 29–46. Witherow, Jean Ann. 2000. Kate Chopin’s Contribution to Realism and Naturalism. PhD Dissertation, Louisiana State University, L.S.U. Digital Commons. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. 1973. Excerpt from ‘Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. In ed. Margo Culley, 231–241. Yaeger, Patricia S. 2000. “A Language Which Nobody Understood”: Emancipatory Strategies in The Awakening. In ed. Nancy Walker, 311–336.

CHAPTER 7

Realms of Resemblance: Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir and Maï Zetterling Maggie Humm

That Virginia Woolf was an experimental writer is now a truism. Woolf pioneered experimental techniques: the use of poetic features in prose such as counterpoint and conversational rhythm, and a free indirect style moving between many characters’ thoughts. These techniques are now commonplace in contemporary writing, including that of Toni Morrison. The experimental, for Woolf, is always engaged with social and ethical issues and is closely bound up with her feminism. Woolf’s exploration of experimental constructions of gender in Orlando, The Years and Three Guineas, among other writings, was ahead of its time. An earlier work, Mrs Dalloway, foregrounds communal voices and integrates the political with aesthetics in its interweaving of the lives of Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway. Throughout her work, Woolf writes experimentally about issues of women’s identities, which are bound up with matrilineal inheritances. The central concern of A Room of One’s Own is the significance of an alternative women’s tradition.

M. Humm (*) University of East London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Aughterson, D. Philips (eds.), Women Writers and Experimental Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_7

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Historical ties and resemblances between writers, and between women, are a major theme in Woolf’s writings. These include cross-class associations, as in her introduction to Life As We Have Known It, the collection of working-class women’s letters gathered by Margaret Llewelyn Davies, where Woolf tries to share women’s concerns across class and histories. Ties, for Woolf, are also diachronic from present to past histories; as in A Room of One’s Own’s famous phrase ‘we think back through our mothers if we are women’ (Woolf 1989, 76). This chapter follows An Experiment of Her Own’s intent to ‘trace a historical chain of avant-garde women writers across a range of different periods and genres’ by examining the pervasive power of Woolf’s experimental legacies in two equally radical women who were both very influenced by Woolf and by each other: Simone de Beauvoir and Maï Zetterling. Simone de Beauvoir writes about Woolf in The Second Sex and was attracted to Woolf by photography, having seen Gisèle Freund’s photographs of Woolf at La Maison des Amis des Livres, the Paris bookshop of Adrienne Monnier, lover of Sylvia Beach, in March 1939. Maï Zetterling, the Swedish actress, author and film director (she made over twenty-nine films), owned Woolf’s complete works in duplicate (one set for annotations), and left, among her papers after her death in 1994, a projected television script of The Second Sex which Maï had worked on with de Beauvoir between 1974 and 75.1 This was to focus on three women writers: Virginia Woolf, Colette and Katherine Mansfield (the outline treatment is included at the end of this chapter, transcribed from the Faceted Zetterling Project).2 Maï Zetterling’s film ‘The Girls’ had so impressed de Beauvoir, Zetterling records in her autobiography, that she asked me to make a film of The Second Sex. In Le Monde, de Beauvoir had enthused that The Girls ‘moves us by the beauty of its landscapes, its poetry and above all its subtle tenderness’ (de Beauvoir 1972, 204). Now, I am conscious that this kind of feminist relational work has been attacked by many critics, including Judith Butler who argues that if feminism is grounded in maternal identifications, it ‘tends to reinforce precisely the binary, heterosexist framework that carves up genders into masculine and feminine’ (Butler 1990, 66). I do not intend to construct an artificial feminist genealogy, but rather to look at marked similarities between Woolf’s themes and techniques and de Beauvoir and Zetterling’s writings (and, in the case of Zetterling, films in addition). Such realms of resemblance enlarge our understanding of Woolf’s influences and contribute to the history of women’s experimental work.

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Woolf herself wrote about Colette, Katherine Mansfield and occasionally about Swedish women.3 Woolf’s ambivalent comments about, and tense relationship with, Mansfield are well known—from her 1917 letter: ‘Katherine Mansfield who seems to me an unpleasant but forcible and utterly unscrupulous character’ (Woolf 1975–80, vol. 2, 144) to her letter to Vita Sackville-West in 1931: ‘as for Katherine [Mansfield] we did not ever coalesce; but I was fascinated, and she respectful, only I thought her cheap, and she thought me priggish…I was jealous, no doubt.’ Mansfield’s short stories Woolf went on to say ‘had a quality I adored & needed, I think her sharpness and reality’ (1975–80, vol. 4, 366). Critics have noted the similarities in both writers’ elegies for dead brothers—between Mansfield’s Prelude, published by the Woolf’s Hogarth Press, and Woolf’s novels.4 In Woolf’s The Years, the characters Maggie and Eugénie arrive at a party with Mansfield’s Prelude. Woolf was deeply moved by Colette’s writings. In a rapturous letter to Ethel Smyth, Woolf claims: ‘I’m almost floored by the extreme dexterity, insight and beauty of Colette. How does she do it? No one in all England could do a thing like that. If a copy is ever going I should like to have one  – to read it again and see how it’s done: or guess. And to think I scarcely know her books! Are they all novels? … I’m green with envy’ (Woolf, Letters, vol. 6: 49). Jane Marcus notes parallels between Woolf’s The Pargiters and Colette’s My Mother’s House and Sido (1922), particularly Colette’s ‘devastatingly ironic description of male history and literature’ and Colette’s account of her brother’s habit of creating a world of imaginary dead people in a miniature cemetery of tombstones and mausoleums (Marcus 1987, 3). Woolf’s ambivalent feelings about her father Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book might have resonated with Colette’s attack on her brother’s love of mausoleums. Writing about Swedes, Woolf seems to share contemporary clichés. She is amused by Swedish cleanliness: ‘It’s odd how much the Scandinavians scrape, scent, gurgle and clean at night considering the results next morning’ (Woolf 1975–80, vol. 3, 361). In her diary she notes of a Swedish woman; ‘Frau Hinder? Hinckel? I never caught it [and] she has gone, back to London, to her house with its lounge & its modern Swedish furniture’ (Diary, vol. 5, 264). Woolf, de Beauvoir and Zetterling share many themes and issues in their work, most centrally issues of the maternal. I have written elsewhere about how Woolf’s photographs are haunted by memories of her mother just as much as Woolf’s writings (Humm 2003). In addition, although

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Woolf is clear about the restrictions imposed on women by men who falsely claim biological differences, yet she often compares the experience of artistic creation to giving birth. Three Guineas was ‘the mildest childbirth I have ever had,’ no book had ‘ever slid from me so secretly & smoothly’ (Diary, vol. 5, 148–9). In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir is equally ambivalent about mothering. The Second Sex was initially attacked by feminist critics, for its negative characterisation of the maternal, evident in de Beauvoir’s anxiety that pregnancy incurs a loss of individual agency. Indeed, her chapter ‘The Mother’ begins by positioning the maternal within a nexus of control: ‘the voluntary control of human beings’ and the terrors of French illegal abortion and contraception (de Beauvoir 1972, 501). The horrors and necessity of abortions are matched in many of de Beauvoir’s works by a hatred of the mother. Young women in de Beauvoir’s novels often hate their mothers, but it is important to remember that the last woman to be guillotined in France, in 1947 while de Beauvoir was completing The Second Sex, was an abortionist, and I would argue that de Beauvoir is attacking the myth of motherhood not necessarily the experience of mothering, if undertaken in revised social conditions. What is experimental about de Beauvoir’s technique in The Second Sex is her use of visual, novelistic scenes (as in her account of the French writer Henri de Montherlant) in which she describes experiences, including her own, and then deconstructs these in a kind of autobiographical theorising. The technique is very Woolfian, akin to Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Post-modern readings of de Beauvoir suggest that de Beauvoir’s dramatization of the maternal body is an ‘under-appreciated feminist discursive strategy of defamiliarization’ (Zerilli 1992, 112). For example, de Beauvoir brings Montherlant’s literary misogyny sharply into focus in The Second Sex, by examining his use of maternal imagery. Montherlant’s work reveals, de Beauvoir argues, a deep masculine fear of the maternal body. A significant leitmotif in Montherlant’s writings, de Beauvoir suggests, is a maternal figure who exists only ‘to keep her son for ever enclosed within the darkness of her body’ (de Beauvoir 1972, 230). de Beauvoir underpins her analysis of Montherlant’s terror of women with Alfred Adler’s idea that the ‘classical root of the psychosis’ is a fear of reality, arguing that literary misogynies directly draw on a masculine fear of the maternal body (de Beauvoir 1972, 232). Maï Zetterling also had a complex relationship with her mother and favoured her granddaughter over her grandson, Zetterling’s son told me

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(as Woolf favoured her niece Angelica). Zetterling’s novel Night Games is, as the cover blurb suggests ‘an extraordinary tour de force of imaginative writing’,5 she transposes gender, making her central character, the narrator, a male living in his dead mother’s house in whose ‘ancient chairs’ he could sense his mother. ‘It had all started,’ he says, ‘where else in mother’s womb, that inner sanctum’ (Zetterling 1966, 12). In an incredibly moving section (so reminiscent of the Vogue photograph of Woolf taken when she wore her mother’s dress), the narrator seeing his mother’s dress: which I had once caressed and explored…I fell so deeply into it that I thought I would never get out…I whispered mother’s name…was I born for nothing, but to live with the past…mother’s presence filled my brain like a fog, touched my body like a wet hand…I was swimming, in deep scented waters’. (Zetterling 1966, 148)

The narrator also thinks his mother is ‘a floating, invisible angel she was then more terrifying than in the flesh, persistently hanging onto me, demanding’ (Zetterling 1966, 148). The passage resembles Woolf’s description of the Angel in the house in ‘Professions for Women’. ‘The shadow of her wings fell on my page…had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing’ (Woolf 1961, 203). Maï Zetterling had an itinerant schooling, leaving at thirteen without any qualifications, but died owning over 12,000 books, of which a substantial number were by, and about, women writers. Many of these writers are experimental, modernist or avant-garde, including, along with Woolf and Colette, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Monique Wittig and the complete works of Anaïs Nin. Zetterling was a feminist pacifist, taking her son on Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) marches between Aldermaston and London, and supporting Joan Littlewood’s radical Theatre Workshop in Stratford East London. MI5 tracked her mistakenly as a Communist. Zetterling first acted for Ingmar Bergman, then in Hollywood with Tyrone Power (one of her many lovers), and in the United Kingdom acting with Dirk Bogarde, with Peter Sellers (Only Two Can Play, 1962) and Peter Finch—both her lovers. Turning to film directing in the early 1960s, her short film The War Game (1962) won a BAFTA award, and her first feature film Loving Couples was banned from the Cannes Film Festival for sexual explicitness, although Kenneth Tynan called it the most ambitious debut since Citizen Kane. Zetterling’s

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feminism is clearly visible in her films Scrubbers (1983) and The Girls (1968) which was based on Lysistrata. As noted above, on viewing The Girls, de Beauvoir asked Zetterling to develop a seven-part film of The Second Sex. Zetterling’s films are significant satires of politics, class and alternative cultures, and her filmic styles are modernist, displaying a technical virtuosity. In a Woolfian passage summing up this long career, Zetterling’s autobiography begins: I have been a child, a party doll, a mistress, a wife, a mother, a professional woman, a virgin, a grandmother. I have been a woman for more than fifty years and yet I have never been able to discover precisely what it is I am, how real I am. (Zetterling 1985, 2)

A few moments later, again like Woolf, Zetterling records: ‘I felt that as a woman I was still imprisoned in a man’s world which I didn’t quite belong to and whose language I didn’t really speak’ (Zetterling 1985, 4). Like Zetterling, de Beauvoir’s debt to Woolf is both epistemological— she admired Woolf’s way of writing about women—and imagistic. It was on a Sunday afternoon in March 1939 that de Beauvoir saw the collection of photographs of writers taken by Monnier’s friend, Gisèle Freund. The encounter between Freund and Woolf, when Woolf felt that Freund had ‘filched and pilfered and gate-crashed  – the treacherous vermin’, was remembered as more hospitable by Freund (Woolf 1975–80, vol. 6, 351).6 In a preface to Freund’s James Joyce in Paris, which Monnier includes in a collection of reviews, Simone de Beauvoir vividly describes that afternoon: ‘the place was crowded with famous writers. I don’t remember who was there; but what stayed eternally in my mind, however, is…the screen glowing in the darkness [due to wartime exigencies Freund showed slides rather than prints] and the faces bathed in beautiful color’ (Monnier 1976, 491). In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir writes about Woolf’s The Waves, A Room of One’s Own and Mrs Dalloway, focussing on themes relevant to her own project. For example, de Beauvoir notes how ‘in A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf contrasts the meagre and restricted life of an imaginary sister of Shakespeare with his life of learning and adventure…in England, Virginia Woolf remarks, women writers have always aroused hostility’ (de Beauvoir 1972, 138). But, de Beauvoir argues, ‘in France things were somewhat more favourable’ (138). Taking up her theme of the social

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construction of femininity, de Beauvoir praises what she understands to be Woolf’s delineation of social construction in the character of Jinny in The Waves, quoting Woolf’s ‘to his one word I shall answer my one word. What has formed in me I shall give him’ (de Beauvoir 1972, 390). De Beauvoir associates Mansfield with Woolf because both share, de Beauvoir claims, ‘the melancholy in the heart of a woman of thirty’. de Beauvoir thinks that Woolf manifests a certain distress about married life in middle age noting: ‘it is a remarkable fact that in France suicide is less common in married than in unmarried women up to age thirty but not thereafter’ (de Beauvoir 1972, 496). It is worth noting the autobiographical quality of these observations, since de Beauvoir was in her late thirties when drafting The Second Sex. And, perhaps in consequence, she selectively misreads Woolf. For example, de Beauvoir does appreciate the significance of Mrs Dalloway’s parties, ‘the woman who presides over these…is proud to feel herself the creator of a perfect moment’ (de Beauvoir 1972, 554), but argues that any ‘social routine’ will quickly change ‘celebration into institution, gift into obligation’ (de Beauvoir 1972, 554). de Beauvoir is acutely tuned to what she calls ‘those luminous moments of happiness which Virginia Woolf (in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse) and Katherine Mansfield (throughout her work) bestow upon their heroines’ (de Beauvoir 1972, 632). Yet de Beauvoir argues that such moments are merely ‘recompense. The joy that lies in the free surge of liberty is reserved for man’ (de Beauvoir 1972, 632). Again, de Beauvoir appreciates Colette, Mansfield and Woolf’s ‘close and loving observation of nature’ in its ‘non-human freedom,’ but ‘this other presence’ lacks, de Beauvoir claims, ‘metaphysical resonance’ (de Beauvoir 1972, 720). In opposition, I would argue that Woolf’s descriptions of the natural world contribute to Woolf’s creaturely ethics. Additionally, Colette, Mansfield and Woolf’s creation of a compass of natural beings is not only aesthetic but profoundly ethical.7 de Beauvoir seems to accept too literally Woolf’s social comments, without deconstructing Woolf’s more complex aesthetics. For example, Woolf argues in A Room of One’s Own that if women write about relationships with women, recognising the materiality of women’s historical circumstances, then the potentiality of that writing would be profound. ‘If Chloe likes Olivia [and] Mary Carmichael knows how to write, she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been’ (Woolf 1989, 84). Maï Zetterling takes up this theme both in her novel Night Games and in her film Scrubbers (1982). The narrator in Night Games travels ‘flushed

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and excited, I jumped continents’ (Zetterling 1966, 120); and in a very Woolfian gesture, ‘I had a very childish emotional response to my room, which made me go back millions of years to the condition of a constantly multiplying cell in a vibrant ocean’ (Zetterling 1966, 9). Woolf’s Fitzwilliam manuscript of A Room of One’s Own similarly says, at the point where a woman becomes conscious of thinking through her mothers, ‘I should go swinging through the sun’ (Woolf 1992b, 144). Zetterling’s Scrubbers, with the young actress Kathy Burke, is set in an all-female Borstal of unruly girls and sensitively captures the interplay between comradeship and power in female and lesbian relationships, imaged in a scene of the girls at bedtime passing cigarette ends to each other through the bars of their cells with homemade catapults. The subversive action imaged in objects such as shared cigarette butts reflects the ontological subversion of standard social attitudes in the girls’ friendships. A similar association of ontological with epistemological expression occurs frequently in Woolf, particularly in her use of objects in novels and essays. For example, in ‘Waxworks at the Abbey,’ and in Orlando, Woolf associates unrelated objects epistemologically in order to critically subvert the iconic social status of such objects. In Orlando when Orlando sweeps past the Crystal Palace she sees ‘bassinettes, military helmets, memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, wedding cakes’ [in which] ‘the incongruity of the objects, the association of the fully clothed and the partly draped…afflicted Orlando with the most profound dismay’ (Woolf 1992a, 157). Orlando’s view mirrors her move away from the strangling, knotting together of gendered bourgeois objects in her Victorian home. Similarly, in Zetterling’s Night Games, the narrator’s mother’s bedroom contains an array of incongruous objects ‘pearl-embroidered footstools, cushions made of heavy silk, a chair with lion’s feet, a golden clock with cut-out figures…a bird in a golden cage, a Japanese child’s tea-house’ among many other objects (Zetterling 1966, 44). The narrator feels ‘caught up in a whirlpool, sickened’ (Zetterling 1966, 45). And to complete the tripartite resonances, de Beauvoir’s account of subordinated women shares the excess of metaphors in these descriptions in Orlando and Night Games’ descriptions: ‘Woman becomes plant, panther, diamond, mother-of-pearl, by blending flowers, furs, jewels, shells, feathers with her body’ (de Beauvoir 1972, 190); de Beauvoir goes onto to subvert this with her final resonating chapter ‘The Independent Woman.’ All three writers create ludic experimental spaces in which to address myths of femininity, including the maternal, often represented by a

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plethora of objects. Writing for Woolf, de Beauvoir and Zetterling was always more than a matter of aesthetics. The literary act of writing for all three is a material, historical and familial psychological event, in which the deconstruction of gender is central. They experimented with literary forms (and, for Zetterling, also with film), finding new ways in which to interweave philosophy and autobiography. The powerful associations between the three women writers across time and national boundaries tell us much about Woolf’s legacies and about a continuing tradition of women’s experimentation. These successive generational and experimental intertextualities are realms of resemblances.

Archival Interlude Transcription of Zetterling’s Treatment of The Second Sex for a Television Series [A Treatment by Mai Zetterling c. 1975]. We propose to make seven programmes for Television; each lasting one hour, based on the two books of Simone de Beauvoir “The Second Sex” (a study of modern women). The headlines of the programmes could be the following; 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Childhood and the young girl. The Initiation to sex and the Lesbian. The Married woman, the Mother. The Prostitute and the Courtesan. The Narcissist, the woman in love the mystic. Women from maternity to old age. Towards liberation, the independent woman.

We would like to see the action played out all around our globe as the subject is a universal one. The book of Simone de Beauvoir “The second sex” has become a modern classic and a bestseller over the world, and is indeed almost a bible for the woman who wants to understand something about herself and her own sex. We would like to see the action take place in wide-apart places like Japan, China, Australia, Israel, U.S., South America, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey, Africa, Iceland, France, etc. (each country being responsible for its hour of film).

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I would want to choose a woman who in her life is playing the same role as our chosen headline title, like for instance a married woman, a lesbian, a prostitute, and independent woman. This woman will be our heroine during one hour. She will be our spokeswoman. She will be the forceful interviewer, and she will ask herself the most intimate questions as well. She will also be the narrator and the one who will explain and translate the dialogue in some of the scenes of fiction that will be played out by actors, of course. Each programme will have a new heroine, each being typical of her own country and class. From a purely technical point; the film will be greatly helped by having this kind of heroine narrator. It will cut sub-titles to a minimum. When shown in another country, they will only be needed for her direct talk. The rest will be laid over action and the scenes of fiction which will be done mostly without dialogue and described by the narrator, except perhaps for some very special key sentences. The film will be a mixture between documentary and fiction and will be extremely personal, fast moving and inventive. No stodgy documentary technique. We will use fiction scenes from well-known books, Virginia Wolf (sic), Colette, Katherine Mansfield, Zola – case histories from, for instance, Freud, Stekel, and Jung; also stories of personal experience from the author and the heroine narrator. We will move in and out of time with ease, though the time is the present one. We will get to know what was happening politically, economically and on the women’s situation when S.D.B. started to write the book. We will also compare it to what is happening now, politically and economically, and we will get to know why S.D.B. wanted to write the book and how her attitudes have changed, or not changed. We will fantasize as well about the future. We can even move towards science fiction ideas if we so want to. Nothing should be impossible. I see these 7 films as a very exciting television entertainment made in a highly personal way, full of visual and verbal possibilities. I believe them to be able to reach women in very class group. There will be something in each film that will touch every woman. Even a married woman will understand the prostitute, the lesbian, the independent woman and vice versa – as all women have all the tendencies of these women. —transcribed by Maggie Humm from the Faceted Zetterling Project. The script is in the Zetterling Archives at the Swedish Film Institute.

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Acknowledgements  My academic interest in Maï Zetterling was triggered by conversations with Jane Sloan at Rutgers University and discovering that the ‘blond bombshell’ film star of my childhood was a feminist-pacifist, owner of a large library and an innovative author and filmmaker. Many thanks to Jane Sloan, Director of the Faceted Zetterling Project, for sharing expert access to Zetterling’s film scripts, book collection lists and contact details for Zetterling’s son. And, in particular, many thanks to Louis Lemkow, Zetterling’s son, for generously sharing his memories in interview and in subsequent emails.

Notes 1. Personal interview with Louis Lemkow, Barcelona 30/01/2013. All biographical information about Zetterling is drawn from this interview and subsequent emails, as well as from http://www.youtube.com/channel/ UCJeH7pnLgqMKdBCjd0J0LfA—the Faceted Zetterling Project. Elise Pouliot, Zetterling’s assistant and French translator, attended the 1974 UNESCO conference in Paris with Zetterling, and in an interview suggests that Zetterling, de Beauvoir and Pouliot met in Paris during 1974–5 to discuss the script, and that the film possibility was abandoned by 1977. See also: https://sites.google.com/site/themaizetterlingarchives/home 2. The script envisaged mixing documentary and fiction in seven television films each of one hour. The films would each focus on a different woman, including a married woman, a lesbian woman, a prostitute, and an independent woman as spokeswoman. The films would be shot in a range of countries, including Japan, China, the US and Nordic countries. 3. While travelling to Palermo in April 1927, Woolf wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell: ‘I shared a cabin with an unknown but by no means romantic Swedish lady who complained that there was no lock on the door, whereupon I poked my head out from the curtains and said in my best French ‘Madame, we have neither of us any cause for fear’ (Woolf, Letters, vol. 3: 361). 4. See Smith (1999), Banfield (2003), Lawrence (2004), Drewery, (2011), L. Marcus (2010), Simpson (2014) and L. K. Hankins (2014) among others. 5. Night Games London: Constable (1966). Zetterling also directed a film Night Games in 1966. 6. See Humm (2003) for a fuller account of Freund and Woolf. 7. See K. Czarnecki and C. Rohman (2011).

Works Cited Banfield, A. 2003. Time Passes, Virginia Woolf, Post-Impressionism and Cambridge Time. Poetics Today 24 (3): 471–516.

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Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Czarnecki, K., and C.  Rohman. 2011. Virginia Woolf and the Natural World: Selected Papers from the Twentieth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1972. The Second Sex. Trans. H.M.  Parshley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Drewery, C. 2011. Modernist Short Fiction by Women: Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf. Farnham: Ashgate. Hankins, L.K. 2014. ‘Printing ‘Prelude’, Virginia Woolf’s Typesetting Apprenticeship and Katherine Mansfield on ‘Other People’s Presses’. In Virginia Woolf and the Common(wealth) Reader, ed. Helen Wussow and Mary Ann Gillies, 212–222. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press. Humm, M. 2003. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Lawrence, J. 2004. Mansfield and the Aesthetic Object. Journal of New Zealand Literature 22: 31–54. Marcus, Jane. 1987. Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Marcus, L. 2010. Virginia Woolf as Publisher and Editor: The Hogarth Press. In The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, ed. M.  Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Monnier, Adrienne. 1976. The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Simons, Margaret. 1986. The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex. Yale French Studies 72: 165–180. Simpson, K. 2014. Wealth in Common: Gifts, Desire and Colonial Commodities in Woolf and Mansfield. In Virginia Woolf and the Common(wealth) Reader: Selected Papers from the Twenty-Third Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. H. Wussow and M.A. Gillies, 88–93. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press. Smith, A. 1999. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1961. Professions for Women. In The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1975–80. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. ed. N.  Nicolson and J. Trautmann. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 1977–84. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. ed. A.  Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt. ———. 1989. A Room of One’s Own. San Diego: Harcourt. ———. 1992a. Orlando. ed. R. Bowlby. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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———. 1992b. Virginia Woolf Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of a Room of One’s Own. Trans. and Ed. S.P.  Rosenbaum. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press/Blackwell. ———. 1994. Waxworks at the Abbey. In The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume 4 1925 to 1928, ed. A. McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press. Zerilli, Linda M.G. 1992. A Process Without a Subject: Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva on Maternity. Signs 18 (1): 111–135. Zetterling, Maï. 1966. Night Games. London: Constable. ———. 1985. All Those Tomorrows. London: Jonathan Cape.

CHAPTER 8

1966 and Wide Sargasso Sea: The Climate that Made Jean Rhys Legible Helen Carr

Jean Rhys’s writing in the 1920s and 1930s often provoked uncertainty, if not dismay, and gained her only a strictly limited number of admirers: it was the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 that finally brought her acclaim and success. Wide Sargasso Sea was an extraordinary poetic, powerful and politically acute masterpiece, and I do not want in any way to diminish its claims to be the consummation of her literary development. Yet what I would argue is that Rhys’ pre-war novels, with many of the same themes and concerns, had been too experimental to find a wide audience. It was the difficulties they posed for their contemporary readers, not any lack of literary craft or social and psychological insights, that had accounted for their perplexed, uneasy reception. By 1966, her readers had, it seemed, caught up, to some extent at least, with the insights and preoccupations that had always characterised Rhys’ fiction. She had become legible in a new way. The sixties were, of course, a period of intense cultural and political transformation. Attitudes towards sexuality and gender were changing and liberalising: the establishment, that ‘huge machine of law, order and respectability’, as Rhys described it (1970, 241), was under interrogation,

H. Carr (*) Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Aughterson, D. Philips (eds.), Women Writers and Experimental Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_8

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mocked, satirised and subverted; class stratifications were beginning to crumble; madness, which had been the ultimate otherness, was being reclaimed as a painful sanity, reinterpreted and reheard by the anti-­ psychiatry movement, and through the insights of a new generation of writers and artists, racial and colonial, as well as gender hierarchies, were disputed and challenged, even if slow to lose their power; a new climate of feminist and postcolonial consciousness was slowly emerging. Whilst Jean Rhys’s political critique was rarely overtly commented on by contemporary critics when Wide Sargasso Sea first appeared—that would come gradually and later—they could recognise her world and her sensibility. Wide Sargasso Sea’s retelling of the story of the first Mrs Rochester, the madwoman in the attic, had an immediate appeal, perhaps all the more so because Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was not then an academically esteemed classic but a tale that had entered the popular imaginary, and its Gothic magic realism avant la lettre, deplored by mainstream literary critics of the period, became once again in Rhys’s novel a powerful creative force which spoke powerfully to its time.1 Wide Sargasso Sea came out in a literary atmosphere which included the early works of a new generation of writers with concerns that illuminated Rhys’ own: Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), for example, with its compelling insights into mental breakdown, or Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1967), with its links to magic realism and defiance of misogynistic power, and the growing number of Caribbean writers, such as Sam Selvon and George Lamming, who had brought the troubled British relationship with the West Indies into the consciousness of their British readers. To look back to that early reception is to see anew the imaginative power of this transformative novel, its rage against injustice, its compassion for the disempowered, its evocation of the beauty and cruelty of the colonial Caribbean, all of which continue to resonate so powerfully. But it can also illuminate how much of that searing social critique was present in the earlier pre-war novels, too early to find more than a few perceptive readers. Yet, if 1966 proved an ideal time to publish her final novel, Rhys had been working on it ever since she finished Good Morning, Midnight in 1939 and there are perhaps closer links between Wide Sargasso Sea and her earlier novels, and particularly Good Morning, Midnight, than are sometimes realised. Rhys’ literary silence over the intervening years was not, as I have argued before, her own choice but, to a large extent, that of others, and the result of a social climate that had effectively silenced her. The

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immediate post-war years, with their pressure for social conformity and idealisation of domestic life had been particularly inimicable to Rhys, and she was no longer able to get published. The story of her ‘disappearance’ as a writer was a misreading; her work was rejected—Constable turned down a collection of her short stories in 1946—but she never, or only very briefly, stopped writing. Other writers might have tried to find a publisher elsewhere, and had Rhys’ second husband, the literary agent Leslie Tilden, still been alive, things might have been different. But those were the years when a woman’s place was in the home, it was the era of the happy housewife, not of the rackety, racked, sexually compromised women of slender or no means about whom Rhys wrote.2 Even in the interwar years her heroines had been frowned on, although at least the skill with which she depicted them was acknowledged: ‘The sordid little story is written with admirable clarity and economy of language’ was how one critic put it; another commented, ‘we shall have to go far to find another novel so powerfully wrought out of weakness, futility, betrayal, lust and fear’ (cited in Carr 2012, 2). Rhys wrote in 1953 to the writer Morchard Bishop— who had in 1939 written her a rare letter of admiration for Good Morning, Midnight—about her problems with writing in those post-war years. On the one hand, there was her lack of a suitable place to write, a privation that would continue to hamper her for many years. But on the other, more directly menacingly, an unsympathetic publishing climate, publishers who only wanted, she was convinced, cheery, wholesome fiction, publishers who ‘demand[ed] a positive and creative view of life’, exerting a kind of ‘thought control … So insidious’ (Wyndham and Melly 1984, 99–100). ‘Thought control’ and societal pressure to conform—hopeless tasks in Rhys’s case—were increasingly being uneasily perceived and resisted in both Britain and the United States, although Britain had not had the political endorsement of this demand for intellectual conformity exemplified in the McCarthy witch-hunts.3 Yet it is telling that the broadcast of Good Morning, Midnight that brought Rhys back to public consciousness did not take place until 1957, the year after Suez, Look Back in Anger and Rock Around the Clock, when the climate was beginning to change—the year in fact when André Deutsch paid Rhys £25 for an option on her new novel, although it would take her another nine years to finish it. From then on, however, she would have sympathetic encouragement, from new literary friends as well as from a gradually changing cultural climate, if still no adequate place in which to write.

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When Wide Sargasso Sea was first published, for all the praise that it received, the novel was not often seen by British critics as one about colonialism, but rather a brilliant innovative novel that centred on a woman who, in this instance, lived in the colonies, or even perhaps about a woman who lived in a book, the ‘cardboard world’ of Jane Eyre (Rhys [1966] 1997, 117). One of the first critics to recognise Wide Sargasso Sea’s critique of colonialism was a West Indian, the Trinidadian lawyer Wally Look Lai, who in 1968 commented perceptively, ‘the encounter between Antoinette and Rochester is more than an encounter between two people: it is an encounter between two worlds’ (Look Lai, 40). But in 1972, V.S. Naipaul, her fellow Caribbean exile, suggested that all her fiction was shaped by her colonial beginnings, her ‘difference of view’, and that that indeed was what had made her so ahead of her times. ‘Out of her fidelity to her experience’, he observed, ‘and her purity as a novelist, Jean Rhys thirty or forty years ago identified many of the themes that engage us today: isolation, an absence of society or community, the sense of things falling apart, dependence, loss.’ Her earlier readers had found this hard to understand: the ‘Jean Rhys heroine of her first four books’, Naipaul suggested, was to her readers ‘a woman of mystery … appearing to come from no society, making roots in no society, having memories only of places, a woman who has “lost the way to England”, and is adrift in the metropolis’ (Naipaul 1972, 29). By 1972, knowing those Caribbean origins, he argued, one can perceive far more acutely what was going on in her work: ‘The mysterious journey from an unknown island, the break in a life: concrete experience turns into the purest of symbols, and the themes which in the 1930s must have seemed obscure or perverse, deriving from too particular an experience, are today more accessible’ (29). Naipaul was surely right that this had been precisely the problem that many of Rhys’  1930s readers in Britain had had with her novels. Like Virginia Woolf, Rhys begins her novels in media res, within a perceiving consciousness: but when one begins Mrs Dalloway, for example, although the reader sees things through Clarissa Dalloway’s consciousness and has to learn what form that consciousness takes, and what experiences have made Clarissa who she is, it is still the case that the world she inhabits, the social background, her connections, are all well-known in English culture. Even if not all her readers would have been familiar themselves with Westminster or Bond Street or country houses, they knew about them. The same applies in different ways to the other consciousnesses that Woolf’s readers encounter within Mrs Dalloway as the story develops.4 But

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in Good Morning, Midnight, as in the other pre-war Rhys novels, where the central woman character, Sasha (originally Sophia, even her name is unstable) comes from, how her life has come to be what it is, is much harder to place. Her immediate origins, living on ‘Two-pound-ten every Tuesday’ in ‘a room off the Gray’s Inn Road’ (Rhys 1939, 32), are mentioned in passing; her earlier time in Paris as a young married woman and, briefly, a mother plays an important role in her story, but where was she before that? There is the memory that is stirred as she listens to the Martinique music in Serge’s studio: lying in a hammock, where the ‘hills look like clouds and the clouds like fantastic hills’ but no explanation there or elsewhere (Rhys 1939, 75). For readers of her first collection of short stories, The Left Bank, Ford Madox Ford had given something of a context in his enthusiastic, if at times condescending, introduction: ‘Coming from the Antilles’, he had written, ‘with a terrifying insight and a terrific – an almost lurid! – passion for the underdog, she has let her pen loose on the Left Banks of the Old World – on its gaols, its studios, its salons, its cafés, its criminals, its midinettes – with a bias of admiration for its midinettes and of sympathy for its lawbreakers.’ (Ford 1927, 24) She has, he adds, a ‘singular instinct for form … an instinct for form being possessed by singularly few writers of English and by almost no English women writers’ (24–5). So, in her control of form, almost an honorary French writer, but in emotional tone, exotically passionate on behalf of the ‘underdog’ – in both cases very unEnglish. Yet Ford was surely right to associate her fellow feeling for the most despised and disreputable of social groups with her Creole origins – those Creole origins which had made Rhys herself suspect and shunned in Britain.5 Many of the readers of the early novels, however, would not necessarily have known the short stories nor Ford’s introduction to them, so that clue to origin would be missing, There was, of course, Voyage in the Dark, where the rupture between her two worlds is made so clear. But that book shocked and alienated many of its first readers more than any of Rhys’ other novels, with Anna’s slide into prostitution and her near fatal abortion. Those pre-war novels, with their stream-of-­ consciousness writing, time shifts, dubious social milieux, psychic rollercoasting, macaronic texts, were too alien; they were often very witty, but that was not often recognised, any more than was their social critique. These were novels that centred on a female protagonist, but scarcely a socially acceptable one. Rhys wrote about precarious, vulnerable women, always short of money, living on their looks, forced or tempted all too

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easily to offend against the bourgeois social code. As Rhys puts it in Good Morning, Midnight, they were not quite ‘convenable’. The novels were assumed to be autobiographical—and her material in many ways was— which made them all the worse. By the sixties and seventies, with the advent of a more liberal social climate, the subject matter of these earlier novels would not pose anything like the same problems. But at the time, it was a barrier. She certainly wasn’t banned, like D.H. Lawrence, but her novels lacked receptive readers. Although Ford had given Rhys that introduction to the literary world of the 1920s, just as, before the First World War, he had earlier discovered and promoted male modernist figures such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence, going on to support them in their early careers, Ford and Rhys rapidly fell out after their disastrous affair. Whilst that relationship and its break-up gave birth to her first published novel, Quartet (originally entitled Postures in 1928), Rhys lost her literary impresario and had to make her own way without an influential champion to ease the path to literary acceptance.6 After Wide Sargasso Sea’s success in 1966, however, once again she had influential champions, and in Naipaul one who understood much more profoundly what part that journey from elsewhere played in her work. As Naipaul argues, recognising her as a migrant, who sees the metropolis from the outside, with the inevitable disillusion and disappointment of the colonial coming to the mother country—that heart of empire that so rapidly and ruthlessly made it clear that its colonial subjects were second rate, despised and unwelcome—makes it possible for the reader not only to understand her bleakness of vision but to perceive more clearly the psychic landscape of the modern metropolitan life she portrays. For the migrant, the rootless and indeed for many others, there is, in Naipaul’s words ‘isolation, an absence of society or community, the sense of things falling apart, dependence, loss’ (cited in Carr 2012, 15). What he implies about Rhys is what Toni Morrison suggests later, that in the institution and culture of slavery—she is talking about America, but it applies equally to the West Indies—modernity and its alienations began much earlier than in the centre. (Gilroy 1993, 221). Rhys’ view from the periphery, where she grew up constantly aware of the legacy of slavery, is acutely more aware of the alienation and anxiety of modernity than those who live in the imperial home. In the same year as Naipaul made these comments on Jean Rhys, a very different figure, Michel Foucault, in his preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, gave a fascinating analysis of the sixties revolution, which sheds light in another way on the link between those years and the thirties

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in Rhys’ work. Foucault, writing from the viewpoint of French intellectual life, sees a seismic change in 1966 (though the shift he identifies most people would agree started culturally much earlier, as I have argued). But, for Foucault, the years from 1945 to 1965 were characterised among his fellow philosophers by an intellectual orthodoxy: ‘One had to be on familiar terms with Marx, not let one’s dreams stray too far from Freud. And one had to treat sign systems – the signifier – with the greatest respect’ (Foucault, xi). All that, he says, changed in 1966—he is perhaps thinking of 1966 as the year of Derrida’s fatal coup against structuralism (here ‘sign-systems’) in his paper ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, or, perhaps even more, Deleuze’s book, Bergonism, in which he reclaims the figure whose empowering emphasis on creative intuition, memory, duration and the élan vital had been so central and liberatory to early modernism and so despised by structuralism. Foucault describes the second half of the sixties as ‘five brief, impassioned, jubilant, enigmatic years’, which saw an ‘amalgam of revolutionary and antirepressive politics’ and a ‘war fought on two fronts: against social exploitation and psychic repression’ (xi). Foucault himself had of course been an important and influential figure in the anti-psychiatry movement, but what I want to argue here is that although Rhys deals with these issues in very different terms, these two fronts, ‘social exploitation and psychic repression’, are the battleground of Wide Sargasso Sea, with its critique of racial, colonial and patriarchal oppression on the one hand, and its perceptive understanding of psychic breakdown on the other. Foucault suggests that the late sixties were perhaps a return to the anti-fascist surrealism of the thirties, in its turn the terrain of the pre-war Rhys, particularly in Good Morning, Midnight.7 ‘Last but not least,’ he writes, ‘the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism … And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini – which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively – but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, and to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us (xiii).’ This had always been the fascism exposed in Rhys’ writing, the exploitation of patriarchal and monetary power which she saw as so pervasive, and at so many levels, in both the colonial and metropolitan societies in which she lived. When I wrote first about Rhys in 1996, I made Good Morning, Midnight the central text on which I concentrated, not because I wanted to diminish the importance of Wide Sargasso Sea, but because I was dismayed that for so many readers at that time, Rhys had remained the writer of that one

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novel; the earlier ones had been neglected or were simply little known. I was on a crusade to have Jean Rhys taken seriously and to have the range of her fiction acknowledged, campaigning against a style of criticism that had reduced her to an autobiographical novelist, spinning melancholy if beautifully crafted fiction out of her personal grief. There were certainly a range of impressive critics by then who appreciated not only the power of her writing but also the importance of her colonial background to her work. Rhys is deeply concerned with politics in terms of social justice and injustice, but such politics are always embodied in her fiction, emerging through their effect on individual lives and relationships and ways of thought, not as abstractions. The critic who first highlighted Rhys’s observation of the growth of fascism in Good Morning, Midnight was Mary-Lou Emery, who remains one of Rhys’s finest critics, who pointed out how important as a back drop to the novel is the great International Exhibition held in Paris in 1937, dominated by the ideological clash between Fascism and Communism, in the form of the huge pavilions showcasing Germany and Russia. But in the foreground of the novel, these threats are played out in individual lives. Sasha, unhappy, rootless, at her psychic nadir, is on a visit in October 1937 to Paris, which stirs many painful memories of the past. In 1937 it is a city full of people from elsewhere, treated and treating others with suspicion. She meets up with those who, like herself, are unplaceable and placeless, most notably the Russian Jewish painter, Serge: she buys his painting of the old Jewish beggar, singular and defiant – an image, she feels of herself. They are the undecidables, the misfits, the ambiguous whom the Fascists would strive to wipe from sight.8 Fascism, Aimé Césaire influentially argued, is colonialism brought home, the racial other controlled, abused, disempowered and potentially, and often actually, destroyed. Did Rhys recognise this too? It is hard to know, but I would suggest that at some level her texts certainly do. It was immediately after completing Good Morning, Midnight that Rhys began to think about the possibility of writing a novel based in her native islands and in colonial times, the project that would become Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys had had her only visit back to Dominica in 1936, the year before that in which Good Morning, Midnight is set. On that visit she discovered to her pain and shock that as a former white Creole, descendent of slave-­ owners, she is hated by the present-day inhabitants. She wrote about this in a raw and awkward short story, ‘The Imperial Road’, only eventually published in 2000. She at that stage found it too hard to absorb and process the hatred of those whose families had been part of the slave economy.

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Like Anna in Voyage in the Dark, as a child she had longed to be black: ‘Being black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad’ (Rhys, 1969 [1934] 27). She had been indignant that the blacks were poor, the whites had the money, ‘Socialist Gwen’ her parents had called her. In Voyage in the Dark she remembers her attachment to the kind black servant Francine, who mothers her in a way her white step-mother never does, though she says disconsolately ‘I knew that of course she disliked me too because I was white; and that I would never be able to explain to her I hated being white’ (Rhys 1969 [1934], 62). Francine was based on an actual servant whom she remembered with much affection, but who suddenly vanished from her life; it was only much later when she wrote her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please, that she could admit to her memory of a much more painful relationship with her black nurse, Meta. But in 1936 she was unprepared for the hatred she experienced in Dominica, and it would take her many years to understand that hatred and be able to portray it in Wide Sargasso Sea. But perhaps the effect of that confrontation had already had an influence on the writing of Good Morning, Midnight, making her more aware of the swirling prejudices and suspicions of pre-war Paris. Yet all her pre-war novels had charted the play of power relations in the metropolis. As Julia thinks in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, ‘Because he has money he’s a kind of god. Because I have none I’m a kind of worm’ (Rhys 1971 [1930], 81). Now Jean Rhys is widely accepted as a significant experimentalist and a powerful modernist and postcolonial novelist and since 1996, there have been a range of impressive critics working on her, Sue Thomas, Elaine Savory, Judith Raiskin and many more, including further important research from Mary-Lou Emery, exploring how the Caribbean and its history shaped her work and her insights, and how she deals with the complex issues of race, power and nature of modernity in her work, themes now central to critical accounts.9 Two new collections of essays on her work are to be published in late 2020.10 Her importance is no longer in doubt. But as with so many women experimental or modernist novelist, her struggle to be recognised was a hard one. She had to wait many years to find the audience her work merited, but that was welcome change that had come about by 1966.

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Notes 1. Even the first generation of feminist literary critics were ambivalent about the critical status of Charlotte Brontë’s work—‘mawkish’ was how Kate Millet described her (Carr 2007). Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, was accepted by the male critical establishment as a classic text. 2. Muriel Sparks’ The Girls of Slender Means came out in 1963, another of those novels that perhaps helped prepare the ground for Wide Sargasso Sea. 3. The comparison of the social conformity of the post-war West with a form of fascistic thought control began in some cases soon after the end of the war. See my discussion of Lacan’s view on this in Carr (1997, 212). 4. It should be noted that although Woolf’s novels sold better than Rhys’, she too was cold-shouldered by the literary critics, in her case as a much too genteel a lady novelist; it was not till the seventies that feminist literary critics began to reassess her work. 5. See Carr (2003) for an analysis of the stereotyping of White Creoles in Britain in the early twentieth century. 6. Ford wrote his own novel based on this affair, When the Wicked Man (1932) not one of his best, and with a very racist depiction of the Jean Rhys figure (see Carr 2012, 91). 7. See Britzolakis (2007). 8. I have written more extensively about the pre-war tensions and fascist threat in the Paris Rhys visited in 1937 in Carr (2012). 9. Critics who had discussed this before 1996 included Kenneth Ramchand (1972), Coral Ann Howells (1991), Mary-Lou Emery (1990), Peter Hulme (1994) and Teresa O’Connor (1991), in addition to Look Lai and Naipaul. 10. Savory and Johnson (2020); and Lopoukhine, Regard, Wallart (2020).

Works Cited Britzolakis, Christina. 2007. “This Way to the Exhibition”: Genealogies of Urban Spectacle in Jean Rhys’s Interwar Fiction. Textual Practice 21 (3): 457–482. Carr, Helen. 1996, 2012. Jean Rhys. Tavistock: Northcote House. ———. 1997. Post-It Notes at the fin-de-siècle. Women: A Cultural Review 8 (2): 197–218. ———. 2003. “Intemperate and Unchaste”: Jean Rhys and Caribbean Creole Identity. Women: A Cultural Review 14 (1): 38–60. ———. 2007. A History of Women’s Writing. In A History of Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gill Plain and Susan Sellers, 120–137. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Emory, Mary Lou. 1990. Jean Rhys at “World’s End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile. Austin: Texas University Press. Ford, Ford Madox. 1927, 1970. ‘Introduction’ to Rhys, Jean. In The Left Bank and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by Books for Libraries Press, 24–25. New York: Arno. Foucault, Michel. 1984 [1972]. Preface, xi–xiv. In Anti-Oepidus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, ed. Deleuze, Gilles and Guatari, Félix. Trans. from the French by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London: Athlone Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Howells, Coral Ann. 1991. Jean Rhys. Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Hulme, Peter. 1994. The Place of Wide Sargasso Sea. Wasafiri 20: 5–11. Look Lai, Wally. 1968. The Road to Thornfield Hall: An Analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea. In New Beacon Reviews: Collection One, ed. John La Rose, 61. London: New Beacon Books. Naipaul, V.S. 1972. Without’s a Dog’s Chance. New York Review of Books 18: 29–30. O’Connor, Theresa. 1991. Jean Rhys: The West Indian Novels. New  York: New York University Press. Ramchand, Keith. 1972. The West Indian Novel and Its Background. London: Faber and Faber. Rhys, Jean. 1927, 1970. The Left Bank and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by Books for Libraries Press, New York: Arno. ———. 1939, 2000. Good Morning, Midnight. London: Penguin. ———. 1934, 1969. Voyage in the Dark. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1930, 1971. After Leaving Mr Mackenzie. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1966, 1997. Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. Angela Smith. London: Penguin. Wyndham, Francis, and Diana Melly, eds. 1984. Jean Rhys Letters 1931–1966. London: André Deutsch 20: 5–11.

CHAPTER 9

Neo-Victorian Experimental Narrative: Writing the Absent Objects of History in Affinity and In the Red Kitchen Claire Nally

Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999) and Michèle Roberts’ In the Red Kitchen (1990) represent a radicalized historical fiction, encompassing fragmented multivoicedness, and playing out an experimental Neo-Victorianism. Both narratives explore the traumas of patriarchy; through the tropes of the ghost, sexual abuse/incest, mental illness, and they bear witness to what Kohlke and Gutleben have characterized as ‘fill[ing] a lacuna rather than seiz[ing] an already occupied space of enunciation’ (2010, 7). Yet the impossibility of historical recovery is emphasised through various experimental literary strategies addressing and emphasising the artifice of the text. Experimental strategies are the prism through which epistemological notions of self, history and archive are probematised for women. In Roberts’ novel, the reader is confronted with three time periods (Egyptian, Victorian and the late twentieth century), and five different narrative voices (Hat, Rosina, Flora, Minny and Hattie), whose identities seem to blur into one another through spiritualist mediumship. That said,

C. Nally (*) Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Aughterson, D. Philips (eds.), Women Writers and Experimental Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_9

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this chapter argues that the text also emphasises the incommensurability of experiences across time, as well as the unfinished and partial nature of the material, historical archive and of historical fiction itself. Foucault’s notion of the archive confirms this historical difference: ‘It establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks’ (Foucault 2002, 147). Unlike the ‘spectral turn’ of many studies related to Neo-Victorian spiritualist texts, I focus here  on the presence and absence of material objects: how these are navigated, and how they contribute to a re-­ enactment of lost histories.1 The value of comparing these two texts is apparent in how they navigate the complexities of archives, as Mitchell explains, ‘they are not always positive, nor do archival encounters produce only positive feelings’ (2014, 166). This chapter’s contribution to the ongoing discussions of historiography in Neo-Victorian fiction specifically relates to the destruction (or the paradoxical absence) of the archival text. In a text like In the Red Kitchen, this means an analysis of the Egyptian archaeological and material record as well as the textual play for which the novel is celebrated. This focus on materiality is evident in many of Roberts’s novels, including her most recent, The Walworth Beauty (2017). In the Red Kitchen crosses historical time, but similarly reveals ‘psychoanalytical and phenomenological concepts in order to grasp the intricate relationship between the subject and object world’ (Boehm 2011, 244). In The Walworth Beauty this is achieved through objects like Madeleine’s turquoise pot, or the detritus of the contemporary city. In the Red Kitchen, such a compromised (and often paradoxically absent) materiality is figured through features like the boxes in the attic, and other Egyptian archaeological artefacts which have escaped inclusion in the archive. By comparison, Waters’ Neo-Victorian fiction is heavily invested in problematising the archive, and Affinity is not Waters’ only novel to investigate such a subject. Fingersmith (2002) foregrounds the interaction between lesbian desire and an archive of patriarchal pornography which ‘seems to deny or suppress the existence of such a desire’ (Mitchell 2014, 165). Through the absent presence of material traces like the diary, Waters’ focus in Affinity is on the (un)reliability as well as the (in)visibility of same-­ sex desire. This addresses an epistemological suspicion of the archive which goes beyond addressing archives as ‘ripe for queer appropriation or irrevocably tainted by its association with authority, institutionalisation

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and regulation’ (Mitchell 2014, 164). Rather, it views the process of and absences in the archive as central to Affinity and In the Red Kitchen. This is also reflected on a formal level, insofar as both novels replicate the multiplicity of historical voices through the strategy of the fragmentary multiple narrators. As such, my reading also incorporates the literal archive (as a repository of historical documents including material such as diaries, newspapers, the work of museums and libraries) as well as the Foucauldian notion of the archive. Schwartz and Cook have articulated the dilemma of the archive as follows: … the choice of what to record and the decision over what to preserve, and thereby privilege, occur within socially constructed, but now naturalized frameworks that determine the significance of what becomes archives. Within them, the principles and strategies that archivists have adopted over time, and the activities they undertake – especially choosing or appraising what becomes archives and what is destroyed – fundamentally influence the composition and character of archival holdings, and, thus, of societal memory. (2002, 3)

If we combine this with Foucault’s notion of the archive, ‘the first law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events’ (Foucault 2002, 145), then both what is permitted to be said and what is destroyed—being impermissible—becomes of paramount importance. In this context, Affinity addresses how the history and narratives of lesbian women, traditionally absent from the historical canon, also necessitate the consideration of absences, as well as recovery and recuperation. Using the diary entries of middle-class spinster Margaret Prior, and that of Selina Dawes, incarcerated at Millbank Prison where Margaret is a visitor, alongside purportedly ‘real’ documentary objects such as newspaper reports and archival material, we are encouraged to piece together a narrative which is ultimately duplicitous. The reader finds they have been duped by Selina and her lover (Ruth Vigers), in the same way as Margaret, and we are left with the speculation that an informed appraisal of historical lesbian experiences is impossible. As such, the text emphasises the partial nature of historical recovery, through its status as an unreliable text. Whilst seeking to challenge ‘a patriarchal view of history … through rewriting or at least engaging textually with the written histories of previous generations,’ (O’Callaghan 2017, 55) the genre of the historical novel

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nonetheless proves unable to provide a complete recovery of women’s voices, chiefly because the objects of such an experience (such as diaries, or first-hand accounts) are subject to curatorial intervention, loss or displacement. This problematic echoes Foucault’s notion of the ‘historical a priori’, determined by presences not absences: ‘the emergence of statements, the law of their coexistence with others, the specific form of their mode of being, the principles according to which they survive, become transformed, and disappear’ (Foucault 2002, 44). Through the correlation of literary form with content, this chapter addresses how these two novels explore women’s dislocation from literary history. History, form and genre are thus not only foregrounded but utilised in order to reflect upon the reconstructed narratives involved in appropriating historical persons and their life stories. Whilst these two texts share a common genre and subject matter (spiritualism), their most compelling aspect relates to their suspicion of the very enterprise in which they participate. How do we recover women’s voices lost in the annals of time? How do we represent the absent presence of lost records, and lost archives? The genre of historical fiction therefore becomes crucial to any understanding of these novels, and is arguably one of the reasons why both texts focus on the loss of artefacts: ‘the past is something that we impose order on, but which is ultimately unknowable.’ (de Groot, 2010, 111). At various points both texts conceal and reveal their ambiguity about epistemological certainties: there is the strategic omission of sources and  recreations which are partial and ultimately escape the reader. For instance, the unknown content of the boxes in Hattie’s attic in In the Red Kitchen symbolically generates a clear anxiety about the status of historical artefacts, and how we construct histories from the archive. Roberts’s novel opens with Rosina’s letter to Charles Redburn, about the fraudulent nature of Flora’s mediumship: ‘She is a liar, too, and a fake. She fools all those poor people who come to her for comfort for the loss of their loved ones.’ (In the Red Kitchen, 1)2 The reliability of Rosina’s own narrative is called into question when Rosina references the ‘accomplice’ who helps her in the spiritualist performances, as we later learn that Rosina herself is the one who provides assistance to Flora. Rosina’s resentment is also based around Flora’s affair with Rosina’s beau, George Cotter, as well as rivalry related to spiritualist practice. Thus, in the process of reading, no single narrative is reliable. We are left with the conclusion that, paradoxically, it is impossible to retell a ‘truthful’ story. Such texts are struggling with the incommensurability of historical experience and the

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impossibility of recovering that which is absent. This is why the conceit of spiritualism is so powerful in these novels, as the condition of both texts gestures towards a metaphorical ‘materialized spirit  – as partly fictional and partly real.’ (Kontou 2009, 173). This produces further interrogation of ideas of truth and authenticity, as well as an anxiety about writing, women and meaning. Whilst some accounts of In the Red Kitchen focus on the compelling narrative of spiritualism through the characterisation and voices of Minnie, Flora and the contemporary Hattie (Arias and Pulham 2009; Kontou 2009), I want to foreground the Egyptian narrative in the text, through the sections which feature the character of Hat, who is loosely modelled on the Egyptian ruler, Hatshepsut. As a historical woman, Hatshepsut ascended the throne sometime around 1473 BC and reigned for about twenty years. Despite her extensive impact on Egyptian and Middle Eastern society, the records of her large-scale projects, including temple-­building, trade negotiations and conquests were destroyed by her successor, Thutmose III, her nephew and stepson, to whom she acted as Regent. She was almost lost to history until a series of excavations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries revealed a broken and fragmented record of her reign. Significantly, during the Victorian portions of narrative in In the Red Kitchen, the 1870s, Hatshepsut is still undiscovered, an absence in the historical record (and one of the many reasons why Flora cannot make sense of her claims to be a ‘King’). It was Howard Carter, famed for his discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, who recorded the wall reliefs in the temple of Hatshepsut with Édouard Naville at Deir el-Bahari, from 1894 to 1899. He also discovered her sarcophagus in 1903. Carter’s iconic status influenced the Egyptology craze of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and provides the contemporary moment with a mediation of the Egyptian world. This layering of archive and absence is mimicked in the structure and aesthetics of the text, as in Hattie’s twentieth-century time frame we can see the influence of such archaeological (and by extension, curatorial) intervention. Hattie’s composition of one of her recipe books was directly influenced by this legacy: ‘Recipes for Death, initially inspired by the Tutankhamun exhibition catalogue with its descriptions of meals left in tombs for the spirits to enjoy, brought me some small fame, and a few hundred a year in royalties’ (13). So, like Tutankhamun, Hat/Hatshepsut cannot be separated from the curatorial, archaeological and historical mediations which reconstruct her, and which result in myriad versions of

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historical truths. We read Hat triply, our contemporary curation, through Howard Carter and, by extension, nineteenth century archaeological discovery. At issue is what White calls ‘private and public histories, consistently worrying at who records such histories and who remembers them … History in all its forms – autobiographical, biographical, fiction and fact – is seen as partial, liable to be refracted in the light of other versions of the same story.’ (White 2004, 181). Specifically, this history is enacted through the physical object—those archival and archaeological traces of her story. Nora argues: Modern memory is above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image … The less memory is experienced from the inside, the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs  – hence the obsession with the archive that marks our age, attempting at once the complete conservation of the present as well as the total preservation of the past. (1989, 13)

As Victorian England and ancient Egypt cannot be experienced ‘from the inside’, we find both Affinity and In the Red Kitchen anxiously navigating the incomplete archive. In many ways, the factual Hatshepsut is ineffable because of the incomplete historical record. Notably, Hatshepsut’s image, wrought in stone as part of her enduring legacy, including her extensive building work at the Temple of Amen, Karnak and her mortuary temple at Djeser-Djeseru (Cooney, 113), was strategically overshadowed and erased from history by her successor and stepson/nephew, Thutmose III: At some point following Hatchepsut’s death a serious attempt was made to deny her existence by physically removing her presence from the historical record. Gangs of workmen were set to work at the various monuments, and soon the name and figures of Hatchepsut had vanished; they had been completely hacked out  – often leaving a very Hatchepsut-shaped gap in the middle of a scene… At Karnak her obelisks were walled up… while at Djeser-­ Djeseru her statues and sphinxes were torn down, smashed and flung into rubbish pits. This was not merely a symbolic gesture of hatred; by removing every trace of the female king it was actually possible to rewrite Egyptian history, this time without Hatchepsut. (Tyldesley 1998, 216).

Just as our knowledge of Florence Cook (Flora in the text) is facilitated by the masculine historicization of spiritualism through Sir William Crookes’ investigations, any attempted recovery of Hatshepsut’s history is only

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enabled through an intersection of various forms of masculinity in both her archive and in the novel: her successor Thutmose’s anxiety and resentment about her reign and Carter’s Victorian collusion with the history of colonialism and imperial enterprise which uncovered her archaeological building projects. In Roberts’s text this is mirrored in Hat’s father’s gift of a writing set, through which she started to record her name and narrative (p. 23).3 In the Red Kitchen anxiously reflects upon archival memory—the physical object, written document, archaeology and artefact all crowd about the text, in opposition to the immateriality frequently ascribed to spiritualism and the séance room. Whilst uncovering the silenced history of Hatshepsut, In the Red Kitchen acknowledges that repossession by necessity involves reconstruction and interpretation. This underscores the reasoning behind the text’s anxiety about the recovery of history, and indeed representation in historical fiction. Any recuperation of such narratives must always be partial. The contingent nature of such historical recovery is emphasised at various points in the text, with an obsession with (in)authenticity, but also, with the ways in which reception functions as a palimpsest, as an intervention and appropriation. Roberts confirms such a reading in her discussion of the writing process: ‘take everything I say with a pinch of salt.’ (Roberts 1998, 189). When we first meet Hat as a vision that Flora experiences during her father’s funeral, she is described as follows: At first the sun dazzles me and I can’t see. Then the green-gold mist fades from my eyes and I can focus on the row of black-clad figures opposite, on the white tombstones behind them, and on the woman standing on the cropped turf between the tombs, a silver staff in one of her hands, a tall jewelled crown rising above her black brows, a pleated white cloak falling from her shoulders. And, curved about her handsome, haughty face, a curled white beard. (4)

Notably, our introduction to Hat is assembled entirely through archaeological objects. It also very much accords with the visual representations of Hatshepsut which historians have identified as somewhat unusual in the Egyptian context, given her adoption of masculine attire in various images and inscriptions from temples and tombs built during her reign: From the time of her coronation onwards Hatchepsut no longer wished to be recognized as beautiful or indeed even a conventional woman. She chose

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instead to abandon the customary woman’s sheath dress and queen’s crown and be depicted wearing the traditional royal regalia of short kilt, crown or head-cloth, broad collar and false beard. (Tyldesley 1998, 130)4

Flora later confuses Hat’s ‘white cloak’ with Hattie’s decorating overalls (57), resulting in a collapse of the different time frames in the novel; again, the spirit’s name and identity is (mis)formed by the material object (albeit paradoxically, as this scene represents a vision). There is also the possibility that Hat is imagined by Hattie herself, who explains: ‘in my narrow white bed encircled by white curtains, I escaped to another country called Egypt where I was king.’ (135). The use of the colour white clearly ties these narratives together, as does each woman’s experience of taboo sexuality (Falcus 2007, 134). But, unlike the experiences of Hattie and Flora, Hat at no point expresses her marriage to her father as anything other than positive. She describes her pleasure on her wedding day, and her jealousy of his other wives, one of whom she poisons (84–5). Clearly, the patriarchal culture of ancient Egypt as represented in the novel precludes any real sense of sorority and reveals our alienation from her story. As White explains, this might be why Hat is one of the most unappealing characters of the novella (2004, 183). Her worldview is so utterly incommensurate with the modern day that the contemporary reader cannot relate to it in any real way—these include her rejection of femininity and the mother (53–4), her lack of sorority, as when she murders one of her father’s concubines (85), as well as her acceptance of her father as husband. Whilst attempting to recover her experience, the novel’s narrative only really proves that her voice is lost. Early in the novel, Hat describes a scene where her father gave her a gift: a writing set exactly like that of the scribes; only made in finer materials as befits my loftier rank: a wooden palette, edged with ivory, holding cakes of red and black ink, a brush-holder and water pot of alabaster, a bunch of brushes cut from reeds, a linen bag of broken pieces of pottery and limestone for me to practise writing on.(23)

Importantly for the context of this novel, and perhaps somewhat perversely, the evanescent, unstable and multifarious means of communication—language—is uncovered here entirely through the physical. We can read this scene through Roberts’ own commentary on the writing process. She explains:

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Writing is a physical act. I don’t use a word processor (I always want to call it a food processor) but a tiny ancient portable typewriter with very bouncy keys you can hit satisfyingly hard, and with smudgy ink ribbons. I like ­scribbling in pen over typed drafts; I like the act of the hand moving, the traces of ink, the sound of the nib scritch scritch scritch; the palimpsests I produce, memory encoded on the page; the history of three drafts, perhaps, visible on a single sheet. That’s all very physical, close to drawing. (Roberts 1998, 199–200)

In another essay she remarks that: Language isn’t just a transparent pane of glass through which we view the real world. It is part of the real world. It is matter. Shaping it affects how we see things…. Words are your stuff, as material as paint or clay, to be put together in patterns and shapes (otherwise known as novels) that may end up figurative or abstract or somewhere in between. (Roberts 1998, 191)

The physicality of Hat’s experience of writing is mirrored by the sensual and eroticised materiality of the writerly process Roberts describes here. But, as an attempted historical recovery, the novel also signifies a broader anxiety about the loss of the historical artefact. Hat’s narrative confirms this, through her discussion of her temple building projects: I cause to be raised many new buildings in Thebes, and at Karnak, the highest obelisk ever to be seen in Egypt, all of them monuments that will attest to the greatness of my reign. The most splendid of these is my mortuary temple that rears itself proudly under the lofty cliffs across the river, the most noble structure ever built in the history of my people. (113)

As readers we are placed in the uneasy position of historical knowledge: despite her bombast here, Hat’s name and her temples are doomed to obscurity, to lie in ruins unknown and unacknowledged for centuries. In reconstructing her, the text also reflects upon what it means to write in absence of a physical record. As she later bemoans: On the walls, all the painted scenes depicting the triumphs of my life have been washed over. Over the doorway, the writing reciting prayers for me has been defaced, half obliterated. On the columns, all the cartouches containing the hieroglyphs spelling out my name have been savagely hacked out. I

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have been unwritten. Written out. Written off. Therefore I am not even dead. I never was. I am non-existent. There is no I. (132–3)

This idea of the absent record is aligned with the idea of historical fiction more generally, as Roberts acknowledges: ‘The demands of the subject help you invent a form… the form and the subject become part of each other, inseparable.’ (Roberts 1998, 191). The lacuna at the heart of historical fiction and history itself necessitates this co-option of the material artefact: for the contemporary reader, there is a fissure in Hat’s history, and fiction writing is one way of attempting to bridge the gap. Roberts’s writing is a project that seeks to reconstruct the physicality of the archive. In the Red Kitchen also explores Hat’s experience of an erotically charged ritual where Thoth, the god of writing, comes to her in order to bestow immortality upon her, but the text hints that her father is in fact hidden beneath the ‘a gold ibis mask covering his face, his scribal palette slung by a strap from his shoulder, over a cloak of gold feathers fastened by a gold clasp, golden sandals on his feet.’ (72).5 This figure touches her with ‘the gentle fingers of a man’; Hat explains, ‘He is the one I worship and have waited for so long … I know his true name. I know whose face is concealed by the harsh jutting beak. It is not fear that courses through me and dissolves my limbs, but anticipation’ (72). Writing is thereby bound up with discourses of sexuality, in the custody of patriarchy and the father. This is confirmed when Hat states: ‘I have written my father’s name, and I have written my own name underneath. I have joined them’ (24). Certainly, the historical Hatshepsut was enabled in her rise to power through her father’s lineage; Joyce Tyldesley emphasises that ‘Given Hatchepsut’s unusual circumstances, she needed to stress her links with her father more than most other kings.’ (118). As a woman in a society with a strictly patrilineal ascent to the throne, Hatshepsut needed to stress her links to Thutmose I. This precariousness is crucial, as women did not generally become Pharaohs, and it is only through a fierce campaign of propaganda that Hatshepsut retained her grasp on power for so long. In the Red Kitchen is suspicious of how narrative and writing has been handed down to women by fathers. Flora’s father is a printer: ‘his words are objects he holds in his hands’ and he gives his daughter broken type to play with (19). His role is to stabilise words, so he secures letters and locks into place the type, ‘so that no words fall out and spoil his neat sentences’ (19).6 The physicality of these words, this type, is also the means by which memory, and thus history, is supposedly passed down through

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generations, as Hat explains: ‘To write is to deny the power of death, to triumph over it. To inscribe a person’s name on the wall of his tomb, to describe his attributes thereupon, is to ensure he will live forever’ (24). At all points, the narrative emphasises the physicality of writing, through the printmaker’s apparatus and the Egyptian writing tools. The gift of writing allows Hat to construct her own narrative, but despite her best efforts, this is erased by other patriarchal forces (in this case, her successor). The survival of the archive, the evidence that suggested Hat existed, is eroded by the subsequent process of history. Foucault’s theorisation of regulatory systems (‘power produces knowledge … power and knowledge directly imply one another … there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations’ (Foucault 1991, 27)) helps to illuminate how it is that Hat is subject to the intersection of knowledge (writing) and power (the Father). As the historical record unravels, so does Hat’s language, and with that, any ability to be heard or understood across the generations, something which is confirmed by her stuttering and unravelling at the end of the novel: KING HAT HAT THING HATTIE KING HATTIE NOT KING HATTIE NOTHING HATTIE NOT HATTIE HAT HA H O     (146)

It has been argued that ‘the power of the proper name as a mark of reference and the developing discourse of character’ is a hallmark of the rise of fictionality and the modern novel (Gallagher 2006, 84). Conversely, Hat’s final inability to articulate her own name is important because her very identity is an absent presence in the text, a paradox that also reflects the genre of historical fiction in terms of its anxiety about its own status. Hat’s appellation of the title ‘Pharaoh’, misread as ‘FARE. O! FARE.’ (46), by Flora, is accompanied by other misapprehensions, such as Flora’s

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misreading of ‘hysteria’ as ‘history’ (124). Ultimately, this testifies fictively and aesthetically to the slippery nature of epistemological knowledge itself. Whilst ‘Hat’s narrative continually emphasizes the significance and power of writing in the creation of history’ (White 2003, 79), it also reveals how this is subject to reconfiguration and omission. Roberts extends such a reflection on writing and language to her writerly practice in order to demonstrate writing and knowledge is precarious through the experimental marks of writing itself. In her ‘Author’s Note’, Roberts explains that: In the course of researching contemporary accounts of mediumship I came across an essay by Alex Owen on femininity and mediumship which clarified my ideas (in Language, Gender and Childhood, edited by Steedman and Walkerdine, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987). Another very helpful secondary source was Elaine Showalter’s study of women and madness in nineteenth-­century English culture. (The Female Malady, Virago, 1987)

At no point, however, does she make any reference to her scholarly research into Hatshepsut as the historical model for Hat (as White 2003, 79, also notes). Roberts herself, then, performs the elision of Hatshepsut from history in her writing here, akin to the historical process which Hatshepsut (and Hat) endured after their deaths. The way in which this knowledge circulates but ultimately evades the reader (what sources did Roberts use, and what was their perspective on the Egyptian ruler?) is replayed in the text through the cardboard boxes which Hattie hands over to the distant relative of Flora and Rosina towards the end of the novel: Cardboard boxes grimy with dust, sealed with brown masking tape. He tore back the tops to check the contents. I peered over his shoulder… a pile of photograph albums bound in red half-calf. Tissue paper between the leaves, faded brown silk markers. Frizzy-haired beauties in starched blouses and boaters, fat pasty babies in frocks, scowling matrons in black tents, young men with moustaches striking jokey poses. Images fading fast on glossy pasteboard. Underneath, the legends in neat brown copperplate: on the beach at Southend; Flora puts her hair up; Rosina’s wedding day. The old man slapped the album shut when he saw how interested I was. Family souvenirs. Mustn’t touch. They’re very precious. (138)

Whilst this scene clearly performs a gendered consideration of how masculine discourses of history have functioned, how men have been history’s

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custodians, and have determined how a story is told, as well as if it is told at all, there is also a related concern about the condition of the archive, arguably an inherently modern condition: we feel obliged assiduously to collect remains, testimonies, documents, images, speeches, any visible signs of what has been, as if this burgeoning dossier were to be called upon to furnish some proof to who knows what tribunal of history. (Nora 1989, 13–4)

Moreover, these interstices in the genre of historical fiction leave us reflecting on both the notion of ‘proof’ and on whether a reconstituted historical narrative can ever even approximate its ‘original’ source. A similar obsession with the physical archive as an authentic repository of meaning is discernible in Affinity. In Affinity, Margaret Prior’s diary opens with the following exploration of history and patriarchy: Pa used to say that any piece of history might be made into a tale: it was only a question of deciding where the tale began, and where it ended. That, he said, was all his skill. And perhaps, after all, the histories he dealt with were rather easy to sift like that, to divide up and classify – the great lives, the great works, each of them neat and gleaming and complete, like metal letters in a box of type. (7)7

Like Het and Flora in Roberts’ novel, Margaret’s experience of writing is constructed triply through the father figure, the physicality of writing, and an anxiety about the survival of documentation. But such self-reflexivity on the part of texts, like the two under discussion here, also reflects a wider crisis of how to recapture the past: ‘Margaret’s thoughts articulate a wider problem in history writing, in the transition from event to narrative.’ (Kontou 2009, 172). This anxiety about history, and relatedly, writing, become more overt in Waters’ use of the word ‘queer’ (3, 110, 348), a Neo-Victorian pun, exploiting the indeterminacy of the word’s meanings as both homosexual (contemporary usage) and unusual or strange (nineteenth-century usage, Llewellyn 2004, 210). Waters’ identification of the instability of this word signifies a broader concern with the nature of epistemology—as meaning shifts, it becomes more improbable that a message will be understood across decades and centuries. Thus the anxiety

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about the status of the artefact and the archive, expressed in In the Red Kitchen are comparable with those in Affinity. Waters has explained that part of her use of historical fiction is to enact ‘a radical rewriting of traditional, male-centred, historical narrative’, and other critics, such as Marie-Luise Kohlke, have identified that Waters’ earlier novels propose a redefinition of ‘what counts as history worth telling in the first place.’ (Waters 1996, 188). Such commentaries have carefully addressed the terrain of women’s stories and their omission from the historical record, and the objective here is not to rehearse those ideas. Complementarily, I argue that Waters is additionally foregrounding the irretrievable nature of such narratives, even as she paradoxically represents them in her fiction. At the end of Affinity, Margaret’s emotional health deteriorates, following the revelation that Selina Dawes has been deceiving her in an elaborate set-up with the servant, Vigers (who is an absent centre in the novel, due to her characterisation as Peter Quick in Selina’s diary). Already emotionally precarious, her suicide at the end of the novel may be inferred, but remains open ended. We do not experience the finality of narrative closure here, despite the obvious cues that Margaret intends to drown herself: ‘How deep, how black, how thick the water seems tonight!’ (351). Of particular interest here is the way in which she tidies up her private effects prior to her presumed suicide. Margaret explains: ‘This is the last page I shall write. All my book is burned now, I have built a fire in the grate and set the pages on it, and when this sheet is filled with staggering lines it shall be added to the others. How queer, to write for chimney smoke!’ (348) We are left with the impression that the diary will follow its predecessor, which provided an account of Selina’s relationship with Helen (who becomes her brother’s wife): ‘I have been thinking of my last journal, which had so much of my own heart’s blood in it; and which certainly took as long to burn as human hearts, they say, do take’ (70). In both instances, the journal records a personal history, and one which testifies to a transgressive sexual identity, itself figuring as absence. O’Callaghan notes that in the late nineteenth century: ‘identification as a homosexual – in the modern sense of the term – was emerging, but (contemporary) terminology to describe female homosexuality was as yet unavailable’ (2017, 47). So, as modern readers, we readily identify the text as a lesbian diary, but this category is absent from the historical context of the novel. The journal replicates this duality of vision, especially when we attempt to account for

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the fact that we are reading a diary which to all intents and purposes has been destroyed by the author. The novel, composed of Margaret’s diary entries interspersed with Selina’s, thereby occupies a paradoxical space—whilst it is coded as lesbian, it is also both present and absent, and therefore on a formal level, reproduces the experience of lesbianism in the period, as well as our contemporary reception of lesbian histories, occluded and partial as they may be. Mitchell argues: ‘The burnt journal is a spectral presence, the present mark of the absence, not only of itself but of the passion between Margaret and Helen that it recorded’ (Mitchell 2010, 124). In reading the (supposedly destroyed) journal, we are asked to question the nature of truth and authenticity in any form of historical document, as well as the existence of this story and this novel itself. The intertextual references to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Aurora Leigh (1856) and the historical models of mediums like Florence Cook, Mary Rosina Showers (who had a spirit guide called Peter) and Susan Willis Fletcher, all demonstrate an awareness of the text as intermediary between fact and fiction (Kontou 2009, 176).8 This intertextuality extends into the paradoxical presence and absence of source material in the text. In Waters’ novel, the role of (un)acknowledged sources replicates cultural anxiety about historical fiction and narrative ‘deceit’, played out on another level through Selina and Ruth’s deception of Margaret and the reader. In her reading of Twelve Months in an English Prison (1884), Kontou has noted that the story, about an American medium imprisoned for fraud, ‘is so similar to Waters’ novel that we can infer that she used Fletcher’s text as a blueprint (even though it is never credited as a source)’ (2009, 176). Fletcher’s offence was one of ‘undue influence’ for material gain, but also included an element of sexual scandal, as it became apparent that Fletcher and her husband (also a medium) were engaged in a ménage a trois with the injured party, Mrs Hart-Davies. This comparison is crucial, as Waters’ concealed use of this text performs quite overtly the process ‘Pa’ described as the making and ordering of history: whilst a text like Aurora Leigh is foregrounded and interpreted as a same-sex love affair, a text like Twelve Months is obscured entirely. These decisions are ultimately subjective, and the reasoning behind them not always readily apparent. In many ways, Waters is self-consciously replicating the process of history by suppressing Fletcher as a source, in order to identify how contingent and partial is our understanding of any historical narrative. Eve’s assertion that ‘taxonomographic metafiction’ is a compelling way to read Affinity is persuasive

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particularly because such an approach emphasises ‘the dynamic nature of genre and [acknowledges] the constant negotiation of terminology within a changing environment’ (Eve 2013, 110). As a text which hovers uneasily between genres, the novel ‘mimics history’s obscuration of its own narrativity, not merely critiquing it but re-enacting it…. Such new (meta)realist fiction however, remains resolutely silent on its own fictionality, presenting itself as paradoxically more real than the thing it imitates’ (Kohlke 2004, 156). In subsuming prior texts and writers like Twelve Months, Aurora Leigh and Henry James within the fictional narrative of Affinity, the novel performs both Victorian reality and our construction of that history, even as it is aesthetically conscious of its own precariousness. I would argue that Waters’s imaginative intervention in history is also the source of the novel’s anxiety, taking further O’Callaghan’s argument that Waters ‘creatively imagined lesbian subjectivity’ (2017, 48) and actively problematises the notions of such history. This is not to say that same-sex relationships are absent from history, but that such narratives may require careful reading and culturally specific knowledge, which may not always translate across time, something we have already seen in Roberts’s characterisation of Hat.9 In Affinity, the absent presence of such a subjectivity confirms on a linguistic level Castle’s notion of the apparitional lesbian, an idea which also usefully maps onto the novel’s spiritualism and its links with performativity (Castle 1993).10 The imagery of ghostliness is apparent here, especially when Margaret identifies her relationship with Helen: ‘Don’t go too near the bed! Don’t you know it’s haunted, by our old kisses? They’ll come and frighten you! […] I have seemed to see our kisses there sometimes, I’ve seen them hanging in the curtains, like bats, ready to swoop.’ Now, I thought, I might jolt the post and they would only fall, and shatter, and turn to powder. (204)

Symbolically, this passage gestures towards the ephemeral nature of (lesbian) memory, foregrounding the notion that historical fiction can only ever represent an unfinished record. Various critics have discussed the (un)helpfulness of Hutcheon’s theory in relation to Waters (Eve 2013; Kohlke 2004; Llewellyn 2007). But of particular interest here is Hutcheon’s reflection on the status of historical artefacts, especially in terms of how we read, interpret and depend upon the archive, and how we construct a sense of history through documents.

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She explores the ‘problematic nature of the past as an object of knowledge for us in the present’ and offers this caveat: The past really did exist. The question is: how can we know the past today – and what can we know of it?… [historiographic metafiction] can often enact the problematic nature of the relation of writing history to narrativization and, thus, to fictionalization, thereby raising the same questions about the cognitive status of historical knowledge with which current philosophers of history are also grappling. What is the ontological nature of historical documents? Are they the stand-in for the past?… Both [fiction and history] unavoidably construct as they textualize the past. The ‘real’ referent of their language once existed; but it is only accessible to us today in textualized form: documents, eye-witness accounts, archives. The past is ‘archaeologized’ (Lemaire 1981, xiv) but its reservoir of available materials is always acknowledged as a textualized one. (Hutcheon 1988, 92–3)

Potentially, we can add to this discussion the idea of narrative absences as well as presences, such as partial source materials and lost histories, which also present a useful comparison to Hat and In the Red Kitchen. Historical fiction is by necessity a fictional construction as much as it is a recovery. This has a wider point in relation to the genre; Jerome de Groot notes that ‘Historical novels are keenly interested in the interaction between what is “known” and what is made up, querying, for instance, the deployment of varieties of quoted “evidence”, which is often literary, therefore highlighting the innate textuality of history’ (de Groot, 113). Waters’s work in the queer archive is ‘created against the mainstream archive, without that archive and constructed despite that archive. Such novels query/queer the notion of evidence and in doing so interrogate the ways that the past and that history have been written and constructed’ (151). However, if ontological certainty is dependent on the (heterosexual/patriarchal) archive, any attempt to discover and narrate alternative histories is fraught with ghostliness, the trace, or the lacuna, which is why both In the Red Kitchen and Affinity enunciate and reject the power of the archival source (be it a diary, boxes in the attic, or archaeological artefacts). Indeed, they function outside of the conventional archive. If In the Red Kitchen is a text which simultaneously identifies and performs the elision of memories and histories like that of Hatshepsut, a text like Affinity focuses on the way in which lesbian histories have been omitted or otherwise obscured. In both these texts, there is a concerted engagement with the problem of documentary evidence, and more

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broadly, the nature of epistemology and truth-seeking: how do we recover these narratives without conventional ‘proof’ and what is the status of such a reconstruction of historical events? In Affinity, the use of the burnt diary signifies a broader concern with the authenticity of recovering nineteenth-­century lesbian life experiences in fiction. Whilst the burnt diary is absent, it also suggests an obsession with the materiality of historical documentation. At the same time, In the Red Kitchen foregrounds the process and concerns associated with historical fiction, through numerous references to the physicality of writing. Both novels also perform that which they disavow: the absence of Hatshepsut in Roberts’s ‘Author’s Note’, and Waters’s strategic occlusion of a text like Twelve Months in an English Prison. These absences identify how easy it is to write one narrative into the annals of history, whilst condemning another to obscurity. In thinking about these texts as part of a broader archive, we can also situate them in a theoretical framework of the Foucauldian archive which reflects upon an emphatically embodied textuality obsessed with the physical paraphernalia of writing, even as they represent clear anxieties about the presences and absences of texts, the process of writing, and the ways in which source materials can complicate the status of these novels.

Notes 1. For a discussion of the spectral turn, see Luckhurst (2002); Pykett (2003) and Sattaur (2012). 2. All references are to Roberts (1999). 3. See Kontou, Spritiualism and Women’s Writing (2009), especially Chapter 3. 4. See also Cooney (2014, 154) and Keller (2005, 158). 5. Cooney (2014, 39) suggests that the ritual Hatshepsut would have undergone to become ‘God’s Wife of Amen’, a revered and ceremonial role, will have been invested with a thinly veiled sexuality, viewed as sacred by the ancient Egyptians. 6. See Kontou (2009, 104) on the word ‘forme’: ‘The printmaking “forme” quite literally, secures words—it prevents them from falling apart, from being forgotten or destroyed.’ 7. All references to this novel will are to Waters (1999). 8. See Kontou: 176, for further discussion of the comparisons between Selina Dawes and Susan Willis Fletcher. For a wider discussion of mediumship in the nineteenth century, see Owens (1989). For Mary Showers and ‘Peter’, see Oppenheim (1985, 20).

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9. As a point of reference here, Anne Lister’s diaries frequently use the word ‘kiss’ as a reference to orgasm, which maps onto her use of ‘crypthand’ or cipher to disguise her sexual adventures (Lister 2010). 10. For a discussion of the links between this theory and Affinity, see O’Callaghan, 58 and Kontou, 188.

Works Cited Arias, Rosario, and Patricia Pulham, eds. 2009. Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-­ Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Boehm, Katharina. 2011. Historiography and the Material Imagination in the Novels of Sarah Waters. Studies in the Novel 43 (2): 237–257. Castle, Terry. 1993. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Cooney, Kara. 2014. The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt. London: OneWorld. de Groot, Jerome. 2010. The Historical Novel. Abingdon: Routledge. Eve, Martin Paul. 2013. “You Will See the Logic of the Design of This”: From Historiography to Taxonomography in the Contemporary Metafiction of Sarah Waters’ Affinity. Neo-Victorian Studies 6 (1): 105–125. Falcus, Sarah. 2007. Michèle Roberts: Myths, Mothers and Memories. Bern: Peter Lang. Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 2002. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London/New York: Routledge. Gallagher, Catherine. 2006. The Rise of Fictionality. In The Novel: Volume 1  – History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Abingdon: Routledge. Keller, Cathleen A. 2005. The Statuary of Hatshepsut. In Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh, ed. Catherine H. Roehrig, Renee Dreyfus, and Cathleen A. Keller, 158–173. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. 2004. Into History Through the Back Door: The “Past Historic” in Nights at the Circus and Affinity. Women: A Cultural Review 15 (2): 153–166. Kohlke, Marie-Luise, and Christian Gutleben, eds. 2010. Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Kontou, Tatiana. 2009. Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siecle to the Neo-Victorian. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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Lister, Anne. 2010. In The Secret Diaries of Anne Lister, ed. Helena Whitbread. London: Virago. Llewellyn, Mark. 2004. “Queer? I Should Say It Is Criminal!”: Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999). Journal of Gender Studies 13 (3): 203–214. Luckhurst, Roger. 2002. The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the “Spectral Turn”. Textual Practice 16 (3): 527–546. Mitchell, Helen. 2010. History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Mitchell, Kaye. 2014. “That Library of Uncatalogued Pleasure”: Queerness, Desire and the Archive in Contemporary Gay Fiction. In Libraries, Literatures, Archives, ed. Sas Mays. London: Routledge. Nora, Pierre. 1989. Between Memory and History: Le Lieux de Mémoire. Representations 26: 7–24. O’Callaghan, Claire. 2017. Sarah Waters: Gender and Sexual Politics. London: Bloomsbury. Oppenheim, Janet. 1985. The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914, 1985. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Owens, Alex. 1989. The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pykett, Lyn. 2003. The Material Turn in Victorian Studies. Literature Compass 1 (1): 1–5. Roberts, Michèle. 1998. Food, Sex and God: On Inspiration and Writing. London: Virago. ———. 1999. In the Red Kitchen. London: Vintage. Roberts, Michéle. 2017. The Walworth Beauty. London: Bloomsbury. Sattaur, Jennifer. 2012. Thinking Objectively: An Overview of “Thing Theory” in Victorian Studies. Victorian Literature and Culture 40: 347–357. Schwartz, Joan M., and Terry Cook. 2002. Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory. Archival Science 2: 1–19. Tyldesley, Joyce. 1998. Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh. London: Penguin. Waters, Sarah. 1996. Wolfskins and Togas: Maude Meagher’s The Green Salamander and the Lesbian Historical Novel. Women: A Cultural Review 7 (2): 176–188. ———. 1999. Affinity. London: Virago. White, Rosie. 2003. Permeable Borders, Possible Worlds: History and Identity in the Novels of Michèle Roberts. Studies in the Literary Imagination 36 (2): 71–90. ———. 2004. Vision and Revisions: Women and Time in Michèle Roberts’s in the Red Kitchen. Women: A Cultural Review 15 (2): 180–191.

CHAPTER 10

Troublesome Reading: Story and Speculation in African-American and African-Originated Women’s Writing. Resurrecting the Past, Re-imagining the Future Gina Wisker Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) rewrote the silenced histories of African-American women’s lives, troubled complacent reading practices, and permanently changed the landscape of what, why and how readers engage with writing. Their work confronts readers with histories and contexts which have been obscured and misrepresented. Their fiction challenges scant, received knowledge and views on Black women’s lives through forms of experimentation which revive and revalue folklore and folk expression, oral storytelling, music, and the worth of the imaginary, in the form of the supernatural. Latterly, these forms have been further developed by Nalo Hopkinson and Tananarive Due who, like Morrison in particular, use the power of the speculative to imagine forwards into other ways of being, through Afrofuturism. This chapter begins with the excitement and the

G. Wisker (*) University of Brighton, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Aughterson, D. Philips (eds.), Women Writers and Experimental Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_10

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troublesome reading of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It situates their work in the criticism from the time at which the books were published in order to emphasise their distinct contributions to contemporary women’s fiction. In so doing, the chapter is a reminder of the ways in which Black women’s writing was received, with the extant fascination with testimony, ‘a little black pain undressed’ (Burford 1987, 37). It recalls also the articulate, contested, and heady moments of critical challenge to the fixed canon, and to the dominance of the middle-class white women’s writing and reading practices which then shaped feminist criticism (see Spare Rib 1984; Feminist Review 1984). The chapter further opens up the ongoing effects of reading these works and investigates, along with their critical reception, their concerns with postcolonialism, with gender, and challenges to heteronormativity and the effectiveness of the supernatural. It also considers the Afrofuturist rewriting of controlling tales, the magical possibilities of Nalo Hopkinson’s work in The New Moon’s Arms (2007) and Tananarive Due’s recovery of the hidden musical history of Scott Joplin in Joplin’s Ghost (2005) and of lost histories and potential futures in Ghost Summer (2015). The Color Purple was probably the first novel by an African-American woman to be taught widely in UK Universities. Its opening pages are shocking, raw: a letter to God from a fourteen-year-old girl who has been raped by the man she believed to be her father, her mother’s husband. It is a tale of abuse and silencing, the marginalisation of women and particularly of black women, but what is so unusual is that The Color Purple is the voice of the historically absent and silenced abused black woman. It is vivid, realistic, painful and written in her own words. Like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce 1916) in the early part of the twentieth century, it takes the perspective of a young person, a voice which we do not normally hear in a novel, and uses Celie’s words and her worldview to project and make real the ways in which she sees the world, what she does and does not understand, what is kept from her, what she is trying to work out. The language of the novel, as well as the insights of Celie, as in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, mature through a variety of experiences. In The Color Purple these are all related to gender and power. The first page was a shock for many white women readers because it was unlike any writing that had been read before. It seemed to be a strange

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mixture of an eighteenth-century epistolary letter writing style, with the straightforwardly, intimately expressed account of someone most readers would not know anything about, a poor black sharecropper’s daughter in the 1920s. The Color Purple revealed information about the lives of African-American women at different historical moments which had been largely silent in mainstream fiction. Set at the beginning of the twentieth century, although Walker wrote it at the end of the seventies, the novel gives a sense of black women’s lives and asserts their right to speak out. It opened up a new range in women’s writing, black women’s writing, and writing about identity, intimacy and power. Celie has her own voice. She is not the one being written about; she is the one who is writing. So this African-American teenager, a sharecropper’s impoverished, underfed daughter, whose worth is only in her domestic service rather than the commodification of good looks, opens up the world as she sees it step by step, and makes sense of it. She is increasingly empowered and voiced, and her perspective is one many readers would not have before encountered. The novel requires us to position ourselves historically, in different locations and to look at life from different perspectives. Gender and ethnicity, culture and sexuality were not major issues in the literature syllabus of the early 1980s. When The Color Purple was widely introduced and discussed, some university literature teachers felt, as I did, that this book was going to change the way we look at literature, because it brought a new voice into our sense of what the novel could do and a new set of experiences. It highlighted the need to explore history and to acknowledge what was erased or hidden from taught mainstream history: cultural difference, issues of domestic violence, lesbian relations, women’s agency. The Color Purple is also important because of its tricks of expression, which themselves undermine our expectations of a novel ostensibly written by, as well as about, an underclass teen. There is a manipulated distance between the form Alice Walker has chosen and the deliberate coming out of the darkness and silence into light and articulation, which is the trajectory of the novel. Walker takes that upper-class masculine mode, the epistolary novel, with its elegant, artificial, constructed tone and makes it brutally honest, as written from an uneducated black female perspective. Ironically, this also gives a voice to those from not totally dissimilar backgrounds, the servant girls whose voices were ventriloquised by upper-class male authors, as in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748). The Color Purple takes a form of white male aristocratic expression and gives it to a poor black teenager, a woman. The sexual abuse Celie suffers comes

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unfiltered, direct to the reader; this immediate record of violation and subsequent lack of self-worth has led to students suggesting that the novel should be accompanied by ‘trigger warnings’, testimony to a twenty-first century reader awareness of the potential for damage of novels of trauma, particularly personal trauma (Madsen 2008). Claudia Tate has emphasised how important it is that black women writers tell the stories of other women, so that their silence could be broken and their histories valued, writing is a means of rescuing their sisters: ‘from an all pervading absence’ (Angelou 1983, 7). Alice Walker similarly argues: ‘I think my whole programme as a writer is to deal with history just so I know where I am’ (Walker quoted in Tate 1984, 185). In testifying to and sharing the experience of hidden lives, Toni Morrison decodes and opens up black lives. Like Walker, Morrison shows that writing is a creative manifesto, an opportunity to bring times and lives together in a way which portrays people’s lives but which does not always render the black woman as hidden and subservient, as slave, ex-slave, sharecropper, servant, wife or mistress. They might be any of these, but they are always more than that, especially in the work of Walker and Morrison, and of writers such as Ntozake Shange, Paule Marshall, Alice Childress and Maya Angelou. Their characters tell their own stories and establish a voice, perspective and agency in doing so. In speaking of the absence which Claudia Tate noted, Toni Morrison, then an established editor at Random house, said of her own work that: I wrote Sula and The Bluest Eye because they were books I had wanted to read. No-one had written them yet, so I wrote them. My audience is always the people in the book I am writing at the time, I don’t think of an external audience. (Morrison quoted in Tate 1984, 122)

Barbara Smith comments on the empowerment enabled by black women writing in their own words about the lives of other black women: The use of Black women’s language and cultural experience in books by Black women ABOUT Black women results in a miraculously rich coalescing of form and content and also takes their writing far beyond the confines of white/male literary structures. (Smith 1978, 164)

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Celie’s children are both stolen away from her by her abusive stepfather; she protects her sister Nettie from being handed over into an early marriage, but cannot continue to attend school when she herself is married off to Mr Albert. She is abused and attacked by the wild children she must care for, and domestically raped by the husband who does not love her. Celie’s empowerment begins with her rejection of conventional responses to her husband, when he brings back a sassy, beautiful, wild, independent spirited jazz singer and his long-term girlfriend, Shug Avery. Celie’s excitement and shyness give way to intrigue at Shug as a celebratory adult woman—her beauty, her rejection of conventional behaviour, and her appreciation of Celie which leads to Celie’s own pleasure in her body and, gradually, to a sense of self-worth. Celie’s power is domestic; it enables her to simultaneously challenge the convention that women are always in competition rather than a sisterhood, and to enact a tiny bit of kitchen justice. When Albert’s father mocks and expects her to be jealous of Shug, she gives him a bit of his own small-minded medicine by adding some of Shug’s urine to his lemonade. Shug and Celie’s growing, loving friendship teaches Celie about her own body and self-worth. This lesbian relationship, in a mainstream novel, was another experimental move for readers, some of whom struggled to rename the relationship or to see it as metaphorical. It is metaphorical of course, but it is also a physical lesbian relationship. In this writing of women loving women and in Alice Walker’s sense of women’s appreciation of women, there is a radical questioning of conventions—an emphasis on the imaginative and physical resilience of black women. There is a breath of fresh air, energy, a revelation about different kinds of love, and a celebration of women, young women, women loving women, as well as, or instead of, loving men. Celie moves from advising Albert’s son Harpo to beat his feisty wife Sofia, to becoming friends with Sofia and with the abused, silenced singer Squeak, Mary Ann. She also speaks out against the illogicality of Albert and Shug’s partner Grady, when she ridicules the notion that women need to keep house and depend entirely for their self worth on finding and keeping a man, so undercutting the premise of men’s control over women. Celie’s own story in America is paralleled by that of her sister Nettie, the educated daughter who thrived at school. Nettie joins a missionary family who had adopted Celie’s two babies and travels with them to Britain and to Africa, to be a missionary herself. Nettie’s letters are kept from Celie, who believes her sister dead, but Shug lets Celie know that Mister has

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hidden them. The letters  are revealed to the reader as they appear in a bundle to Celie, and her reaction is anger, joy and empowered retort, an articulation of her refusal to be pushed around anymore. Critics have less to say about Nettie than Celie, but hers is also an extraordinary tale, one reminiscent of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), which caught widespread interest when first published and televised the next year. Haley returned to Black American roots in Africa and gave Afro-­ American readers back their history and a sense of dignity with his clear evidence of fully lived lives, the economic, religious, intellectual work of families of only a few generations ago. The Color Purple still has the power to makes white readers embarrassed that they do not know more about transatlantic slavery and about abuse in the plantations. Slavery was a word to many readers, but not a reality in its history and the economic basis of the trauma of the transportation of people from largely western parts of Africa through the terrible, deadly, middle passage, in crammed ships, to the slave plantations; their families broken up so that they could not communicate. The economic history in which crops and slaves from the plantations were brought back to Britain and Europe were critical to the wealth of those countries and to the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean. This brutal economic transaction is only recently being spoken about as part of mainstream historical debate. The profits of the plantation owners, many of them British and European, helped to build the grand buildings of cities such as Bristol, Liverpool and Hull, and fuelled the wealth and the industrial revolution of Britain. What was missing from most people’s knowledge was the roots of those people who were transported; where they came from, what their lives were like, what their civilisation was like, was an absent history. It was erased, rewritten; conventional history excused illegitimate human trafficking and remained silent about the richness of the lives in the Africa from where those who were enslaved were stolen, removed and transported. Nettie’s letters tell of cities and a continent where to be Black is the ordinary, not the Other, or secondary. She meets no racism on her visit to New York, to Harlem, in Britain or then in Alexandria and further into the African continent. Initially, she is entirely celebratory, this is only gradually tempered with the more feminist lens she develops. She comes to recognise the patriarchal power, experienced as family brutality and in white ownership back home, is here enacted and normalised in expectations that girls will be uneducated, silent and obedient. She learns this when Olivia, Celie’s daughter, goes to school with Tashi; in the Olinka village Tashi is

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seen as misled, too independent and too prone to ask questions, because of her education. Nettie is also intrigued that she is pitied because she is a lone woman wandering the world, seen as an add-on to Samuel’s family. Alice Walker dramatizes the paternalistic patriarchal undermining of Nettie, the conflicts for Tashi, and then indicts the European destruction of the land. Celie’s story is the novel’s core tale, but Nettie’s story also offers a broad range of insights about European influence and sexism in Africa. The Color Purple and Beloved both demand that we know more about the history of slavery, of racism and sexism, and of African-American women’s writing. The critic bell hooks can be a first step in this discovery set off by the novels. The title of her Ain’t I a Woman? (1981), is based on the poem and political statement of the same name by author and activist Sojourner Truth in 1851. At the height of slavery, its slave auctions, the rape of black women, the removal of their children for sale, plantation brutality and overwork, Sojourner Truth reminds her readers and listeners of the humanity of black women. bell hooks digs back into the historical context, and in this critical historical work, one of many, she develops a scathing exposê of the dangerous dehumanising lives black women were forced to lead on the plantations. She calls for things to be different, that black women must be recognised and must value themselves. hooks investigates the rape culture in the plantations where women were property. While black men were also property, women were the sexual  property of the white slave owner, the plantation owner, and could be raped, abused sold and beaten up at will. One of the most disturbing outcomes of this forced interaction was the treatment of children born to slave women by slave owners, who were sold on to other plantations. Recent research has revealed that when slave importation was abolished, human breeding farms were further established in Virginia and South Carolina (see Kottke 2006). Transatlantic slavery was rarely discussed in the university classes I attended. Both The Color Purple and Beloved invite and require white readers to find out more about African-American lives at specific historical moments in America. The historical case of Margaret Garner in 1854 and its aftermath when free African-Americans lived with the memories of the violent recent past in the 1870s are key to Beloved. The Color Purple offers readers a southern American perspective on the moment of the Jazz age in the 1920s and 30s when poor, African-Americans could be imprisoned for refusing to work for white folk, as Sofia is in The Color Purple. But at the same time, black women did own and work some of their own land, made

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and sold clothes (as Celie does), sang (as Shug and Squeak do), played music, created artworks for a living. Both novels use form to demand of their readers some historical placing and understanding—The Color Purple through its parallel stories, narrative voices and epistolary form; and Beloved through its multiple time frames and the figure of haunting. Both offer insights into the lived experience of African-American women through those same formal modes. The Color Purple reveals structural inequalities based on gender, race and economics. It does so by opening up the lives of individuals, their feelings and experiences, their thinking, responsibilities, family lives, abusive relationships based on male power and loss; sisters (Celie and Nettie) and families (Sofia and her family) are torn apart. Beloved brings African-American history to life, revealing the brutality of slavery through the experiences of Sethe and the stories Paul D tells. It deepens and questions literary notions of realism by giving equal weight to the lived imaginary, to personal memories, inherited memories and hauntings, so revealing, via disruptions to formal realism, the everyday presence of guilt, loss and trauma. Both novels employ a weight and texture of testimony which involves the reader directly and offer us women who are survivors—creative, lively, tough women. Alice Walker was instrumental in discovering, displaying and sharing the work of Black women writers who preceded her. She was a researcher and advocate for the influential work of the real life original of Shug Avery, Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist and talented writer of the Jazz age. Hurston was born in Florida in 1891 in Eatonville, an all-black township and  actually did not realise that she was supposed to be disadvantaged because of her skin colour. Walker literally memorialised Hurston, she bought her a headstone, recuperated her work and had it reprinted. Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) tells of an independent woman, Janie, whose grandmother warns her about her constrained role as a poor Black woman, at the bottom of the hierarchy of life, shouldering a ‘triple burden’ of race, gender and poverty: Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as far as I can see…de white man throw down the load and tell de nigger man to pick it up. He picks it up because he has to, but he doesn’t tote it. He hands it to his womenfolks … The nigger woman is the mule of the world as far as ah can see. (Hurston 1937, 34)

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Janie rejects the constraints of her race, class and gender and moves through two dully conventional husbands and with Tea Cake, a lover, travels the country. She avoids the rabies that causes Tea Cake’s death, and she challenges the porch gossips’ negative versions of her successful life. Hurston, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison react against the constrained norms of which Janie’s grandma warns and create positive lives for black women. Hurston was herself experimental in finding a voice for Janie’s values, a narrative voice which would go on to influence both Walker and Morrison in their representations of black women and their histories. Alice Walker deliberately makes use of an Enlightenment form (the epistolary novel), but with a wry revelatory irony through the voice and perspective of an uneducated black teenager, speaks out against abuse and racism. In The Color Purple, Alice Walker has merged genres and modes: melding an ironic representation of English white male upper-class writing with African-American women’s writing, to make something completely new. In its use of narrative voice through letters from the two poor sharecropper’s daughters, in its explorations of sexual relationships and possibilities, and in its articulate challenge to the silencing of African-American women’s voices, a silencing legitimated through racism, Walker’s The Color Purple quietly changed the way we read and thought about rights, gender, perspective and expression. She claims space, voice and power for the perspectives of black women. In Celie’s letters to God and Nettie there is clarity, maturity, without the artifice of a white male upper-class voice. As Martha Cutter comments (2000, 148), Walker challenges established rape narratives. In the myth of Philomela, Philomela has her tongue cut out and is silenced, if  tapestry making offers her an alternate form of speech it ultimately fails to change established power relations between the sexes. The rape myth warns women not to react against oppression as it will be futile and destructive. Patricia Joplin explains that the Philomela myth establishes ‘in eternity the pattern of violation-revenge-­ violation …. The women, in yielding to violence, become just like the men’ (48–49). In The Color Purple, Walker turns the needle into a weapon. Celie Shug and Sofia make a quilt together, Celie sews for Folkspants, the company which will eventually provide her with independence. Celie not only speaks out against (rather than taking revenge upon) her abuser, she challenges and then finally forgives him. This is her story and the novel matures around her, as a gradual, ultimately celebratory revelation which moves beyond a desire for revenge and retaliation into an agentic choice of forgiveness and resolution. This is a settled, perhaps controversial,

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version of a happy ending in which Celie makes amends with Mister and they sit together on the porch while she makes a living sewing. This is similar to the end of many African stories, an almost idyllic ending after a tough revelatory tale. We find these sorts of endings in the celebratory closures of Bessie Head, Buchi Emecheta, of Miriam Tlali and other African women writers. In the early 1980s, criticism of and by African-American women writers concentrated on recuperating the writers of the past and speaking out about racism and sexism, the importance of motherhood, women’s communities and forms of artwork. The latter often includes domestic forms of art, such as the quilt Walker found in the Boston Smithsonian museum, produced by anonymous women artists, a model for that which Celie, Sofia, and Shug sew in The Color Purple. Toni Morrison is always articulate about the political importance and the honesty of the craft of writing, as well as its dangers. Her aim is ‘To bear witness to a history that is unrecorded, untaught in mainstream education and to enlighten our people’ (quoted in Wisker 1993, 28). She tackled naïve interviewers and critics who wished to redefine her, arguing: I refuse to let them off the hook about whether I’m a black woman writer or not, I’m under a lot of pressure to become something else. That is why there is so much discussion of how my work is influenced by other ‘real’ writers, for example white Southern writers whom I’m constantly compared to. (Morrison quoted in Stuart 1988, 15)

Like The Color Purple, Beloved plunges in medias res with an unusual unexpected voice in its opening: ‘124 was spiteful, full of a baby’s venom’ (1). The novel opens with a number, no street name, a magic number perhaps, with the 3—the missing child—Beloved herself—left out in this small family of three which should be four. The house is spiteful, the baby is venomous, the ghost is present, a poltergeist, disruptive, angry, refusing to let the family that she thinks has rejected her to live anything like a normal life. This opening with a vengeful child spirit launches into the problem of the novel; the inescapable un-quiet presence, the haunting of homes and bodies with the continued painful presence of slavery and its aftermath. The family cannot move on because of their trauma. The haunting presence of the dead child, the terrible memory, appears physically in the home and eventually drives away the two young brothers Howard and Buglar. The community is alarmed by the house which, with its haunting angry

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presence, reminds them that they did not run to Sethe’s defence when the slave catcher came to reclaim her family, and that they too have ghosts of slave families in their own attics. To appreciate the haunting power of the trauma of slavery, Morrison reminds us of the extent of its legacy: Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. (Morrison 1987, 180)

Haunting is a legacy, a focus and a form in this novel: in every attic there is the ghost of a slave. Slavery is scarred into the mind, as it is on the body: Sethe’s permanent scar on her back carries the physical and historical evidence of brutal beatings and acts as a physical sign of how memory cannot be erased. Morrison ventriloquises the vile, twisted, dehumanising language of the slave owners, slave catchers and their henchmen and families through the scar. This articulation and these scars give a solidity to the dehumanisation of slavery. The novel tells the story of Sethe, who escaped slavery and took her children with her, but at the point at which the thriving family had settled, was driven to try and kill them, to rescue them from being reclaimed and re-enslaved. She manages to kill one, the third child named Beloved, after the phrase ‘dearly beloved’. Abuse, slavery and haunting dominate the novel: it is tough to read, possibly even tougher than The Color Purple, because it is located earlier than the time of post-slavery freedom; it takes place in the middle of the trauma of slavery. Like The Color Purple, the first page tells of a partly understood family rape. Beloved brings the destructive currency of slavery right into the family and the home. Toni Morrison recreates the lives of African-American women in history and simultaneously introduces an element of the imaginary, the supernatural, of different, discredited ways of seeing, thinking and of storying lives. She was initially wary of writing what we recognise as a Gothic novel, a novel that embraces the supernatural, inherited memory, the haunting of the home and the community, albeit the Gothic is arguably the richest way to express the lived presence of traumatic, imprinted horror. Gothic writing engages with contested, troublesome knowledge through a lens of metaphor and critique, which destabilises fixed certainties to open up critical thinking, the imagination and agency. Wilson Harris acknowledges the way ‘the

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lived imaginary’ must coexist with felt historical reality in post-slavery Black fiction: the imagination of the folk involved in a crucial inner re-creative response to the violations of slavery … the possibility exists for us to become involved in perspectives … which can bring into play a figurative meaning beyond an apparently real world or prison of history. (1981, 27)

Morrison argues that the liberating powers of the imagination—including different modes, registers and genres— can record different histories and versions of the present and envision alternative futures. She wanted to find: the tone in which I could blend acceptance of the supernatural and a profound rootedness in the real time at the same time with neither taking precedence over the other. It is indicative of the cosmology, the way in which black people looked at the world, we are a very practical people, very down to earth, even shrewd people. But within that practicality we also accepted what…. I suppose could be called superstition and magic, which is another way of knowing things. But to blend these two works together at the same time was enhancing not limiting. And some of those things were ‘discredited’ only because black people were ‘discredited’ therefore what they knew was ‘discredited’. And also because the press upward towards social mobility would mean to get as far away from that kind of knowledge as possible. That kind of knowledge has a very strong place in my world. (quoted in Evans 1984, 342)

Toni Morrison’s Southern Gothic, influenced by the revival of the Gothic of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, revalidates the supernatural. Her groundbreaking contribution to a new African-American Gothic brought to the centre stage the appropriateness and legitimacy of facing trauma as a form of cultural haunting. It brought the vengeful, mournful ghost into the midst of the living, causing more suffering before any kind of reparation could begin to be made, and it did so in exciting and traumatic breaks to conventional literary realism. Ghost stories are, in the twenty-first century, a legitimated, even respectable, global mode of choice to express trauma, hidden ills. These are of individual wrongs caused by social injustice, or large-scale culturally contextualised wrongs, as in  Singaporean Sandi Tan’s critique of British imperialism and Japanese invasion in The Black Isle (2012). Beloved, and, more recently, Tananarive Due’s Ghost Summer (2015), use the ghost and haunting to bring the

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horrors of slavery in the United States and its terrible legacy of abuse and inequalities into immediate view. Beloved links the trauma of the middle passage slave crossing, a ‘race’ memory which Sethe and Beloved (her sacrificed daughter) inherit rather than experience directly, with the everyday inhumanity of slavery in the United States, in the shape of lynching, burning, and the exiling of the men from the plantation ‘Sweet home’, which Sethe and her children later fled. The returned baby ghost, the titular Beloved, traumatically reminds Sethe and her family that memories must be faced, guilt expiated, sorrow and loss managed. Beloved is firmly grounded in an historical moment, 1854, when Margaret Garner, an escaped slave, killed two of her own children to prevent their recapture into slavery. These are real events. The novel underlines that naming is important—‘124’, ‘Beloved’, ‘Sweet home’—all have connotations both resonant and ironic. The English colonialised language of the slavers—for Black ex-slaves in particular—is both a denigrating weapon and explored and exposed by the novel’s voices and experiences for the ways it constructs, expresses and controls how people see and represent the world. Being mis-named is to be absent in history, a form of control and a destructive denial familiar across time and place. In Beloved the power of words is starkly realised in the language of the slave catcher (known as the schoolteacher), plantation and slave owner, who accompanies the slave catcher and has taught his sons to place Sethe’s ‘human’ characteristics on one side of a balance sheet, her ‘animal’ characteristics on the other. The novel places the reader inside traumatic experiences not only through this ventriloquisation of the white slave owner’s rhetoric (via ‘the Schoolteacher’s actions as owner and slave catcher) but most importantly through the narrative trope of bringing the initially inarticulate vengeful ghost of a dead baby back into the home and into lives that are beginning to heal. The house, the story, history, itself insist that Beloved cannot be forgotten and silenced, that she will rise and make real the conflicted pain, the need to mourn and then the need to move on. Trauma, rape, murder, slavery and wars cannot be forgotten. The novel offers one deeply affecting and embodied way to un-forget, giving a voice and a living presence to the deeply traumatic experience of the middle passage of transatlantic transportation of slaves and its reach into the lives of the still living, through the bodies of women, their children and families. Morrison uses forms from a black folk aesthetic: in contrast to the predominantly

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first-­person narrative of The Color Purple, Morrison uses the imaginary—a parallel haunting as tangible as everyday experiences. Sethe’s body, permanently tattooed through a brutal whipping by the slave-owner’s sons, is re-imagined as ‘the tree of life’ and becomes both a record of a pattern of imprinted cruelty and as an emblem of a tree of life and in being re-named as such—acts as a metaphor for possible futures that do not erase the past. An impoverished and abused African-American woman is at the core of both of these novels; women who are usually silenced and unheard come to speak out—they think through relationships and develop agency, they are survivors. Morrison experimentally uses the Gothic form and mode to express the imaginary, history and memory. Both writers bring forth and speak out for a previously silenced history, and the legacies of both novels are many. Shug Avery’s jazz energies underpin and inform Morrison’s own novel Jazz (1992) which reveals the limitations and damage of investing too much in the liberating moment of the Jazz age in Harlem. In Tananarive Due’s novel Joplin’s Ghost (2005), the memory of unpublished work by the jazz musician Scott Joplin is channelled by a young pianist and singer, Phoenix, simultaneously speaking out past histories, and showing how they can still damage one’s own present. In Joplin’s Ghost, histories and lost music play through the living, who must learn to prevent them from overwhelming their own voices, just as Sethe and her community must move on beyond the overwhelming legacy of slavery. Tananarive Due’s collection of short stories, Ghost Summer (2015) replays the haunting of land, homes and barns by dead slaves as the sensitive children who holiday round a haunted lake each become the focus of hauntings by the ghostly presences of lost children and escaped slaves. Ghost stories and their hauntings testify to, revive and seek retribution for the constant pain of historical and personal trauma. They also begin to set historical tales straight. In Literary Afrofuturism (2020), Lavender and Yaszek argue that the next step is to re-imagine history, to retell it and to assert and construct imaginative positive ways forward. In her mix of Afrofuturism and Gothic in The New Moon’s Arms (2007), Canadian/ Trinidadian/Jamaican writer Nalo Hopkinson takes the terrible history of the drowning of slaves in the middle passage crossing, when they were thrown from the slave ship, the Zong in 1781. She retells the history as a magical chosen escape in which the slaves jump overboard and turn into mer-people, now inhabiting the coastal waters of imaginary Caribbean island Dolorosse. Through the central character Calamity, oppressive

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histories are dealt with, magical powers return and a positive future is imagined. Not all Afrofuturism is Gothic or influenced by Toni Morrison’s deliberate supernatural tales and hauntings, but her influence can be seen in Hopkinson’s novel and in her many fine tales, especially in the collection Skin Folk (2001). Hopkinson’s answer to the question: ‘What do you think of Audre Lorde’s comment that massa’s tools will never dismantle massa’s house?’ was that ‘In my hands massa’s tools don’t dismantle massa’s house – and in fact I don’t want to destroy it so much as I want to undertake massive renovations – then build me a house of my own’ (Hopkinson and Mehan 2004, 7). In her mythic, Gothic, Afrofuturist and science-fiction work Hopkinson is continuing and morphing the legacy of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison who simultaneously challenged, used and adapted the established modes and forms of the novel. Carole Ferrier emphasises the continued topicality of these works— both in content and form—to our dismantling and questioning of colonisation and the legacy of slavery, words written in 2010, but particularly resonant now in 2020 in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement: … the relationship of teaching literature dealing with issues of race and gender politics to the society in which it is written and read; political interaction and interchange – especially since the 1960s – between activists, writers, and academics … which have impacted considerably upon cultural politics and teaching in the universities; the expectation of the production of “truth effects” in reading black narratives, or the expectation on the part of white readers that such writing will “educate” them and / or articulate a lost or silenced history. (2013, 137)

Beloved and The Color Purple raise issues of what is revealed and what is hidden in partial versions of history, and replace some of that history, particularly with the stories of those who are triply silenced and absented, African-American women. Their politics and their formal innovations go hand in hand—a complicity echoed, championed and acknowledged by Nalo Hopkinson’s work and the Afrofuturism movement—it is only by confronting and subverting and looking anew at the ‘massa’s language— that our world can change and be rebuilt. These stories send us, as readers and students, back to history and to earlier writing to try and piece the truths together. These writers open up an active engagement with

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challenging, divisive and destructive philosophies, the languages of racism and sexism, languages which Other the less powerful.

Works Cited Angelou, M. 1969. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House. ———. 1983. Interview with Claudia Tate. In Black Women Writers at Work, 2–8. New York: Continuum. Burford, B. 1987. The Landscapes Painted on the Inside of My Skin. Spare Rib 179: 36–42. Cutter, M. 2000. Philomela Speaks: Alice Walker’s Revisioning of Rape Archetypes in The Color Purple Melus. Revising Traditions 25 (3/4): 161–180. Due, T. 2005. Joplin’s Ghost. New York: Washington Square Press. ———. 2015. Ghost Summer: Stories. Gathersburg: Prime Books. Evans, M., ed. 1984. Black Women Writers: Arguments and Interviews. New York: Random House. Ferrier, Carole. 2010. Teaching African American Women’s Literature in Australia: Reading Toni Morrison in the Deep North. In Teaching African American Women’s Writing, ed. G. Wisker, 137–156. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Haley, A. 1976. Roots. New York: Doubleday. Harris, W. 1981. History, Fable & Myth in the Caribbean and Guiana. Caribbean Quarterly 16 (2): 1–32. Hill, S. 1983. The Woman in Black. London: Vintage. hooks, b. 1981. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. London: Pluto Press. Hopkinson, N. 2001. Skin Folk. New York: Aspect. ———. 2007. The New Moon’s Arms. New York: Grand Central Publishing. Hopkinson, N., and U. Mehan. 2004. So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Hull, G.T., P.  Bell Scott, and B.  Smith, eds. 1982. Toward a Black Feminist Consciousness. In All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Brave: Black Women’s Studies. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY. Hurston, Z. Neale. 1937. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Joplin, P.K. 1984. “The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours” Rape and Silence in the Medusa Story. The Stanford Literature Review 1: 48–49. Joyce, J. 1916. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: B. W. Huebsch. Kottke, J. 2006. A History of the Slave Breeding Industry of the United States. https://kottke.org/16/02/a-­h istor y-­o f-­t he-­s lave-­b reeding-­i ndustr y-­ in-­the-­united-­states Lavender, I., III, and L. Yaszek. 2020. Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

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Madsen, D.L. 2008. On Subjectivity and Survivance: Rereading Trauma through the Heirs of Columbus and the Crown of Columbus. In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, ed. G. Vizenor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Morrison, T. 1987. Beloved. London: Picador. ———. 1992. Jazz. London: Picador Pan. Neale Hurston, Z. 1991. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Champhain: University of Illinois Press. Nichols, G. 1983. I Is a Long Memoried Woman. London: Karnak House. Richardson, S. 1740. Pamela. London: Messrs Rivington & Osborn. ———. 1748. Clarissa. London: Messrs Rivington & Osborn. Scafe, S. 1989. Teaching Black Literature. London: Virago Press. Smith, Barbara. March 1978. Towards a Black Feminist Criticism. The Radical Teacher, No. 7: 20–27. Stuart, A. 1988. Inerview with Toni Morrison. Spare Rib 189: 12–15. Tan, S. 2012. The Black Isle. New York: Grand Central Publishing. Tate, C., ed. 1984. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum Press. Thrasher, Steven W. 2015. Afrofuturism: Reimagining Science and the Future from a Black Perspective. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/ dec/07/afrofuturism-­black-­identity-­future-­science-­technology Truth, S. 1851. Ain’t I a Woman? June 21. The Anti-Slavery Bugle. Ed. M. Robinson. Walker, A. 1982. The Color Purple. Orlando: Harcourt. ———. 1984. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Orlando: Harcourt. Wisker, G. 1993. Insights into Black Women’s Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2010. Teaching African American Women’s Writing. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 11

Working from the Wound: Trauma, Memory and Experimental Writing Praxis in Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Sonya Andermahr The title of this collection, An Experiment of Her Own, could not be more apposite than when applied to the writing life of Jeanette Winterson. The author, born in Manchester, England in 1959, has become famous—and rich—for her many genre-defying books, for her extraordinary origin story as an adopted child of evangelical Christians, for being an out lesbian and feminist from the outset of her career, and for her persona as a public intellectual and broadcaster, opining on cultural and political issues in television appearances on inter alia Front Row and Question Time. Her diverse oeuvre, which includes adult literary fiction, short stories and novellas, play and film scripts, as well as journalism and works for children, foregrounds above all the themes of love, loss and identity in challenging decidedly anti-realist, and frequently experimental forms, which subvert dominant modes of representation in ways that are simultaneously

S. Andermahr (*) University of Northampton, Northampton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Aughterson, D. Philips (eds.), Women Writers and Experimental Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_11

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rhetorical and ideological. In this respect, Winterson’s work may be seen in terms of Ellen Berry’s (2016) definition of experimentalism as formalrhetorical mode with a political purpose, which is characterised by: disruption of narrative hierarchy, causal structures, clear teleology, and realist characters. In their place are techniques that stress fragmentation, indeterminacy, dispersion, randomness, contradiction, ambiguity, irony, extremity; an emphasis on performative modes and reflexive structures; a valuing of hybridity and multiplicity as in hybrid genres, subjects, worlds. Thematic emphases on radical difference, heterogeneity, multimodality, instabilities of identity—suggest a breakdown in ‘the official story’ as formerly repressed voices (of women, minorities, queers, outlaws of all kinds) emerge into the mainstream. (Berry, 8)

Of course, Winterson’s work has long been appraised in terms of those features associated with literary postmodernism and it is all too easy to reduce her work over a 35-year career, and that of other contemporary authors, to such formal check lists. That account needs to be updated and revisited, not least because the discourse of postmodernism has now been circulating for nigh on six decades and has itself become subject to critique and revision as theorists seek more granulated accounts of the present cultural moment (Braidotti 2005). Berry’s own study includes a close reading of Winterson’s relatively early 1992 novel Written on the Body, which Berry sees as operating a ‘negative aesthetics’, which both subverts binaries and refuses critical mastery (119) in its ‘sustained meditation on the subject of loss and the process of grieving a lost relation’ (121). Such a reading, which foregrounds experimental unmaking, could also be applied to Winterson’s memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011), written nearly two decades later, which revisits the terrain of her early work and reinserts the authorial persona into the text as simultaneously fictional and real, absent and present. The question therefore arises of what is at stake in Winterson’s turn to the genre of memoir, rather than the novel, as a dominant cultural form within which to locate her familiar yet always strange story of abandonment and outsider-dom, and against which to define her sense of ‘not-belonging’. As I hope to show, Winterson may be located within the contemporary post-­postmodern moment as a writer who explicitly problematises writing and subjectivity,

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from the perspective of both sex and class, and for whom representation and aesthetics intersect at the level of the political (both personal and public). Like Rita Felski, in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, in what follows I am writing against the view that there is an intrinsically feminine form of writing and that Winterson is a practitioner of it. Similarly, I am not suggesting that she simply blurs the binary or ironizes discourse in typical postmodern fashion. Rather, she makes use of the codes and conventions of dominant genres, forms and modes, adapting and transforming them consciously and purposefully into a poetics of the personal that is also socially and culturally determined by her working-class background, her history of adoption and her female embodiment. This chapter examines Jeanette Winterson’s experimental writing praxis in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, focusing on the intersection between trauma, memory and experimental narrative forms. It locates the text as a ‘limit-case autobiography’ (Gilmore 2001), which transgresses the boundaries of autobiography, historical discourse, myth and fiction. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? draws on a diverse range of narratives as a framing device for conveying Winterson’s account of her traumatic childhood experiences of abandonment, adoption and emotional neglect. Winterson’s act of remembrance draws inter alia on personal memory, the history of working-class Manchester, Greek mythology and theories of trauma. Acknowledging the radical provisionality of memory, the text provides a version or reconstruction of events and Winterson’s shifting responses to them. In revisiting the experiences explored in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) and elsewhere in her writings, Winterson presents her earlier work as a ‘cover story’. Conventionally seen as postmodern device to foreground the artifice of fiction, the memoir reconfigures the cover story as a narrative strategy to ‘cover over’ material which is/was unspeakable. Thus, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? encourages us to reread Winterson’s fiction in the light of traumatic omission and textual survival strategy. As in limit-­ case autobiographies, the memoir has no clear-cut resolution: although Winterson is reunited with her birth mother some 50 years after her adoption, there is no unambiguous healing of wounds. Moreover, while Winterson acknowledges the power of stories to mitigate suffering, she adopts a more ambivalent model of ‘working from the wound’ in which trauma is acknowledged as an aspect of self. For her, trauma carries a double legacy as something which motivates her work but which writing can never entirely heal.

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In Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Winterson revisits the personal and cultural traumas of Oranges are not the Only Fruit: her abandonment by her birth mother, her experience of adoption by an evangelical Christian couple in a deprived working-class community in the North West of England, and her subsequent ostracism by the community because of her lesbian sexuality. Winterson’s memories of these events, already so familiar to readers of Oranges, are given an intertextual and metafictional treatment in a highly self-conscious act of remembering, which foregrounds the vagaries and elisions of memory. This story is overlaid with a contemporary narrative of Winterson’s search for her birth mother and the traumatic events which led to her decision to look for her. Winterson also explores the wider cultural trauma of class, of growing up working class and poor in the 1960s, and the impact such a narrowing of opportunities for self-expression had on her adoptive mother. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? thus combines life writing, social history, cultural mythology and fictional intertextuality in a hybrid form that transgresses various genre boundaries and corresponds both to what Ellen Berry identifies as women’s experimentalism and to what Leigh Gilmore in The Limits of Autobiography, has termed ‘limit-case autobiography’. According to Gilmore, ‘memoir has become the genre in the […] period around the turn of the millennium’ (1). In addition, the memoir boom in the West has been framed by a ‘culture of confession’, or a ‘culture of testimony’, which foregrounds ‘the centrality of speaking pain’ (2). While Gilmore identifies a number of reasons for the rise of the memoir at this historical juncture, her primary focus is its complex imbrications with trauma. Her analysis redirects attention away from the most prominent memoirs to texts about trauma that test the limits of autobiography. In such limit-case texts, self-representation is distanced from the conventions of autobiography, challenging its traditional requirements for truth-telling and representativeness. Significantly, for our argument about women’s writing praxis, these are often positions more easily occupied by middle class and male autobiographical subjects. Limit-case texts may use a variety of fictional devices and adopt an anti-confessional mode in their attempts to articulate trauma. As Gilmore states: ‘Crucial to the experience of trauma are the multiple difficulties that arise in trying to articulate it’ (6). Such limit-cases express an ambivalence about the claims of language, or of narrative to heal the self: ‘Although those who can tell their stories benefit from the therapeutic balm of words, the path to this achievement is strewn with obstacles. To navigate it, some writers move away from

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recognisably autobiographical forms even as they engage autobiography’s central questions’ (7). Such texts seek to establish what Gilmore calls ‘a lyrical position for the subject of trauma as one that entangles violence, memory, kinship, and law’ (8). Winterson’s memoir takes up just such a position, in common with other outsider texts by women across the literary canon. While Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? may be seen as Winterson seeking to capitalise on what has become in the twenty-first century the lucrative ‘misery memoir’ boom, this is by no means a conventional autobiography, in which the truth of the life ‘behind’ the novels is revealed. Rather, she uses invention and imagination, precisely those elements associated with her fictional work, in order to make self-­ representation, in Gilmore’s words, both possible and desirable (Gilmore, 24). Winterson interpolates her fictional work, re-staging it in acts of self-­ conscious remembrance. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? may therefore be seen as a limit-testing text, in Gilmore’s terms, which foregrounds the constitutive ambivalence of language. From the outset, Winterson foregrounds storytelling as a means of self-invention: Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb. (5)

Winterson’s adoptive mother’s stories were so powerful that Winterson risked becoming overwhelmed by them: ‘To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson’s story I had to be able to tell my own; It’s why I am a writer’ (5). In this construction, authorship becomes part of a struggle to control her own naming and to forge her own identity. Winterson relates that she finally achieved this on publication of her novel and recalls the occasion when her mother telephoned to say that such was her embarrassment, she had to order the book under a pseudonym. When Mrs Winterson finally read the novel, she complained that it wasn’t ‘true’, reflecting Gilmore’s contention that traumatic memory often involves a struggle over the ownership of language and story. In Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Winterson reflects: ‘Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. […] Mrs Winterson objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story’s silent twin’ (8).

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This ‘silent twin’ forms part of the subject matter of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? in which Winterson’s account of her childhood is distinctly different from that of Oranges. Adopting an altogether darker tone to describe her childhood experience, Winterson describes how she was almost always hungry and was never picked up or cuddled. ‘I was beaten as a child and I learned never to cry’ (2). Moreover, there was no extended female community to offer surrogate mothering: ‘There was no Elsie’ (a character in Oranges). As Winterson writes, ‘I wrote her in because I couldn’t bear to leave her out… There was no one like Elsie. Things were much lonelier than that’ (7). Additionally, as Winterson recounts, there was little or no humour to leaven the reality of poverty, neglect and religious bigotry. What comes across in the memoir is not the exuberance and warmth of the first novel but an overwhelming sense of grief: ‘And I suppose that the saddest thing for me thinking about the cover version that is Oranges, is I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.’ (6). In the light of the memoir, Oranges becomes a marvellous cover story, constructed to cover over and defend against Winterson’s trauma and multiple losses. In remembering those stories, Winterson connects them to the trauma of adoption, showing how they came out of a place of absence and loss. One of the socio-political axes that challenges the myth of a unified female or feminine literary history is that of social class. The memoir contains chapters and sections that locate Winterson’s origin story in a precise geographical locale and historical moment: North West England in the 1960s and 1970s. This contextualisation is important to the reader’s understanding of Winterson’s identity as a working-class Northern female with the desire and ambition for self-improvement through education. In Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Winterson tells a story that is as much about class as it is about sex and gender. We learn that her birth mother gave her up because she was a poor teenage working-class Irish immigrant with nothing to offer her newborn baby. As a result, Winterson was adopted by a church-going working-class family from Accrington. In reconstructing her origin story, Winterson interpolates a collective history of Manchester’s radical past that includes its industrial heritage, its contrarian spirit and its radical politics. She reminds us that Manchester was the birth place of women’s suffrage and the Trade Union movement, the site of the Peterloo Massacre and the Corn Law riots, as well as the inspiration for Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Charles Dickens’s

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Hard Times (1854). In a reference which metaphorizes her combined emphasis on class and familial losses, she reminds the reader that the Celtic name for Manchester was ‘Mam-ceaster – and Mam is mother, is breast, life force … energy’ (14). What becomes apparent to the reader is that while Winterson’s childhood was one of extreme privation and neglect in some crucial ways, it was rich in others. As she writes: ‘It is hard to understand the contradictions unless you have lived them’ (72). On the one hand, the lives of her family and neighbours in Accrington’s working-class streets of two up-two down terrace houses were materially constrained and impoverished but, on the other hand, the centrality of church life meant they were part of a vibrant community which put collective self-help front and foremost: We had no bank accounts, no phones, no cars, no inside toilets, often no carpets, no job security and very little money. The church was a place of mutual help and imaginative possibility. I don’t know anyone, including me, who felt trapped or hopeless. What did it matter if we had one pair of shoes and no food on Thursday nights before payday? (69–70)

While other writers might have fallen into a nostalgic mode, effectively romanticising their working-class roots, Winterson resists such a manoeuvre, instead choosing to highlight the painful contradictions of her class background. As a young person with the ambition to go to university and to see the world beyond Accrington, Winterson rejected the hardship and narrowness of her parents’ lives; she admits to dreaming of escape, her mature adult self reflecting that: ‘In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community – to society?’ (17). When she comes out as a lesbian, these contradictions eventually become unsurvivable and she is forced to leave home, losing her adoptive family, community, and a sense of class belonging in one fell swoop. These are simultaneously material and psychic losses that continue to shape her entire life up until the writing of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Although, for some readers, the richly grained autobiographical material contained in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? may operate as authentication of ‘the real story’, the text also works against that logic, to problematise acts of remembering and self-representation. It demonstrates how, in Gilmore’s words, conventions about truth-telling can be at odds with the desire to bring stories into language. According to trauma

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theorists, one of the major symptoms of trauma is the compulsion to repeat. Either involuntarily, in acting out trauma, or consciously, in working through it, the sufferer goes back to the origin of the trauma. Winterson’s work keeps going back to the same moment—to when her birth mother gave her up, which becomes the model for her abandonment/betrayal by her adoptive mother and lovers. This moment has evidently shaped her life, making her feel unloved and unlovable. The structure of trauma is mimicked in the repetition compulsion of her novels: the return to the same narrative events, the same motifs, even the same lines. Winterson’s artistic quest for love, her preoccupation with origin stories and storytelling testify to the acting out and working through of this primary trauma. Early in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Winterson foregrounds the scene she briefly depicted half way through Oranges when her birth mother apparently came for her. This time, she constructs it in terms of the vagaries of traumatic remembering: ‘I have a memory – true or not?’ (11). It is of early childhood, Winterson wearing her favourite cowboy outfit, and of a woman coming to the door. Her mother, Mrs Winterson, goes to speak to the woman, while Winterson peeps down the hall. The women argue and the door slams. ‘Was that my mum?’ she asks, whereupon Mrs Winterson hits her and the blow knocks her backwards. The shock of the violence of this action brings the reader up short. In re-evaluating this memory, already a fictional event, which she works over and into the multiple accounts of her life, Winterson eschews a simplistic fact/fiction model, acknowledging that memoir represents another construction in language of experience and emotion, and another attempt to transform traumatic memories into narrative events. The episode relates to what Ian Hacking has termed ‘memoro-politics’, which he defines as ‘a politics of the secret, of the forgotten event that can be turned, if only by strange flashbacks, into something monumental’ (Hacking 1995, 214). Thus, the notion of traumatic memory is intimately related to self-representation in Winterson’s work: at the origins of memory and selfhood is a traumatizing absence. If memory relates to what can be known, then what are the implications for selfhood when your past has been deliberately written out or over as Winterson’s was by Mrs Winterson? As Winterson states, ‘I was a loner. I was self-invented. I didn’t believe in biology or biography. I believed in myself. Parents? What for? Except to hurt you’ (155). Writing for Winterson therefore becomes a radical act of self-invention and survival, the experiments in form and mode part of a concerted effort to give meaning and shape to an otherwise inchoate sense

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of identity, to create and connect with fictional bodies and stories in order make good those losses and to compensate for the absence of a mappable lineage in her own life history. Late in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Winterson returns to the memory, calling into question the identity of the caller, asking ‘Who was it then, the figure who came into the garden?’ (223), so challenging the ‘truth’ basis of much autobiographical writing. In foregrounding the provisional nature of truth claims, memory, and self-representation, Winterson is concerned not so much with ‘what really happened’ as with the symbolic power to frame an event as a part of personal and cultural memory. Two thirds of the way through Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Winterson stops telling the story of her life. It ends in the same place as Oranges, with her final return home to Accrington as a university student. While Oranges ended on a reconciliation of sorts with the adoptive mother, listening to her tune up her new CB radio, Winterson’s comment in the memoir is: ‘I never went back. I never saw her again’ (152). What follows is a frame-breaking chapter entitled ‘Intermission’, in which Winterson reflects on the relationship between life and art which foregrounds the non-linear character of creative work, and rejects conventional autobiography: ‘The womb to tomb of an interesting life—but I can’t write my own; never could. Not Oranges. Not now.’ (154). In a move which exemplifies the text’s organisation around flashbacks and fragments, and which foregrounds aporia, Winterson then declares that she is going to miss out the next twenty-five years of her life story. The subsequent chapter describes the success of Oranges and provides an explanation for her choice of the name Jess for the main character in the tv series: it was the name of the birth mother written on a birth certificate she found in a drawer as a child. Then, in another temporal disruption to the narrative, Winterson writes: ‘Flash forward to 2007 and I have done nothing about finding my past. It isn’t ‘my past’, is it? I have written over it. I have recorded on top of it. I have repainted it. Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments’ (156). She then narrates how, in 2007, on the death of her father’s second wife, Winterson goes to help clear out his house before he goes into a care home. Here she finds a box, and inside it another box, like buried treasure, a motif that recurs in her fiction, which contains her adoption papers from 1960. She writes: ‘And I had a name – violently crossed out’ (159). Winterson discovers that her given name was Janet. It was Mrs Winterson who subsequently ‘Frenchified’ it to Jeanette. Under

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‘reason for adoption’, her birth mother has written on the form, ‘Better for Janet to have a mother and father’ (200). The discovery calls into question the fiction she has been living with for nearly 50 years in which ‘The baby begins again. No biography, no biology’ (160); this causes a crisis of identity, what Gilmore refers to as a ‘disturbance in the “I”’ (Gilmore 2001, 36). At the same time, Winterson relates the break-up of her relationship with her then partner, Deborah Warner. The two events trigger a total breakdown; as Winterson writes, ‘I began to go mad’ (161). In common with many trauma sufferers, she describes how the experience left her unable to communicate: ‘Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place’ (163), culminating in a suicide attempt in February 2008. The episode points to the dual meaning of trauma in Freudian theory, which can signify either a new wound or the opening up of an old one: The sudden unexpected abandonment, constellated as it was around the idea of/impossibility of home, lit a fuse that spat and burned its way towards a walled-up opening a long way back inside me. Inside that walled-up opening, smothered like an anchorite, was my mother. (161)

According to Lucie Armitt, Winterson’s work after Sexing the Cherry (1989) represents a severance from the maternal axis, whose presence or absence informs women’s writing from Wollstonecraft through Woolf to the present time (Armitt 2007). If this is the case, then Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, written from the place of the abandoned child, represents an emphatic return to the mother. Reflecting on her preoccupation with stories of love and loss, Winterson observes: ‘It all seems so obvious now – the Wintersonic obsessions of love, loss and longing. It is my mother. It is my mother. It is my mother’ (160). What is striking here is not the typically self-aggrandising ‘Wintersonic’, which has annoyed many readers, but the repetition of the phrase ‘it is my mother’. Although Winterson makes extensive use of intertextual refrains in her work, this kind of simple, unambiguous construction is atypical. Winterson’s words suggest that we read the novels differently; behind every female pronoun, and every female addressee, stands not the lover, or not only the lover, but the mother. The famous ‘you’ of Winterson’s novels becomes the lost mother, to whom she writes and whose love she craves. The mother then is the figure that all Winterson’s writing comes back to. Rereading Oranges in the light of her memoir, it seems Winterson’s work has come full circle

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and the centrality of the mother to her oeuvre is made manifest. As Winterson acknowledges, ‘But mother is our first love affair. Her arms. Her eyes. Her breast. Her body. And if we hate her later, we take that rage with us into other lovers. And if we lose her, where do find her again?’ (160). While this may appear, contra Felski, to suggest a feminine aesthetic based on maternality, it is one characterised by absence rather than presence—an aesthetics of loss (in Berry’s phrase), rather than a Cixousian plenitude. Moreover, to recapitulate Felski’s point that there is no essential quality to women’s writing across time but rather a situated and historical praxis, Winterson’s thematic preoccupation with m/other love is one she invests with varying degrees of intensity across her work. If it is a structuring principle of her writing, it is a polymorphous and polyvalent one. Winterson’s status as mourning daughter echoes the melancholic subject Julia Kristeva writes about in Black Sun. One of the most severe kinds of depression Kristeva discusses concerns what she calls the loss of the archaic mother. This goes beyond conventional mourning for the end of a relationship or a bereavement to a loss suffered before entry into the symbolic order. Unlike classic mourning, which conceals an aggressiveness towards the lost object, this form of depression represents a total sadness pointing towards a primitive self—wounded, incomplete and empty. According to Kristeva, this melancholy is beyond signification: ‘Their sadness would be rather the most archaic expression of an unsymbolizable, unnameable narcissistic wound’ (Kristeva 1987, 12). Winterson’s sense of loss is of this kind, as she describes it: ‘Something that happened a long time ago, yes – but not the past. This is the old present, the old loss still wounding each day’ (161). Here, Winterson registers the sense of traumatic repetition and intrusion that characterises the stories of trauma sufferers. For Kristeva, one way out of depression and melancholy, besides psychoanalysis, is literary creation, which she says may palliate the affect of sadness. It does this by transposing affect into rhythms, signs and forms. According to Kristeva, ‘Literary creation is the adventure of the body and signs that bears witness to the affect – to sadness as imprint of separation and the beginning of the symbol’s sway’ (22). Survival for Winterson has followed just this trajectory, overcoming the lost object through identification with the word, logos, form, schema, as she makes clear in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?:

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I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. (9)

Indeed, Kristeva’s idea of imprinting, working over and working through, traumatic affect is perceptible in a key aspect of Winterson’s narrative practice, namely her use of intertextual refrains. Critics have noted her tendency to repeat lines within and across texts: ‘oranges are not the only fruit’; ‘I’m telling you stories, trust me’. ‘It’s the clichés that cause the problem’; ‘why is the measure of love loss?’ ‘To avoid discovery I stay on the run’ and, in The Stone Gods (2007): ‘Everything is imprinted forever with what it once was’ (157). Written at the time Winterson began to discover the facts about her birth, this novel develops the idea of the fossil record introduced in Lighthousekeeping, which may be viewed as an image of sedimentation, forming a kind of analogue to human memory and an archaeological memorialisation of personal and cultural history. Indeed, this latter text, published in 2004, prompted some critics to consider whether Winterson had embarked on a departure from the high postmodernism of her middle period and a rapprochement with historicity and material reality, if not literary realism itself (Keulks 2007). As a trauma narrative, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? explores what the trauma theorist Geoffrey Hartman has called ‘the relation between psychic wounds and signification’ (Hartman 2003, 257). In one powerful section, Winterson figures her sense of loss as a wound. Exploring the symbolism of wounding through a range of male mythological figures such as Chiron, Prometheus and the Fisher King, Winterson concludes ‘wounding seems to be a clue or a key to being human’ (221). One of the features of Winterson’s oeuvre has been the ambitious and frequently trans-gendered transposition of a ‘personal’ narrative into a classical mythos in order to position the particular as the universal and validate an (otherwise insecure and marginal) authorial writing identity. However, Winterson also invokes the emphatically female wound of childbirth: ‘Birthing is a wound all of its own. […] The baby’s rupture into the world tears the mother’s body and leaves the child’s tiny skull still soft and open. The child is a healing and a cut. The place of lost and found’ (222). As Winterson suggests, her work is written from such a place: ‘All my life

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I have worked from the wound’ (223). And while, to heal the wound would mean ‘an end to one identity’, the healed wound never disappears completely, but leaves a scar: ‘I will always be recognisable by my scar’ (223). Writing about her birth mother, Winterson states: ‘My mother had to sever some part of herself to let me go. I have felt the wound ever since’ (220). The wound was mutual: mother and daughter have both shaped a life around a choice the mother did not want to make. Where, Winterson asks, does that leave them? ‘Are we mother and daughter? What are we?’ (223). In common with limit-case autobiographies, Winterson provides not certainty about identity and origins, but a radical questioning of the relationship between self and other. Her journey back to the mother brings, not infantilization, but insight and an acknowledgement of the mother as a subject too. According to Gilmore, limit-case autobiographies provide no neat resolutions to the questions of self-representation. How then does Winterson’s memoir, resistant as it is to linear narrative, resolve this story of lost mothers, traumatic memory and a lifelong quest for identity? Having discovered the identity of her birth mother, and contacted her, Winterson visits her several times and they talk, and learn a bit about each other’s lives. There is a poignant account in which her birth mother relays a conversation she had with the local librarian on ordering one of Winterson’s books: ‘I said to the librarian, “This is my daughter.” “What?” she said. “It’s for your daughter?” “No! Jeanette Winterson is my daughter.” I felt so proud’ (224). Winterson juxtaposes Ann’s response to her memory of Mrs Winterson’s indignant comment after the publication of Oranges: ‘It’s the first time I’ve had to order a book in a false name’ (225). The same scene that Winterson depicted in a comic manner, if not exactly played for laughs in the novel, becomes here an admission of acute pain at Mrs Winterson’s act of disavowal. Yet, in re-encountering her birth mother, there is no overwhelming emotional bond, no sense of ‘coming home’ or plenitude. While the longing for the maternal axis has persisted in Winterson’s psyche, the umbilicus was severed long ago. Winterson admits she has read many emotionally charged accounts of reunion but that is not her experience. ‘I am warm’, Winterson states, ‘but I am wary’ (228). ‘Ann is my mother. She is also someone I don’t know at all’ (228). And, she admits, ‘I don’t know what I feel about her’ (228). She realises that she cannot regret the ‘me’ she has become and would rather be this person ‘than the me I might have become without books, without education, and without all the things that have

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happened to me along the way, including Mrs W.’ (228) Winterson calls this sense of ambivalence an ‘emotional matrix’, in which different and opposing ideas and realities mix, but which is not a simple binary split between head and heart, thinking and feeling. In fact, she embraces both realities, insisting ‘I have to hold these things together and feel them both/all’ (229). Winterson resists maternal blaming: ‘I don’t blame her and I am glad she made the choice she made. Clearly I am furious about it too’ (229). She makes a plea for more nuanced stories around adoption, stating, ‘I am trying to avoid the miserable binary of “this means so much to me/this means nothing to me”’ (228). Rather, she attempts to represent the complexity of the emotional matrix, acknowledging that this revised story of her own beginnings is also a version and its relation to truth is complex and constructed. ‘All I can say is that I am pleased – that is the right word – that my mother is safe’ (229). For her part, she writes: ‘I can’t be the daughter she wants. I couldn’t be the daughter Mrs Winterson wanted’ (229). In common with her novels, Winterson ends with a reflection on the meaning of love, which she calls: ‘The difficult word. Where everything starts, where we always return’ (230). But, also in common with her novels, the ending is a distinctly occluded and open one, its final line reading ‘I have no idea what happens next’ (230). Despite being her most explicitly autobiographical work then, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is still, I would argue, like her novels, written against autobiography’s grain. It doesn’t reveal a single truth, a stable self, or a definitive story, but does continue Winterson’s dialogue with experimental forms of self-representation. Her work demonstrates that there is, in Gilmore’s words, ‘no transparent language of identity despite the demand to produce one’ (Gilmore 2001, 24). Working both with and against the grain of autobiography as a western mode of self-­ production with a rational and representational ‘I’ at its centre, Winterson repeatedly shows the constructedness of this ‘I’, its articulation contingent on the painful but necessary unravelling of the relationship between trauma and memory. How then do we read the ‘social function and effects’ (Felski 1989, 2) of Winterson’s memoir (and her wider oeuvre) in our contemporary post-­ postmodern moment? How is it received and understood by its readers and what contribution if any does it make to a feminist counter public sphere in the here and now? These are questions that go beyond the scope of a text-based inquiry such as this and would arguably require a reader response methodology or at least a more thorough-going analysis of

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Winterson’s relationship to the contemporary women’s movement as it is currently constituted. Nevertheless, it is possible to assert that by utilising a genre that, by definition, constructs the self as simultaneously public and private, by self-consciously blurring the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, and by foregrounding the slippages, aporia and contradictions in any writing life, Winterson opens up discussion of the social function of (feminist) memoir, both for its author and readers. Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?—alongside all her work—may be located as part of a long and fascinating tradition of women’s writing in which experimentalism becomes a necessary means of questioning dominant stories, identities and rhetorical modes—and, in Winterson’s case, a necessary means of survival.

Works Cited Armitt, Lucie. 2007. Storytelling and Feminism. In Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide, ed. Sonya Andermahr, 14–26. London: Continuum. Berry, Ellen E. 2016. Women’s Experimental Writing: Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique. London: Bloomsbury. Braidotti, Rosi. 2005. A Critical Cartography of Feminist Post-Postmodernism. Australian Feminist Studies 20 (47): 169–180. Felski, Rita. 1989. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Hacking, Ian. 1995. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hartman, Geoffrey. 2003. Trauma Within the Limits of Literature. European Journal of English Studies 7 (3): 257–274. Keulks, Gavin. 2007. Winterson’s Recent Work: Navigating Postmodernism and Realism. In Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide, ed. Sonya Andermahr, 146–162. London: Continuum. Kristeva, Julia. 1987. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Winterson, Jeanette. 1985. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. London: Pandora. ———. 1989. Sexing the Cherry. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 1992. Written on the Body. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2004. Lighthousekeeping. London: Fourth Estate. ———. 2007. The Stone Gods. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 2011. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? London: Jonathan Cape.

CHAPTER 12

Helen Oyeyemi at the Vanguard of Innovation in Contemporary Black British Women’s Literature Elisabeth Bekers and Helen Cousins

Friedman’s account of women’s avant-garde writing notes that, initially, ‘to separate out women’ was a justifiable strategy to address the ‘exclusion and difference’ of experimental women writers. However, ‘other social constructions, such as race, class, religion, sexuality, nationality, and ethnicity, which necessarily come into play in the delineation of women and their productions’, need to be taken into consideration for ‘the category to remain viable and transformative’ (Friedman 2012, 154, 165). This chapter takes a closer look at the underappreciated aesthetic innovation of contemporary black British women writers, who, like women experimentalists in the twentieth century, have been underrepresented in studies on

E. Bekers (*) Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] H. Cousins Newman University, Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Aughterson, D. Philips (eds.), Women Writers and Experimental Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_12

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innovative writing and on women’s literature. The formal innovativeness of much writing by black British women writers illustrates the artistic merit of authors who are often known primarily for their thematic broadening of British literature and who, historically, are thrice removed from the mainstream or canon: as experimentalists and as women writers, but also authors of colour. If the literary innovation of women writers has not always received due recognition, neither in studies of experimental writing nor in works devoted to women’s literature (Friedman 2012, 154), this certainly holds true for British women writers of African and African-Caribbean descent, whose writing has come to be distinguished as a field in its own right only several decades after the establishment of analogous categories such as British or African-American women’s literature.1 Anthologies and book-­ length studies of experimental (British) literature have given priority to the innovation of white women, even when they have looked beyond Virginia Woolf and the Modernist Avant Garde.2 Even today, black British women authors remain conspicuously absent from monographs and essay collections devoted to either British or women’s experimental literature.3 Black British Literature’ was described as an ‘invisible’ category in literary scholarship only thirty years ago (Brennan 1990, 1) and was still considered ‘a relatively new field’ two decades later (Arana and Ramey  2009, ix). Nevertheless, black writing in Britain has expanded steadily since the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 announced the large-scale immigration of inhabitants from Britain’s former colonies. In the 1970s, beginning with the autobiographically inspired writing of authors such as Buchi Emecheta and Beryl Gilroy, black British women, too, began to claim a space for themselves on the literary scene. In recent decades critical acclaim for their writing has grown: ‘contemporary black writing of Britain [is] characterised more and more by the work of women writers’ who are moreover ‘opening up a range of vistas which are quite some distance removed from the purview of Black British writing as it has been predominantly understood’ (Mcleod 2010, 46). Bernardine Evaristo’s recent award of the 2019 Man Booker Prize (jointly with Margaret Atwood), after earlier nominations of Smith (in 2005) and Levy (in 2010) has cemented the status and international reputation of black British women writers. Andrea Levy and Zadie Smith won the Women’s Prize for Fiction (respectively in 2004 and 2006), followed by the shortlisting of Aminatta Forna (in 2011) and Diana Evans (in 2019). Other accolades include Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe in The

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Times’ 100 Best Books of the Decade (2009); the inclusion of Smith, Nadifa Mohamed and Helen Oyeyemi in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013, thirty years after Buchi Emecheta was the first black British women writer to be listed; and the appointment of Jackie Kay as Scotland’s new makar or poet laureate in 2016. Susan Scafe’s survey of black British women’s writing corrects the assumption that ‘black women’s writing might be thought to express a minor key in [Britain’s] contemporary literary production’ and positions their writing ‘in the vanguard of black British literary production’ (Scafe 2015, 226). Susheila Nasta, in her editorial introduction to a special issue on British literature’s immigrant voices, praises such voices for having ‘always played a major role in shifting the lens and geographies of the nation’ (Nasta 2002, 3), and Scafe specifically commends the aesthetic endeavours of Britain’s black women authors, whose ‘novels enliven and renew a form whose death is routinely foretold’ (Scafe 2015, 226). Building on Scafe’s appraisal of the formal ingenuity of black British women writers, we argue that experimentation is the most salient hallmark of much recent literature by black British women, refocussing the more common critical assessments of black women’s writing in Britain, which have predominantly paid tribute to the writers’ thematic broadening of British literary tradition through the inclusion of the experiences of black Britons, and black women in particular.4 Our objective is not to disregard the authors’ commitment to issues of gender, ethnicity and race, class, multiculturalism, Britishness, identity and belonging. However, rather than read their writing as primarily ‘ethnographic’ or socio-political, we examine the authors’ work, and the politics to which it gives expression, through the lens of their literary experimentalism. By homing in on the variety and diversity of the experimental techniques utilised by black British women, we acknowledge that black British women writers’ literary innovation is a crucial act of reclamation and thus part and parcel of their political activism. Discussions of experimental women’s writing and experimental black literature, concur on two points: first, that the experimental writing of these authors is neither apolitical nor opposed to political writing; second, that literary practices and reader expectations historically have tended to occlude experimental forms by black and female writers in favour of realist approaches. In her discussion of women’s experimental writing, Ellen Berry warns that a dichotomous view which separates out realist/political writing from experimental/apolitical works ‘has acted to render inaudible and invisible formally innovative works [by women] that also challenge

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dominant paradigms of power and privilege but do not embody their political content in conventional forms’ (2016, 4). In fact, such writing offers ‘self-consciously avant-garde or outsider angles of vision pushed to the limits of traditional genres, norms, and strategies for sense making’ (2016, 2), forcing readers to engage with the subversion of socio-political meaning via challenging form. David Marriott similarly points to the traditional reader and publisher expectation that black literature must be political and that this must be expressed in realist forms of writing, emphasising that the experimentalism of (North American) black literature cannot be seen as divorced from its political engagement: ‘Against the defining opposition between meaning and form in European aesthetics – where the former is always on the side of conservation, reaction, tradition etc. – […] Black experimental writing refers to a body of texts where this opposition is at once superseded and rejected’ (2017, 1), arguing that experimental texts by black writers are deliberately challenging historical assumptions about black writing as authentic experience (2017, 1). In a similar fashion, the intersecting category of black British women’s literature is politically driven to experiment with formal elements such as genre, language and style in order to challenge a literary establishment that, according to Bray, Gibbons and McHale, has a predilection for mainstream or canonical literature and deliberately represses questions such as ‘what are [literature’s] function, its limitations, its possibilities’ (Bray et al. 2012, 1). The experimental text, they argue, purposely ‘unrepresses’ those questions and ‘in doing so it lays everything open to challenge, reconceptualization and reconfiguration […] makes alternatives visible and conceivable’ (2012, 1, original emphasis). Historically excluded from the mainstream and the canon, like women’s literature and black literature in general, black British women’s writing increasingly has refused to be confined by the literary establishment’s restrictive demand for mimesis and ethnographic relevance, and rejected marginalisation, whether in terms of gender or ethnicity, despite the fact that the signifier ‘black’ still operates to segregate this literature from the ‘greater body’ of literary production (Osborne 2009, 242–243). Through their experimentation, then, black British women’s texts present a political challenge to the traditions and conventions that congeal around them, attempting to fix their writing into realist and ‘authentic’ modes: their experiments with chronology, history and ‘writing back’ contest dominant discourses of Britishness. A turn towards more experimental writing can be noted in literature by black British women from the 1990s onwards, with Bernadine Evaristo’s

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work often recognised as the first which ‘consistently confronts and resists realistic conventions’ (Scafe 2015, 218). Nevertheless, already the earliest writing by black British women was drawing on its ‘outsider angles of vision’ to push against conventional boundaries (Scafe 2016, 2). For instance, Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen (1974)—the first female black Bildungsroman—already constituted an innovation of the genre, entailing the rebranding of the traditional novel of formation as a ‘novel of transformation’ in which the protagonist’s coming of age also chronicles ‘the transformation of British society and cultural institutions’ (Stein 2004, xiii). This thematic genre innovation also relies on formal changes, such as the black woman’s focalisation, which is very much enlivened by her predilection for humour and euphemism, but also on the infusion of Igbo and Yoruba words and the literal translation of proverbs and sayings from these Nigerian languages. Later black British women writers have attracted new audiences by similarly enriching various other types of genre fiction with novel perspectives and sounds, often still reported as uncommon because of the ‘propensity of the [publishing] industry’ to push black writers towards the ‘literary’ (Kean 2015, 9). Nevertheless, black British women writers have successfully broken into, and innovated, the more lucrative market of genre fiction. For instance, Malorie Blackman turned race relations upside down in her Noughts & Crosses teen romance series (2001–2008), which toured Britain in 2008 and 2019 as two separate stage adaptions, was included in the BBC News’s list of hundred most influential novels as well as The Guardian’s list of 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, and is currently being serialised for television. The chicklit of Dorothy Koomson shot up bestseller lists after her My Best Friend’s Girl (2006) was chosen as a ‘read’ by the popular ‘Richard & Judy Book Club’5; Dreda Say Mitchell’s crime fiction, including Geezer Girls (2009), was popularised by its selection for World Book Night UK in 2014. One of the most commonly identified features of experimental writing is its play with language, whereby text is fragmented, composed of striking words and imagery, or set out unusually on the page. For example, standard punctuation is largely absent throughout Bernardine Evaristo’s polyphonic and hybrid novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019), while Elizabeth-­ Jane Burnett’s creative use of typography captures the sounds of nature in her novel The Grassling (2019):“Trilllalalickwtrickalickalick!’ spills the blackbird’ (2019, 173). The Grassling memorialises Burnett’s father’s dying and death and seeks innovative ways to say the unsayable, and develops a

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‘prose [that] is both sinuous and knotty, stretching language to capture what is often beyond words’ (Smith 2019). Her narrator metamorphosises from human into the Grassling, a creature that is one with the natural environment. Hence it, ‘bends into its end. It has listened to its father and mothers. It has listened to the grasses and the flowers. It knows how to hear worms pulse and bark sound and how to be cut and how to be rooted’ (2019, 182). Assonance, repetition and the hypnotic ‘and’ connect the narrator to her human family and to the Devon soil where she grew up. Language can also be used to defamiliarize the reader. For example, Irenosen Okojie’s novel Butterfly Fish (2015) shifts between the real and the unreal, as when the narrator goes swimming in her local pool, a fish, ‘silver with purple fins’ appears and disgorges a key into the narrator’s hands (2015, 23). An element of the surreal erupts in descriptions of the everyday: looking in the wing mirror of her car the ‘[p]eople dripped out of it onto the pavements with bits of glass embedded in their bodies’ (2015, 26). These surreal events and descriptions allow Okojie to convey to the reader a sense of the narrator’s grief for her mother, which is so unspeakable she can only talk about it to her friend underwater in the pool, ‘knowing our words would not survive without air’ (2015, 22). Experimentation with language can be connected also to the blurring of generic lines, whereby poetry, drama and prose are no longer clearly delineated. Some of the most remarkable examples of generic hybridity in the field of black British women’s literature are Evaristo’s novels-in-verse Lara (1997 & 2009) and The Emperor’s Babe (2001), which are composed entirely in couplets. While the former retraces Evaristo’s multi-ethnic family’s line across the globe, the latter recounts the story of a young black woman (of Sudanese heritage) living in Roman London, who is married off to a much older Roman citizen before she embarks on an affair with Roman Emperor Severus Septimus on his visit to Britain. The Emperor’s Babe delights in both generic and historical anarchism, its energetic poetic couplets straying far from a traditional historical novel or the conventions of the Bildungsroman. Building on recent histories of Britain that  have demonstrated a black presence in Britain for at least that long (contrary to popular belief),6 Evaristo’s verse narrative combines humourful anachronistic  references to Armani and Versace togas with a masterful blend of standard English, Cockney rhyming slang and Latin to counterpoint the supposed absence of black people in Britain from Roman times. Various black British women writers experiment with intertextual literary borrowings in their revisions of the English or broader European

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canon, often crossing into other genres and media. Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty (2015) draws inspiration from Howards End (1910), complicating E.  M. Forster’s class-based family drama with racial and ideological tensions. Several black British women authors, utilising a range of literary styles and genres, marked the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of slavery with their own examples of the neo-slave narrative, originally an African-American literary genre that revisits the historical slave narratives of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as well as the continuing blind spots in European historiography regarding the Transatlantic slave trade and slavery. For example,  Andrea Levy’s metafictional neo-slave narrative The Long Song (2010), which was adapted into a television serial by the BBC in 2018 looks back on the narrator’s own youth as a house slave on Amity plantation. The Long Song’s narrative frame, in which July is being persuaded by her long-lost son to share her (and his) past, highlights how the former slave’s account is instrumental in correcting the biases of the official colonial records as well as the ‘puff and twaddle of some white lady’s mind’ in her private journal (Levy 2010, 8). The frame also draws attention to the depth of July’s trauma. Her act of self-narration is as forbidding and painful as it is humourous and empowering, as is illustrated by her insistence that she tell her own life-­ story as she sees fit, as well as by her continual attempts to circumvent or embellish its most difficult parts, such as her own violent conception, much to the frustration of her editor-son who naively begs his mother to ‘speak true’ (Levy 2010, 143). Such metafictional reflections are also the hallmark of other black British neo-slave narratives in poetry and drama, including Jackie Kay’s The Lamplighter (Bekers 2018). Other black British women writers question racial inequalities in British society then and now by blurring the boundaries between the real and unreal. Whether Orenosen Okojie’s matter-of-fact introduction of fantasy into her generically hybrid Butterfly Fish (2015) is to be labelled as magical realism or rather, as Evaristo suggests, is ‘more indebted to the traditions of Nigerian storytelling that weave together the real, fantastical, fabular and spiritual’ (Evaristo 2016), the novel’s smudging of the distinction between the magical and the historical helps to establish connections between Nigeria and its London diaspora across the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Diana Evans, in her first novel, 26a (2005), similarly uses Yoruba elements that shift the essentially realist text into the fantastical, for example when Georgia, having committed suicide, possesses her twin sister’s body; a possibility that has been revealed to the twins in a folktale

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they were told whilst visiting their mother’s village in Nigeria. In ‘The Shell’ (2002), which is included in Jackie Kay’s first volume of short fiction Why Don’t You Stop Talking, single mother Doreen and her son do not appear to find it strange that she is slowly transforming into a tortoise, rather Doreen, who is shunned by the neighbours, abandoned by her son’s father and criticised by her son, quite welcomes the fact that ‘she can hide her whole head inside the musky damp darkness, the forgiving darkness’ should she want to (Kay 2011, 152). Although Kay does not explicitly state her characters’ race, nor whether this (or anything else) triggers Doreen’s magical realist transformation, it does not take much imagination to read Doreen’s shell as a metaphor for her race and her literal withdrawal into her shell as a figurative retreat from a society that spurns her because of her (racial) appearance. Helen Oyeyemi, undoubtedly the most prolific of Britain’s experimental black women writers, draws on many of the above-mentioned innovative strategies in her work. She garnered instant success with The Icarus Girl (2005), which she wrote whilst still at school, and has followed up her novel with a new work nearly every two years. The novels The Opposite House (2007) and White is for Witching (2011) were followed by the short story cycle Mr Fox (2011), a further novel, Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), another short story cycle, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (2016) and her most recent novel Gingerbread (2019). Methuen has also published her plays Juniper’s Whitening (2004) and Victimese (2005), both of which were performed when she was still at university. Oyeyemi is not only a prolific and versatile writer, but also well-recognised by the publishing industry. White is for Witching won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2010 and was a finalist for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award. In 2013 Oyeyemi was included in Granta Magazine’s Best of Young British Novelists list. Boy, Snow, Bird was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and, in 2016, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours won the PEN Open Book Award. Oyeyemi has been shortlisted twice for the BBC National Short Story Award: in 2010 with ‘My Daughter the Racist’, which was subsequently published in Mr Fox, and in 2017 for ‘If a book is locked there’s probably a good reason for that, don’t you think?’, which was later included in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. She has also served on judging panels for awards, including the Book Trust Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (2015), the literary award for Canadian authors (2015), the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2015) and, most notably, the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.

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Berry defines experimental writing by women as a mode which ‘deconstructs[…] conventional genre forms such as the Bildungsroman’ (2016, 2). Several of Oyeyemi’s novels and stories subvert the Bildungsroman by having her heroines’ development impeded by supernatural or magical realist influences. In The Icarus Girl the ostensibly typical postcolonial story of a mixed-race girl growing up in London who finds it difficult to belong is soon side-tracked by the appearance of the supernatural TillyTilly, an increasingly violent, haunting sprit who befriends Jess, poses as Jess’s deceased twin sister and ultimately switches places with Jess. At the end of the novel, TillyTilly takes possession of Jess’s body, while banishing Jess to the wilderness of The Bush, which is the home of evil spirits in Yoruba mythology. The novel refuses closure, only declaring that Jess is going ‘up and up and up’ (2005a, 322), in a less hubristic fashion than the original Icarus, leaving the reader unsure whether she has died, or successfully repossessed her body, or even defeated TillyTilly. In Oyeyemi’s third novel, White is for Witching, the teenage Miranda, who has lost her mother, develops an eating disorder. The nascent Bildungsroman is diverted when Miranda is revealed as a vampiric being, possessed in some way by the racist house in which she lives. White is for Witching is simultaneously a gothic novel or vampire narrative, and a deconstruction of these genres: ‘Oyeyemi shakes loose that connection [between non-human vampire others and blackness] by reversing racial norms through a racially white vampire who preys on a black woman’ (Cousins 2012, 54). Oyeyemi’s texts also frequently slip between genres or refuse the generic rules. The beginning of White is for Witching looks like the text of a play, with the voices of two different characters announced by their name followed by a colon. The words that follow are barely prose, as they have the line breaks associated with poetry, and some lines appear in parenthesis, which further disrupts the flow of the text (2009, 1). This generic fluidity also marks Oyeyemi’s fourth book, Mr Fox, which was labelled ‘a novel’ on the cover of the Riverhead Books 2012 reprint, but generically is more akin to a short story cycle. It starts with a conventional framing device, where an author of murder stories, St John Fox, and his (apparently imaginary) muse, Mary Foxe, spar through the stories that they are telling. As the book progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to work out who is telling which tale, with some of these tales bleeding into the narrative frame. For example, in Mary’s dream about Mr Pizarsky, she wakes up to find writing all over her pillow. At first, she thinks that Mr Pizarsky exists in the real world too, but it transpires that St John has written it, having

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accessed her dream in some way (2011, 62). Although Oyeyemi says that she is inspired by One Thousand and One Nights, another framed narrative featuring a murderous patriarch and a female story-teller, she does not replicate its linearity in her short story collection. Instead, she drawn to the way in which Sheherazade’s ‘[e]very story revolves around another story. It’s never-ending’ (Akumiah 2019). What is Not Yours Is Not Yours (2016) is presented as a volume of ‘stories’ in the subtitle and through the list of story titles (at least in the American edition, Oyeyemi 2016b). No such generic label or a table of contents are provided in the Picador edition (Oyeyemi 2016a), so that British readers are given a more ambiguous impression of the same text. In both editions, however, Oyeyemi’s short story cycle has an even looser structure than Mr Fox, as the unifying principle of the latter’s narrative frame is here reduced to the reccurrence of characters and motifs across stories set in different times and places; at the same time, some characters’ life stories can be (partially) reconstructed by piecing together information from various stories. This generic hybridity of Oyeyemi’s work reflects the blurred boundaries between the real and the unreal and between the human and the non-­ human (ghost, animal or puppet) of Oyeymi’s fictional worlds, as well as the identitarian fluidity of Oyeyemi’s human characters, both in terms of gender and race. The latter remains a strikingly understated category in Oyeyemi’s work, certainly in comparison with most of works penned by her fellow black British women writers. Although this virtual erasure is suggestive of a post-race world in which race and ethnicity no longer play a role, it paradoxically confronts readers with the racializing tendencies with which they read fictional worlds and the real world alike. Mr Fox can also be read as a metafictional text, with authorship and the act of storytelling being referenced in many of the stories and especially in the narrative frame, which is set in 1930s New York and focuses on the relationship triangle between St John, his wife Daphne and his muse Mary. Towards the end this frame becomes more significant, as the author’s wife gains prominence and the muse manifests herself as someone real, with whom the wife can communicate, although she could not be more different from the woman whom she suspects to be her husband’s mistress. Daphne is a docile homemaker, whose life revolves around her husband and who reads books entitled ‘Make Him Happy, Keep Him Happy’ (2011, 262); Mary Foxe, by contrast, reproaches the St. John for writing

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Bluebeard-like misogynist stories in which the leading lady is killed off and proposes to turn the tables. Through her conversations with Mary, Daphne begins to question her patriarchal husband’s self-proclaimed superiority and gains confidence in her own budding authorship; this connects her to her namesake, the English romantic woman writer Daphne Du Maurier, whose Bluebeard-inspired novel Rebecca (1938) acts as an intertextual echo for Daphne Fox’s life. The framed narrative’s open ending and generic hybridity suggest Oyeyemi’s refusal to give precedence to either one of the different perspectives on literary style of Mr Fox’s metafictional frame. Oyeyemi is well known for basing her works on fairy tales. Mr Fox rewrites Bluebeard; Boy, Snow, Bird is a revision of Snow White; and ‘dornika and the st martin’s day goose’ in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours adapts Red Riding Hood (and the Czech folk tale ballad ‘The Golden Spinning Wheel’). Friedmann notes that ‘revisionary fairy tales and the novels and poems that take on paternal myths by offering the perspective of a female or another oppressed minority figure in the myth are common revisionary strategies’ (2013, 163). The first part of Boy, Snow, Bird is told by the ‘wicked stepmother’, Boy. Oyeyemi, however, complicates her fairy tale revisions by also drawing widely on other intertexts. The second part of Boy, Snow, Bird is told from the perspective of Bird, who is Boy’s biological daughter. Bird is less beautiful than Snow (and unable to pass for white like Snow) and less favoured by the family, indicating that the text blends in another fairy tale—‘The Juniper Tree’. Allusions to other texts come thick and fast throughout Oyeyemi’s work, White is for Witching providing a particularly rich example. It draws on several gothic narratives: not least Dracula, but also The Haunting of Hill House and Edgar Allen Poe’s short story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ which Miranda discusses in the text (2011, 93–4). When Miranda disappears, it is suggested that she cannot cry out as ‘[h]er throat is blocked with a slice of apple’ (2011, 1), a clear allusion to ‘Snow White’. Two of the novel’s chapter titles, ‘CURIOUSER’ and ‘AND CURIOUSER’, evoke Alice in Wonderland; and the murder of the housekeeper by the house (who electrocutes Sade with a faulty kettle) is recounted in nursery rhyme: sade puts the kettle on

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Sade puts the kettle on Sade puts the kettle on and sparks fly out. (2011, 175)

In White is for Witching, several female characters are depicted with padlocked lips referencing the ‘Wise Woman’ who knows not to speak or be curious (Warner 2010). Other texts draw on the Yoruba belief of abiku (The Icarus Girl), children who die young and are reborn—sometimes multiple times—to the same mother, and the syncretic religion Santeria (The Opposite House) that blends Yoruba religious beliefs with Catholicism. In the eclectic mix of sources on which Oyeyemi draws, she lays claim to the long literary and cultural traditions of both Europe and of Yorubaland, and imagery and beliefs from both cultures abound. What is experimental about Oyeyemi’s use of intertextuality is its sheer volume. Readers who try to trace and make sense of the author’s sources of inspiration soon find themselves caught up in a gleeful game designed by the author. Oyeyemi argues that: books … are like games […] the ones that I love – the ones I think are useless and not contributing anything. Because of that desire to be happy, and that desire to play, but also, they feel like my own, and not just projects. These are the books where I feel I’m developing toward something, some style. (Akumiah 2016, np)

Oyeyemi’s sense of playfulness is also illustrated by her use of trickster figures and tricks. In Boy, Snow, Bird, for example, there are spiders in Bird’s room who talk to her and, in a letter to her sister, Snow, Bird links these to the stories about Anansi, the West African trickster god who is also found in Caribbean folklore. Additionally, there are the central tricks of the plot: that Snow’s family are passing for white, a trick played on the white community (2014, 139), but also an intertextual reference to the (mainly) African-American tradition of narratives of passing, most famously Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929). Moreover, Boy’s mother tricks her by passing as her violent father; and mirrors trick Bird, either refusing to reflect her or mis-representing her in the mirror as her mother’s black maid when she helps her white mother get ready to go out (2014, 185).7 Like Oyeyemi herself, her trickster figures are subversive and anarchic. After Bird is born and is clearly black, Boy’s husband, who has been passing for white even to his wife, is revealed as black himself: one of the

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tricksters. He asks Boy, if [she’d] have married him if [she’d] seen him as coloured’ (2014, 133), a trick question that Boy finds impossible to answer. Both in the 1940s America of the novel and in our contemporary times this is more than a question of cross-racial marriage, but rather one addressing the whole concept of identity politics: who we think we are and who we think others are via race, gender, religion and so on: the ‘feminist trickster […] is not adding a feminist perspective to existing readings or expanding a narrow, masculinist culture, but attempting to undo it altogether’ (Friedman 2012, 163). Uncertainty abounds in women’s experimental fiction. As Berry notes, authors use ‘techniques for producing indeterminacy and lack of closure; strategies emphasising silence, absence, loss, blankness, incompleteness, fragmentation’ (Berry 2016, 2). For instance, keys and locks abound in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, and although they may open doors and chests and even other worlds, they just as often ‘cause more problems than they solve’ (Oyeyemi 2016a, 118; 2016b, 144). They may lead characters into obsessions or draw attention to uncertainty and a lack of information, as in ‘if a book is locked…’, which refuses closure, despite it being the final story of the book. White is for Witching seems to start in media res, but at the end of the book readers realise the opening is, in fact, recounting the story’s ending. In the beginning, readers do not know who Miranda Silver is, or what relation the speakers (her friend Ore and her twin Eliot) bear to Miranda. However, both express loss and incompleteness in not knowing quite what has happened to Miranda, and this is not clarified at the end of the book. Occasional episodes defy attempts to incorporate them into the logical plot of the narrative as a whole. For example, in Boy, Snow, Bird the mysterious double that Boy sees running parallel to her, with hands covered in blood (2014, 59–61) implies possible connections with the text’s obsession with implications of doubles or mirrors, but it is hard to rationalise the episode into the storyline. In addition, Oyeyemi’s writing often draws on the grotesque, including the ‘extreme, bizarre, or violent situations especially involving the female body’, one of Berry’s hallmarks of women’s experimental writing (Berry 2016, 2). In White is for Witching, such situations are used to heighten the gothic mode. For example, the house, which is being run as a Bed and Breakfast, boasts how it has entrapped some black guests: ‘the couple on the second floor who I had kept in their bed the past three days, curved around the bed like fitted sheets with their faces crusting over’ (139); or the women Miranda finds in the basement—her deceased

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foremothers—‘naked except for corsets laced so tightly that their desiccated bodies dipped in and out like parchment scrolls bound around the middle. They stared at Miranda in numb agony. Padlocks were placed over their parted mouths, boring through the top lip and closing at the bottom’ (126–7). Stylistically, Oyeyemi often favours a poetic and postmodernist mode of writing. For example, the text often ‘turns’ on a word that gives the narrative in a new direction:↓ A building of this size would not blend on the Western Heights if it was                          white was a colour that Anna Good was afraid to wear. (115)

With the word ‘white’, the narrative jumps from discussing the immigrant detention centre found in Dover, to Miranda’s grandmother’s worry over getting white clothes dirty. Here, the word ‘white’ seems significant but other examples include ‘the lift’ (35) or ‘that’ (41) suggesting that the word itself is not key to understanding this technique. What it does do is to fragment the narrative by disrupting the linearity of the plot. Similarly, at the beginning of White is for Witching, italicised interjections ‘Try again’ (3) and ‘Try a different way’ (4), seem to indicate an authorial struggle to explain what has happened to Miranda. The Opposite House is marked by the surreal, particularly in descriptions of events in the ‘somewherehouse’, which is occupied by the fading Orisha (gods of the Santeria pantheon). The episode in which Aya (or Yemaya, the universal mother) climbs out of the attic window of the somewherehouse and encounters a ‘terrible’ father illustrates Oyeyemi’s unusual style and phrasing. This father is described as: Him. He leans forward to her; he is the one who has caused the trees to grow contrary; to grow from his heart. He is a great cuspate blade primed to flay her, he is a hammer bringing sun down to gloom. (215)

The one-word sentence consisting exclusively of the male pronoun gives this figure a dominant gendered and almost deified presence. The jumbling of images indicates how ominous and dangerous ‘He’ is to Aya, as in the description of his wilful distortion of nature against (‘contrary’ to) its true forms and in the metaphors likening him to tools used violently against her and the environment. When Aya falls and is impaled on one of those

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‘contrary’ tree branches, the third-person narration is disrupted by free indirect discourse—the declaration ‘Oh, blood’ and bracketed text—giving the narrative a first person perspective from Aya↓: her stomach impaled on an ice-whitened branch. Oh, blood.      Mama Proserpine, swimming in place in an ocean of black silk, leans out of the attic window      (too far, she could fall)      to try and help her (215)↓

This intruding voice breaks up the sentence but is also literally and figuratively bracketed off from the main narrative. In this book, such narrative techniques echo the themes of ‘fragmentation and cultural atrophy’ (Cousins 2012, 3) that the text explores in relation to hybridity and multiculturalism, something that marks the story world of Oyeyemi’s characters as well as our own contemporary world. We have argued that the aesthetics of Black British Women’s Writing demonstrate that their literary achievements reach well beyond the thematic. Although they have been valued primarily for the politics of their writing, contemporary black British women have been enthusiastically experimenting with language, generic hybridity, intertextuality, intermediality, metafictionality, and genre adaptation, often using several of these innovative methods in combination in a single text. The depth and breadth of these formal innovations support our opening plea for a more profound acknowledgement of the aesthetic merit of black British women literature, which often underlies and supports, but always also complements its political relevance. The innovations of the writing of black women of African and African Caribbean descent in the twenty-first century undeniably fuels their ongoing endeavours to broaden the canon, thematically as well as aesthetically. What is more, the experimental nature of their writing unmistakably positions black British women in the vanguard of contemporary literature in English.

Notes 1. The first anthology showcasing Black British Women’s Writing was published in the late 1980s (Cobham and Collins 1987), with a ten-year gap before literary criticism followed. Among the earliest contributions on black British women’s literature are Niesen de Abruña in Werlock (2000); Wisker

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(2000, 2004); Lima (2004); Weedon (2008, 2009), with some studies including also British authors of Asian descent. In 2009 Deirdre Osborne edited the first special issue exclusively devoted to black British women’s writing (Women: A Cultural Review 20.3). 2. Writers of colour (including black British women writers) are overlooked in such collections and monographs on experimental women’s writing  as Friedman and Fuchs (1989); Loeffelholz (1992); Freitag (2006); Kennedy and Kennedy (2013); Mitchell (2015). However, the edited collection of Parker and Young (2013) on ‘experience and experimentation in women’s writing’ includes Zadie Smith among a wide range of authors of different ethnicities and sociocultural backgrounds, even if most essays do not focus on the writers’ formal experimentation, while Berry (2016) takes Korean American author Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as one of her six case studies. 3. While some book-length studies on British experimental literature focus on the period preceding the rise of black women’s literature in Britain (e.g. Bluemel 2010; Booth 2012; Clarke 2015), black British (women) writers are not included either in such comprehensive discussions of experimental literature as The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (ed. Bray et al. 2012), Armstrong’s overview of experimental fiction (2014) or Reed’s volume on black (American and Caribbean) experimental writing (2014). The Routledge Companion’s only contribution on women’s writing (Friedman 2012) discusses American authors of colour (Toni Morrison and Bharati Mukherjee) alongside pioneering white British women such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, but no black British authors; the companion’s only chapter specifically devoted to avant-garde authors of colour (Nielsen 2012) is devoted exclusively to African-American writers and focuses on the male poets Melvin. B. Tolson and Lorenzo Thomas, with cursory references to some of their female colleagues. Notable exceptions are Onega & Ganteau’s The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960s (2007) and Noland & Watten’s Diasporic Avant-­ Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (2009), which respectively contain articles on the experimental writing of Zadie Smith (Sell 2007) and black British poetry (Ramey 2009). Other books devoted to more peripheral manifestations of avant-garde literature (and other forms of culture) (e.g. Vincent 2012; Bäckström and Hjartarson 2014) do not include any black British women writers. 4. The sociopolitical engagement of male and female authors is central to such monographs on (predominantly) Black British Literature as Sommer (2001); Sandhu (2003); Stein (2004); McLeod (2004); Ellis (2007); Gunning (2010); Pirker (2011); Laursen (2012). While these and other studies generally do comment on the literary techniques the authors employ to raise their political concerns, the literature’s (black) aesthetics rarely takes

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priority. A case in point is R.  Victoria Arana’s editorial introduction in ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today (2007), whose description of the ‘black’ British aesthetics references the texts’ political agendas rather than their formal features, save for her addition that the former (significantly described as ‘artistic ends’) are best accomplished ‘through a friendly sort of satire’ or works that are ‘full of subtle wit and good humour’ (2007a, 4). Nevertheless, Arana’s volume (2007b) and a special issue of Woman: A Cultural Review (2009) edited by Deirdre Osborne both include contributions that discuss experimental writing by women, such as Lauri Ramey’s ‘Situating a ‘Black’ British Poetic Avant-Garde’ and Roy Sommer’s illustration of the aesthetic turn in black literary studies through Zadie Smith’s On Beauty in the former and articles considering fragmentation and polyphony (e.g. Lynette Goddard on debbie tucker green) or intertextuality (Nicole King on Zadie Smith) as experimental attributes of the works discussed. More sustained attention is given to (genre) innovation in the book-length studies Fictions of Migration (2001) by Roy Sommer and Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (2004) by Mark Stein, but emphasis remains on the thematic transformations rather than on issues pertaining to the texts’ formal experimentation. 5. This book club was a segment in the Richard & Judy chat show (Channel 4, November 2001–August 2008; Watch, October 2008–July 2009). 6. For example, Fryer (1984) and Olusoga (2016). Bernardine Evaristo’s Soul Tourist (2009), a novel with verse features and images of traffic signs evoking the road trip that drives its plot, repurposes the conventional travel narrative genre to confront both her travelling protagonists and her readers, with their amnesia regarding the historical black presence in Europe (Evaristo 2008, 3). 7. Friedman (2012, 163) suggests that ‘contemporary feminist experimentalists find new forms of subversion, adapting, for instance, the trickster figure […]. As the western male trickster helps society to stay in balance, the trickster in feminist avant-garde impedes or throws off-balance normative social narratives’.

Works Cited Primary Texts Blackman, M. 2001–2008. Noughts and Crosses Series. London: Random House. Burnett, E.-J. 2019. The Grassling. London: Allen Lane. Emecheta, B. 1971. In the Ditch. London: Allison and Busby.

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Emecheta, B. 1974. Second-Class Citizen. London: Allison and Busby. Evaristo, B. 1997. Lara. Speldhurst, Kent: Angela Royal. ———. 2001. The Emperor’s Babe. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 2005. Soul Tourists. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 2008. Blonde Roots. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 2009. Lara (expanded edition). Hexham: Bloodaxe. ———. 2019. Woman, Girl, Other. London: Hamish Hamilton. Kay, J. 2011. Why Don’t You Stop Talking. 2002. London: Picador. ———. 2008. The Lamplighter. London: Bloodaxe. Koomson, D. 2006. My Best Friend’s Girl. London: Time Warner. Mitchell, D.S. 2009. Geezer Girls. London: Hodder. Okojie, I. 2015. Butterfly Fish. London: Jacaranda Books Art Music. Oyeyemi, H. 2005a. The Icarus Girl. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2005b. Juniper’s Whitening & Victimese. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2007. The Opposite House. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2009. White Is for Witching. London: Picador. ———. 2011. Mr Fox. London: Picador. ———. 2014. Boy, Snow, Bird. London: Picador. ———. 2016a. What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. London: Picador. ———. 2016b. What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. New York: Riverhead. ———. 2019. Gingerbread. London: Picador. Smith, Z. 2005. On Beauty. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Secondary Texts Akumiah, H. 2016. Bookforum Talks with Helen Oyeyemi. Bookforum, June 20. https://www.bookforum.com/interviews/bookforum-­t alks-­w ith-­h elen-­ oyeyemi-­16190. Accessed 30 Jan 2020. Arana, V.R. 2007a. Introduction: Aesthetics as Deliberate Design: Giving Form to Tigritude and Nommo. In ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today, ed. V.R. Arana, 1–16. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———., ed. 2007b. ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Arana, V.R., and L.  Ramey. 2009. Introduction. In Black British Writing, ed. V.R. Arana and L. Ramey, Rev., 1–7. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Armstrong, J. 2014. Experimental Fiction: An Introduction for Readers and Writers. London: Bloomsbury. Bäckström, P., and B.  Hjartarson, eds. 2014. Decentring the Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: Brill. Bekers, E. 2018. Creative Challenges to Captivity: Slave Authorship in Black British Neo-Slave Narratives. Arteel, I, Bekers, E, Schandevyl E (eds) Critical

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Interrogations of the Interrelation of Creativity and Captivity, Life Writing 15 (1): 23–42. Berry, E.E. 2016. Women’s Experimental Writing: Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique. London: Bloomsbury. Bluemel, K. 2010. Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Booth, F. 2012. Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940–1980. Milton Keynes: Marston Gate. Brace, M. 2011. Mr Fox, by Helen Oyeyemi, The Independent, June 17. https:// www.independent.co.uk/arts-­e ntertainment/books/reviews/mr-­f ox-­b y-­ helen-­oyeyemi-­2298490.html. Accessed 30 Jan 2020. Bray, J., A.  Gibbons, and B.  McHale, eds. 2012. The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. London: Routledge. Brennan, T. 1990. Writing from Black Britain. Literary Review 34 (1): 1–11. Clarke, C. 2015. Tracing the Ethical Dimension of Postwar British Experimental Fiction. University of Southampton, Faculty of Humanities, Doctoral thesis, 193 pp. Cobham, R., and M. Collins, eds. 1987. Watchers and Seekers: Original Anthology of Creative Writing by Black Women Living in Britain. London: The Women’s Press. Cousins, H. 2012. Helen Oyeyemi and the Yoruba Gothic: White Is for Witching. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47 (1): 47–58. Ellis, D. 2007. Writing Home: Black Writing in Britain Since the War. Stuttgart and Hannover: ibidem-Verlag. Evaristo, B. 2008. CSI Europe. Wasafiri 23 (4): 2–7. ———. 2016. Speak Gigantular by Irenosen Okojie Review  – Surreal Tales of Love and Loneliness. The Guardian, November 24. https://www.theguardian. com/books/2016/nov/24/speak-­g igantular-­b y-­i renosen-­o kojie-­r eview. Accessed 30 Jan 2020. Freitag, K. 2006. Cultural Criticism in Women’s Experimental Writing: The poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe. Heidelberg: Winter. Friedman, E.G. 2012. Sexing the Text/Women’s Avant-Garde Writing in the Twentieth Century. In The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, ed. J. Bray, A. Gibbons, and B. McHale, 154–167. London: Routledge. Friedman, E.G., and M.  Fuchs, eds. 1989. Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fryer, P. 1984. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto. Goddard, L. 2009. ‘Death Never Used to Be for the Young’: Grieving Teenage Murder in Debbie Tucker Green’s Random. In The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010), ed. D.  Osborne, 299–309. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Gunning, D. 2010. Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Kean, D. 2015. Black and Asian Writers and Publishers in the UK Market- place. London: Spread the Word. Kennedy, D., and C.  Kennedy. 2013. Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970–2010: Body, Time and Locale. Oxford: Oxford University Press. King, N. 2009. ‘Creolisation and On Beauty: Form, Character and the Goddess Erzulie’. Special Issue: Contemporary Black British Women’s Writing. Women: A Cultural Review 20 (3): 262–276. Laursen, O.B. 2012. Black and Asian British Life Writing: Race, Gender and Representation in Selected Novels from the 1990s. PhD thesis, The Open University. Lima, M.H. 2004. The Margin at the Centre: Teaching Black British Women Writers. Black British Writing, Special Issue of Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora 5 (2): 60–69. Loeffelholz, M. 1992. Experimental Lives: Women and Literature, 1900–1945. New  York: Twayne Publishers, Toronton: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, New York: Maxwell Macmillan International. Marriott, D. 2017. Introduction: Black Experimental Poetics. Special Issue: Black Experimental Poetics. The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 47 (1): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2017.1264826. McLeod, J. 2004. Postcolonial London. London: Routledge. ———. 2010. Extra Dimensions, New Routines: Contemporary Black Writing of Britain. Wasafiri 25 (4): 45–52. Mitchell, K., ed. 2015. Experimental Writing. Special Issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing 9 (1). Morrison, T. 1988. Beloved. London: Picador. Nasta, S., ed. 2002. Writing in Britain: Shifting Geographies. Special Issue of Wasafiri 36. Nielsen, A.L. 2012. Experiments in Black: African-American Avant-Garde Poetics. In The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, ed. J.  Bray, A. Gibbons, and B. McHale, 168–181. London: Routledge. Niesen de Abruña, L. 2000. Sea Changes: African-Caribbean and African Women Writers in England. In British Women Writing Fiction, ed. A. Werlock, 270–292. Tuscaloosa: Alabama University Press. Noland, C., and B.  Watten, eds. 2009. Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement, 189–206. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Olusoga, D. 2016. Black and British: A forgotten History. London: Macmillan. Onega, S., and J.-M. Ganteau, eds. 2007. The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960s. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Osborne, D., ed. 2009. Special Issue: Contemporary Black British Women’s Writing. Women: A Cultural Review 20 (3).

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———. 2015. Resisting the Standard and Displaying Her Colours: Debbie Tucker Green at British Drama’s Vanguard. In Modern and Contemporary Black British Drama, ed. M.F. Brewer, L. Goddard, and D. Osborne, 161–177. London: Palgrave. Parker, A., and S. Young. 2013. Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Pirker, E.U. 2011. Narrative Projections of a Black British History. London/New York: Routledge. Ramey, L. 2007. Situating a ‘Black’ British Poetic Avant-Garde. In ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today, ed. R.V.  Arana, 79–100. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———. 2009. Diaspora and the Avant-Garde in Contemporary Black British Poetry. In Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement, ed. C.  Noland and B.  Watten, 189–206. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Reed, A. 2014. Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sandhu, Suzanne. 2003. London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. London: Harper. Scafe, Suzanne. 2015. Unsettling the Centre: Black British Fiction. In The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970-Present, ed. M. Eagleton and E. Parker, vol. 10, 214–228. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sell, J.P.A. 2007. Experimental Ethics: Autonomy and Contingency in the Novels of Zadie Smith. In The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction Since the 1960s, ed. S. Onega and J.-M. Ganteau, 149–169. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Smith, P.D. 2019. The Grassling by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett Review – A Geological Memoir. The Guardian, March 21. https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2019/mar/21/the-­g rassling-­b y-­e lizabeth-­j ane-­b urnett-­r eview. Accessed 30 Jan 2020. Sommer, R. 2001. Fictions of Migration. Ein Beitrag zu Theorie und Gattungstypologie des zeitgenössischen interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien. Trier: Wissenschaftliger Verlag Trier. ———. 2007. The Aesthetic Turn in ‘Black’ Literary Studies: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and the Case for an Intercultural Narratology. In ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today, ed. R.  Victoria Arana, 176–192. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Stein, M. 2004. Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Vincent, S. 2012. Experimental Writing Within the Postcolonial Framework: Counterrealistic Diasporic and Non-diasporic Indian Writing in English. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing.

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CHAPTER 13

‘She’s a Fine Girl’: Early Experiences of Sexuality and Selfhood in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands Emer Lyons

I flee from washing brushing. Get the teeth in good and deep. Too much. That knuckling scrubbing. Like soap suds scalp scratched in. She’ll work her arms out. No lice here no disease. No psoriasis or dandruff for many miles to see […] Don’t you want hair like your brother’s? See that lovely shiny bright. I do. Out in handfuls but two years on – as good as you. (A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, 8) Hygiene’s not a major concern of mine. At some point I realized that boys and girls are taught differently about how to keep their intimate regions clean. My mother placed great importance on the hygiene of my pussy but none at all on that of my brother’s penis. He’s allowed to piss without wiping and to let the last few drops dribble into his underwear. (Wetlands, 12)

E. Lyons (*) University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Aughterson, D. Philips (eds.), Women Writers and Experimental Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_13

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I played games with other girls as a child. Many different girls. These games involved kissing, touching. I read Carol Gilligan’s work on the sexual development of girls when I was at university and I used her work to justify my actions as a normal part of heterosexual development.1 I used Gilligan’s work to delay my lesbian sexual awakening. I was ashamed of my origin story. I have written numerous short stories on the subject. Fictional openings. I knew these games were wrong, sinful, and dirty, but I never confessed to them. I spent fourteen years, in all-girls Catholic education under the Presentation Sisters, silent. I often wonder, how many of the girls remember? Two years ago I met Ann, working as a bank teller. She was very pregnant and quickly told me all about her husband, her husband’s job, her husband’s down payment on a ranch house, and her husband’s plans for a summer vacation. ‘Hey, Annie,’ I wanted to say, ‘do you remember those great kisses?’ But I didn’t. I remained silent. I dedicate this chapter to the breaking of that silence between women. (Chesler 1972, 237 italics in original)

This chapter will attempt to break some of that silence by examining the sexual formation and awakening of girl’s sexuality in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) and Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands (2009). Hélène Cixous’s claim in ‘Laugh of the Medusa’ that ‘woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies’ (Cixous 1976, 875) asserted a deep connection between patriarchal repression of identity, bodies and voice  – with a simultaneous call to women to write out against that repression. In experimenting with style, content, voice and character  – writing against the grain  – McBride and Roche suggest that dwelling in a girl’s sexuality, filth and body enables a confrontational and liberatory effect and affect in their readers. I will ‘grow sideways’ with Kathryn Bond Stockton, and conceive of my child self as precisely who I am not and never was; this chapter is the act of an adult looking back (2009). For Bond Stockton, growing up is a short sighted and limited rendering of human growth, ‘By contrast, “growing sideways” suggests that the width of a person’s experience or ideas, their motives or their motions, may pertain to any age, ringing “adults” and “children” into lateral contact of surprising sorts’ (2009, 11). I will ask how the world of metaphor grows sideways in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and Wetlands to produce queer girls: girls fucking on their lunch

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breaks at school, girls who grow avocados in place of children. What effect does reading the experiences of these ‘girl’2 narrators have on the memories of my own sexual awakening? In our second last year of Primary school in West Cork when we are ten or eleven, the teacher left the room returning to wheel in a television and VCR with ‘the video’ all ready to go inside. The video was about sex. Well, the first half was about periods, body hair, and hormones. We would have to wait another year to hear about actual sex. And even then, the only type of sex the nun on the video told us about was penetrative heterosexual post-martial coitus for reproduction purposes. I missed the second half. My teacher asked my mother if she would talk to me about sex. My mother said she would. I only remember her relaying this story. I have no recollection of having a talk at that time. Years later, at seventeen, I would go for a walk with my mother and ask her if I could stay with my boyfriend who lived then in the city for university. She had taken me two years before to get the pill when my acne became unmanageable. She said okay, but don’t tell your Dad. The men in our families are often left out of conversations regarding a girl’s sexual awakening, her sexual development is thought to blush shame to their cheeks, the thought of girls as sexual would only mortify them. This cross-gender familial silence regarding a girl’s sexuality creates deep openings in the relationship she can form with the men in her family, the things she can say, the way her body is allowed to move. She’s a fine girl. How often I heard that phrase uttered from the lips of men. I had always felt the phrase to mean I was big for my age. Or fat. Now I look up the definition and see ‘make or become thinner’. There were not many men in my milieu when I was a child that would have allowed a girl to take up that kind of space; they wanted us all fine, ground down and silent. Etymologically shame comes from the Goth word Scham, which refers to covering the face. The crucial element that turns sham into shame is the level of interest and desire involved. There is no shame in being a sham if you don’t care what others think or if you don’t care what you think. But if you do, shame threatens. To care intensely about what you are writing places the body within the ambit of the shameful. (Probyn 2010, 72–73)

Both A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and Wetlands blush with all the secret shame, silence, and embarrassment I also felt while growing sideways. Whether through a confused textual state violently separating, and elongating through murky punctuation:

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I sit bow-legged Encyclopaedia Britannica on my knee. Sex Sexism. Sexuality. All the words. I know it’s something. I’ve looked in there before. Since I was ten and since I knew what men and women sometimes do but I am something else. I am. Going to the bad. To the somewhere new’. (McBride, 63)

or, in overexposed confessional glory, ‘If you find cocks, cum, or smegma disgusting, you might as well forget about sex. I love it when sperm dries on my skin, when it crusts and flakes off’ (Roche, 20). Both novels examined in this chapter are filthy with shameful, dirty girls. Both are written in the first person but with differing relationships to their sexual awakenings. McBride’s unnamed girl is sexually assaulted by her uncle, tainting the portrayal of sexual liberation she expresses as a teenager. Her enjoyment of sex is sullied by her uncle, so the girl opens her legs to let anyone in, to try and fill up the emptiness of her silence and shame. Roche’s Helen bathes in the joys of sex, she visits female prostitutes, gets voluntarily sterilised at eighteen, visits a man weekly to be shaved. Helen takes photographs of her body, of her wounds, she examines herself. She spends the majority of the novel covered in her own shit, blood, and skin, following an operation. The imagery of female bodies in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and Wetlands as unclean goes against what Ariel Levy terms ‘raunch culture’. Levy sees the sexual objectification of women being sold commercially as empowerment and cites Hefner’s explanation of the rabbit as the symbol for his Playboy empire as proof of this: ‘it’s a fresh animal, shy, vivacious, jumping—sexy […] The Playboy girl has no lace, no underwear, she is naked, well-washed with soap and water, and she is happy’ (Levy 2005, 57–58). Hefner is nauseated at the thought of the bodies of women as being alive, evoking Kristeva’s notion of abjection: ‘bodily emissions nauseate because they aren’t alive yet they come from us, bodily emissions point up our mortality, our impending thingness’ (cited in Bellamy 2008, 13–14). Bodily shame in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and Wetlands significantly points to the ‘thingness’ of girls only. The slippage between the double registers of the ‘thing as meaning something’ and ‘the thing as pure artifice’ seems to bear an uncanny relationship to Kristeva’s claim that ‘abjection is above all ambiguity’ [1982] (9). Both camp and abjection reveal their attachments to that which they refuse, even as they expose the dangerous slippage between the subject and what threatens it. It is precisely a camp aesthetic that serves to make these scenes more

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palatable to diverse publics by attempting to create a greater distance between the ‘thing’ and the ‘artifice’. But the slippage and ambiguity that mark both camp and abjection remain. (Rodríguez 2014, 163–164)

McBride’s girl reveals an attachment to her abusive uncle when she willingly sleeps with him while at university, while Roche’s Helen develops a relationship with her nurse, Robin. The girl and Helen serve to make the stories of the author more palatable, they serve as receptacles to disseminate shame. These girls attempt to create distance from the thingness of the author, as women, in order to create acceptance within the reader regarding the artifice of the characters. The girls provide McBride and Roche with an opportunity to tackle patriarchal shame through a fictional character, while conversely the authors are questioned on the resemblance of the character to themselves: The author [Eimear McBride] has been at pains to stress the fictionality of her work. “If I’d wanted to write a memoir, I’d have written a memoir”, she says sharply. (Allardice 2020) The fascination in Germany has inevitably centred on how closely Helen’s sex life resembles Roche’s own. (Aitkenhead 2009)

In conjunction with these authorial claims is the desire expressed in the novels by McBride and Roche to give something over to the reader through the bodies of their girls, which could be read as a desire to bind the reader to them, and in doing so, attempting to efface their authorial agency. ‘Shame on you’, is a performative act, described by Judith Butler as a form of authoritative speech, these are ‘statements which, in the uttering, also perform a certain action and exercise a binding power’ (1993, 17). Eve Kosofsky Segdwick describes the absence of an explicit verb from the performative speech act ‘shame on you’, as recording the ‘place in which an I, in conferring shame, has effaced itself and its own agency. Of course the desire for self-effacement is the defining trait of—what else?— shame’ (1993, 4). The ambiguous state created by shame’s ability to bind, and to efface, is evident throughout both novels in the form of the unnamed girl in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and Helen in Wetlands. ***

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I could kill them for this or you. I could roar. I could cry. I do not. Anything at all. Just stand feel it worse and worse. Thinking of the scald and full of shame. Was it yours or mine? (McBride, 60) Right now, though, I can’t imagine ever doing it again. Either thing. Ass cleaning or ass fucking. Which would be a shame. (Roche, 90)

In my reading of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing I encountered nineteen uses of the word ‘shame’, five instances of ‘ashamed’, and one of ‘shamed’. In Wetlands, I read ‘shame’ six times, ‘ashamed’ five, and ‘shamed’ not at all. Not only are there more instances of shame in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing but the word (or affect) appears to be also used (or expressed) with different meaning than in Wetlands: ‘And look at that one. What way is that to rear a girl? Look at her. Forward rolls in a skirt. It’s disgusting. It’s perverted. Underwear on display. What kind of carry-on is that? How is she supposed to be a child of Mary? Well, you shouldn’t let her away with it. I never reared you that way’ (McBride 19). * * * In A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, the girl is ‘full of shame’ (60), ‘Filled with shame’ (76), and her thoughts, ‘Are all shame’ (151): shame is internalised, it becomes an expectation for the unnamed ‘girl’ protagonist. McBride expresses shame through the affect’s inherent relationality as the quotation above asks, ‘Was it yours or mine?’ (60). The disrupted narrative is told through the unnamed girl narrator, but in such a way that others speak through her. There are no dialogue signifiers, the voices of others become hers within the arrangement of the novel. When the grandfather speaks in the above quote, he expresses his shame at the thought of the girl’s underwear, and therefore her genitals, being on display. He is terrified at the thought of what would happen if he saw his granddaughter exposed in what he, as an adult, regards as a sexual way. He transfers the responsibility of his shame to his daughter, the girl’s mother, when he says ‘I never reared you that way’ (17), while at the same time reassuring his daughter that he doesn’t think of her ‘that way,’ doesn’t think of her as a sexual being. This is the moment that the girl enters into sexual delay in the narrative, ‘Sexual delay as an active arrest (“I am delaying my sexual activity”) is a way, we say, of “maturing” sexually—a sexual growth to the side of sex—raising the question of when does the child, when does each child, actively enter into delay?’ (Stockton 2009, 63). The girl’s state of

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sexual delay is acknowledged later in the novel through the grammatical repetitions and hangings of her self-description: Come running by the lake. Fall down. I am almost too old for that I should be smoking drinking now. Taking hand up my jumper. Fingers down my skirt. I should be. I should be. I am not. (67)

This acknowledgement of her sexual delay elides into the girl’s experiences of sex for the first time: self-consciousness and narrative and grammatical strategies elide. In secondary school, sex education was brought in from the outside, but the group hired to deck out our assembly hall were not allowed to show, or to talk to us about contraceptives, especially condoms. Their condomless banana sat cold on the table. We know they were not allowed to discuss these things because they told us. I know all this, not because I was there, but because someone told me. Again, I missed school that day. Again I delayed my sex education. A year later, our male religion teacher would discuss contraception with us. He said he knew the best contraception. We were all delighted he was going to share this sexual nugget with us. He went to the blackboard and wrote ‘NO’ in massive chalky capitals. Most instances of shame in Wetlands refer to the thought of something occurring or not occurring, either thoughts Helen has herself or imagines others to have. When fantasising about her nurse Robin, she thinks about undressing him, and licking his dark moles, contemplating that ‘It would be a shame if he died of skin cancer’ (150). When the anaesthesiologist visits before Helen’s second operation to inquire if she has eaten, she says ‘I have. I had a lot of granola for breakfast. He finds this a shame. Why?’ (178). Sexual delay is expressed through one of the most sensational aspects of Helen’s personality, namely the frequency with which she addresses anality and the scatological. Both Helen and the protagonist of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing learn to grow sideways, to use Stockton’s terminology. I mean by this that Helen has not grown out of (or up from) her childish impulses towards anality, running explicitly counter to Freud’s model of adulthood as an identity in which we ‘are encouraged to suppress … childhood love of anality, voyeurism, and aggression’ (cited in Stockton 2009, 27). Even though, according to her schoolmates, Roche’s Helen expresses an ‘exaggerated sense of shame,’ with regard to ‘crapping,’ which she inherits from her mother: ‘When I was a little girl she told me all the time that she never went to the bathroom. And never farted.

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She held everything inside until it disintegrated’ (Wetlands, 72). This exaggerated sense of shame is remarkably absent from the novel. Aspects of anality and the scatological combine when Helen explains to the reader the intricacies of her approach to anal sex, which echoes her dismissal of hygiene. Helen celebrates her shamelessness and the abject in her disregard for normative and consumerist-driven forms of hygiene, rebelling against ‘raunch culture’ to become a paradoxical advocate for abjection: When I know I’m going to have sex with someone who likes anal, I ask: with or without a chocolate dip? Which means: some guys like it when the tip of their cock has a little crap on it when they pull it out after butt fucking—the smell of the crap their cock’s pulled out turns them on. Others want the tightness of the asshole without the filth. To each his own. (88)

Helen challenges her mother’s narrative that ‘everything inside’ ‘disintegrated’, instead we read here that ‘crap’ is always at the ‘tip of their [her lover’s] cock.’ Wetlands brings the inside out. By bringing the inside out, Roche also blushes the boundaries of herself as the writer. The distinct embodied reality of the words become alive, they become like humans, even if as readers we know that is not a possibility. But through this anthropomorphising process, the characters within, ‘become subject to shame that is not, so to speak, theirs’ (White 2014, 4) as, ‘the question of shame is utterly imbricated with questions of identity and selfhood – particularly, but not only, flawed selfhood’ (Mitchell 2020, 2). Both texts pulse with bodily energy, and a desire expressed by the narrator to give over something of themselves to the reader through their body (bodies) of work. Both McBride and Roche embody Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s ‘theory of the flesh’ (Anzaldúa and Moraga 1981, 23), creating ‘A body-essay … a somato-political fiction, a theory of the self, or self-theory’ (Preciado 2013, 11). Is the shame expressed in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing ‘yours or mine?’ (60), have you, as the reader, lived ‘This filth you’ve made of yourself’ (256), or are we so dissatisfied with the other, that we turn inwards, and seek consolation in the hope that our, ‘next self-fuck will be better’ (164), or is that ‘asking too much of myself’ (177)? Auto-theory, theories of the flesh, body essays, whatever terminology takes our fancy, in the end they are all glorified terms for self-­ fucking, an auto-sexual literary attraction to the infinite depths of ourselves; ‘I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well’ (Thoreau 2016, 3). Elspeth Probyn explains how

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shame matters to how we understand the body, shame matters to how and what we write: Shame, for example, works over the body in certain ways. It does this experientially—the body feels very different in shame than in enjoyment—but it also reworks how we understand the body and its relation to other bodies or, for want of a better word, to the social. This matters at the level of theory. It matters in terms of what we want writing to do. (Probyn 2005, 137)

A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing opens with the lines, ‘For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name’. Wetlands opens with an ‘Author’s Note’ which immediately forces the reader to question the distinction between Roche and Helen: I place a lot of importance on the care of the elderly within a family. I’m also a child of divorce, and like all children of divorce I want to see my parents back together. When my parents eventually need to be taken care of, all I have to do is stick their new partners in a nursing home and then I’ll look after the two of them myself—at home. I’ll put them together in their matrimonial bed until they die. (1)

Both novels begin by prioritising someone else. In A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing the foetus of the unborn girl speaks to her brother, and possibly her mother, although the ‘you’ of much of the narrative might be her brother, mother or we, the readers. In Wetlands Helen begins by addressing her divorced parents. Both narrators are children of broken homes. They are constantly seeking a way in which to bind themselves to a unit, attempting to create some kind of connection, to bind, rather than efface. The unnamed girl attempts to do so through casual sex, while Helen does so through growing her avocado trees. McBride and Roche bind the reader to their protagonists by giving the reader explicit, intimate access to their bodies, the kind of access one would usually only give a lover. The female body is presented to us in all its sweating, bleeding, coming glory not ‘well-washed’. As Probyn (2005) writes, an acknowledgement of disgust can serve to render public what we seek to keep inside. As Sedgwick and Frank (1995) put it, this is to make visible the hyper-reflexivity of the body, as affects turn us inside out, and outside in. The inside/out shame of the narrative content and form of these novels narrate and display words and attitudes which conventionally connote disgust, but by displacing the

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notions of inside/outside, the reader is encouraged to reflect, to move with the protagonists ‘inside out, and outside in’, and thereby re-evaluate the role of shame in our cultural discourses. There were about eighty girls in my year at school. By the time we got to our final exams in secondary school, a number of girls were pregnant. In order for the rest of us not to be distracted by their pregnant bodies, they were given their own room to complete their exams. The teachers said it was better; the girls had more room if they got uncomfortable, less people to disturb if they needed anything. This may seem a reasonable, even thoughtful gesture. However, Ireland’s history as, to use Caelainn Hogan’s (2019) term, ‘a republic of shame’ in regards to the treatment of so called ‘fallen women’ in institutions and laundries meant that The Presentation Sisters saw these girls as a bad influence on the rest of us, those who hadn’t yet fallen. The assumption was that with the slightest provocation we too would join the ranks of fallen women and have to be hidden away. But the fact was that all us (fine) girls were hiding silent in plain sight. * * * Now I had two or three behind the prefabs. Consecutive days mind. Them boys. Muck to the great knee high. Slip my boots in it. Their knees ache with bending for they don’t know what. I won’t say I don’t either. Building building numbers up. When the rain comes I will not postpone. It’s now or never… The great work. It’s my great work. (McBride, 88) I’ll never get closer to giving birth than this. I looked after that first pit for months. Had it inside me, pushed it out. And I take perfect care of all the avocado trees I’ve started that way. (Roche, 35)

* * * In A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing the protagonist is sexually abused in the kitchen of her house by her uncle who is visiting. The girl’s sexual agency is abused, while she is also made aware of herself as a sexual being. After the abuse, the girl’s attitude towards herself changes, ‘For a change now I wear my skirt high. Rolled up to the arse when I get off the bus. A new thing’ (79). She takes it upon herself to pass on the sexual experience to others, while admonishing their lack of prior knowledge, ‘Go on then I say you’re a big hard man. You know don’t you know everything. I don’t he

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says. Oh don’t you?’ (87). She attempts to take back control for (or of) herself by giving her body to the inexperienced boys around her, seeing the process of sexual transference as her ‘great work’ (88). The girl’s sexual promiscuity travels quickly from ‘behind the prefabs’, to the ‘bike shed’, to ‘the lake’, and into the ‘car’ (p.88). Shame is written throughout these pages, but it is deferred onto ‘all you fucking lads,’ who are ‘all shame when they think their flesh desired’ (89), yet ‘they’ll say my name forever shame but do exactly what I say’ (90). The girl’s name becomes shame, her nameless anonymity overridden, so that she becomes the affective state of her namesake. The girl compares the ‘feathery boy rosen cheek’ with her ‘new blousy blazen face’ (90). She acknowledges the moment of shame in the blush of her ‘blazen face’, connoting the silent homonym of a ‘brazen’ face. The girl embodies her sense of shame by attempting to hide behind a veil of confidence, and brazen shamelessness. McBride’s girl makes her sexuality hyper-visible with her lack of bodily boundaries. Probyn argues that shame can be a form of self-­transformation but only if it is acknowledged: If you’re interested in and care about the interest of others, you spend much of your life blushing. Conversely, if you don’t care, then attempts to shame won’t move you. Shame highlights different levels of interest. Shame goes to the heart of who we think we are. In this sense, shame puts one’s self-­ esteem on the line and questions our value system. (Probyn 2005, ix–x)

It is clear that the girl’s self-esteem is entangled in her sexuality, in her ability to redden the faces of the ‘fucking lads’. The girl’s new face, her new self transformed, is ‘blousy’, it is loose with promiscuity. The incestuous sexual abuse she has encountered has ensured that she is not interested in the lads, or in her body. Her value system has been corrupted from the outside in, ‘I love the. Something of it all. Feeling ruined. Fucking’ (A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, 111). Attempts to shame the girl go unnoticed by her, which shows the welt of corruption in her self-esteem: she doesn’t care to have others interested in her as anything more than a hole, a vehicle for fucking, a ‘ruined’ body, as she is not even interested in herself. This erasure of shame through content, characterisation and language creates a work of fiction that enacts boundary blurring: denying hierarchical and binary forms of identity and judgement. This is a narrative technique which can be demonstrated through an absence as well.

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There is no talk of contraception in the novel, no talk of missed periods, or pregnancy. The only imagery of birth in the book is the protagonists’ own. McBride erases the narrative of shame surrounding unmarried mothers in Ireland. Of course, McBride is painting a picture of Ireland at a particular time, and, as a Catholic country, contraception has always been a contested subject. When I was attending an all-girls Catholic school in West Cork between 2000 and 2006, these issues were of paramount importance. I couldn’t say for sure how many times I sat over the toilet bowl begging my insides to bleed. Girls got pregnant in our school as young as fourteen. There was talk of pregnancy pacts. How to trap a man. Buying pills from the North. Going across the water to ‘visit relatives’. Bleeding out at home after a litre of vodka. ‘Falling’ down the stairs. I’m certain I’m not the only one who contracted an STI. No rhythm method will save you from that. Then why does McBride leave all of this out of her girl’s story? She deliberately silences these concerns even within the girl’s stream of consciousness. These worries could seem repressed within the narrator or completely not of interest to her because of the erasure of self she has suffered through sexual abuse. Her lack of interest in herself and others puts her beyond the reach of shame, even if her name is ‘forever shame’. In Wetlands, Roche approaches reproduction through Helen’s sterilisation and unusual hobbies to display the queer ways in which Helen attempts to access motherhood: ‘I grow avocado trees. Besides fucking, it’s my only hobby’ (33). Helen creates a gestation period for the avocado pit by putting it inside her, calling the pit her ‘organic dildo’ (35). In this section of the novel, sensation becomes sustainability as Helen develops a queer futurity all of her own. Following on from José Esteban Muñoz, the queer futurity that I am describing in this chapter is not an end but an opening or horizon, ‘it is instead a future being within the present that is both a utopian kernel and an anticipatory illumination. It is a being in, toward, and for futurity’ (2009, 91). As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to have a child. There’s a recurring pattern in my family. My great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, and me. All first-born. All girls. All neurotic, deranged, and depressed. But I broke the cycle. This year I turned eighteen and I’ve been waiting for that moment. One day after my birthday—as soon as I didn’t need parental approval—I had myself sterilized. (35–36)

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Helen attempts to address the problem of futurity in heterosexual culture. As she remains in a period of sexual delay, and therefore not a grown up adult but rather a perpetual child growing sideways, she sees herself as the future, and not the potential children that she has chosen not to reproduce. Muñoz argues that, ‘Rather than invest in a deferred future, the queer citizen-subject labors to live in a present that is calibrated’ (Muñoz 2009, 49). Helen invests in this present self with her choice to be sterilized, ostensibly to protect her future self, and future reproduced selves, from intergenerational mental illness. But the narrative refuses to erase fully maternal reproduction, transferring her motherly inclinations towards her avocado pits, creating a queer post-human family that gives her a sense of purpose, ‘My family’s all set up. The pit collection makes it feel a bit more like home. As long as I can take care of my avocados I’ll have something to do’ (94). Through the girl’s expression of her ‘great work’, and Helen’s of ‘something to do’, we get the sense that both feel a lack of autonomous self-awareness. The surrounding environment of shame constantly attempts to efface them; Helen cannot eat her breakfast of granola, and the girl cannot express her childish playfulness in forward rolls, without these moments being considered shameful. As a response to this effacement, they try to find ways in which to bind themselves to an other through their bodies, while attempting to also bind themselves to their bodies. Both novels achieve this by offering up the girls’ bodies as orifices through which to read. McBride uses the full stop with abandon, against the traditional rules of punctuation, paradoxically to open the holes further, to offer constant openings in the text through which the reader can merge with the girl. Roche is more explicit, with Helen literally bursting holes in the stitches in her asshole to provide a chance meeting between her parents, hoping to cause them to reunite. Helen breaks holes in herself in order to seek wholeness. The girl’s sexual abuse and Helen’s fear of intergenerational mental illness makes them feel incomplete, or unsuccessful, expressed via a rhetoric which focuses on bodies which fail to reach society’s conventional codes of hygiene, sexual maturity, and reproduction. * * * There now. There now. That just was life. And now. What? My name is gone. (McBride, 261–262) I smack the button, the door swings open, I throw back my head and scream. (Roche, 229)

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The final words of each novel (quoted above) provide writerly clues to our readings. McBride chooses to end on what reads as erasure, ‘My name is gone’, but this could be read as redemption in its erasure of the girl’s name being ‘forever shame’ earlier in the novel. The girl has managed to transcend the ‘forever’ of her name through death. Roche ends Wetlands with Helen’s scream in response to freedom. These last lines seem uncharacteristic of Helen, who throughout the novel vocalises without contention. We end on a ‘gone’ ‘scream’, a contradiction of our reading experiences of the narrator. Experimental and sensational writing are styles that are at once difficult, and abject: these novels centralise women’s unclean bodies, and shame, but use styles that are also simplified, and … proud? Apparently, the opposite of abject is ‘proud’. People often ask me what the opposite of shame is. They seem uncomfortable with the topic of my PhD thesis, which has the words ‘lesbian’, and ‘shame’ in its title. They want the opposite of those things, straightness, and pride. But is pride really the opposite of shame? I read an argument once that suggested love as the opposite of shame. Whereas Caryl Emerson makes the case for the conflation, rather than opposition, of love and shame through the work of Bakhtin, I love another but I cannot love myself, another loves me but cannot love himself, each is right in his own place … another occupies his place in my … consciousness [only] to the extent that I love him as another, and not as myself. (Bakhtin cited in Emerson 1991, 664)

Emerson continues to suggest that the larger implication of Bakhtin’s argument may be that ‘there is something shameful about a single isolated consciousness, and that the only way to get out of that sin or shame situation is by the proper sort of love’ (1994, 664). As a lesbian possessed by an auto-theoretical consciousness, I am full of the shameful self-fucking consciousness of the girls in both novels; we are guilty of improper expressions of love. But these girl narrators are not me; they are an other, conflicted in character somewhere between love and shame, pride and abjection. No matter how cleverly McBride, and Roche, use shame, expressed around and through them as a mode of final narratorial effacement. I didn’t shag lads on my lunch break. I didn’t get sterilised, and grow avocado trees. * * *

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When I was a nineteen-year old university student, I became obsessed with a man. He was thirteen years older than me and his son was two years my junior. In the first ever text message he sent me, after months of watching him walk past my flat from my friend’s attic bedroom window, he signed off with his first initial only—‘M’. I thought this showed maturity and that it somehow implied that I was naively attached to the entire four letters of my own first name. I am reminded of a quote from Foucault that I read years ago—(and may be mis-remembering now, as I cannot find the source)—but it is what I remember: ‘at what age will I become a letter/ the name is the end of discourse’. I was at that stage in my life only ‘a half-­ formed thing’, much like McBride’s unnamed narrator. McBride’s fragmented sentences capture the shamed, distorted mind of a girl raised (or more accurately razed) Catholic in Ireland, and the constant attempts to mould herself into the unforgiving, patriarchal world surrounding her. A year later the English translation of Wetlands was published. I was fascinated with Helen, the novel’s eighteen-year old narrator, and with how her sexuality was fluid in an unexplained way. One moment a man is erotically shaving her legs, the next she is having sex with a female prostitute. Every Wednesday night, one of the nightclubs in Cork City had a queer night called Freak Scene. I would go every week, drink copious amounts of €2.50 vodka and orange, kiss women on the dancefloor, and in the bathroom stalls. The older man once asked me about it. I shrugged it off with some excuse. I delayed that conversation. I believe there has been altogether too much silence. Experimental, and sensational, women writers feed off shame to creatively dig holes in the garden of literary convention, they get dirt under their fingernails, and make no attempt to clean it out. Literature needs more filthy girls written by filthy women, more dirty bitches, packs of them.

Notes 1. Specifically, Making Connections: The Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School published in 1989 which Gilligan edited. 2. ‘Girl’ is a Cork colloquialism expressed with affection towards someone, usually female.

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Works Cited Aitkenhead, D. 2009. It Should Make You Blush. The Guardian. https://www. theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/17/interview-charlotte-roche-debutnovel-wetlands. Accessed 1 Dec 19. Allardice, L. 2020. Women Are Really Angry. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/24/eimear-mcbride-women-are-reallyangry. Accessed 1 Dec 19. Anzaldúa, G., and C.  Moraga. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press. Bellamy, D. 2008. Barf Manifesto. New York: Ugly Duckling Presse. Butler, J. 1993. Critically Queer. GLQ 1: 17–32. Chesler, Phyllis. 1972. Women and Madness. Garden City: Doubleday. Cixous, Hélène. 1976. The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs 1 (4): 875–893. Emerson, C. 1991. Solov’ev, the Late Tolstoi, and the Early Bakhtin on the Problem of Shame and Love. Slavic Review 3: 663–671. Johnson, E.P. 1995. SNAP! Culture: A Different Kind of ‘Reading’. Text and Performance Quarterly. 15: 122–142. Kristeva, J. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Levy, A. 2005. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. London: Free Press. McBride, E. 2013. A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company. Mitchell, Kaye. 2020. Writing Shame: Gender, Contemporary Literature and Negative Affect. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Muñoz, J.E. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Nelson, M. 2015. The Argonauts. Minnesota: Graywolf Press. Osmundson, J. 2018. Inside / Out. Little Rock: Sibling Rivalry Press. Preciado, B. 2013. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornograhic Era. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York City. Probyn, E. 2005. Blush: Faces in Shame. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Roche, C. 2009. Wetlands. London: Fourth Estate. Rodríguez, J.M. 2014. Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings. New York: NYU Press. Sedgwick, E.K. 1993. Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of The Novel. GLQ 1: 1–16.

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Sedgwick, E.K., and A. Frank. 1995. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. London: Duke University Press. Stockton, K.B. 2009. The Queer Child: Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. London: Duke University Press. Thoreau, H.D. 2016. Walden. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zwartjes, A. 2019. Autotheory as Rebellion: On Research, Embodiment, and Imagination in Creative Nonfiction. Michigan Quarterly Review. https://sites. lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2019/07/autotheory-as-rebellion-on-research-embodiment-and-imagination-in-creative-nonfiction/. Accessed 1 Aug 2019.

CHAPTER 14

‘Daring to Tilt Worlds’: The Fiction of Irenosen Okojie Suzanne Scafe

The title of this chapter is taken from the epigraph of the short story collection Speak Gigantular (2016) which reads: ‘To all the misfits who dare to tilt worlds’, and in an interview for BritLitBerlin, Okojie speaks frequently about her interest in those who are ‘on the fringes’, whose voices ‘you never get to hear’ (Okojie 2017). These are people, she explains, who are ‘coming undone’, and ‘trying to realign themselves’. Her work focuses on their worlds, worlds that are structured by their own startling logic and, through its stylistic inventiveness and intricate patterning, her fiction participates in processes of realignment. As Mrs. Harris, a character in Butterfly Fish says to Joy, the novel’s protagonist, ‘People like you and I sometimes find ourselves embracing different realities. There’s a beauty in it. It’s like having a key’ (Okojie 2015, 183). The ‘beauty’ of the other worlds is evident in the novel’s lyrical descriptions of nineteenth-century Benin or the more surreal, fantastic scenes in twentieth-century London, but it is a beauty that is also obscured or made difficult to access through Okojie’s complex, challenging language, the unconventional material and

S. Scafe (*) London South Bank University, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Aughterson, D. Philips (eds.), Women Writers and Experimental Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_14

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its non-linear structures. The character’s reference to ‘having a key’ is ambiguous, raising issues of interpretation. How do we read these other realities, or ‘experimental’ fiction more generally, in ways that do not simply decode the texts otherworldliness? In this chapter, I argue that part of the meaning of Okojie’s fiction lies in its wide spaces of open-endedness, where her prose resists an easy route to meaning. Her work challenges readers and critics to refuse allegorical readings that normalise the strangeness of these ‘different realities’ and their tilted characters. As Kaye Mitchell notes, citing Christine Brooke-Rose: ‘More than just tinkering with the signifier, an experiment with new forms produces “new ways of looking”’ (Mitchell 2015, 5). A new way of seeing black women’s experimental fiction is one that resists both exoticizing the text by locating its difference in non-European, supposedly non-rational and otherworldly cultures, and allegorising the work to find its socio-cultural truths. There is, as Kaye Mitchell (2015) points out, a notable absence of discrete studies of women writers in the recent, magisterial collection of essays on experimental literature edited by Joy Bray, Alison Gibbon and Brian McHale. There is just one chapter on African-American experimental poetry, Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s ‘African-American Avant-garde poetics’, and in the corrective collection, Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction (1989), there is no sustained discussion of black women writers, despite a rich seam of experimental writing by twentiethcentury African American women such as Octavia E. Butler, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Gayle Jones, Ntosake Shange to name just a few, and by African and Caribbean writers such as Bessie Head , Michelle Cliff, Erna Brodber or Nalo Hopkinson.1 As Aldon Lynn Nielsen (1997) notes, commenting on the double exclusion of African-American experimental poetry, ‘a requisite “realism” of language practice must be adhered to by black authors if they are to be canonized as proper literary representations of the social experiences of marginality’ (Nielsen 1997, 8). It is also the case that black British women’s writing continues to be subject to sociological readings that side-­step linguistic or stylistic aspects of the work. Bernardine Evaristo’s fiction or her novels-in-verse, for example, are often anlaysed in critical contexts that privilege concerns with black British experiences of identity and the search for belonging, despite her experiments with form, with genre, language and content. Other writers, such as Zadie Smith,2 Helen Oyeyemi, Diana Evans, or less celebrated writers such as Leone Ross, however, have highlighted the experimental aspects of their

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work and there is a sense that critical attention is beginning to focus less on its ‘black British content’ and more on the aesthetic values of the work, as evidenced in recent essays on Zadie Smith’s NW (2012),3 contemporary reviews of Evaristo’s Man-­Booker prize winning Girl, Woman, Other (2019) and the edited collection, Telling It Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi (2017). It is important to cite these critical and textual absences not simply as an account-taking exercise but to suggest, as I demonstrate below, that Okojie’s work emerges in a context of black British women’s writing that is already, in various ways, innovative, speculative or experimental. It is of course, difficult to define comprehensively what is meant by experimental literature. The introduction to The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature advances a basic definition of experimental literature noting that ‘[T]he one feature that all literary experiments share is their commitment to raising fundamental questions about the very nature and being of verbal art itself. What is literature and what could it be?’ (Bray et al. 2012b, 1). These questions, the editors argue, are ‘repressed’ in ‘mainstream’ literature even though, as with the writing of the modernist period, much of the work that has been defined by its contemporaries as experimental often transfers into the mainstream (1). If, in addition to its self-reflexive quality, experimental literature presents experiments that are either linguistic, structural, generic or material (Mitchell 2015), then much contemporary fiction can be classed as experimental. Nielsen suggests that Phillis Wheatley, writing from within ‘a particularly inhumane experiment in slavery’ produced poetry that was by definition experimental, since it brought lives that were disregarded and unaccounted for into visibility (Nielsen 2012, 168) While it might have been the case that the newness of the African subject on the page constituted an experiment in the eighteenth-century Americas, as Nielsen would also argue, it is important in the context of the contemporary period not to consider the representation of black worlds in and of itself as experimental but, as in the approach taken to the fiction discussed in this chapter, to focus on the otherworldly worlds the texts construct, worlds that are almost beyond words and beyond ‘fully imaginable situations’ (Ryan 2012, 369). Reading worlds that are unimaginable is by definition difficult, and surmounting this difficulty involves some deconstruction, a process by which the difficulty is diminished, and the text made accessible. The process of analysing work defined as experimental, therefore, where the term itself includes literature that is ‘unconventional’ and associated with ‘qualities of shock

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and affront, iconoclasm and difficulty’ is a contradictory one (Bray et al. 2012b, 2). While not denying the contradictory nature of this critical process, Marie-Laure Ryan’s essay ‘Impossible Worlds’ offers a useful framework for reading Okojie’s work in part because Okojie’s fiction does construct worlds and realities that are sometimes impossible to imagine and are frequently in conflict with each other, and also because the concept of an ‘impossible world’ offers an approach to reading that retains some of the work’s incommensurability. Ryan argues that, since fictional worlds are necessarily products of the imagination, concepts of ‘possibility’ and ‘impossibility’ are both relative and specific to literary texts. As she notes, a literally ‘impossible’ textual world is one that cannot be deciphered, where the words on the page have no external referent, whereas the kind of impossibility focused on in Ryan’s work is more narrowly defined as a range of textual effects. She cites three textual forms of impossibility: semantic contradictions, where the words or sentences contradict each other, confounding the achievement of coherence, of a logical sequence of events or of a plausible understanding of character; ontological impossibility, often referred to as metalepsis, where characters from the ‘real’ world enter the text, or where boundaries between the ‘real’ and the fictional are self-consciously used to highlight the work’s fictionality. As Ryan notes, ‘This self-referential, illusion-destroying effect explains why the device has become a dominant feature, some would say a trick of the trade of postmodern fiction’ (Ryan 2012, 372). The third impossibility is temporal, where time moves backward, chronology is disrupted, or characters and events are out of time. Ryan posits the question: ‘How then do we make sense of these worlds?’ (Ryan 2012, 376). Rather than advocate a paradigmatic reading of texts according to the schema cited above that lists categories of impossibility, Ryan acknowledges the difficulties and dangers of making sense of these impossible worlds and the need for diverse interpretative strategies. The analysis that follows defines possibility and impossibility from within the specific contexts of the texts themselves. In some instances, I use an approach to meaning that is naturalising, that preserves ‘the logical integrity of the fictional world’ (377), in others, I signal the texts’ unreliable narrator and argue that the worlds s/he constructs contrast with reality as constructed within the diegetic frame. In the discussion of Okojie’s short fiction, I offer a reading that aims to preserve the dream-like world of the texts, one that ‘endows the actual world of the textual universe with the characteristics of dreams: fluid images, objects

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undergoing incessant metamorphoses, and a general lack of ontological stability’ (Ryan 2012, 377). Irenosen’s debut novel, Butterfly Fish is set in nineteenth-century Benin, mid-twentieth-century Nigeria and London, and contemporary London. It is about the hauntings of history and its active presence in the present. Its protagonist and first-person narrator, ironically named Joy, is for the most part of the novel, unaware of the precise character of these hauntings but is nevertheless subject to their effects, including experiences of violence that threaten her life. The narrative is therefore framed by the past of nineteenth-century Benin, and the connection between past and present is expressed in the poetic language of Okojie’s narrative; its use of frequent repetition, its intricate, interwoven threads of language and imagery, its use of symbolism to structure the plot, and the patterned, mosaic structure of disparate events. Within the novel’s present, however, there are characters who are ‘coming undone’ and whose worlds are beyond logic and explanation. These worlds and times, the orderly and the rationally depicted past and the chaotic, unreadable present are in conflict and tension throughout. The novel’s opening chapter, set in ‘Modern London’, presents a concatenation of surprising and seemingly out of place objects and images that set out the novel’s main preoccupations and introduce the figures around which meaning is made: A green palm wine bottle rolled on the wet London Street. Its movements were audible gasps made of glass. It didn’t matter how the bottle had arrived at its location under the curious yellow gaze of the lamppost or whether the messenger had been a postman delivering for both God and the dancing devil. The image unfurling inside the bottle shimmering like moonlight trapped in glass mattered. Lick the edges of the picture presented and you could taste the sour, sweet traces of palm wine and trap your tongue in a different time; 19th century Benin, Nigeria. (3)

The image of the bottle in the novel’s first paragraph brings the past and a geographical and cultural distance into the novel’s present in contemporary London. The as yet undecipherable contents of the bottle seep into the dreams of the protagonist, asleep in a ‘quietly dark flat’, whose head tosses ‘towards two paths lined with coloured, broken glass … the tiny people from the palm wine bottle pleading against her thumping heartbeat’ (4). By depicting in ‘real’ time, the arrival of the bottle on the

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‘wet London Street’, Okojie preserves the ambiguity of this event: ‘Out of the dark London night a teenager being chased by two raucous friends … swiped the bottle up and threw it against the wall, watching it smash. He yelped as the contents spilled out, an amorphous mass, images flickering like ancient film reel’ (4). This event is given a material identity by the actions of the boy who also sees the contents of the bottle spill out. The materiality of the spillage, however, is immediately placed in doubt by the narrative’s reference to the boy’s drunkeness: ‘The boy’s pupils were swimming in beer and he was uncertain of the picture before him as the scene dragged itself up the pavement’ (4). The figures in the bottle walk into the dreams of the protagonist, and in this way a fluid, incoherent world of dreams blends seamlessly into the material world, thus blurring the boundary between the real and the surreal. The characters in the bottle emerge from a different reality but a reality nevertheless, as the figure of the boy suggests. The green bottle, sometimes appearing later in the narrative as a green bottle of ginger wine, images of broken glass, and the colour ‘green’, reappear throughout the novel, linking all the characters to each other either literally, in terms of their genealogical and familial connection, or figuratively. Like the glass, all the main characters are broken and either dangerous or in danger. The sharp edges of the broken glass echo in a juxtaposing scene which describes a razor ‘that had called me by my name’ (8) and led the protagonist to a suicide attempt. Broken glass is used throughout to express the characters’ disintegration: ‘My glass feet broke repeatedly on the pavement. Heartbeats were gunshots fired in my chest’ (229). At this point in the narrative, Joy has discovered that the lawyer Mervyn and her mother were having an affair. This discovery seems to bring her mother back to life, make her ‘real again’ but at the same time, to present her as a ‘fevered angel sleepwalking on the wings of planes’ (: 229). The glass connects Joy’s and her mother’s experiences of trauma back to the story of the figures in the bottle and the curse within which all their lives become enmeshed; the plane reflects the mother’s journey and her daughter’s, both in opposite directions. Despite its hauntings in the present and despite its realistic representation in the narrative, the ‘real’, lived past of nineteenth-century Benin is, as I argue below, presented in the novel as unavailable in the present of the novel. This is suggested by references throughout this opening scene to the past as an artefact, a ‘picture’, or as ‘images flickering like an ancient film reel’ (4). The bottle contains an ‘emerald-eyed man and a young

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woman attired in traditional Nigerian cloth’: they are, as is later revealed, Adesua and Sully, who were buried alive as punishment for their affair by ‘soldiers who could perform the nifty trick of building distances between bodies in close proximity’ (3). There are, in the novel, no testaments to this history. This is an imagined past, and although the characters in the present are somehow affiliated to this past, evident in Mrs. Harris’s green eyes, for example, they are not represented as being directly connected by ‘blood’ to use an image often repeated in the narrative. In the novel, ‘History’, the history of nineteenth-century Benin, stops with the two lovers’ deaths but its repercussions continue with the reappearance and repetition of sequences of images discussed in the second half of this chapter: the brass head in 1950’s Lagos and London; the fumes of the palm wine; the ‘pink beaded bracelet’ (3) of the woman in this opening scene; the ‘red dust’ (3), and Anon/Adesua, a figure from the bottle who reappears in Joy’s other reality. The author has said that her choice of nineteenth-century Benin as a setting for the novel was motivated by her frustration that black history was always seen through the lens of slavery and colonialism. There is so much more, she explains in her interview with Tobias During (2017), that remains hidden. The invisibility of black African cultures and societies and the absence of black voices in the representations of the African and European past is something that continues to preoccupy black British writers such as Caryl Phillips, whose use of ‘borrowed’ texts of eighteenth and nineteenth-century colonialists and nineteenth-century slave narratives and black missionaries’ diaries in his novels Cambridge and Crossing the River, speaks to the absence of an authoritative account of African culture not circumscribed by the language of the coloniser. While using her experimental novel-in-verse, The Emperor’s Babe (2002) to point to the presence of Africans in Roman Britain, Bernardine Evaristo’s narrative also reveals the past’s inaccessibility, and the impossibility of recovering history simply by inserting black characters or reversing history’s privileging of whiteness. This text is characterised by her repeated use of anachronisms. In one of many such instances Alba, a friend of the young protagonist Zuleika reprimands her: ‘No Zee, get a personal trainer,/lift some dumb-­ bells like everyone else, or go to the gym. Your value’s up/but you’ve got to maintain it’ (101). By situating Zuleika’s role as wife to the Emperor within contemporary discourses of fame, the pervasive reach of social media and the gendered politics of the body, Evaristo suggests that any project of uncovering the past is inevitably shaped and perhaps distorted

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by preoccupations in the present. In attempting to recover the past, we hold a mirror up to ourselves. The Kingdom of Benin has always proved fascinating for European travellers and this fascination has continued to the present day. Much of the evidence of the pre-colonial past exists in written accounts by sixteenth and seventeenth-century European traders and missionaries. As Paula Ben-Amos Girshick and John Thornton argue, Benin as it appears in those documents was a ‘wealthy and centralized kingdom [with a] magnificent capital city, one whose archaeology has only begun to be explored’ (2001, 358). To these Europeans, Benin city was reminiscent of their capital cities: Lisbon, Madrid, Antwerp, Florence and Amsterdam and their writing describes in some detail the ‘impressive’ orderly layout of the capital, and its prosperity (359). The Irishman James Field Stanfield, writing in the 1780s describes a stable, wealthy community, whose markets ‘teemed with luxuries unknown to Europeans’ (Girshick Ben-Amos and Thornton 2001, 376). After the British invasion of 1897, however, and the subsequent razing to the ground of Benin City, imperial historiography recast Benin’s past as barbaric, despite the high aesthetic and monetary value assigned to the bronze, brass and ivory artefacts plundered by the British during that conquest (Osadolor and Otoide 2008; Bondarenko and Roese 2004). In the 1930s, however, Edo historian Jacob U. Egharevba began to recover a detailed history of the past, drawing on a ‘vast collection of disparate oral traditions from titleholders, priests, and elders in Benin who had been alive prior to the colonial takeover in 1897’ (Girshick Ben-Amos and Thornton 2001, 356), and from the 1950s, Benin historiography has been rearticulated by Nigerian, American and European scholars whose work has extended the research of oral historians and continues to use the accounts of first-hand witnesses to try to capture the details of the Kingdom’s rich, centuries-old past. Okojie confronts the challenges posed by history’s silences and misrepresentations both by drawing on and representing eyewitness accounts as well as her own experiences of the Kingdom, and by scrambling existing chronologies in order to suggest the incompleteness of the project of historical recovery. The narrative focuses, not on the formal relations of the court or royal history, but on the gendered, domestic aspects of the palace, and, in particular, the interiorities of the women of the Oba’s household, their desires, acts of resistance and betrayals. This emphasis points to women’s absence in historical accounts, and underscores the impossibility of understanding life as it was lived in the Benin past, particularly as much

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recent history has tended to focus on describing elite structures of governance and reconstructing an orderly account of the transfers of power within the Kingdom (Bondarenko and Roese 2004). The novel’s depiction of the city’s geography repeats oral and colonial accounts that emphasise its sophisticated structures of governance and economic prosperity but in Okojie’s narrative, this orderliness is juxtaposed with descriptions of turmoil and the transgressive events which lead to the downfall of the Kingdom: Benin was a city that had flourished over time under the rule of the different obas, and for the most part sat in quiet, satisfied contentment. You could see it in the number of undamaged gates there were throughout, many of them reaching eight or nine feet in height, with doors made from single pieces of ancient wood hinged on pegs, behind which smart and sometimes opulent homes had been built … Even along the streets the houses sat in neat rows. The palace of Benin was divided into several quarters, apartments for courtiers and houses in sprawling, endless dust-shrouded grounds … the sun shone on the ornate copper engravings depicting war exploits … Each roof had a small turret with copper casted birds harbouring the sounds of battle, waiting to carry them into angles of light swirling in the blue sky. (42–43)

Benin city and its palace is a closed environment, surrounded by impenetrable walls, divided by closed doors that entrap the Oba’s wives and conceal his own deterioration, his fragile grip on reality. In contrast to the seeming orderliness of the city and palace the engraved plaques and copper casts depict battles past and predict future conflict; the ‘dust-shrouded grounds’ foreshadow death and the city’s destruction. The closed character of the city and its palace signifies what, in historical accounts, has been described as the late nineteenth-century Oba Ovonramwen’s protectionist policies, which the British had, for some years, been trying to overcome in order to penetrate Benin and the surrounding forest region. Despite the Oba’s clear refusal to allow the British entry to the city, the Acting Consul-­ General Phillips decided to ‘force an audience’ with the Oba in order to open the route to British trade. The murder of Phillips en route to the palace led to a ‘full-scale war effort’ on Benin, other wise known as the Punitive Expedition, on February 18, 1897 (Obinyan 1988, 38). Okojie side-steps this version of history, however, focusing instead on the ways in which murderous or transgressive acts haunt lives in the present and future, and create cracks in the fabric of a society and culture that invite

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retribution. The chapter describing Oba Odion’s assassination of his childhood friend Ogiso, his father’s favourite son and whom he learns is his half-brother, begins: ‘The fall of a great kingdom did not always start with war. Sometimes it took a vicious wish shrouded by the hot breath of a bitter woman … perhaps even the good intentions of a craftsman’ (Okojie 2015, 53). The second event to precipitate the fall is the casting in brass of the head of the slain Ogiso by the royal craftsman Ere. The first is the arranged poisoning of Odion’s father Oba Anuje, who watches him die. Following these events Oba Odion unravels and loses himself in drink, and the order of the palace collapses. Odion’s youngest wife Adesua and her white lover Sully are murdered on the orders of the courtiers; the Oba’s first son by his favourite wife Omotole is born without a face, and the Kingdom falls. The narrative repositions the arrival of the first Portuguese traders in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the nineteenth-century context of the novel, suggesting that in addition to the disintegration that resulted from curses on the Kingdom following personal acts of violence and betrayal, during this period the Kingdom had also ‘unlocked the stranger’s gate and in doing so, extended a hand to unforeseen dangers. Because more European men would come, setting in motion an unstoppable, tragically disastrous, chain of events’ (Okojie 2015, 218). The ‘tilts’ in the narrative’s representations of Benin are consistent with its depictions of a distant and unavailable time and place. In contrast, many scenes in the novel’s present seem both to lack coherence and express a poetic logic. The sudden disappearance from the narrative of Mrs. Harris, the shape-shifting, self-proclaimed Houdini, is explained by the arrival of police, who claim she is wanted for benefit fraud. In the context of her strange otherworldly presence and her suggested connection to Sully and the events that spill from the green bottle, this naturalisation of her character is provocatively inadequate. Joy is, throughout, losing her grip on reality and dangerously so. The first-person narrative brings the reader into the mind of the protagonist, thus heightening the blurred distinctions between the real and the surreal. Readers, like the narrator, are unable to distinguish between the material and the imagined worlds. Towards the end of the novel, Joy becomes involved in a dangerous love affair, signalled in the sentences that introduce the relationship: ‘A mouse’s red head spun the day I met Rangi. Coincidentally, on my way out, the dead mouse lay just beyond my thick, brown welcome mat’ (Okojie 2015, 269). The dismembered head projects the future dismembering of Joy’s right arm as she is led to jump on to a rail track by the imaginary Anon and

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also possibly by Rangi himself. The figure of the mouse on the carpet brings the dream and the material worlds and the worlds of humans and animals on to the same level of consciousness. At another moment in their relationship, there is another of many descriptions of a similar collision of worlds and realities: On the drive back home, I swallowed the stone floating in my minds eye. It sank to the bottom of my stomach …The purple collar of my dress was stiff, ready to corner stray creatures of night… We stopped on a bridge by the river for air. A fox was taking orders from something unseen. Rangi lit a cigarette, took a draw and began to pace the small area we’d resigned ourselves to. An empty bottle of Australian Pinot Grigio rolled nearby. (293)

There are frequent references to the protagonist swallowing stones, perhaps as a way of bringing herself back to earth. It is a habit her doctor asks her about, though again, it is not clear whether, as in the example above, this is not something she repeatedly imagines herself doing. In this example too, worlds collide and the material world, evidenced in specific named objects and actions, lends a kind of reality to the imagined. Okojie describes her prose as a ‘robust, charged language’4where the everyday is mixed with the surreal and the magical, and in this text the charge of the magical comes in part from Joy’s unravelling but also from the force of the past that interrupts but also lends coherence to the present. These interruptions are represented by the imagery which patterns the novel and which become the means by which worlds and times are seen to infiltrate each other. Insects are one of the primary means used to create the effect of temporal and spatial borderlessness: flies, caterpillars, grasshoppers, butterflies and spiders repeatedly appear as agents. They belong to the material, everyday world that incorporates all life forms, as well as a world of spirits. The web of relations between the characters, for example, is presented through the repeated use of spiders and cobwebs attached to Adesua and Joy. After the Oba first has sex with her, Adesua feels ‘a tiny spider’ crawl into her heart: ‘It sat comfortably and arranged its slightly crooked legs. It sipped a little blood’ (50), and after her mother’s death and when fear and despair begin to take hold, Joy experiences the rain outside transformed into ‘Spiders made of water’ crawling on her skin (74). Waiting in the hospital she saw herself ‘sitting on a crumbling rock, swatting cobwebs away from my privates frantically’ (20). In addition, the narrative exploits

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and expands the colloquial use of animal or more frequently insect imagery and activity. Figurative expressions such as ‘I fished the leather bound journal from my handbag’ (Okojie 2015, 121), ‘Fish out of Water’ (12), or ‘A concrete path snaked its way’ (141), are literalised and made strange through the appearance of fish that are literally out of water such as the caught fish that Adesua imagines ‘turning blind in one eye from the brightness of the light’ (161). Fish become other matter but retain their essence: ‘Plastic fish made of old photo IDs’ that enter an always changing painting and swim towards the figure of a woman’ (260). In her essay for the collection that accompanied the exhibition of Benin art in New  York, 1981, Flora Kaplan notes that the ‘The  Bini envision existence on two planes: the visible world known as “Agbon” and the invisible world known as “Erinmwi”’ (Kaplan 1981, 78). In this culture, the invisible world is made visible through symbols in the material world that are freighted with meaning and express their connection to another life. The most significant of such symbols used in Butterfly Fish that originate in Bini culture include the pink/red beaded necklaces and bracelets or simply the colour pink that, in the London of the narrative’s present, evoke the importance of coral in Benin royal culture, valued because of its connection with Olokun, god of the waters and prosperity (Bickford Berzock 2008). The Benin brass head is a unifying symbol in the novel, connecting the Oba’s murder of his close friend and brother to the murder committed by Joy’s grandfather, Peter Lowon, in 1950’s Nigeria, and to Lowon’s incestuous act with his daughter, Queenie, Joy’s mother. The power of the head signifies the deep meanings and secrets, many still undecipherable, that reside in the looted artefacts that were integral to the preservation and daily governance of Benin and that are now detached from their contexts, and held in museums and galleries in British, European and American cities. Although the title suggests that the novel’s central symbol is the butterfly fish, of significance to the narrative because it feeds on coral, in fact for the most part the butterfly and the fish are represented separately. There are frequent references to ‘mad butterflies’, ‘the rare butterfly’ (Okojie 2015, 67) or the ‘broken wing’ of the butterfly, all of which are attached to the broken and ‘out of place’ (67–68) women characters in both Benin and London. Fish, on the other hand, as they first appear and throughout, are not the small yellow and blue butterfly fish but often bear a similarity to mudfish. Electric mudfish, in Benin mythology, are important because if touched, they deliver a shock. They can also exist out of

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water for extended periods of time, thus making them fitting symbols of ‘the oba’s otherworldly, terrifying powers’ (Bickford Berzock 2008, 8). Fish, therefore, as the following example illustrates, are both ‘otherwordly’, and signs of another historically material world: We were at the bottom of the sea, not the crammed leisure centre pool in east London … the remnants of our conversation sunk to the bottom to become tadpoles. “Shit! There’s a fish in the water.” A kid squealed. … The fish stared at me; inside its filmy eye shuttered a mini camera lens. A crowd gathered around us. The fish’s mouth opened repeatedly. It trembled, then heaved and a worn, brass key slick with gut slime fell out of its mouth into my hand… The fish trembled as if my hands gave electric shocks. (22–4)

Once she has the key, Joy tries to revive the fish with mouth to mouth resuscitation, to which the kids respond: ‘This woman’s weird’ (24) and again, the narrative plays with the diegetic levels of its own fictional worlds. The dimensions of this two feet long, shiny fish are closer to those of the mudfish than the butterfly fish, and images of fish or parts of a fish reappear in the narrative in several scenes that are both realistic, such as the scene of Sully and Adesua fishing, magical, or on the border between the real and the fantastic, such as the scene cited above. It is not until the end of the novel, when Joy returns to Benin city following her discovery of the identity of her grand/father, that the butterfly fish makes an appearance: On the plot of land tucked behind the boarding house, right arms grew in soft soil, rising amidst yams, cassava, bitter leaf … I listened for the ripple a butterfly fish made in glass. I held my father’s diary, stroked the warm leather. Grappling with his legacy, I opened the pages and sat under water, waiting to begin again. (344)

On first reading, this ending seems to offer a neat plot resolution: the ‘mad butterfly’ image used to describe Joy throughout the narrative is integrated into the fish that signifies Benin’s past, and her crouching position, rocking back on her heels ‘under water’, suggests a rebirth. The glass, strangely connected to the fish, is not, as it is throughout the novel, broken, though both are out of place. When the butterfly fish first appears, it swims ‘in the window as though it would survive in any surface’ (343), a reference here to the electric mudfish. ‘Under water’, however is an

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image that recalls Joy’s attempted suicide and her mother’s attempt, when Joy was a small girl, to drown her in the bath. There are, in addition, strange interruptions throughout the descriptions of her arrival in Benin that, combined with the tilted language of this final scene, its semantic contradictions and inconsistencies, its gaps, silences and persistent irresolutions, reflect a tension between the desire for meaning and a continued disruption of meaning that experimental novels seek to exploit. Despite its experimental form, the novel’s experimental language and its use of fluid, dream-like sequences to structure events, it is possible to make meaning from the narrative using conventional strategies of interpretation. The more boldly inventive style of the short stories, however, resists such attempts at meaning-making. The short story form itself, as Okojie (2017) has said, lends itself to experimentation; its compact form offers writers and readers a ‘space to play’ with new languages and with unusual material. The spaces of a short story collection provide an opportunity to experiment with other impossible, tilted worlds and words. Speak Gigantular was published in 2016 and both novel and short story collection reflect similar preoccupations, including a preoccupation with dysfunction, an interest in the relationship between different life forms, and a concern with the alienating character of the city. The short fiction, however, more consistently shocks the reader with its unexpected reversals where, for example, relationships that are expected to be nurturing, those between mothers and children or lovers, are fractured, alienating and destructive. ‘Gunk’, the story that opens the collection and ‘Animal Parts’ take a crooked look at the relationship between a mother and her child. ‘Gunk’ has no narrative arc: it is a series of cruel injunctions and accusations directed from a mother to her son. Although the son has no voice and is seemingly crushed and annihilated by the force of her words, the mother’s words give him life and substance; they bring him into existence, whereas the mother-figure remains disembodied. She repeats: ‘You just want to prove what a waste of space you are’ (1) as if, while seeming to encourage him to resist self-pity and to make something of his life, she is also goading him to self-destruct. She claims a biological and emotional connection to him with the words, ‘It’s just you and me’, ‘I gave you DNA’ (2); and ‘I carried you/ I bled for you/ I suffered for you’ (4), yet says, ‘The extras we programme ourselves to think are necessary – family, friends, jobs, love companionship – these sentiments weaken us … You’ll die one day. Look around you, this is really it’ (2–3). In this context, the words, ‘what a

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waste of space you are’ take on a more ominous significance, seeming to lure him to his death, even while her haranguing also exhorts him to ‘Get up from that bottom’ (4). Her voice emerges from his memory like a haunting and is overlaid by his own experience of a deteriorating, chaotic world: ‘Cracks in the ceiling, the floor that’s turned to quicksand’ (3). This is her voice but her words are his, and from within his world. She is ventriloquising her son. The story’s title, ‘Gunk’, is a term used in Okojie’s fictions to describe the vernix caseosa, the protective substance that protects both the foetus while still in the womb and the delicate skin of the new born. When his mother sees Henri, the protagonist of the short story ‘Animal Parts’, whose tail grows as he does, she sees something otherworldly, signalled in this description by an image of ‘gunk’: ‘… when she held Henri for the first time and he looked her in the eye blinking gunk away, she knew … that he had entered her womb before’ (24). In Butterfly Fish Omotole’s faceless, unloveable baby is born ‘covered in an unusual blue gunk’ (205), and ‘gunk’ is used to evoke the horror of the birth of each of Filo’s stillborn babies: ‘all she saw was her gunk-filled hand, drenched in slime clutching the remains of her battered womb’ (153). The epigraph of the short story, ‘Gunk’, locates the term in mereology, a philosophical system that theorises parthood relations, or the relations between parts and wholes and ‘gunk’ in mereology, describes ‘any whole whose parts all have further proper parts’ (1), thus highlighting its significance as an image for maternal relations. Okojie’s fiction, however, combines the more colloquial use of the term to mean unpleasant, dirty or sticky, both with its origins in philosophy and its biological meaning. Whereas ‘gunk’ might, in its conventional forms, be used to symbolise the protective role that the mother’s body, and then the mother herself, performs before and after the birth of her child, in all of Okojie’s work, ‘gunk’ signals abnormal, destructive or problematic mother-child relations. ‘Animal Parts’ is a self-reflexive narrative that uses, revises and extends fairy tale structures and conventions. Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales is described as a book that Henri loves and the structure of the story with its strong narrative arc, its elements of the surreal such as the blue light moving under the skin of one of the characters, the blue lotus-flower shaped scar of the strange visitor, and the scenes of gruesome violence, is evidence of a narrative in dialogue with this psychologically complex nineteenth-­century genre. The characters owe their identities to other texts, illustrated in the ‘pixie-like’ (21) or ‘blonde, cherubic’ faces of the

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children and the rugged faces of the adults such as Hans the mill operator whose ‘face [is] ruddy, full red beard unkempt’ (8). Henri also emerges as a character in a fairy tale setting and the story begins: Henri Thomsen lived in the Danish town of Frederiksberg near Copenhagen. At ten-years-old he possessed one distinguishing feature; a long furry grey tail … Otherwise he looked like an average boy, with a shaggy mop of light brown hair that hung down over his forehead, inquisitive blue eyes and dimples in his cheeks into which his mother Ann sank adoring kisses. (5)

The directness of the prose makes the depiction of the tail more shocking, reflecting the overlapping worlds of the ordinary, everyday and the extraordinary. As the unnamed stranger says to the mother, Ann: ‘Impossible things happen all the time’ (11). Threaded through the story is Ann’s unravelling and a dystopic element that further unsettles the narrative. Ann had used the services of a sperm donor bank, Love Larry Inc., in order to conceive Henri. His mysterious paternity is hinted at throughout the story through the colour blue that connects Henri’s drawing of ‘a father figure with a tail and an injured blue deer’ above which is the word ‘Speak’ (15). This drawing is connected to the stranger who leaves the business card of the sperm donor bank, and to the blue ball of light darting under Jorgen’s skin. In an attempt to stop this blue light travelling around his body, Jorgen attacks himself with a hammer, an act of violence that foreshadows the novel’s ending. These strange connections reflect a contemporary distrust, despite their contemporary normalisation, in scientific advances that have the potential to alter human reproduction. Although the characters are fantastic, their feelings and the relationships in the story are presented realistically: feelings of loneliness and isolation, the fear and inability of Ann, the mother, to manage the challenge of her son’s difference, her own unravelling, and the cruelty of the school-children and the community itself. In ‘Gunk’ the mother refers to a relationship her son had had in the past and her description prefigures the return, in this collection, to a concern with the ways in which familial or sexual intimacy creates a space for destruction and abuse. She says: ‘You destroyed each other then came up for air. You watched her fly down the street engulfed in blue flames’ (2). Like ‘Gunk’, many of the stories in this collection such as ‘Footer’ and ‘Fractions’ connect a traumatic experience in childhood or a problematic parental relationship with aggressive or dangerous intimacies and sexual

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acts. The nature of the dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship in ‘Footer’ is not made explicit but the daughter’s foot fetish is connected to that relationship, and results in the murder of several of the lovers she meets to ‘gather’, as the first-person narrator describes her activities. These activities take place in an underworld space of online dating and dangerous sex, a world that is ‘dark’ to use Okojie’s term (2017), and that reflects a preoccupation throughout the stories with the effects of technology. This preoccupation also haunts the edges of ‘Animal Parts’. Other stories construct impossible worlds in dialogue with other representations of impossibility. ‘Walk with Sleep’, for example, narrates the lives of two characters who jumped on to the underground train track, exchanging one life for another but continuing in dialogue with that other world. Their underground world, literally the tunnels of London’s underground system, retains the imprints from the world ‘Before’ (62) but it is silent world, without the noise of the city or the insistent destructive voices in the characters’ heads. This world is bare and ironically, in the context of the narrative’s own formal innovations, without ‘artifice’ (61). Writing in 1973, B.S. Johnson writes: ‘“Experimental” to most reviewers is almost always a synonym for “unsuccessful.” I object to the word experimental being applied to my own work. Certainly I make experiments, but the unsuccessful ones are quietly hidden away’ (Bray et al. 2012a, b, 2). Other writers cited in the introduction to The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature also object to the term, claiming that its use represents a publisher’s way of marginalising work that cannot easily be categorised. In her essay ‘Illiterations’, Christine Brooke-Rose offers a gendered perspective on publishing and writing experimental fiction, arguing that, [W]omen writers, not safely dead, who at any one living moment are trying to ‘look at new ways’ or ‘re-read’, and therefore rewrite their world, are rarely treated on the same level of seriousness as their male counterparts. They can get published, they can get good reviews but they will be more easily forgotten between books and mysteriously absent from general situation surveys. (Brooke-Rose 1989, 65)

Irenosen Okojie makes a similar point, but locates the difficulty at the point of publishing. Discussing her experience of trying to publish Butterfly Fish, she says that the big publishing houses found the novel, as one publisher made clear, ‘too strange for our lists’ (2017). She cautiously

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suggests that, for publishers, experimental work by ‘writers of colour’ presents a further risk, particularly because there is a certain requirement that black women’s writing fits stereotypes about suffering and strength (2017). Okojie insists, however, that she is determined to forge a space for black women writers to experiment with language, form and content. Her fiction offers both new ways of looking at the world and an opportunity to ‘re-read’ the worlds that British fiction constructs. The worlds her narrative constructs are impossible and strange but also strangely coherent.

Notes 1. Concepts of Afrofuturism have emerged as a critical context within which black and primarily African-American cultural forms can be theorised. Recent developments of theoretical concepts of Afro-Futurism seek to foreground the speculative character of African-America sonic, visual and literary culture, focussing on the work’s collapsing of time and space and its preoccupation with futurist projections of the past (Lillvis 2017). In his introduction to an interview with poet and visual artist Krista Franklin, T.L.  Andres (2014) locates Afro-Futurism in specifically American  contexts of cultural production and criticism. In other areas of African diaspora and continental African scholarship, however, the term has been treated with some scepticism (Bristow 2014). Krista Franklin emphasises an important intersection between ‘the lives of people of color, and technology, science, science fiction’ (https://www.berlilnartlink.com/2016/06/21/futures-afrofuturism-an-interiew-with-krista-franklin/ (Last accessed 01 June 2020). 2. See, for example, Smith (2009). In an interview with Lisa Allerdice, Diana Evans, repeating sentiments expressed when describing the otherworldly quality of her writing and in particular characters who are ‘lost … emotionally off the A-Z’, says, “I seem to need some other dimension … normal reality doesn’t feel enough’ The Guardian 10 March 2018. (https://www. theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/19/diana-evans-interview-ordinarypeople accessed 13 September 2019). Leone Ross has said that she uses her writing to get into ‘strange, dark corners’ (Leone Ross TEDx 16 June 2011 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3MsWj8UigU last accessed 13 September 2019). 3. James, D. (2013). ‘Wounded Realism’, Contemporary Literature. 51:1, pp. 204–14. 4. Irenosen Okojie in conversation with Tobias During, BritLitFest, Berlin 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTg-AsuctsM accessed 13 September 2019.

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Works Cited Bickford Berzock, K. 2008. Benin: Royal Arts of a West African Kingdom. In Benin: Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria, The Art Institute of Chicago. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bondarenko, D.M., and M. Roese. 2004. Between the Ogiso and Oba Dynasties: An Interpretation of the Interregnum in the Benin Kingdom. History in Africa 31: 103–115. Bray, J., A.  Gibbons, and B.  McHale, eds. 2012a. The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. London: Routledge. Bray, J. et  al., eds. 2012b. Introduction. In The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, 1–18. London: Routledge. Bristow, T. 2014. From Afro-Futurism to Post African Futures. Technoetic Arts 12 (2): 167–173. Brooke-Rose, C. 1989. Illiterations. In Breaking the Sequence, ed. E.G. Friedman and M. Fuchs, 55–71. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Buckley, C., and S. Ilott, eds. 2017. Telling It Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Evaristo, B. 2002. The Emperor’s Babe. London: Penguin. Girshick Ben-Amos, P., and J. Thornton, eds. 2001. Civil War in the Kingdom of Benin, 1689–1721: Continuity or Political Change? Journal of African History 42: 353–376. Kaplan, F.S. 1981. Of Symbols and Civilizations. In Images of Power: Benin: Royal Arts of a West African Kingdom, ed. F.S.  Kaplan and M.A.  Shea, 77–79. New York: New York University Press. Lillvis, K. 2017. Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination, 58–78. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Mitchell, K. 2015. Introduction: The Gender Politics of Experiment. Contemporary Women’s Writing 9 (1): 1–15. Nielsen, A.L. 1997. Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. African-American Avant-Garde Poetics:  Melvin B.  Tolson and Lorenzo Thomas. In The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, eds. J. Bray, A. Gibbons and BMcHale, 168–181. London: Routledge. Obinyan, T.U. 1988. The Annexation of Benin. Journal of Black Studies 19 (1): 29–40. Okojie, I. 2015. Butterfly Fish. London: Jacaranda. ———. 2016. Speak Gigantular. London: Jacaranda. ———. 2017. Irenosen Okojie in Conversation with Tobias During. BritLitFest, Berlin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTg-AsuctsM. Last accessed 13 Sept 2019.

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Osadolor, O.B., and L.E.  Otoide. 2008. The Benin Kingdom in Imperial Historiography. History in Africa 35: 401–418. Ryan, M. 2012. Impossible Worlds. In The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, ed. J. Bray et al., 368–379. London: Routledge. Smith, Zadie. 2009. Two Directions for the Novel. In Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. London: Penguin. Thomas’. In The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, 168–181, ed. Bray, J. et al. London: Routledge.

Index1

A Abjection, 230, 231, 234, 240 Addison, Joseph, 45 Aesop, 24 Aesthetics, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 16–18, 22–24, 26, 30, 32, 34, 37, 38, 52, 58, 74, 76, 82, 100, 111, 125, 131, 133, 155, 183, 191, 199, 207, 208, 219, 220–221n4, 230, 247 Afro-Futurism, 262n1 Ainsworth, William Harrison, 92 Aitkenhead, Decca, 231 Andermahr, Sonya, 15 Angelou, Maya, 14, 174 Anzaldúa, Gloria, E., 234 Arana, R. Victoria, 206, 221n4 Archives, 151–157, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166–168 Arendt, Hannah, 3, 8 Arias, Rosario, 155 Armitt, Lucy, 198 Armstrong, Isobel, 8

Armstrong, Julie, 220n3 Armstrong, Nancy, 23 Astell, Mary, 54, 56 Atwood, Margaret, 1, 2, 13, 206 Aughterson, Kate, 11 Austen, Jane, 6, 30, 32, 39n12, 117 Autobiography, 15, 16, 126, 130, 133, 147, 191–193, 197, 201–203 Auto-eroticism, 114 Auto-theory, 234 B Bachscheider, Paula, 37, 39n16 Bacon, Francis, 28 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 240 Ballaster, Ros, 23, 26, 37, 39n14 Bambara, Toni Cade, 246 Barnes, Diana G., 11, 45, 46, 50, 59n3 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 165 Beach, Sylvia, 126

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Aughterson, D. Philips (eds.), Women Writers and Experimental Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7

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266 

INDEX

Beer, Janet, 122n5 Behn, Aphra, 9–12, 21–38, 38n5, 38n6, 39n7, 39n8, 39n10, 39n11, 39n14, 39n15, 39n16, 39n17, 39n18, 47 Bekers, Elisabeth, 15, 16, 211 Bell, Emma, 12 Bellamy, Dodie, 230 Berry, Ellen E., 2, 3, 8, 10, 190, 192, 199, 207, 213, 217, 220n2 Bishop, Morchard, 141 Black British literature, 206, 220n4 Black Lives Matter, 17, 185 Blackman, Malorie, 209 Bluemel, Kristin, 220n3 Bodies, 9, 12, 13, 16, 25, 26, 28, 33, 36, 38, 50, 64–66, 68–71, 73, 74, 77, 78, 81–83, 106–109, 111, 113, 114, 121, 122, 128, 129, 132, 175, 180, 181, 183, 184, 197, 199, 200, 208, 210, 211, 213, 217, 218, 228–231, 234–237, 239, 240, 251, 259, 260 Bogarde, Dirk, 129 Bondarenko. Dimitri M., 252, 253 Bonnetain, Paul, 120 Booth, Francis, 220n3 Booth, Wayne, 39n12 Botting, Fred, 69 Boyle, John, Earl of Orrery, 52 Boyle, Robert, 10, 21 Braddon, Mary, 12, 87–101 Braidotti, Rosi, 9, 10, 190 Brant, Clare, 46 Bray, Joy, 7, 208, 220n3, 246–248, 261 Brennan, Tim, 206 Brodber, Erna, 246 Broner, E.M., 6 Brontë, Charlotte Anne, 4, 5, 92, 101, 140, 148n1

Brontë, Charlotte Emily, 4, 5, 92, 101, 140, 148n1 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 246, 261 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 91, 92, 101 Burnett, Elizabeth Jane, 209 Butler, Judith, 9, 10, 126, 231 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 63, 66 C Carnell, Rachel, 23, 25, 32, 37, 39n18 Carr, Helen, 14, 141, 144, 148n1, 148n3, 148n8 Carter, Angela, 13, 14, 129, 140 Carter, Howard, 155–157 Castle, Terry, 166 Cavendish, Margaret, 9, 10, 12, 22 Caverero, Adriana, 9, 10 Césaire, Aimé, 146 Chalus, Elaine, 46 Charles II, 22, 24 Childress, Alice, 174 Chopin, Kate, 10, 13, 16, 105–122 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 46 Cixous, Hélène, 7, 9, 16, 17, 38, 228 Clarke, Chris, 220n3 Cliff, Michelle, 246 Cobham, Rhonda, 219n1 Colette, 126, 127, 129, 131, 134 Collaboration, 80 College of Physicians, 48, 49 Collins, Merle, 219n1 Colonialism, 142, 146, 157, 251 Communism, 146 Congreve, John, 44 Cook, Florence, 156, 165 Cook, Terry, 153 Cooney, Kara, 156, 168n5 Cousins, Helen, 15, 16, 213, 219 Cowan, Steven, 46 Cressy, David, 46

 INDEX 

D Darwin, Charles, 93 De Beauvoir, Simone, 9, 13, 17, 56, 125–134, 135n1 Defoe, Daniel, 23, 28–30, 32 DeKoven, Marianne, 3, 8, 10 Deleuze, Gilles, 144, 145 Derrida, Jaques, 69, 145 Descartes, René, 73 Desire, 15, 25, 28, 31, 35, 36, 67, 68, 77, 89, 91, 92, 108–114, 145, 152, 179, 194, 195, 216, 229, 231, 234, 252, 258 Dickens, Charles, 194 Dickinson, Emily, 116 Dickinson, H.T., 51 Donnell, Alison, 2 Doody, Margaret, 37, 39n17 Dryden, John, 29 Due, Tananarive, 14, 171, 172, 182, 184 E Ecriture feminine, 3 See also Feminine writing Eliot, George, 4, 101, 217 Ellis, Stickney Sarah, 95, 97 Emecheta, Buchi, 15, 180, 206, 207, 209 Emerson, Caryl, 240 Emery, Mary-Lou, 146, 147, 148n9 Engels, Friedrich, 194 Enlightenment, the, 10, 44, 45, 58, 63–65, 69, 73, 74, 79, 179 Epistemology, 163, 168 Epistolary form, 11, 27, 28, 34, 35, 44, 48, 50, 52, 55, 56, 58, 178 Ethics, 2, 131 Evans, Diana, 206, 211, 246, 262n2 Evans, Mari, 182 Evaristo, Bernadine, 1, 2, 6, 8, 15, 206, 208–211, 221n6, 246, 247, 251

267

Eve, Martin Paul, 165, 166 Experimentalism, 3, 4, 6, 8–12, 16, 21, 23, 26, 31, 37, 190, 192, 203, 207, 208 F Fairy tale, 13, 118, 119, 215, 259, 260 Falcus, Sarah, 158 Fascism, 145, 146 Felski, Rita, 3, 8, 191, 199, 202 Feminine writing, 6 Femininity, 7, 13, 28, 94, 97–99, 131, 132, 158, 162 Field, Ophelia, 44 Finch, Peter, 129 Fish, Stanley, 26 Flaubert, Gustave, 114–116 Fletcher, Susan Willis, 165, 168n8 Fontanelle, Bernard Le Bouvier, 24 Ford, Madox Ford, 143, 144, 148n6 Forster, E. M., 211 Foucault, Michel, 144, 145, 152–154, 161, 241 Frederick, Prince of Wales, 50 Free indirect discourse, 30, 32, 219 Freitag, Kornelia, 220n2 Freud, Sigmund, 145, 233 Friedman, Ellen G., 3, 5, 6, 8, 65, 69, 70, 205, 206, 215, 217, 220n2, 220n3, 221n7 Fryer, Peter, 221n6 Fuchs, Miriam, 3, 5, 6, 8, 65, 69, 70, 220n2 G Gallagher, Catherine, 161 Ganteau, Jean-Michel, 220n3 Garner, Margaret, 177, 183 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 194 Generic hybridity, 210, 214, 215, 219

268 

INDEX

Genre, 5, 8–14, 18, 23, 26, 28–30, 38, 45, 46, 64, 71, 88–90, 92, 96, 99, 116, 118, 153, 154, 161, 163, 166, 167, 179, 182, 190–192, 203, 208, 209, 211, 213, 219, 221n4, 221n6, 246, 259 Ghosts, 14, 82, 83, 151, 180–184, 214 Gibbon, Alison, 208, 246 Gilbert, Sandra M., 5, 67, 118 Gilmore, Leigh, 15, 191–193, 195, 198, 201, 202 Gilroy, Paul, 144 Goddard, Lynette, 221n4 Gothic, 5, 13, 14, 18, 63–83, 90, 140, 181, 182, 184, 185, 213, 215, 217 Grammar, 80, 112 Groot, Jerome de, 154, 167 Grundy, Isobel, 44, 48, 59n7 Gubar, Susan, 5, 67 Gunning, Dave, 220n4 Gutleben, Christian, 151

History, versions of, 185, 253 Hitler, Adolf, 145 Hobbes, Thomas, 10 Hogue, Cynthia, 6, 9 hooks, bell, 177 Hopkinson, Nalo, 14, 15, 171, 172, 184, 185, 246 Houston, Natalie, 94, 99–101 Hughes, Thomas, 92 Hulme, Peter, 148n9 Hunter, William, 70–75, 78, 79, 83 Hurston, Zora Neale, 178, 179

H Hacking, Ian, 196 Haley, Alex, 176 Hall, Jordan, 54 Halsband, Robert, 46, 54 Hanna, Leonie, 47 Harraway, Donna, 7, 9 Harris, Wilson, 181, 245, 251, 254 Hartman, Geoffrey, 200 Head, Bessie, 180, 246 Heckendorn Cook, Elizabeth, 47 Heffernan, Teresa, 54 Hefner, Hugh, 230 Heroinism, 87 Hetero-normative plot, 106 Hinton, Laura, 6, 9 Historical novel, 153, 167, 210

J James II, 47 James, Henry, 91, 100, 166 Jay, Elizabeth, 93 Johnson, B.S., 66, 67, 261 Jones, Gayle, 246 Jones, R.F., 26 Joplin, Scott, 172, 184 Joyce, James, 172

I Ideology, 4, 9, 21, 23, 33, 36, 52, 88, 97 Impossibility, 106, 151, 155, 198, 248, 251, 252, 261 Intersectional feminism, 2 Intertextuality, 16, 118, 133, 165, 192, 216, 219, 221n4 Irigaray, Luce, 121, 122 Irony, 8, 98, 120, 179, 190

K Kant, Immanuel, 9 Kaplan, Flora, 256 Kaplan, Frances F., 256 Kay, Jackie, 207, 212 Kean, Danuta, 209

 INDEX 

Kennedy, Christine, 220n2 Kennedy, David, 220n2 Keulks, Gavin, 200 Khader, Serene, 2 King, Nicole, 221n4 Kit-Cat Club, 44 Kohlke, Marie-Luise, 151, 164, 166 Kontou, Tatiana, 155, 163, 165 Koomson, Dorothy, 209 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, 32, 231 Kottke, Jason, 177 Kristeva, Julia, 7, 13, 17, 38, 68, 199, 200, 230 L Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine, Comtesse de la, 26 Lamming, George, 14, 140 Landry, Donna, 57 Larsen, Nella, 216 Laursen, Ole Birk, 220n4 Lawrence, D. H., 144 LeBlanc, Elizabeth, 108 Lessing, Doris, 5 Levy, Andrea, 15, 206, 211 Levy, Ariel, 230 Lewis, Matthew (Monk), 90 Lewis, Wyndham, 144 Lima, Maria Helena, 220n1 Lister, Anne, 169n9 Llewellyn Davies, Margaret, 126 Llewellyn, Mark, 163, 166 Loeffelholz, Mary, 220n2 Look Lai, Wally, 142, 148n9 Lowenthal, Cynthia, 46 Lucretius, 10, 28 M Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 38n2 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 114

269

Manley, Delarivier, 23, 39n14 Mansfield, Katherine, 5, 126, 127, 131, 134 Marshall, Paule, 174 Marshall, Tim, 80 Marx, Karl, 145, 194 Massey, Lyle, 70, 74 Masturbation, 120 Materiality, 131, 152, 156, 159, 168, 250 Maternal metaphors, 65–70 Maupassant, Guy de, 115, 116 McBride, Eimear, 9, 10, 16, 227–241 McHale, Brian, 208, 246 McIntire, C.T., 38n2 McKeon, Michael, 29, 32, 38n1, 39n9, 39n10 Melly, Diana, 141 Memory, 15, 17, 28, 66, 109, 121, 122, 127, 142, 143, 145–147, 153, 156, 157, 159, 160, 166, 167, 177, 178, 180, 181, 183, 184, 189–203, 229, 259 Metafiction, 16, 165, 167 Meyer Spacks, Patricia, 52 Mezei, Kathy, 6 Miller, Linda C., 48 Mitchell, Helen, 152, 153, 165 Mitchell, Kaye, 3, 10, 64, 65, 234, 246, 247 Mitchell, Linda, 47 Modernism, 4–6, 17, 18, 145 Moers, Ellen, 5, 65, 66, 87 Monet, Claude, 114 Monnier, Adrienne, 126, 130 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 11, 12, 43–58 Montherlant, Henri de, 128 Moraga, Cherrie, 234 Morrison, Toni, 14, 15, 144, 171, 172, 174, 179–185, 220n3, 246 Moscucci, Ornella, 80

270 

INDEX

Mothering, 128, 194 Muñoz, José Esteban, 238, 239 Mussolini, Benito, 145 Myth, 15, 16, 55–57, 63, 79, 118, 119, 128, 132, 179, 191, 194, 215 N Naipaul, V.S., 142, 144, 148n9 Naming, 183, 193 Narratology, 6, 7 Nasta, Shusheila, 207 Neo-Victorianism, 14, 151 Newgate Calendar, 91 Niesen de Abruna, Laura, 219n1 Nin, Anaïs, 129 Noland, Carrie, 220n3 Nora, Pierre, 156, 163 O Obinyan, Thomas Uwadiale, 253 O’Callaghan, Claire, 153, 164, 166, 169n10 O’Connor, Theresa, 148n9 Okojie, Irenosen, 16, 17, 210, 211, 245–262 Oliphant, Margaret, 90, 95, 100, 101 Onega, Susan, 220n3 Osborne, Deirdre, 208, 220n1, 221n4 Owens, Alex, 168n8 Oyeyemi, Helen, 205–219 P Pacheco, Anita, 38n5 Pal, Carol, 47 Parker, Adele, 220n2 Patriarchy, 14, 151, 163 Phillips, Caryl, 251, 253 Philomela, 179 Philosophical Transactions, 47

Pinero Gil, Eulalie, 122n2 Pirker, Eva Ulrike, 220n4 Plath, Sylvia, 5, 14, 140 Plato, 9 Pleasure, 29, 34, 37, 50, 53, 56, 57, 113, 121, 158, 175 Poe, Edgar Allen, 215 Poetics, 2, 17, 59n7, 82, 112, 125, 139, 191, 210, 218, 246, 249, 254 Pope, Alexander, 51, 55 Post Boy, The, 48 Postcolonialism, 172 Postmodernism, 4, 190, 200 Pound, Ezra, 144 Preciado, Paul B., 234 Prest, Wilfrid, 51 Probyn, Elspeth, 229, 234, 235, 237 Pulham, Patricia, 155 Pykett, Lynn, 91, 93–99 Q Queen Anne, 51 R Radcliffe, Anne, 64, 90 Rae, Fraser W., 100 Raiskin, Judith, 147 Ramchand, Keith, 148n9 Ramey, Lauri, 220n3, 221n4 Randall, David, 47 Readers, 6, 8, 14, 16, 17, 23, 26–36, 69, 71, 74, 78–82, 88, 89, 91–93, 95–98, 108, 111, 113, 115–117, 119, 121, 139, 140, 142–145, 151, 153, 154, 158–160, 162, 164, 165, 171–178, 183, 185, 192, 194–196, 198, 202, 203, 207, 208, 210, 213, 214, 216, 217, 221n6, 228, 231, 234–236, 239, 246, 254, 258

 INDEX 

Realism, 5, 7, 13, 29, 39n16, 88, 90, 101, 140, 178, 182, 200, 211, 246 Reed, Anthony, 220n3 Renoir, Auguste, 114 Ress, Emma, 38n3 Rhys, Jean, 14, 139–147 Richardson, Dorothy, 5, 6, 28, 30, 36, 220n3 Richardson, Samuel, 173 Roberts, Michèle, 14, 151, 152, 154, 157–160, 162, 163, 166, 168, 168n2 Rochefoucauld, François de la, 24, 26, 28 Roman Catholicism, 56 Royal Society, the, 11, 21, 22, 28, 38, 38n3, 39n7, 43, 48–50 Ryan, Marie-Louise, 247–249 Rye House Plot, 24 Rymsdyk, Jan Van, 70, 74 S St James, Henry, Lord Bolingbroke, 51, 91, 100, 166 Sala, George, 101 Sand, George, 5 Sattaur, Jennifer, 168n1 Savory, Elaine, 147 Say Mitchell, Dreda, 209 Scafe, Suzanne, 16, 207, 209 Scheibinger, Londa, 38n4 Schwartz, Joan M., 153 Science, 12, 13, 18, 23, 38n1, 64, 65, 69, 134, 262n1 Sellers, Peter, 129 Selvon, Sam, 14, 140 Semantics, 80, 106, 109, 111, 248, 258 Seneca, 26 Sensation fiction, 87–101 Sethi, Anita, 2

271

Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chanthal, Marquise de, 51–53 Sexuality, 1, 2, 6, 13, 76, 98, 105, 107, 115, 121, 139, 158, 160, 168n5, 173, 192, 205, 227–241 Shame, 36, 100, 229–241 Shange, Ntosake, 6, 174, 246 Shapin, Steven, 44 Shelley, Mary, 4, 10, 12, 66, 67, 69, 74, 76, 81, 82, 83n1 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 64, 66, 68, 78–81, 83n1, 83n2 Shetterdahl Macpherson, Heidie, 2 Showalter, Elaine, 4, 5, 10, 12, 87, 88, 97, 113, 114, 116, 118, 162 Showers, Mary Rosina, 165, 168n8 Shuttleton, David, 48 Singh, Julietta, 2, 6, 23 Slavery, 23, 144, 176–178, 180–185, 211, 247, 251 Smith, Barbara, 174 Smith, Zadie, 15, 206, 207, 211, 220n2, 220n3, 221n4, 246, 247, 262n2 Smollett, Tobias, 45 Sommer, Roy, 220n4, 221n4 Song, 115 Spare Rib, 172 Spectator, the, 47, 48 Spencer, Jane, 23 Spender, Dale, 23 Sprat, Thomas, 22 Steegmuller, Francis, 117 Steele, Richard, 45 Stein, Gertrude, 6 Stein, Mark, 209, 220–221n4 Stuart, Andrea, 180 Stuart, Mary, Countess of Bute, 51 Style, 2, 6, 11, 12, 22, 23, 26, 28, 30–33, 35, 51–53, 55, 105, 113, 114, 116–118, 125, 130, 146, 173, 208, 211, 215, 216, 218, 228, 240, 258

272 

INDEX

Subversion, 2, 13, 18, 110, 132, 208, 221n7 Suffragettes, 4 Sutton, Geoffrey V., 44 Swift, Jonathan, 53 Syntax, 117 T Tague, Ingrid A., 47 Tate, Claudia, 174 Tatler, 45, 47, 48 Tavor Banet, Eve, 47 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 92 Thomas, Sue, 147 Thornton, John, 252 Tlali, Miriam, 180 Todd, Janet, 5, 23, 25, 30, 38n5, 39n7, 39n9 Trauma, 14, 15, 68, 151, 174, 176, 178, 180–184, 189–203, 211, 250 Treichler, Paula A., 111 Tyldesley, Joyce, 156, 158, 160 Tynan, Kenneth, 129 V Verlaine, Paul, 114 Villegas Lopez, Sonia, 37, 38n5, 39n7 Vincent, Suhasine, 220n3 Virgil, 56, 59n7 Voltaire, Francois, 43–45 W Wagstaffe, William, 49 Walker, Alice, 14, 171–175, 177–180, 185

Walker, Raphael, 108 Walpole, Robert, 50 Warner, Marina, 216 Warner, Michael, 46 Waters, Sarah, 14, 151, 152, 163–168, 168n7 Watten, Barnett, 220n3 Weber, Max, 38n1 Webster, Charles, 21, 38n2 Weedon, Chris, 220n1 Werlock, Abby P., 220n1 Wheatley, Phillis, 247 Whigs, 24, 44, 45, 48–50, 52 White, Rosie, 156, 158 Whitehead, Charles, 91 Williamson, G., 26 Willis Fletcher, Susan, 165 Winterson, Jeanette, 9, 15, 17, 129, 189–203 Wisker, Gina, 14, 180, 220n1 Witherow, Jean Ann, 122n3 Wittig, Monique, 6, 7, 129 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 4, 64, 66, 198 Women’s voices, 154, 179 Wood, Ellen, 12, 87–101 Woolf, Virginia, 4–6, 13, 17, 118, 125–134, 135n3, 135n6, 142, 148n4, 198, 206 Wynne, Deborah, 88–90, 96 Y Yaeger, Patricia S., 111 Young, Stephen, 220n2 Z Zetterling, Mai, 9, 13, 125–134, 135n1