Excursions into Modernism: Women Writers, Travel, and the Body [1 ed.] 1472444205, 9781472444202, 9781315563251

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Excursions into Modernism

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Excursions into Modernism Women Writers, Travel, and the Body

Joyce E. Kelley Auburn University Montgomery, USA

First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2015 Joyce E. Kelley

Joyce E. Kelley has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Kelley, Joyce E. Excursions into Modernism: Women Writers, Travel, and the Body / by Joyce E. Kelley. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Fiction – Women authors – History and criticism. 2. Travel writing – Women authors – History and criticism. 3. Modernism (Literature) 4. Feminism and literature. 5. Geography and literature. I. Title. PN3401.K45 2015 809.3’0082–dc23 2015015860 ISBN 9781472444202 (hbk)

Contents List of Figures   List of Abbreviations   Acknowledgements  

vii ix xi

Introduction: Women, Travel, and the Body   Women and Modernism   Women and Travel: Mobile Identities   A Woman’s Travel Book   Travel Estrangement: The Female Body and the Other   Feminist Geographies / Feminist Phenomenology   Excursions into Modernism  

1 5 11 17 21 23 26

1

2

Increasingly Imaginative Geographies: Excursions into Otherness, Fantasy, and Modernism in Early TwentiethCentury Women’s Travel Writing   Gender, Genre, and Travel   Twentieth-Century Imaginations   “I was a white woman once”: Curious Constructions of Self and Other in Nettie Fowler Dietz’s A White Woman in a Black Man’s Country   The Fantasy of the Other: Grace Thompson Seton’s Kaleidoscopic “excursion into the fourth dimension” in A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt   Moving into Modernism: Vita Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran   Postscript: Intimate Relations Between Travel Writing and Fiction: Woolf and Sackville-West   Narratives of Passing: Transdermal Excursions in Larsen, Rhys, and Hall   Nella Larsen’s Novels of Movement and Stasis: Quicksand and Passing   “A pretty useful mask that white one”: Jean Rhys’s Representation of the “Voyage” of Racial Identity   Finding Miss Ogilvy: Following Radclyffe Hall’s “excursion into the realms of the fantastic”   Passing and Primitivism  

33 34 39 43 54 68 79 85 88 102 113 126

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Modernist Fever: The “Undiscovered Countries” of Illness   Illness and Geographic Space   Moving Beyond the Victorian Novel into “unknown places”: Woolf’s The Voyage Out   “I’m not here I’m there”: Excursions into Illness in Voyage in the Dark   “the fearless explorer (my mind was)”: H.D.’s Hermione in the Hinterland of Illness  

4

5

“I am going on and on to the end of myself where something else begins”: Travel, Pregnancy, and Modernism   Pregnancy, Personal Geographies, and Mobility   Rethinking the Experience of Pregnancy: Katherine Mansfield’s Journeys to Germany, France, and “Rome”   When a World Tour is Not Enough, the Language of the Body Remains: The Creation of Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept   Evelyn Scott’s Escapade, the Pregnant Body, and the Modernist Travel Narrative   “It carried her out of the house, out of the world”: Modernist Women Writers and the Piano   The Piano and the Journey   “Poured straight into music”: The Piano, the Body, and the Woolfian Voyage   A Pilgrimage through Music: Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs   Rebecca West, the Piano, and the Travel “Fantasy”   Coda: Black and White and Read All Over: Philippa Duke Schuyler’s Travels with the Piano  

133 136 142 156 166 183 186 190 205 221 235 239 242 257 272 279

Conclusion: Final Excursions: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon  

289

Bibliography   Index  

295 321

List of Figures

I.1

Advertisement for White Star Line (April 1928). Courtesy of Cunard Line.

15

I.2

Advertisement for White Star Line (May 1928). Courtesy of Cunard Line.

15

1.1 Cover of A Woman’s Winter in South America (1909).

45

1.2

Frontispiece from A Woman’s Winter in South America (1909).

46

1.3 Images from A White Woman in a Black Man’s Country (1914).

52

1.4

Frontispiece from A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt (1923).

58

1.5

Photograph from A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt (1923).

67

2.1 Illustration from the Western Morning News, May 1, 1926. By kind permission of the Western Morning News. 5.1

Frontispiece from Adventures in Black and White (1960). By kind permission of Ms. Kathleen Shedaker Speller, VP—Robert Speller & Sons, Publishers, Inc.

122

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List of Abbreviations D1–5 The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols.) JRL Jean Rhys Letters, 1931–1966 L1–6 The Letters of Virginia Woolf (6 vols.) LAC Library and Archives Canada LKM The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield LSW The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf OED Oxford English Dictionary

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Acknowledgements

Many people have assisted me throughout my work on this project. When I began examining issues of modernism, women, and travel for my dissertation at the University of Iowa, a wonderful group of faculty helped guide my thinking, including Teresa Mangum, Rosemarie Scullion, Florence Boos, and Dee Morris. Most of all I am indebted to Mary Lou Emery, whose constant assistance, insight, and encouragement through the stages of my writing were invaluable, and whose wisdom has continued to guide me in my years since graduate school. Several sections from this book have been published previously. A shorter version of Chapter 1 appeared as “Increasingly ‘Imaginative Geographies’: Excursions into Otherness, Fantasy, and Modernism in Early Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing” in The Journal of Narrative Theory, volume 35.3, and is here reprinted with permission of JNT. The final Woolf and Sackville-West discussion from Chapter 1 also shares material with a published conference paper, “‘Nooks and Corners Which I Enjoy Exploring’: Investigating the Relationship Between Vita Sackville-West’s Travel Narratives and Woolf’s Writing,” which appeared in Woolf and the Art of Exploration: Selected Papers from the Fifteenth International Conference on Virginia Woolf. It appears here with permission from Clemson University Digital Press and Executive Editor Wayne Chapman. My initial ideas for Chapter 3 also began with a conference paper, “Rachel Vinrace’s and Anna Morgan’s Parallel Voyages: Exploring the Relationship Between Illness and Modernism,” published in Voyages Voyages Out, Voyages Home: Selected Papers from the Eleventh Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. These selections likewise appear with permission from Clemson University Digital Press and Wayne Chapman. Finally, short selections from the Philippa Duke Schuyler section of Chapter 5 overlap with material in “Racial Identity, Travel, and Music in Philippa Duke Schuyler’s Adventures in Black and White,” published in Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing, and appear with permission of Routledge. I would like to thank those who have granted permission for my visual materials. I offer my sincere gratitude to musée d’Art moderne André Malraux for agreeing to let me print Renoir’s “The Excursionist” on the cover in color: Auguste Renoir, L’Excursionniste, 1888, huile sur toile, 61 x 50 cm. Legs CharlesAuguste Marande, 1936. Le Havre, MuMa, musée d’Art moderne André Malraux inv. A 498—© Florian Kleinefenn. My thanks to Géraldine Lefebvre for her assistance with this matter. The White Star advertisements in my introduction appear with special permission of Cunard Line and Jackie Chase, Manager, Public Relations. The travel narrative photographs from Chapter 1, no longer under copyright, were reproduced from books owned by the University of Iowa

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Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa. I offer special thanks to University of Iowa Special Collections staff, especially Kathryn Hodson, for their wonderful assistance, and for granting reproduction permission of images from their copy of Charlotte Cameron’s A Woman’s Winter in South America, published by Small, Maynard & Company, 1912. In Chapter 2, the image “Important Discovery” appears by kind permission of the Western Morning News. Thank you to Julie Chapman, Newsdesk Secretary and “What’s On” Editor, for her assistance. In Chapter 5, the frontispiece of Schuyler’s Adventures in Black and White appears with permission of Ms. Kathleen Shedaker Speller, VP—Robert Speller & Sons, Publishers, Inc. I offer my thanks for her exceptional kindness and generosity. I also would like to thank those who have given me permission to quote from their publications. The epigraph in my introduction from Cixous’s “Laugh of the Medusa,” originally published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1.4 (Summer 1976): 875–893, appears here with the consent of The University of Chicago Press. The epigraph in Chapter 2 from Cixous’s “Sorties” from Cixous and Clément’s The Newly Born Woman, Trans. Betsy Wing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, appears with permission of University of Minnesota Press. Original publication information is as follows: Original, French language, edition copyright 1975 by Union Generale d’Éditions, Paris. English translation copyright 1986 by the University of Minnesota. The first epigraph in Chapter 3 from “On Being Ill” from Virginia Woolf’s Collected Essays, Volume 4, appears with permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf, and The Random House Group Ltd. My third chapter’s second epigraph, a quotation from The Vital Balance: The Life Process in Mental Health and Illness by Karl Menninger with Martin Mayman and Paul Pruyser, copyright © 1963 by Karl Menninger, M.D.; copyright renewed © 1991 by Jeanetta Lyle Menninger, Robert Gaines Menninger, Julia Gottesman, Martha Nichols and Rosemary Menninger, is used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC. The epigraph beginning Chapter 4, a quotation from Evelyn Scott’s Escapade, appears with permission of University of Virginia Press. I would like to express my appreciation to Auburn University at Montgomery for the Grant-in-Aid funding that allowed me to travel to Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, Ontario, to study Una Troubridge’s diary. I also offer my thanks to a number of librarians and museum curators for their assistance throughout this project, all of whom have been generous with their time, expertise, and insight, including the librarians at Library and Archives Canada; those from Special Collections of the McFarlin Library of the University of Tulsa; those from Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries; James Hull, General Operations Manager of Kent’s Cavern; and Barry Chandler, Assistant Curator of the Torquay Museum. I additionally thank Alessandro Rossi Lemeni Makedon, M.D., Estate of Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge, who gave kind permission for the reproduction of quotations from Una Troubridge’s diary.

Acknowledgements

xiii

Special thanks go to Ann Donahue at Ashgate Press for her excellent assistance throughout the publication process, to Diane Wardle and Kirsten Weissenberg for their wonderful editorial assistance, to my anonymous readers, and especially to Dr. Jana Funke, University of Exeter, who provided such insightful comments. I also must express my gratitude to my current colleagues at AUM, many of whom have provided assistance, guidance, and support as I revised this project and sought publication, especially Alex Kaufman, Bob Evans, Kate Lemay, and Eric Sterling. To the endlessly generous and resourceful Interlibrary Loan Staff at AUM, especially Karen Williams, Beth Parrish, and Antonia Aultman, I also owe sincere gratitude and, likely, my sanity. I offer a special word of thanks to my graduate assistant, Ashley Stanaland Lucier, who spent many months helping me check my quotations for accuracy. Thank you, Ashley, for your resourcefulness, your thoughtfulness, and your consistent eye for detail. Finally, I wish to thank my family members for their love, support, and advice as I have completed this project. To my mother, father, husband, and daughter, this book is lovingly dedicated.

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Introduction:

Women, Travel, and the Body

The Dark Continent is neither dark nor unexplorable. —Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”

In her fanciful essay “Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor-car,” Virginia Woolf observes the English countryside beneath the mysterious veil of evening. As she travels, taking in the fields, farmhouses, and sky around her, she imagines splitting into several selves, each excitedly catching a color or image and storing it intact: There they sat as the car sped along, noticing everything: a haystack; a rust red roof; a pond; an old man coming home with his sack on his back; there they sat, matching every colour in the sky and the earth from their colour box, rigging up little models of Sussex barns and farmhouses in the red light that would serve in the January gloom. (291)

As the selves work to capture these simple beauties in a record of travel, to paint a mental picture of haystack and roof for a later moment, the original self remains in melancholy reverie. As Woolf returns home and unites her many selves, her body calls in a voice “as low as the rush of the wheels: ‘Eggs and bacon; toast and tea; fire and a bath; fire and a bath; jugged hare … red current jelly; a glass of wine; with coffee to follow, with coffee to follow—and then to bed; and then to bed’” (292). After dismissing her multifarious selves, she ends the short essay with the alluring line, “And the rest of the journey was performed in the delicious society of my own body” (292). These “reflections,” although perhaps merely whimsical, raise intriguing questions about the nature of travel and the individual. What is the purpose of travel and what happens to the self when one travels? When and how is travel necessary for the act of writing, for internalizing and then “model[ing]” what one sees? What is the relationship between the world one travels through and the home to which one ultimately returns, and what does it mean that Woolf’s domestic thoughts of home are colored by the repetitive pattern of the motor-car’s wheels? Perhaps most importantly, what kind of inner “journey” in the society of the body have Woolf’s travels inspired her to make, and how does this connect to her modernist aesthetic?

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Woolf’s essay demonstrates a fascination with travel shared by many writers of her generation. Novelists D. H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, Rebecca West, Graham Greene, Wyndham Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, Vita Sackville-West, and George Orwell all wrote volumes of travel literature. Traveling gave writers inspiration for their work, whether fictional or autobiographical. It opened up new ways of seeing the self, and provided new eyes for seeing the world at home. Particularly for modernist writers, so interested in depicting the intricacies of daily life and catching the “atoms as they fall upon the mind,” as Woolf describes so famously in “Modern Fiction” (107), travel provided a new venue, a new muse. The titles of many fictional works of the era similarly reflect this lure of outward movement: Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark. In these texts, journeys, whether literal or metaphorical, local or foreign, provide the characters with new opportunities for discovery and self-exploration. While fiction and travel writing share many commonalities and held equal popularity during the modernist period, they have been examined in tandem too rarely in modernist literary studies. The categories of travelogue and travel fiction are not mutually exclusive and reveal intimate connections. Naturally reliant on subjective observation, travel accounts become further compromised by authors’ desires to share tales of thrilling adventure, thus drawing inspiration from fiction. Take, for example, this teasing passage from the opening of Dr. Janet Miller’s African travel narrative Jungles Preferred (1931): Nearly three years have passed since my adventures began, but I remember each detail quite perfectly. I remember the day we embarked on our expedition, in a silver galley with golden oars … . Could I ever forget the pirate brig … that came alongside our boat, and the cross-bones flag of piracy that was flaunted on our decks, as black-bearded men with brass rings in their ears—But I am lapsing into extravagant mendacity; if I am not careful, no reader will believe a word of the adventures which follow. (1–2)

Miller’s fantastical pirate story, a self-proclaimed “extravagant mendacity,” sets the tone for her narrative as she gets carried away both geographically and imaginatively. Despite her humorous self-reprimands, Miller alerts the reader to the possibility of fictions lurking within the traveler’s tale. Like many travel authors, Miller longs to tell a story of splendor and action, and the text she delivers is little different, the pirates replaced by “jet-black savages” (23) with rings in their noses instead of their ears. Akin to memoir or other autobiographical forms, travel narratives by design border on fiction as authors commonly recreate scenes and conversations for the reader, embellishing details to make the narrative come alive. When late Victorian traveler Louise Chandler Moulton writes of seeing a castle like Bluebeard’s at

Introduction: Women, Travel, and the Body

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Interlaken where “We climbed … on a summer afternoon, and saw, or fancied that we saw, the turret from which Sister Anne looked forth to see if her knightly brothers were on their way” (203), the question we must ask is, how do we delineate the difference in travel narrative between “saw” and “fancied that we saw”? Even the writers themselves get carried away by the seeming reality of their own fantasies. In a memorable example, in Jungle Ways (1931) explorer and journalist William Seabrook described eating human flesh as he dined with the cannibals in Africa; later, he doubted the veracity of his own tale enough to want to sample human flesh in earnest—from a hospital in France.1 As modernist writers explore the concept of travel, they follow a long tradition of imaginative travel-writing Westerners. Centuries ago, travel authors were particularly notorious for inventing and exaggerating what they observed on their journeys; tall tales of strange and implausible adventures were common entertainment. In the Middle Ages, travelers often wrote of strange men and monsters witnessed on land and sea, including Odoric of Pordenone’s description of a “vegetable lamb” and Marco Polo’s accounts of swift-footed Cyclops and men with the heads of dogs (qtd. in Verdon, 289, 290). Fictional devices and hyperbolic anecdotes persisted into the following centuries. In the 1700s, Baron Münchausen was so famous for his implausible descriptions of his travel adventures that the medical phenomenon of patients exaggerating and faking their illnesses became known as “Münchausen’s Syndrome.”2 By this time, travel fiction and travel fact were inextricably entwined. Recorded journeys turned fantastic as they were inspired by imagination and, conversely, travel fiction was fueled by voyagers’ real observations. Neil Rennie has noted that “imaginary voyages depended on the popularity of real accounts of travel, which, in France as in England, replaced romances in the popular taste” (68). This continued in the eighteenth century with the development of new forms of fiction; as Percy G. Adams explores in Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel, the novel owes its development, in part, to the travel narrative and its structure, and there is a marked relationship between travel accounts and the “amorphous early novel” (278). Early novelist Henry Fielding connected travelogue and fiction when writing in the preface for Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon that the “vanity of knowing more than other men, is, perhaps, besides hunger, the only inducement to writing … at all” (qtd. in Gove, 15). In travel, part of the writer’s personal voyage lies in discovering something new to write about and in taking it, as Fielding did, for his or her own. Like 1

 At first, Seabrook legitimately may have thought he was eating human meat, though he does so with uncanny gusto: “I proposed to make a meal of it … with rice and a bottle of wine” (187). In Chapter 21 of his autobiography No Hiding Place (1942), however, Seabrook reveals his discovery that his cannibal hosts had substituted animal meat; he then relates his successful culinary experience in France. 2  See, for example, Arthur Kleinman, who mentions eighteenth-century German adventurer Baron Münchausen in his chapter “The Creation of Disease: Factitious Illness” (187).

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the early novelists, the modernists sought innovative literary forms in which to articulate their ideas. In a rapidly changing world of new technologies of motion and newly accessible geographic and social spaces, the fanciful and transformative opportunities of travel appealed to these authors in their quest for a kind of fiction that would carry them into unexplored realms of language and the mind. As David Ian Paddy explains in defining key concepts of modernism, the movement’s “interest in the flux of experience and the unconscious forces running beneath and against consciousness … poses a challenge to notions of stable voices and identities” (121). Given modernism’s fascination with spatial and temporal representation, it comes as no surprise that the modernists would revere the concept of travel, which intensifies the “flux of experience” with new geography. Destabilization of identity comes with change of place: a rural, white American may know who he is at his home in Kansas, but who is he in New York, or even in Zimbabwe or Nepal? Self-definition usually comes from regularity and constancy—family, employment, familiar environs, routine habits—but such definition becomes increasingly difficult the further one travels from one’s comfort zone. Estrangement from a customary place can focus a traveler’s perception not just outward but inward, bringing increased awareness of the physical self, of patterns of consciousness, and of methods of expression, all fascinating new avenues of exploration for early twentieth-century writers. Although the meaning of the term “modernism” has been ardently debated, a core foundation of the movement(s) was to embrace the new, as the name implies, and with the new the different. When Paul de Man speaks of modernity in his essay “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” he speaks of it in geographic terms, as a quest or journey for new space in which to remake something, whether the self or the work of art: “Modernism exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure” (148). This statement has colonialist undertones, and suggests remaking a country or culture for one’s own purposes. De Man’s use of the term “point of origin” to mean not one’s original placement but the locus one discovers as a place to begin is particularly resonant when we think about the number of modernist authors who traveled in order to write. Most crucially, these writers expected that the novelty and remoteness of a new area would open up new mental spaces for them. As Frances Bartkowski remarks, “A new place is always an opportunity for sanctioned cross-thinking, inter-speaking (we could say, borrowing from Irigaray), cross-‘dressing,’ out of which something may emerge that transforms, transvalues, translates” (xxv–xxvi). Even dichotomies of self and Other, often upheld by traditional narratives of foreign travel, might be challenged by an inventive boundary crosser willing to look beyond usual definitions. Travel writers of the early decades of the twentieth century reveal the extent to which travel allows for new conceptions of the self, opportunities for imaginative thought, and experimentation with literary form and language. This is especially the case for early twentieth-century women, who often sought in travel the

Introduction: Women, Travel, and the Body

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personal freedoms the Victorian era denied them. While modernists’ fascination with travel cuts across gender lines, traveling women in particular explored the modernist opportunities that travel provided, for their interest in the subject coincided with historical patterns of women increasingly journeying abroad without chaperones and using travel for self-definition. In their travel writings and in their fiction, women authors inscribe themselves and their women characters in places of difference, seeking experimental possibility. As my historical discussion will show, when women travelers deviate in their texts from established norms in structure, content, or language, they often create modernist innovations; women’s travel narratives parallel or even anticipate the work of fiction writers, revealing that travel writing is an overlooked but exceptionally crucial source of modernist innovation. In examining together women’s travel writing and women’s fiction about travel, we can see both sets of authors exploring new venues and voices, for new experiments with articulating the self arise out of these experiences of novelty, movement, and estrangement. Focusing on the minutia of daily life, reconceptualizing one’s own body, investigating fantasies of the imagination—these are the pathways most often pursued by women travelers. As in Woolf’s “Evening over Sussex,” their journeys often turn inward as they meditate on the body and its relationship with the act of travel. Anticipating phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s famous theorization of perception, “I am conscious of the world through the medium of my body” (Phenomenology of Perception, 82), these women, though often brought into foreign spaces by modern methods of transport, reveal how the body remains the most immediate vehicle through which to see the world. As they do so, they articulate the female body in subversive ways, utilizing once limiting conceptualizations of self and body as the basis of their artistry. My project seeks, as a point of departure, similarities between women’s early twentieth-century travel writing and women’s fiction of this period, using one genre as a lens through which to examine the other. By further investigating these genres through theories of the body and embodiment, feminist geographies and phenomenology, and transnational modernist studies and by using close textual analysis of these literary works, I explore the outward and introspective journeys in these literary forms to demonstrate how women’s travel experiences and writings produced fundamental practices of modernism. Women and Modernism Many women writers of the early decades of the twentieth century paralleled their male colleagues in traveling abroad to write; London, Paris, and New York especially captured the modern imagination as stimulating centers of flux and change. Nonetheless, many women did not connect with male writers’ cliques, and some created alternate feminine subcultures. Tracing geographic and personal connections between these women’s lives, Gillian Hanscombe and

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Virginia L. Smyers in Writing for Their Lives note how many of these women had experimental lifestyles to complement their original work during their time as expatriates. Illustrating the adage that life imitates art and, too, that art imitates life, these women “lived-what-they-wrote” and “wrote-what-they-lived” (xv). In Women of the Left Bank, Shari Benstock reminds us that modernism was “a literary, social, political, and publishing event” and that many of these women gave modernism a “medium” for expression (21). White American and English expatriate women such as Gertrude Stein, H.D., and Kay Boyle assembled in Paris, finding it a safe and nurturing place to write; African American women such as Jessie Fauset, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Nella Larsen also traveled to France in the 1920s and early 1930s, seeking an atmosphere of racial tolerance.3 Jean Rhys (from Dominica), Una Marson (from Jamaica), and Katherine Mansfield (from New Zealand) moved from Colonial spaces to London, and their experiences of shifting between geographies and identities of location helped define their work. Although critics have examined the urban geographical locales to which women writers of the modernist period congregated and have investigated the literary cultures there, less work has been done to closely compare the similar interests, attraction to themes, and literary experiments of these women, as well as others who sought more remote spaces. I place in dialogue modernist works rarely discussed together to uncover common themes resonating across time and place. Just as many of these women made the voyage out of their native homes to seek a new foundation, they voyaged together out of realism into remarkably similar narrative innovations. As I examine representations of travel in modernist fiction, I seek to make connections in two ways that have not been fully explored: first, to study the intimate tie between travel narratives and modernism and, second, to investigate links between travel and the body which span women’s transnational works. Over the last two decades, a number of studies have linked technologies of travel to ideas of modernism, including Sara Danius’s The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (2002) and Nicholas Daly’s Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (2004). Alexandra Peat’s recent study Travel and Modernist Literature: Sacred and Ethical Journeys (2011) begins, like my scholarship, with the observation that travel was particularly significant to the modernists; while Peat’s focus remains “the trope of the sacred journey” in fictional accounts (2), she usefully observes that pilgrimage allows individuals a chance to “rethink the imperialist structures of cross-cultural exchange” (10). Other scholars have begun to question what movements to a range of spaces meant for twentiethcentury individuals of diverse cultural and economic backgrounds, and have opened up discussions of travel to include nomadic peoples, the homeless, and those in exile. In Questions of Travel (1996), Caren Kaplan connects modernism and postmodernism through the concept of displacement, while reminding us that 3  Please see the section on France in Farah J. Griffin and Cheryl J. Fish’s collection A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing.

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travel may take place for many reasons. Kaplan interestingly suggests that while we might consider the tourist and the exile to be opposites, as modernist authors adopt the term of writers “in exile” for artistic purposes, those oppositions collapse (28). Another groundbreaking text for issues of space and place in modernist texts is Andrew Thacker’s Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (2003), which usefully investigates how modernist writing comes from “movements between and across multiple sorts of space” (8). While he does not examine travel writing in his study, Thacker acknowledges that a closer attention to the genre would be an important next step.4 While there are few studies of travel narratives in the modernist period, Helen Carr was one of the first to draw scholars to the area with her overview “Modernism and Travel (1880–1940)” in the Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing in 2002. A recent book by David Farley, Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad (2010), skillfully examines travel works by e. e. cummings, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca West. Farley’s work also illustrates the trend in studies of travel and modernism to rely on West’s 1941 travel narrative Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia for an example by a woman author. Because of West’s strong presence in the canon, I delay discussing her travel narrative until my conclusion. It is my wish to acquaint readers with the decades of women who come before West to demonstrate that her work is only one step in a series of experimental works by women. While there is excellent scholarship investigating women travelers, from Sara Mills’s Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (1991) to Monica Anderson’s Women and the Politics of Travel, 1870–1914 (2006),5 regions of this scholarly area still remain relatively unexplored, including connections between women’s travel writing and women’s fiction. My project brings a new approach to both genres by examining them in tandem; to my knowledge, there are only a handful of scholarly works that attempt this, particularly Bonnie Frederick and Susan McLeod’s edited collection Women and the Journey: The Female Travel Experience (1993) and Karen Lawrence’s Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (1994).6 My work, in contrast to these, has a more specific historical focus and a transcultural emphasis. I offer a quicker shift from travel writing to fiction, since my aim is not 4  A footnote continuing Thacker’s discussion of space and modernism explains, “Two forms of space that I have not had room to discuss here concern contemporary scientific discourses, such as the theory of relativity, and that of travel writing in the modernist period” (11). 5  For reference books on women and travel, I recommend Jane Robinson’s Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travellers and Marion Tinling’s Women into the Unknown: A Sourcebook on Women Explorers and Travelers. 6  Frederick and McLeod’s study is a compilation of essays about travel texts ranging from travel and captivity narratives to drama, fiction, and epic poetry. Lawrence’s has a broad historical focus and concentrates on works exclusively by British authors.

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to examine fully women’s articulation of the journey over time but to offer a new perspective on women’s role and position in modernism. In exploring modernist representations of travel, I look across geographic distance to find connection, much as many women writers of the early decades of the twentieth century sought to do in their own lives. While I look solely at works written in English, I challenge the tradition of a Eurocentric conception of modernism by choosing texts by writers from various regions, including the United States, Britain, the Caribbean, Canada, and New Zealand. The writers I discuss not only represent and move through different geographic spaces but also occupy different transnational cultural positions and perspectives as travelers and writers. While the works of fiction in my project range from the more frequently read to the almost entirely neglected, few of the works of travel writing I include have been examined before in a scholarly context. Using an elasticized definition of modernism, I draw on texts from the late nineteenth century through the mid twentieth century and focus on works which, in whole or in part, reveal a break from the patterns and norms that came earlier. While some of these works are not widely recognized as “high modernist” texts, radically divergent post-war experiments, each still poses a challenge to realist tradition through its innovations in style or structure, its new ways of representing experience and perception, and its examination of the complexity or flexibility of identity. My project joins the movement of “new modernist studies,” dedicated to remodeling and remapping the modernist canon as well as investigating and recovering works of women writers. Thanks to innovative scholars like Bonnie Kime Scott, who dedicates her anthology The Gender of Modernism (1990) to “the forgotten and silenced makers of modernism,” the white marble structure of Modernism has been expanded to include, among other writings, the works of the Harlem Renaissance, those of marginal colonial status, and both the formally experimental and the nonexperimental. For instance, Peter Childs’s Modernism and the Postcolonial (2007) examines issues of global migration, exploration, and cultural hybridity. Anna Snaith, in her essays on Jean Rhys and Una Marson (2005 and 2008), is one of a number of writers interested in characters in modernist literature who operate on the borders of different racial and cultural spaces. In the past decade, scholars have shown an increased interest in modernism’s non-Western connections, including Laura Doyle and Laura A. Winkiel in Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (2005) and Susan Stanford Friedman in essays concerning “Postcolonial Modernities.”7 Mary Lou Emery’s Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature (2007) introduces Caribbean visual art and theater to the conversation while Bonnie Kime Scott’s Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007) adds transnational dance, drama, film, manifesto, essay, and other genres. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s collection Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (2005) seeks to map the cultural activities of modernism’s movements in a global 7

 For example, Friedman’s “Periodizing Modernism.”

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context, while a series of recent studies and conferences refer to South American, African, and Eastern European “peripheral modernisms.”8 All of these works demonstrate much needed efforts to enrich our conception of modernism and suggest that more reconceptualizations of the period are still to come. Modernism is sometimes, although less frequently today than in the past, characterized as a predominantly masculine movement. Despite all the revisioning of the modernist canon in recent years, women’s works still sit precariously among those of their male companions. The 2009 publication The Modernism Handbook demonstrates this fully; here an exploration of modernism’s “Critical Figures” incorporates fourteen men and no women.9 Another chapter investigating seventeen of modernism’s “Major Figures” includes only two women: Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. Other women are relegated to a separate chapter called “Gender and Modernism,” indicating that women are still an awkward fit when scholars try to conceptualize the era. In bringing women into the canon, the period itself must be rethought and refashioned. In trying to claim a place for multiple varieties of women’s writing in the modernist canon, feminist critics have inquired why the works of most women were not considered canonical in the first place. Although we may think of modernism as a category our contemporaries impose on authors creating innovative literary works roughly between the years 1890 and 1940,10 we must remember that critics, editors, and other writers over the years have influenced which texts were read, admired, and remembered. What makes a work “modernist” is even debatable, as examining a number of authoritative texts designed to answer the question “what is modernism?” reveals. Rita Felski demonstrates this in The Gender of Modernity when she places critics in dialogue, revealing how some see modernism originating from a culture of stability and coherence, others from instability and transience, and how some say it involves a conception of a “rational, autonomous subject” while others stress joint participation in a “culture of rupture” (qtd. in Felski, 11). A number of “identifiers” for modernist fiction usually include fragmentation, unusual juxtaposition, montage, and uncertainty, all traits which, as Felski concludes, involve “the crisis of language, history, and the subject which shaped the birth of the twentieth century” (23). Critics like Felski align these qualities with a masculinist conception of history that excludes women in significant ways. While a number of scholars suggest that most women were not directly involved in certain crucial events of the twentieth century that created a new way of conceptualizing modern life and the self, such as the isolation 8

 See, for instance, Benita Parry’s “Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms” and Marc Caplan’s How Strange the Change. The University of London’s Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies hosted a 2012 conference called “Peripheral Modernisms” focusing on geographic diversity. 9  Philip Tew and Alex Murray, eds. The Modernism Handbook. 10  Of course, literary modernism often is defined more narrowly, with some scholars looking only at the period between the world wars.

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and confusion of urban existence and the experience of fighting in World War I, others assert that women’s involvement in and reactions to such events were often more personal, more intimate, and internal.11 As Alison Light notes resonantly in Forever England, “No one has lived more on the inside than women” (5). The idea of living “on the inside” implies not only that women traditionally have inhabited a strategic position from a domestic locale, but that women, more than men, have been culturally perceived to inhabit a more internal world, one more in tune with dream, fantasy, and the body. The works of the women modernists reflect this interiority as they capture the world of their protagonists, who are frequently not only women but also thinly veiled versions of the authors themselves. Texts like these often did not fit with masculine models of modernism, and as a result they were overlooked or dismissed. For instance, upon its publication, Dorothy Richardson’s first volume of Pilgrimage was seen as a text without “good form.” Virginia Woolf, however, recognized the design as startlingly important, lauding Richardson in 1923 for her ability to craft an elastic kind of “woman’s sentence” (qtd. in Hanscombe and Smyers, 8). Hanscombe and Smyers remark how the writings of women like Richardson reflected a world turned upside down by new discoveries in mathematics, physics, and psychoanalysis which argued that “nothing objective exists” and that “the observer” is “intrinsic to every phenomenon” (9). It became necessary to these women writers to present not just “what had happened to them” but “what it was like to be them” (9), producing a woman’s form of modernist writing. It is also likely that men and women modernists were reacting against different literary traditions. Anthea Trodd, for instance, suggests that male modernists were splitting from what they saw as a “heavily feminized Victorian culture” while female modernists like Woolf and Richardson specifically reacted against Edwardian male realists (31). In so doing, Trodd emphasizes, they seem to have taken up certain experiments of form used by New Women writers including George Egerton, Sarah Grand, and Mona Caird, who utilize forms such as reverie, dream, confessional writing, and the short story. Additionally, as Elizabeth Podnieks investigates in her work on the diary in Daily Modernism, women modernists grow from a feminine tradition of writing about the self. In a diary or journal, a writer can let loose her inner thoughts and feelings while making her own consciousness a central and important focus. A number of women modernists take inspiration from their journals and use the novel as a space in which to rewrite the story of their own lives from the inside out. These writers reveal a quest for a form that could capture the modern woman’s perspective of the world. They belong not only to the modernist movement but also specifically to a women’s movement in search of a new kind of fiction. In her 1938 foreword to Pilgrimage, Dorothy Richardson recollects how she examined the works of male Edwardian realists and found herself caught between 11  See Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse” and Angela K. Smith, The Second Battlefield.

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“following one of her regiments and attempting to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism” (9). She chose the latter, and thus found herself freed of convention, pursuing “a fresh pathway, an adventure” (10). It was the resulting first volume of Richardson’s work, Pointed Roofs, that inspired May Sinclair to first apply the phrase “stream of consciousness” to literature in an April 1918 review, echoing William James’s observation that consciousness is like a “stream,” for it cannot be “chopped up in bits … . It is nothing jointed; it flows” (James, 239).12 Sinclair was delighted that Richardson’s novel challenged formal conventions, asserting that “Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on,” therefore allowing Richardson to get “closer to reality than any of our novelists” (6). In “Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf expands on this idea of the new novel working to capture “life” itself. In the course of criticizing Edwardian writers such as Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy, whom she terms the “materialists” of fiction, Woolf contends that in these works “Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while” (105). If these women did not see the male novelists capturing their own perception of “life,” especially a sense of inner life, it was time to usher in a new kind of writing, specifically one that could adequately depict women’s experiences. Finding a “fresh pathway” for fiction often involved seeking new spaces and new opportunities. Many of these women found that an “outer life” was necessary in order to reach an inner self, feeling the need to move on the outside in order to write “on the inside,” to return to Alison Light’s term. Travel allowed for new ways of perceiving and writing about the self, so crucial during this period of revolutionized technologies of transport and the emerging modern woman. Women and Travel: Mobile Identities In his study of stream-of-consciousness fiction, Shiv K. Kumar credits Katherine Mansfield and Dorothy Richardson with devising an early “method of revealing the inner flux” of life, focusing on “inner reality” (40). He examines Rosabel from Manfield’s 1908 story “The Tiredness of Rosabel” alongside Miriam from Richardson’s Pilgrimage, noting that both young women are “highly sensitive and introspective characters” and choosing two passages to demonstrate (40).13 Although Kumar does not make it part of his discussion, both selected passages show the women traveling alone on city buses. As they do so, their ordinary worlds become extraordinary; even for Rosabel, who finds the bus repulsive, the journey seems to be the catalyst for her envisioning the London streets as Venice waterways and then, once home, imaginatively trading places with a rich young  James’s chapter, “The Stream of Thought,” published in The Principles of Psychology, volume 1, appeared in 1890. 13  The Pilgrimage passage to which Kumar refers comes from The Tunnel. 12

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lady. In both works, travel becomes key to the young women recreating their everyday worlds through flights of fancy. Such travel-inspired writings of the modernist period arrive in the midst of an age when domestic travel was common for Westerners of all classes and foreign travel had become increasingly accessible to the middle class. Once steam power made locomotion widely available in the mid nineteenth century, travel was no longer confined to the very wealthy or the truly daring. By the end of the century, the travel industry had exploded, even domestically: English passenger trains commonly contained upholstered seats, heated interiors, and restaurant cars, veritable homes-in-motion away from home. Colonialism brought Western innovations to foreign lands, though the spaces less touched by modernity often held the most allure for the Western traveler. By the twentieth century, those who could afford an automobile found themselves with the freedom to travel just about anywhere a road could lead. Voyages of early twentieth-century women make up part of a larger pattern of improved freedom of movement for women and increased ability to travel for pleasure. In the introduction to The Encyclopedia of Women’s Travel and Exploration, Patricia D. Netzley explains how, “prior to the mid-twentieth century,” travel for women was “discouraged” unless a woman went to a “safe, civilized territory” with a chaperone and conducted herself in a “‘ladylike’ manner” (ix). A form of travel deemed acceptable for women in the eighteenth century was the “grand tour,” in which wealthy travelers took lengthy tours of Europe for enjoyment and educational purposes. While the grand tour began as a male custom, many women made similar journeys accompanied by their mothers, aunts, or older brothers. Brian Dolan’s Ladies of the Grand Tour notes that this type of travel “provided education, entertainment, physical exercise, and an escape route for a wide range of women” (11). For instance, Mary Berry, a traveler and bluestocking, saw travel as a tool against “the almost necessary idleness of both mind and body” encouraged by upper-class society (qtd. in Dolan, 19). Less affluent single women in England gained the ability to travel in the nineteenth century when Thomas Cook began to organize tour groups, first to France, Italy, and Switzerland, and later to more exotic locations. As Bonnie Frederick and Virginia Hyde note in their introduction to Women and the Journey, the increase in women’s travel in the Victorian period undoubtedly corresponded with the “Claustrophobic” feel of women’s life in the domestic sphere (xix). Thus was travel, both at home and abroad, frequently conceptualized as an avenue to freedom of movement and thought. This was the case for many women of color as well as for white women; Farah J. Griffin and Cheryl J. Fish note that many of the black women travelers in their anthology “link travel with freedom from narrow definitions of womanhood” as well as those of race (“Introduction,” xv–xvi). Some women even used their travels as excuses to escape from undesirable marriages or to enter into covert relationships. Nineteenthcentury African American missionaries Amanda Berry Smith and Nancy Prince are among those Griffin and Fish find to be “bucking husbands, male church

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authorities, or both in leaving home” (56). Other women traveled specifically in quest of widening horizons: to expand their knowledge and to write about what they saw. Maria H. Frawley argues that travel and writing were intimately aligned for the nineteenth-century Englishwoman of the middle or upper class. Both writing and travel, she asserts, are “connected to the writer’s sense of her self and of her relationship to others. Both give to the writer an identity with purpose and a basis for accomplishment” (15). Travel, especially to far-off or exotic areas, made women experts on a foreign culture and gave women writers a kind of authority often denied them at home. Upon their return, they used their experiences abroad to “forge identities at home with the reading public” (Frawley 24). Frawley stresses that travel writing provided a means of self-fashioning and gave a woman an identity beyond the domestic sphere. Moreover, it was an identity that could change with each new locale: a mobile identity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the New Woman’s identity was directly linked with mobility in the popular imagination. The bicycle became her vehicle of choice, and she altered her clothes appropriately. Bloomers and knickerbockers replaced skirts, while garments with more free-fitting support replaced corsets. Bonnie G. Smith writes that “the freedom that the bicycle brought was not only social, it was a kind of physical release from constraint” which affected all economic classes, “for the bicycle expedition was a venture taken just as often by working-class women as by upper-class women.” Due to the less restrictive nature of their clothing, women “increased their activity” not only in bicycle riding but also “in calisthenics, swimming, [and] hiking” (326). The invention of the automobile further mobilized women, as Curt McConnell documents in “A Reliable Car and a Woman Who Knows It”: The First Coast-toCoast Auto Trips by Women, 1899–1916. The modern imagination was enthralled by new means of transport, including, as Sara Danius has explored in The Senses of Modernism, the “excitement of speed, the throbbing thrill of the new and the estrangement of the familiar” that the motorcar allowed (140).14 In 1909, champion woman motorist Dorothy Levitt wrote in The Woman and the Car, “There may be pleasure in being whirled around the country by your friends and relatives, … but the real, the intense pleasure, the actual realisation of the pastime comes only when you drive your own car” (16). With travel comes a release from old confinements and a movement into new territories. Many women found it liberating, renewing, even transgressive. While early twentieth-century women’s experiences are not reducible to one set of characteristics—some traveling by choice, others out of necessity for survival, some traveling in luxurious conditions and some in squalid, and the women themselves of varying races, nationalities, and cultural backgrounds—travel, at its most idealistic level, held promise for many women and offered a sense of escape. 14

 Danius’s study also examines travel simulator rides from the turn of the century. The general population was so eager to experience the thrill of travel that they would pay to take a pretend journey by sea, in a balloon, or in a train. See pp. 126–129.

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Women traveled for different reasons, but the excitement of travel’s possibilities captivated the general public. We can glimpse how extraordinarily the concepts of travel and freedom for the modern woman, including freedom from masculine authority, were linked in popular thought in a series of 1928 advertisements for the White Star cruise line running in the American monthly The Woman’s Journal. Attempting to attract unmarried women onto their ships, the company that created the Titanic reminds readers in one ad that women “live their own lives and obey their own impulses. And often these impulses seem to lead them abroad” (April 1928, 37). The woman pictured in the ad is rebellious, a feisty young bride replying “I do not” to the nuptial question, “Do you promise to obey?” (Figure I.1). The advertisement caters to a generation of women ready to set off in their own directions; nonetheless the ad, perhaps really less progressive than it pretends, promises to take “painstaking care” of them while they are aboard—though in an “unobtrusive” manner. Most fascinating is the way these advertisements appeal to the imagination of women by connecting journeying to the power of self-transformation. A second White Star ad asking “Where is Woman’s Place?” tries to present a feminist stance by replacing the old-fashioned saying, “a woman’s place is in the home,” with a revision: “women’s place is far from home” (March 1928, 39). Travel is characterized by the White Star Line as an integral part of being modern. “Travel . . . . see . . . . do . . . . live. That’s the program of modernity,” the ad boasts (May 1928, 39), even showing an image of a woman writing at a typewriter alongside other images of travel, her hair and scarf seeming to blow in an imaginary breeze (Figure I.2).15 According to the advertisement, the incentive for all this traveling is to “get away from—well—from everything!” (March 1928, 32), even to acquire “a new personality” (June 1928, 37), as if the true answer to remaking the self can only be found through the voyage out.16 This concept flourished in the modern imagination: although the quest was different for the wealthy cruise-goer than for the penniless writer-in-exile, travel promised to recreate the self through casting off the past, with its old relationships, experiences, and identities, and through leaving behind both the personal and geographic spaces of the home.

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 The top image of the woman swimming is likely intended to remind readers of Gertrude Ederle, who in 1926 became the first woman and the fastest of either sex to swim the English Channel. For the first time English women could literally swim to another country. 16  This popular idea is satirized in Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) when the young, gold-digging American Lorelei Lee sets sail for Europe to “broaden out and improve my writing” (17) and to escape both a current relationship and a scandalous past.

Introduction: Women, Travel, and the Body

Figure I.1 Ad for White Star Line (April 1928). Courtesy of Cunard Line.

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Figure I.2 Ad for White Star Line (May 1928). Courtesy of Cunard Line.

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Many women sought this self-transformation in a space where they could truly control their own movement without someone else’s “painstaking care.” As one of the White Star ads reveals in situating the typewriter among vehicles of travel, part of this control could come through writing about these experiences, especially those lying beyond the ordinary. We see this illustrated, for instance, in Annie Smith Peck’s travel narrative A Search for the Apex of America: High Mountain Climbing in Peru and Bolivia (1911) when, to justify her enjoyment of crossing a bridge of woven vines, Peck explains, “What is life, if always in the same deadly routine? A thrill of awe, a spice of adventure, affords many pleasant memories” (113). It is this “spice of adventure” that many of these traveling twentieth-century women seek, desiring a tastable change from the ordinary “routine” of existence. These women envision forbidden doors opening to them, disclosing miraculous sights. In the opening chapter of Syria: The Desert and the Sown (1907), Gertrude Lowthian Bell writes: To those bred under an elaborate social order few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel … . Into it you must go alone … . So you leave the sheltered close, and, like the man in the fairy story, you feel the bands break that were riveted about your heart as you enter the path that stretches across the rounded shoulder of the earth. (1–2)

The world of adventure beckons, a storybook land for the woman bored by the “sheltered close” of the home. It is significant that Bell does not say, “like the woman in the fairy story,” for she wants to go on a man’s sort of adventure into a new place for her as a woman. In 1919, Travel magazine proclaimed in a review of Australian author Mary Gaunt’s A Broken Journey, “Adventure, at last, has opened its doors to women!” The reviewer then added that this “one lone woman” who “took the trail across most of China” is “of course an ardent feminist” (“New Travel books,” 47). Although certainly not all of these women travelers called themselves feminists, all can be seen as transgressors not only of geographical but also of social boundaries. Already in 1888, young black American Mary Church (later Terrell), having delightedly remained behind in Europe while her father returned to the U.S., observed that many young Americans abroad, freed “from the restraint of home,” were taking new social liberties (123). More exotic travels brought further opportunities for change. In Adventures beyond the Zambesi, the selfproclaimed “rebel-woman” Edith Maturin remarks that Africa would change even “an anti-suffragette” (10), implying foreign adventuring would make any woman feel important, even powerful. Whether a woman traveled alone or with others, travel was proof that she could thrive away from the sheltering walls of home. Although some of these women were cared for by others on their journeys, in extreme instances even carried by natives in hammocks or chairs, others found themselves scrambling to survive in the harshest conditions. In one noteworthy instance, Dr. Susie Rijnhart was the only survivor of her family’s journey into

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Tibet; in another, Jessie Monteath Currie, living for a time in Central Africa, was given a gun by her husband so that she could take her own life if she fell victim to a band of hostile men.17 Some women who ended up in less dangerous situations found the lack of home comforts liberating, giving them the chance not only to prove their hardiness but also to consider a life beyond the domestic sphere. As I will explore, this freedom of movement and thought is reflected in the writings of women travelers who become linguistically inspired by new spaces. Departing from traditional models set by men in the nineteenth century, early twentiethcentury women’s works extend the variety of private, episodic, and non-linear narratives begun by nineteenth-century women travelers. Their narratives become even more wandering and inventive, exploring introspective territories and moving away from realism. A Woman’s Travel Book In the preface to How We Spent the Autumn; or Wanderings in Brittany (1860), Madeline Dunlop explains that she has written her travel book because “the modern ones are nearly all walking tours by gentlemen, which, though pleasant to read about, are impossible, at least for ladies, to imitate” (iii). Dunlop implies that, for nineteenth-century travelers, women’s travel is different from men’s; restrictions on the social lives and dress of ladies make gentlemen’s tours difficult to replicate. She thus fills the demand for a new kind of travel book explicitly for “those of our own sex who may wish to wander through Brittany” (iii), presenting a woman’s walking tour with sites of possible interest to women. Her text makes fascinating assumptions about the gendered nature of travel, assumptions that carry over into the twentieth century in both the popular and the critical mindset. In studies of travel, scholars frequently use gender to guide or group their discussions, whether intentionally or unintentionally. For example, in the captivating study Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing, Dennis Porter chooses to focus solely on male travelers. He writes, “To deal adequately with the complex motivations that drive women to travel or at least to write about it would … require a separate book” (17). Other scholars write mainly about men, but do not theorize why. Take, for example, Paul Fussell’s Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1980), which largely overlooks a whole world of women’s travel of the early decades of the twentieth century, focusing instead on Graham Greene, Robert Byron, D. H. Lawrence, and Evelyn Waugh, and only occasionally alludes to a wellknown and highly esteemed woman writer like Rebecca West. Fussell hints at his feelings for certain other women travelers when he chooses the work of a woman to illustrate the ridiculous in travel writing. Of Joan Lowell’s The Cradle of the 17  See Rijnhart’s With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple (1901) and Currie’s The Hill of Good-bye (1920).

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Deep (1929) he remarks, “It was full of implausible situations and unbelievably gooey dialogue. In fact, it was a fraud, as Lawrence perceived—‘The girl at sea is a feeble fake,’ he wrote a friend—but it indicates the avid market for anything approximating a narrative of travel or adventure personally attested” (qtd. in Fussell, 54). Note Fussell’s words “avid market for anything”: the attraction for such a book is clearly a surprise. When Lawrence contends that “The girl at sea is a feeble fake,” he chooses to replace the book’s title with a gendered phrase, seeming to reject a whole subcategory of texts he deems invalid.18 Similarly, to illustrate “the postwar demand for travel books of all kinds,” Fussell remarks how “Lady Warren’s Through Algeria and Tunisia on a Motor Cycle was on the 1922 List” (60), a comment which belittles a woman’s work by insinuating its amusing abnormality.19 In these instances, women travelers are held up as examples of the false and eccentric. Their works do not correspond with Fussell’s conception that travel of the 1920s and 1930s relates to the soldier’s need to escape England after the war, and as such they are strange and incongruous, dismissed to the margins of history. Thus women’s travel writing, like women’s modernist fiction, has required recovery. In the past few decades, academics have worked to reprint and analyze travel works by women authors with the understanding that these authors are often neglected and deserve notice.20 Kristi Siegel reminds us, too, that many of the women whose travel accounts are in libraries today made journeys voluntarily, and often came from privileged families: “Consider, then, the vast number of women’s journeys that have never been written—journeys of flight, exile, expatriation, homelessness; journeys by women without the means to document their travel; and journeys whose records have been lost or ignored” (2). Recovering the “lost or ignored” requires us to consider why these texts were forgotten or did not fit the established mold, and that may bring us to consider gender as a determinant for subject and form. Scholars investigating women’s travels often begin with the premise that men and women write differently, and specifically that men and women write travel narratives differently. This presupposition is somewhat problematic, as Susan Bassnett makes clear in her essay “Travel Writing and Gender,” noting the dangers of essentialism across the “sheer diversity” of narrative design, language, place, 18  Lowell’s bestselling work recounting her childhood adventures at sea ultimately did not strengthen women’s presence in the travel canon. Though Lowell claimed the book was a real account, it was later exposed as fiction. 19  The title he gives for Lady Warren’s work is also slightly incorrect: the correct title is Through Algeria and Tunisia on a Motor-Bicycle. 20  Please see, for example, Mary Russell, The Blessings of a Good, Thick Skirt; Dea Birkett, Spinsters Abroad; Elizabeth A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics; Mary Suzanne Schriber, Writing Home; and Susan Clair Imbarrato, Traveling Women. Virago has also reprinted many women’s travel texts, such as those by Mary Kingsley and Isabella Bird.

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time, and intent of women’s travel writing (239).21 While this is clearly true, I agree with other feminist scholars who argue that it is useful to think about the narrative differences that emerge along gender lines in order to address the essentialism already in place in studies like Fussell’s. After all, many women travelers draw attention to their gender as they write; if they are markedly aware of their position as writing women, it makes sense that we should be aware of it, too. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft writes, “A man, when he undertakes a journey, has, in general, the end in view; a woman thinks more of the incidental occurrences, the strange things that may possibly occur on the road” (176). She means this as a criticism of women, not a compliment, and implies the question: why can’t women act (and write) more like men? Wollstonecraft realizes that the interests and behavior of women of her era stem from a long history of perceived gender differences and enforced separate spheres and educations. The same frequently has been true for women travelers. Ultimately, we must also ask Wollstonecraft: if men more often have written linear, start-to-finish travel narratives, is it not just as interesting that women have written more introspective, roundabout works based on domestic interests? As more modern feminists have argued, many women’s writings of travel may be different, but that does not make their observations less important or their experiences less valid. Traveling women may allude to men’s accounts in depicting their own adventures, sometimes to establish themselves as informed travelers or equally exploratory voyagers, sometimes to deviate from traditional methods. One surprisingly frequent reference is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), a text which seems to resonate with many early twentieth-century women. Largely based on Conrad’s own experiences in Africa in 1890, the novel posed a challenge to the standard travel-as-adventure narrative.22 As Albert J. Guerard wrote in his landmark essay “The Journey Within” (1958), Marlow becomes an “introspective voyager” (330) ready to “journey toward and through certain facets or potentialities of self” (328), a journey further complicated by Marlow’s contemplation of it as he meanderingly recounts the story. While modernist in narrative style, Conrad’s work serves as an unusual inspiration for women since it is particularly masculinist in conception. Men are the key players in this African colonialist exploration, and women are relegated to the status of “Other”: the naïve aunt, the primitive native lover, the sheltered fiancée waiting at home. Marlow comments that “the women … 21

 While Bassnett is hesitant to see any innate differences between travel writings by men and those by women, and reminds us that we cannot make conclusions across the “diversity of women’s travel writing” (239), she acknowledges that most women show attention to more social and domestic details and that many women use travel for redefinition, though some of these writings may be “self-conscious fictions” (234). 22  For instance, an unsigned contemporary review from the Athenaeum immediately recognized that Conrad’s fiction broke new ground in combining adventure with “the analysis of the human mind” (“Unsigned,” 311).

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are out of it—should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own lest ours gets worse” (48). In Heart of Darkness women are given a separate place and task while men alone seek to discover—and guard—the knowledge that results from travel. Yet, once women gain ground in visualizing themselves as explorers of the unknown, they may see in Conrad an affirmation for the kind of introspection in travel that women travelers tend to embrace in their writing, and were already exploring prior to Conrad.23 As they write to appreciate, counter, or rework traditional masculine adventure narratives, women prove that when their perspectives and interpretations are included, and not left “out of it,” foreign explorations become even more tied to inner adventuring. Traditional travel narratives over the centuries by both men and women share a number of general characteristics: most give details of the journey, maps of the route, descriptions of the landscape, and records of the appearance and behavior of the native people. It is the means by which all this is done, however, that often separates men’s and women’s accounts. Much of the critical work isolating differences between men’s and women’s travel texts has focused on the Victorian era when lady travelers, while sometimes still deemed eccentric, were far more common and sometimes more pioneering than in previous eras. Much nineteenthcentury travel literature is characterized by tropes of exploration and conquest; Patrick Brantlinger in Rule of Darkness calls these kinds of explorational narratives “nonfictional quest romances in which the hero-authors struggle through enchanted, bedeviled lands toward an ostensible goal” (180). Many women’s texts of the period did not conform, in whole or in part, to these conventions of a linear, goal-oriented “quest” narrative. With the exception of a few notable women who took part in investigating new terrain, many were concerned with a smaller mapping of space; their quests often seemed less about opening new territory for their country and more about opening new spaces for themselves and their readers at home. Twentieth-century travel accounts by women continue this tradition. In her preface to Japanese Lady in Europe (1937), for instance, Haruko Ichikawa articulates the different roles held by herself and her husband while traveling: During our strenuous journey … I played the part of a dry-plate behind the lens in the form of my husband … , while he was intent on studying where to direct our focus of inspection for the next day, I sat up and wrote down all of the things which had cast their shadows on my mind during the day. (13)

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 While Conrad’s text is hugely influential in shaping the way travel is conceptualized in twentieth-century texts, his work’s introspection echoes some women writers’ techniques. In addition, Marlow’s journey is not altogether a straightforward masculine conquest narrative. Marlow’s mental wandering seems to come as the price of not knowing, not conquering, and not seeing clearly in a place where white Westerners fight for mastery.

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Ichikawa likens her husband to the lens of the camera and herself to the “dryplate,” the light-sensitive glass, a comparison which nicely articulates traditional societal roles of the genders (man as director, woman as receptive vessel) as well as differences in focus that often occur between men’s and women’s writings. While men’s accounts tend to stress active journeying, giving more straightforward accounts of the immediate sights and images perceived, women’s works more often absorb smaller details of the surroundings, revealing more introspective tendencies. The potentially radical differences between women’s and men’s narratives of travel may be observed in a comparison of Evelyn Scott’s Brazilian travel book Escapade (1923) and her husband’s descriptions of their Brazilian travel in Life is Too Short (1943), texts I will examine in a later chapter. While Cyril Kay-Scott actively explored regions of south and central Brazil, Evelyn, pregnant with his child, remained largely house-bound in a northern city. KayScott recounts a generally linear tale of adventure and scientific pursuit; in contrast, Evelyn produces an introspective, poetic work highlighting her personal experiences of pregnancy and illness while abroad. In both travel narratives and travel fiction, women write about what they have known and experienced (or have imagined experiencing) through travel, often lending importance to spaces, activities, or ideas that have been less commonly articulated in literature. As this last example demonstrates, the differences found in women’s texts can stem largely from the divergent societal, cultural, and colonial positions held by men and women both at home and in foreign spaces. Women travelers often grow to embrace such differences and may develop a keen attraction for the foreignness they find abroad, even using it as a means of selfdefinition. Travel Estrangement: The Female Body and the Other Julia Kristeva once expressed that “Writing is impossible without some kind of exile” and argued that a writer can only evade convention by becoming “a stranger to one’s own country, language, sex and identity” (“New Type,” 298). This idea also expresses the outlook of many early twentieth-century women whose notion of liberation through travel involved leaving one life behind and embracing another in a space of difference. Becoming “a stranger” through real or figurative travel involves observing places of cultural dissimilarity for inspiration. For white Western women travelers, then, a paradox emerges: in order to observe and inscribe cultural difference they necessarily assume a colonizing position, yet through this construction of Otherness they locate the strangeness in themselves. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said writes that “narrative is crucial” to understanding the interaction between the Western writer and the native “Other” because stories are used by the colonized “to assert their own identity” while they are also the vehicles through which the Western world perceives a foreign culture (xii). The Other complexly functions as a construct of foreignness against which

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the traveler defines himself even while subsuming that foreignness in his desire for it. The Western construction of the Other thus depends on the way the foreign is glimpsed and then redesigned by the traveler. Gisela Brinker-Gabler articulates this point in Encountering the Other(s) when she writes, “‘The exotic’ is a distortion of the other or its degradation to an object of projection … . Whatever can be experienced about otherness—for we can never possess the original—is always dependent on one’s own cultural background, one’s own system of perception” (3). Travelers perceive foreign lands according to their own palette of familiar experiences, and can paint them as they choose. Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan remark that most criticism on travel narratives concentrates on how “travel writing frequently provides an effective alibi for the perpetuation or reinstallment of ethnocentrically superior attitudes to ‘other’ cultures, peoples, and places” (preface, viii), but, as they argue, the issue is often more complex. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha suggests that when one writes about the Other, one invests oneself into the writing as well, so that “The desire for the Other is doubled by the desire in language, which splits the difference between Self and Other so that both positions are partial; neither is sufficient unto itself” (50). This ambivalent relationship perhaps is even more significant for the woman writer since traditionally Western society has categorized woman as a kind of “Other,” foreign to masculine concepts of biology, thought, emotion, and sexuality. When Edward Said writes, in comparing the stereotypical perception of the Oriental to the European, that the “Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike [and] different” (Orientalism, 40), it is remarkable how similar these words are to those traditionally used to describe women.24 Kristin Herzog continues this idea in her introduction to Women, Ethnics, and Exotics by explaining how women are characterized as “more passive, less logical; more imaginative, less technically inclined; more emotional, less incisive; and more religious, less scientifically oriented” than men (xi–xii), traits which link women to images of “‘Noble Savages’ and other non-white people” (xi). What does it then mean for women, already aligned with the foreign, primitive, and exotic, to wish to write about another Other? From a postcolonial perspective, women travelers hold a curious, even contradictory position. Simon Gikandi argues that because of women’s similarity to the colonized subject, “Reading woman in the culture of colonialism and in the service of empire demands, then, that we renounce the binary opposition—between self and other—promoted by the dominant (masculinist) narrative” and realize colonialism’s “contradictions and complicities” (124). Certainly women’s position abroad complicates the standard binary. While women travelers may be more sympathetic to the colonized person’s situation, many still are complicit in the 24

 This idea of women as “Other” is also the foundation of Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 feminist manifesto The Second Sex, where she considers women “always defined as the Other” in relation to white men and thus socially closer to the position of racial minorities (143).

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construction of the foreign to serve their own ends, returning to de Man’s assertion that modernism comes from remaking something else to bring about “a new departure.” At the same time, many of these women are seeking, celebrating, and finding inspiration in their perceptions of cultural and racial Otherness, looking to it as a means to articulate their own voices. As they do so, they frequently present altered subjectivities colored by their own perceived alignments with difference. In a period when painters, writers, and musicians were seeking the “primitive” to redefine their art, I locate a key similarity between travel writing and fiction in the way the women of both texts seek foreign experiences to inspire innovative paths of exploration, searching for a kind of “Otherness” to use as a vehicle for inscribing something new, even something unarticulated about themselves. What can be expressed by women travelers largely revolves around the female body, the personal vehicle encountering these new spaces. Abroad, one’s own displaced body becomes foreign and thus new. Travel writing gives early twentieth-century women an acceptable medium for their thoughts and ideas, for as they articulate foreign spaces and peoples and share them with their eager audience at home, they also articulate themselves, inscribing their own lives into a landscape of difference. My project demonstrates how the women modernists similarly use the concept of travel to search for Otherness inside themselves. While generally moving through spaces less “exotic” than the travel writers, they turn their gaze inward to the geography of the feminine self, making “excursions” into the unknown through the female body. Feminist Geographies / Feminist Phenomenology Women’s increased social and geographic mobility in the modernist era is a component of feminism’s “first wave” when many women sought suffrage, equal educational opportunities, and greater political and social freedoms. Yet, in focusing increasingly on the female body, women authors of the modernist era also anticipate second wave feminists. While the women modernists write several decades before Kate Millett would publish Sexual Politics (1969), where she argues for the right of women to control their bodies, and before the more linguistically oriented French feminists would focus in the 1970s on the right of women to articulate their bodies, illustrated by Hélène Cixous’s idea of écriture feminine (feminine writing) and Luce Irigaray’s notion of parler femme (to speak as a woman), these earlier women writers from Dorothy Richardson to Evelyn Scott are already challenging male models and seeking a means of more creative and liberating female expression. Second wave theorists’ ideas remain particularly appropriate for discussing the motivations of the modernists, for they frequently speak of the ways women have been bound to their bodies by social dictates; as Julia Kristeva remarked, “A woman is trapped within the frontiers of her body” (“New Type,” 296). Her word “frontier” suggests a geographical conception of the body within which women

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have not always controlled their own cartography. Sigmund Freud notoriously conceptualized adult women and their sexuality as “a ‘dark continent’ for psychology,” thus aligning the body of woman with the body of Africa, the “dark continent” (212). Male explorers of new worlds traditionally associated unsettled lands with female bodies; Freud in turn gave women’s bodies their own status as unexplored geography. When Irigaray and Cixous responded to Freud in the 1970s, they challenged his famous association. Cixous wrote in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” “The Dark Continent is neither dark nor unexplorable—It is still unexplored only because we’ve been made to believe that it was too dark to be explorable” (255). She suggested that for women to symbolically regain power over their own bodies, they must find a way to linguistically reclaim this space as their own and thus “write through their bodies” (256). While the internal excursion is the kind of travel Cixous laments in her essay “Sorties” when she speaks of Molly Bloom in Ulysses voyaging in “a bed of pain,” commenting, “She wanders, but lying down. In dream. Ruminates. Talks to herself. Woman’s voyage: as a body” (66), this position may be a subversive one for women. After all, though Molly does not geographically travel, her power lies in her daydreams and in her language, acknowledged by Cixous to be écriture feminine, her term for a type of women’s language that is transgressive and challenges patriarchal norms. As I have discussed already in this introduction, women often have been characterized as living more “on the inside” than men: in the domestic sphere of the home, in the body, in the mind. In order to remake herself, a woman finding herself in this position needs to begin from within this space. As Janet Wolff writes in an examination of feminism and body politics, “There is every reason … to propose the body as a privileged site of political intervention, precisely because it is the site of repression and possession” (“Reinstating Corporeality,” 122). While acknowledging the importance of second wave feminists’ theories, more recent scholars, postcolonial feminists, and “third wave” advocates also suggest looking beyond the essentialism implicit in second wave ideas. Wolff reminds us that “what the female body is varies by culture, by century, and by social group” and while considering these theories we must remember, as scholars such as Elizabeth Grosz have successfully explored, that a body is “a socially inscribed, historically marked, psychically and interpersonally significant product” (Wolff, 133). As Ann Rosalind Jones asserts in “Writing the Body,” we always need to consider “social context if we are to fill in an adequate and genuinely empowering picture of women’s creativity” (380). Social context of course includes the places and spaces individual women come from, and the places and spaces to which they travel. Thus my project uses not only the lens of feminism but that of “feminist geographies,” the study of women, place, and identity which takes as its focus the ways in which women inhabit and move through spaces. Geographers such as Gillian Rose, Linda McDowell, Doreen Massey, Pamela Moss, Karen AlHindi, Lise Nelson, and Joni Seager have worked to theorize the role of gender in geography, conceptualizing and investigating the spatial aspects of women’s lives,

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including women’s work and home experiences in different cultures.25 Among others investigating alternate models beyond white Western norms, Katherine McKittrick considers “what kinds of possibilities emerge when black studies encounters human geography” (Demonic Grounds, x). Looking at different women in the spaces they occupy challenges masculinist conceptions of geography and reveals much about women’s patterns of displacement and belonging, repression and expression. As Linda McDowell points out, however, beneath all lived-in topographies, “the most immediate place … is the body” (34), and it is the articulation of the body in new spaces that impels this study.26 The body functions as a bridge between inside and outside spaces. It mediates between the conception of the self and the reception of the Other. For the fiction writers, the concept of travel, even to less exotic realms, inspired them to look internally to find and explore that “dark continent” of women’s bodies, catching for their own purposes Freud’s statement about the mysteries of womankind. Their women characters use their bodies, transcending the traditional limitations imposed on them, to initiate further voyages, both real and imagined. Body theorists such as Paul Schilder and phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty have long studied the body in relation to consciousness, experience, and perception, exploring the phenomenon of the “lived body.” As Raymond Gibbs explains, a key level of the philosophy of “embodiment” is phenomenology, which is “everything we can be aware of, especially our own mental states, our bodies, our environment, and our physical and social interactions” (40). Merleau-Ponty investigated the body as the medium through which we experience the world, calling it, in Phenomenology of Perception (1945), “the fabric into which all objects are woven, and … the general instrument of my ‘comprehension’” (235). He used the term “schéma corporel” (“body schema”) to refer not to the body as a defined sum of parts but to one’s own perception of the possibilities of the body; once the body interacts with the space and objects around it, they too become a part of the body schema. Simone de Beauvoir, however, in The Second Sex (1949), suggested that the experience of the body as a “lived” entity is different for women than for men and generally conceptualized the female body as confining and limiting.27 Later feminist theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz and Iris Marion 25  See, for example, Gillian Rose’s Feminism and Geography; Doreen Massey’s Space, Place, and Gender; Lise Nelson and Joni Seager’s A Companion to Feminist Geography; and Pamela Moss and Karen Falconer Al-Hindi’s collection Feminisms in Geography. 26  From the late 1980s onward, many feminist geographers have been keenly interested in the study of body and place. As Nelson and Seager write in their introduction, “it is ‘the body’ and the multidimensionality of embodied experience(s) that continue to anchor feminist geography at the dawn of the twenty-first century” (1). 27  Beauvoir’s negative outlook on women’s bodies (seeing woman, for example, as the “prey of the species” (498) and pregnancy as a restricting, parasitic “cellular growth”

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Young have combined phenomenology and feminist techniques to explore more positive notions of female embodiment, even envisioning the female “lived body” as a site of resistance for patriarchal definitions.28 In her work Volatile Bodies, Grosz specifically calls for a further “understanding of embodied subjectivity” (the phenomenological theory that consciousness is embodied) to articulate a “feminist philosophy of the body” (21, 22). If we apply the ideas of “body schema” and “embodied subjectivity” to the female body, we see a resulting personal geography of feminine corporeal form, space, tools, and potential action. This project begins where the still evolving theoretical ideas of feminist geography and feminist phenomenology meet, and I combine these notions with theories of travel and postcolonial studies.29 I select from a number of scholars and theorists whose philosophies relate to a conceptualization of the moving, “lived” body, though they are as diverse as Edward Said, Mary Louise Pratt, Iris Marion Young, and F. M. Alexander. At the heart of my project lies an interest in philosophies of embodiment, an area connected to both anthropology and movement studies (such as dance scholarship) that has only begun to be explored.30 For the modernists, movement over large distances and through new geographies becomes central to studying and articulating subjective experience and imaginative awakenings.31 For women especially, articulating the lived body in travel allows for a new kind of freedom of expression. As women writers turn the imaginative gaze inward, they begin to redefine “travel” entirely. Excursions into Modernism While studies of travel usually limit themselves to the consideration of external space and physical movement, my project employs a more elastic conception of travel to include more metaphorical journeys. Other critics, such as Sidone Smith, (496)) alarmed some later feminists. 28  See Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies, and Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays. 29  For an alternate set of theorists to consider, see Andrew Thacker’s utilization of space theorists Lefebvre, Foucault, and de Certeau in Moving Through Modernity. 30  Consider, for instance, Dee Reynolds’s observation in Rhythmic Subjects that “Movement events that disrupt normative, habitual ways of using energy in movement … are acts of ‘kinesthetic imagination’” (4) and Gibbs’s statement in Embodiment and Cognitive Science that “Movement is central to how we conceive of the relation between ourselves and our bodies. We do not feel subjective experiences to be specific brain states, but sensations of our bodies in action” (27). 31  Some of the most intriguing current philosophies of the lived, moving body exist today in dance scholarship and studies of kinesthesia and proprioception (observations of movement, sensation, and awareness). See especially Carrie Noland’s Agency and Embodiment. Even the idea of new movement over short distances may connect to the perceived freedoms of motion that many twentieth-century women felt in the act of travel.

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who organizes her study Moving Lives around twentieth-century women’s various means of transportation, have examined women and literal vehicles of motion, but the vehicles I select are more abstract. When the White Star cruise line asks in the 1920s, “Where is Woman’s Place?” they realize that the answer used to be: as objects of the gaze, as invalids, as mothers, as angels of the house surrounded by domestic objects. By the twentieth century, women are no longer so closely limited by such conceptions, and are additionally freed by their ability to travel to foreign spaces. Thus, in Excursions into Modernism, I argue that new imaginative and artistic explorations, what I call modernist “excursions,” are enabled through reconceptualizing old vehicles traditionally located in the geography of the female body: the skin, the ill body, the womb, and the piano. Each forms a part of the feminine space which a woman may use to journey into new modernist modes of expression. I choose the term “excursion” because of its multiple and useful historical, geographic, and linguistic resonances. “Excursion” became synonymous with pleasure travel in the Victorian age when Thomas Cook ran the first “publicly advertised excursion train” in England, arranging for 570 passengers to travel from Leicester to Loughborough (Rae, 22).32 When Cook helped shuttle people to the Great Exhibition of 1851, his name became a household word; so, too, did the term “excursion” when Cook created and named the first travel newspaper The Excursionist and Exhibition Advertiser (Swinglehurst 20). By 1865, Cook had helped “more than a million tourists and excursionists” visit Western Europe and the United States (Rae, 77), many of whom had never before possessed the financial means to travel. Jill Hamilton reports that “it was not until Cook started his cheap overseas tours in 1855 that workers, let alone women, had the opportunity to go abroad easily” (vi). Indeed, women were “the mainstay of Cook parties throughout the century” (Swinglehurst, 35) as Cook became known as “the great organiser of excursions in every part of the world,” including Africa, India, and Australia (Rae, 159). Thus, the term “excursion” is importantly linked to the beginnings of freedom of movement around the globe for Western women, and this association persisted into the modernist period. Taking up the term near the end of the nineteenth century, Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted “The Excursionist” (book cover), a work in oil showing a young woman holding a walking stick and gazing wistfully ahead at some unseen object or vista.33 Most striking about the image is that the young woman herself is not in motion, though the wind is blowing the ribbon on her hat; indeed, the real “excursion” appears to be taking place on the inside, in daydream. 32  Cook organized the trip to help others attend a temperance meeting (Rae, 22). Although Cook’s first attempt at travel organization was for altruistic reasons, it soon became a serious business venture. 33  The date of Renoir’s “L’excursionniste” is unknown; the musée d’Art moderne André Malraux, currently exhibiting the painting, estimates that it was painted around 1888. I offer my thanks to the museum for their kind permission to reproduce the painting.

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“Excursion” literally means “A journey, expedition, or ramble from one’s home” but also implies “an overstepping of the bounds of propriety or custom” (OED). It is thus a useful term to signify something new and a bit transgressive for these women, something that applies equally to the movements of the twentiethcentury women I study. “Excursion” is doubly significant for my project because of a secondary meaning. While the term can imply both a physical journey and a deviation from a direct course, it also can signify a “ramble from a subject” and “a digression” in language, further highlighted by the adjective form “excursive” (OED).34 Such a “ramble” or “digression” may suggest a wandering away from realist norms. The related noun “excursiveness” similarly involves a “capacity for mental ‘flights’ in various directions” (OED). The notion of “mental flight” is a recurrent trope of modernism, as modernism frequently is identified with a turn towards psychology and introspection. An “excursion” in language thus connects to the experimental interiority and fluidity of modernist writing. The term “excursion” appears frequently in travel narratives, usually denoting a quick, exploratory trip. Often the word is preceded by the word “pleasant,” as in these examples by Victorian women travelers: “We made a pleasant excursion one day, lately, to the ruins of Shane’s Castle” (Greenwood, 111) and “There are some pleasant excursions to be made in the neighbourhood of Vannes” (Dunlop, 88). Louise Chandler Moulton uses the word in 1896 not only to illustrate such physical journeys but also to describe an act of storytelling: after listening to her Italian host’s tale about a nightingale, she comments that “such delightful excursions invite us that one need never be at loss for a fresh pleasure” (70–71), associating “excursion” with more fanciful diversions. By the twentieth century, “excursion” retains its earlier usages but often has additional imaginative resonance in the writings of travelers and women modernists. A beautiful example comes from the early journals of Virginia Woolf: when on holiday in Huntingdonshire, the young writer describes her imaginary adventures as “my excursions on the ice” as she pretends she is a “Norseman bound on some long voyage” (Passionate Apprentice, 138). Radclyffe Hall uses the word to signify an imaginative escape through writing when she describes her short story “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” as “a brief excursion into the realms of the fantastic” (“Author’s Forenote,” 2). In her 1923 travelogue Grace Thompson Seton speaks of her supernatural vision of Egypt’s ancient past as an “excursion into the fourth dimension” (231). Dorothy Richardson chooses “Excursion” for the title of a story in which an older woman, hearing the bark of a dog, retreats into the “past moments” of her childhood (111), creating a long, stream-of-consciousness passage. These examples illustrate how the modernist authors are as fascinated by inward voyages as by outward ones. Excursions into Modernism revolves around the varied meanings of this term to

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 “Excursus” is also a literary term meaning a lengthy discussion or digression. While an excursus might be found in a work of nonfiction or fiction from any period, an excursus within a character’s thoughts would be particularly modernist.

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present a study of these interconnections between travel and literature, focusing on the body as a site which enables both physical and imaginative journeys. In my first chapter, “Increasingly ‘Imaginative Geographies’: Excursions into Otherness, Fantasy, and Modernism in Early Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing,” I argue that women’s travel writing paralleled, even inspired, fundamental ideas of modernist literature. I examine a number of travel narratives written by British and American women, working with Edward Said’s term “imaginative geography” to emphasize how the preconceptions a traveler brings to a country shape her representations. The three sections of Chapter 1 map a progression from corporeal study to inward exploration. I begin with the more traditional African travel narrative A White Woman in a Black Man’s Country (1914) by Nettie Fowler Dietz, where the native body becomes the locus of escapism for the Western reader. Next I examine Grace Thompson Seton’s A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt (1923), which marks a bridge between fact and fantasy, external and mental voyage. My third section shows travel literature moving into modernism with Vita SackvilleWest’s Passenger to Teheran (1926) and concludes by showing the connections between this and Virginia Woolf’s aspirations for modern fiction. My second chapter, “Narratives of Passing: Transdermal Excursions in Larsen, Rhys, and Hall,” focuses on the skin as a vehicle for personal redefinition and entry into new cultural spaces. In texts based largely on their own travel experiences, three fiction writers explore the perception of race as a space in which to locate identity. I use the term “passing” here to incorporate both the idea of racial resonance and a stage of transition and movement. In Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Helga Crane turns to geographic change to find expression for her conflicting identities as an American woman of multi-racial heritage; in Passing (1929), the slippage between black and white is represented by Clare Kendry, whose body is paralleled in the text by the inviting foreign space of Brazil, where racial boundaries can be redrawn. I next turn to examine the complex ideas of race, place, and travel in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934), where Anna Morgan’s “white” Caribbean body is labeled as non-white when she moves to London from the West Indies. I investigate here how alternating scenes of England and the Caribbean function in this curiously “inverse” narrative of travel as Anna struggles to find a place where she belongs. The third section of my chapter offers an unusual reading of Radclyffe Hall’s “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” (1926) by examining the ways in which the “Otherness” of lesbianism is rewritten as primitive racial difference when a trip to a nearby island allows Miss Ogilvy to become an ancient tribesman through dream. My research into both the autobiographical and paleontological aspects of this story allows me to make provocative new speculations about the particular function of this fantasy. I conclude this chapter with a brief look at Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” (1909) and argue that the complex and personal ways in which these modernist women writers navigate between racial spaces reveal that the use of “the primitive” is not always simple or singular. While my second chapter concerns women using, refiguring, and reimagining the exterior of the body to negotiate spaces, my third chapter turns from the external

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“geography” of the body to the internal. In “Modernist Fever: The ‘Undiscovered Countries’ of Illness,” I examine the connections both between illness and geographic space and between illness and the female body. Here I explore three texts which adapt and subvert the stereotype of illness as retribution for women who transgress appropriate geographical and social spaces, examining three novels in which modernist language arises out of encounters with illness. I argue especially for the creative potential of feverish illness, a disorienting experience taking the individual to a new plane of existence. In Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915) and Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934), these “voyages” may be read not only as Rachel Vinrace’s and Anna Morgan’s journeys into foreign countries but also as metaphors for the illnesses which carry both the young women and their authors into new linguistic space. I conclude by examining H.D.’s HERmione (written in 1927) in which the title character, whom the novel represents as a brave explorer of new linguistic worlds, can only find the means of articulating herself through a delusional illness. Chapter 4, “‘I am going on and on to the end of myself where something else begins’: Travel, Pregnancy, and Modernism,” shifts to another bodily characteristic traditionally seen as trapping women to domestic spaces. Here I investigate how women writers can subvert and reclaim pregnancy as a positive feminine attribute by using it as a vehicle into new artistic spaces. I bring to this discussion both Kristeva’s and Cixous’s articulation of pregnancy’s creative potential and Iris Marion Young’s examination of the pregnant body through the lens of feminist geography. Long before these studies, the modernists were investigating pregnancy both as confinement and as inspiration. In this chapter, I examine several autobiographically enriched works articulating experiences of travel written by three pregnant transnational women modernists. For each young writer, experiences abroad enabled a new kind of text expressed through the body. In the case of twenty-year-old New Zealand native Katherine Mansfield, an enforced journey to Germany to hide her pregnancy led to the writing and publication of her first work of short stories, In a German Pension (1911). While in this volume she explores the grounded female body, later she shows a connection between pregnancy and feminine imagination in “Prelude,” a story inspired by a childhood move to the country. Elizabeth Smart, one of Canada’s first modernists, more freely welcomed connections between innovative writing and ideas of pregnancy and birth. I investigate the ways in which By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945) articulates Smart’s travels, passions, and pregnancy. Finally, I turn to American author Evelyn Scott’s Brazilian travel work Escapade, an inwardly focused narrative showing her experiences of pregnancy and post-partum illness while abroad. By comparing Evelyn’s narrative with that of her husband, I extend my introductory discussion about the potential differences between women’s and men’s travel texts. My fifth chapter, “‘It carried her out of the house, out of the world’: Modernist Women Writers and the Piano,” explores women’s escape from a restrictive home life through the piano, an object so intimately connected to the middle-class woman

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that it becomes an extension of her own body. Using a combination of theories from psychologists, phenomenologists, and musicians, I examine the piano as a part of the personal geography of the woman performer. I demonstrate how three authors rework traditional Victorian conceptions of the piano as a refined, matchmaking instrument by using the piano as a vehicle of creative expression for their female characters. I begin by examining Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915) in which sheltered Rachel Vinrace is able to keep near her the domestic object to which she is closest, the piano, even as she ventures into a remote South American world. Woolf experiments with traditional connections between women and the piano by making the instrument into a vehicle of liberation, exploration, and self-definition. Even Rachel’s manner of playing seems to evolve with her new experiences abroad, displaying an emerging and more modern musical style. Similarly, in Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs (1915) Miriam Henderson discovers, during her time in Germany, both a way to communicate through the piano and a means of allowing music to carry her mentally into new spaces. The novel additionally underscores the importance of musical expression for the self instead of for another. I next examine Rebecca West’s Harriet Hume (1929) in which the title character’s magical art of reading her lover’s mind is connected to her talent as a concert pianist. Harriet has the additional ability to transform London into a foreign space for her lover, allowing the text to become a travel narrative of the imagination. In concluding the chapter, I bring my discussion back to travel writing in examining biracial American pianist Philippa Duke Schuyler’s narrative of her worldwide concert tours, Adventures in Black and White (1960), where the piano becomes her passport into foreign spaces. Through investigating these bodily vehicles of travel, Excursions into Modernism explores the way women of the early twentieth century voyage in to new spaces of the imagination as they voyage out. To conclude my discussion, I turn at last to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, which, coming after examinations of equally experimental works by women, should appear familiar in its modernist tendencies. West’s book is not a lone pinnacle, but a step in a long staircase built by other women writers. As scholars begin to discover and discuss more travel works of the modernist era, many unexplored links between the genres of travel writing and fiction will come to light.

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Chapter 1

Increasingly Imaginative Geographies: Excursions into Otherness, Fantasy, and Modernism in Early Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing

When I sit alone, lost to things external, I see sights that few can. Marvellous rocky peaks, mysterious depths, and familiar dark figures, whose eyes flash with passion or mirth, pass before me. I hear sounds—soft childish voices, weird beating of drums and woeful yells … . It is quite dark. Can I make it light to you? Can I make you see the sights that haunt me, and hear the sounds that thrill me even now? I would that I could. —Jessie Monteath Currie, The Hill of Good-bye: The Story of a Solitary White Woman’s Life in Central Africa

Alluringly positioned between autobiography and fiction, travel narratives rely on the subjective experience of the author to inform the reader about the mysteries of a foreign region. As the above lines from Jessie Currie’s 1920 African travelogue reveal, an author often strives to share the most thrilling attributes of the travel experience and, like Currie, to properly bridge the gap between experience and description, providing vicarious adventures for the armchair traveler. Travel narratives’ popularity stems from the way authors tantalize readers with the allure of the foreign, which we see in Currie’s description of “dark figures,” “soft childish voices,” and “weird beating of drums and woeful yells.” Nonetheless, in giving “light” to these narratives, in losing oneself in “things external,” where does reality end and fantasy begin? Scholars such as Percy Adams have demonstrated that the genres of travel literature and fiction are closer than most acknowledge, with the origins of the novel intricately linked to the tradition of the travel narrative. Nonetheless, little work has been done to explore more recent alignments between the genres or, particularly, to examine the role of women writers in this area. Although nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women travelers come from many backgrounds and display varying personalities, they invite comparison along gender lines as they proudly call attention to their status as women. Their narratives frequently highlight the novelty of a woman moving into a foreign space where Western women seldom go. Often these travels involve a quest for the Other, the exotic, the “not-me.” They also invariably portray a journey to locate an alternate

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self, an identity separate from the home. Vita Sackville-West once remarked while traveling in Italy, “I don’t believe one ever knows people in their own surroundings; one only knows them away, divorced from all the little strings and cobwebs of habit” (LSW, 51). The same might be said for a traveler’s conception of herself, for in relinquishing a familiar societal role she gains the opportunity for self-discovery. Besides a few cherished belongings, all a traveler can bring on her journey is her own body, her preconceptions, and her imagination. This chapter will illustrate how narratives of travel often move away from realism as women authors perceive themselves freed from previous constraints of space and language and frequently align themselves with the foreign or racial Other. While men’s texts often inspired women travelers, these women’s works offer a striking departure from male models. As they revise the masculinist adventure genre and further develop introspective tendencies of nineteenth-century women’s travel writing, early twentieth-century women travelers move toward a modernist aesthetic. Gender, Genre, and Travel Excursions into modernism in women’s travel writing emerge from deviations in women’s texts from the patterns of a male-dominated genre well established by the nineteenth century. While recounting interesting anecdotes about travel conditions or describing unusual sights, male explorers usually had a larger purpose in mind related to Western expansion. In Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt characterizes the conventions of nineteenth-century men’s exploration narratives as a kind of “monarch-of-all-I-survey” writing (201). The belief that what can be seen with the eyes can be taken with the mind and the map tends to produce a certain kind of forthright, linear narrative focused on these goals. Western women have had a different history; rarely respected as explorers and geographers before the twentieth century, women could not even join the Royal Geographic Society with full privileges until 1913.1 Their writings often reflect a different stance. Pratt argues that, although women did participate in exploratory expeditions, they rarely used a “masculine heroic discourse of discovery” in their writings (213).2 Critics are quick to note a theme of sexual prowess underlying traditional male travel writing and note that the sexual metaphors of “opening” a virgin land are much less prominent in women’s works.3 Cheryl McEwan remarks in Gender, Geography, 1

 While Mary French-Sheldon, Isabella Bird, and Kate Marsden were admitted as “fellows” in 1892, it took twenty more years for the RGS to grant women “Fellowship privileges” (Foster, 6). 2  Pratt cites Mary Kingsley’s expeditions in Western Africa as a notable exception. 3  One curious counter-example occurs in Annie Peck’s A Search for the Apex of America: “My next thought was to do a little genuine exploration, to conquer a virgin peak, to attain some height where no man had previously stood” (x, Peck’s italics). She combines traditional masculine heroic rhetoric with feminist assertion, nicely illustrating

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and Empire that, in contrast to the fantasy of men going “to test their manhood in the wildernesses of Africa,” the white women travelers to West Africa she has studied more often see themselves as “observers and describers of their physical environment, rather than conquistadors” (66). This is not to say that traveling women did not carry with them imperialist ideas, simply that the expression of these ideas may take a different form in women’s writing, operating more within domestic spaces and involved less with charting or claiming geographic spaces.4 We must also remember, as Edward Said and others have long noted, that conquest can take place through imaginative inscription as well as physical occupation, and travel literature particularly helped to construct an idea of foreign spaces empowering the Western traveler of both sexes. The perpetuation through the late nineteenth century of a masculine “discourse of discovery” in men’s travel works came from their alignment with the popular genre of adventure fiction, a genre that, as Nicholas Daly writes, was designed to restore “the manhood” of fiction (Modernism, Romance, 19). In 1890, author H. Rider Haggard described adventure novels as refreshment for “all the big and little boys who read them” (qtd. in Paxton, 183), considering them primarily concerned with boyhood fantasies.5 This genre of fiction bears a strong resemblance to the traditional male model of the travel narrative with the “masculine imperial subject” often mapping a “feminized and eroticized” body of land (Daly, 26); Daly remarks, for example, that a map in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines looks like “the outline of a recumbent female body” (57). The novels Daly examines also show the exotic landscape as “a testing ground” for masculinity (61), involve central male characters and their linear quest (often for a treasure), and never let their explorers “become part of that landscape” (64). Heart of Darkness (1899) similarly involves a masculine journey of conquest into spaces conceptualized as primitive, dangerous, and feminine, and combines this with a fear of becoming psychologically absorbed by them. Masculinist themes of exploration continue in men’s travel writing of the early twentieth century. For example, in his text In Wildest Africa (1909), American Peter MacQueen associates himself and his pursuits with a lineage of great male explorers since David Livingstone. He speaks of Africa as “the newest theatre Shirley Foster’s point that when women travelers adopted a masculine genre, they “found themselves caught in a series of paradoxes or tensions” (18). 4  As Reina Lewis argues carefully in Gendering Orientalism, it is a mistake to categorize white Western women outside the ideologies and empowered positions of imperialism, though women’s familiarity with subordinate positions may make them more empathetic observers. In examining women’s writings and artwork, Lewis shows that “imperialism played a role in the very construction of professional creative opportunities for European women” (3). 5  In his article “Adventurers Stake Their Claim” Martin Green similarly asserts that “the writers and readers of adventure are predominantly men.” He continues, “There is and always was a strong affinity between adventure and ‘men’ or manliness” (72), and connects the genre to imperialism.

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for the achievements of the white race” (vi), writes of “opening the wild centre of the Dark Continent” (99), and includes a photograph of himself draped in an American flag with his walking staff suspended above the untouched snow. Susan L. Blake reveals similar findings in “A Woman’s Trek: What Difference Does Gender Make?” In the narratives she examines by Ewart S. Grogan (1900) and by Frank Melland and Edward Cholmeley (1912) each author paints himself as “quest hero” and uses his manhood as his source of authority and power (24).6 In contrast, many early twentieth-century women’s travel narratives follow the models established by their nineteenth-century women predecessors, with content, tone, and structure markedly different from those of their male contemporaries. Nonetheless, they often attribute their interest in foreign travel to masculine adventure stories. In Adventures beyond the Zambesi (1913), Edith Cecil-Porch Maturin explains, “To see the world, to seek adventures, has appealed to me all my life” (1). Ignoring the popular books “written for little girls” (1), she filled her head “full of blood-curdling travels and adventures, tussles with wild beasts, hunger, thirst, hardships, difficulties, dangers!” (2). Australian native Mary Gaunt writes in Alone in West Africa (1912) that her fascination for foreign travel began as a small child when she “sat and read a story-book. It was the tale of a boy named Carlo who was wrecked on the coast of West Africa … and he was taken by savages” (2). As an adult, Gaunt enviously watched her brothers go “a-roving to other lands” while she and her sister remained in a world “bounded by our father’s lawns” (3). Seeking the less “bounded” spaces offered by her story-book, Gaunt set off for West Africa: “The regular, conventional life did not appeal to me; I could only write adventure stories, and the scene of adventure stories was best laid in savage lands” (7). What becomes crucial is that, while these women were inspired to travel by men’s adventure tales, they did not ultimately emulate them. For instance, while some women’s travel narratives of the era show an indebtedness to the ideas and imagery of Heart of Darkness, none formally model themselves on Conrad’s text. This is perhaps no surprise, given that the only women to be found in Conrad’s novel are deluded domestics or voiceless primitives, none of whom seem to have the ability to travel or to step out of their tragic positions. Indeed, it is not the quest narrative of Conrad’s form that seems to attract these women writers but the contemplative nature of the text and the uneasy position of its main male characters within the colonial model. Conrad’s work concerns locating and describing the foreign, both in a remote landscape and within the self; these aspects resonate with a woman traveler’s curious position abroad as both Westerner and Other. Susan Morgan aptly describes the relationship between Victorian men’s and women’s travel writings when she says in Place Matters, “Their cultural aims are similar—in fact, his defines hers—but their specific positions and content are  Susan Blake alternately finds that Mary Hall’s 1907 African adventure A Woman’s Trek from the Cape to Cairo reveals Hall’s ability to negotiate with words rather than firearms and her willingness to consider and understand native people’s positions. 6

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different” (17). Many of these women wrote with masculine examples in mind to give their texts authority; however, their texts often diverged from these for multiple reasons. To begin with, many differences found in these narratives simply reflect differences in men’s and women’s interests and in their ideas of “adventure.” While keen to prove that a woman could go anywhere a man could, traveling women often found their focus drawn by different sights and opportunities. Many women were curious about the domestic activities of a culture and about family life, including, as Shirley Foster notes, “the appearance, costume, and manners of women” and even “the importance of ‘space’ in the physical environment” (24). In fact, these women travelers anticipate later efforts of feminist geographers in recording what Marion Tinling calls “the rhythm of daily life” for women in other cultures, including “birth, marriage, child-rearing, death, and household economy” (xxiv–xxv), and entering feminine spaces that men could not. Billie Melman explores in Women’s Orients that when white women entered the harem or purdah, it shifted from “the locus of an exotic and abnormal sexuality” (60) to a more normalized image of a social, family space, not “of the exotic” but “of the familiar” (76). Women’s narrative movement away from male models, particularly the adventure model from which women were traditionally excluded, shows a subtle resistance to patriarchal norms; while the writings of Western women travelers are certainly not all pro-feminist, they commonly seek to provide a lens that is a woman’s way of seeing and thinking, privileging alternate ways of knowing and understanding a foreign space. Traditionally, a woman’s writing was not seen to wield the same power as a man’s, but in taking a little-known land and its people as a subject of inquiry, a Western woman could gain authority and admiration. As Morgan points out, women’s texts may merely reencode “feminine values of their [home] culture and the superiority of that culture” (17–18), with a woman critiquing a country’s “marriage customs” while a man critiques the “system of justice” (17), but any critique, even established in these separate spheres, suggests women’s empowerment created through a feminine position of knowledge. Writing on the importance of the domestic in women travelers’ accounts, Pratt notes, “If the men’s job was to collect and possess everything else, these women travelers sought first and foremost to collect and possess themselves. Their territorial claim was to private space, a personal, room-sized empire” (159–160). Pratt’s words are revealing, for they point to a kind of self-“possession” that is key to these narratives and to the creation of a new space for these women, a borderland between male (colonial power) and female (foreign, colonized) space available for a new kind of writing addressing women’s issues and interests.7 For instance, Susie Rijnhart, in the preface to her 1901 travel narrative on Tibet, apologizes that her narrative  Cheryl McEwan (Gender, Geography, and Empire) argues that even though Victorian women travelers to West Africa such as Mary Kingsley, Mary Slessor, and Constance Larymore did not work for women’s rights in Britain, all three found liberation in travel and took women’s issues as an important focus of their work in Africa. 7

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“does not aim at literary finish” but asserts that her work on the “customs, beliefs, and social conditions” of the people is more accurate than the information in more renowned works of “great travelers” (i.e. men’s texts): “My close contact … has enabled me to speak with confidence on these points, even when I have found myself differing from great travelers who, because of their brief sojourn and rapid progress, necessarily received some false impressions” (1-2). She excuses men’s mistakes while upholding the authority of her account and her own way of seeing. Thus did women’s positions abroad give them opportunities for new identities and new articulations, even new confidence. This example also demonstrates, as Rijnhart oscillates between apology and assertiveness, how women authors may waver in tone when they try to position their narratives for a home audience more accustomed to traditional male accounts. Many nineteenth-century Western women’s travel writings particularly show an interplay of more “masculine” and more “feminine” textual attributes, partly due to these women’s atypical positions abroad. Complex dynamics of voice emerge in their work as they strive for a balance between the assertive and the “feminine.”8 McEwan finds that nineteenth-century women who adopted more of an explorational style then “modified their texts by disclaimers and interjections of humour, or by stressing the difficulties of travel,” all of which make a work less formal, authoritative, and masculine in tone (Gender, Geography, and Empire, 19). Many women’s travel narratives also depart structurally from masculine models. In a chapter on nineteenth-century South American exploration in Imperial Eyes, Pratt finds many male texts relying upon the “goal-directed, linear emplotment of conquest narrative” (157). In contrast, the women’s texts she examines are formed of circular paths centering around journeys to and from a domestic center. In the preface to Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travelers, Jane Robinson posits, as a generalization, that “men’s travel accounts are traditionally concerned with What and Where, and women’s with How and Why” (x). Among the structural and linguistic differences found in writings by women, critics often note a “confessional nature which permits self-exploration” (Foster, 19). Catherine Barnes Stevenson theorizes in Victorian Women Travel Writers in Africa that, judging from the texts she has examined, men are more likely to structure their works as “questromances or tragedies” while women more often produce “odysseys,” exploratory texts centering around “the experience of travel itself” (8).9 Supporting her ideas 8

 For instance, many nineteenth-century women gained new authority in their writing but shied away from such authority in remembering how their texts would be received. Alison Blunt characterizes Mary Kingsley as self-consciously creating a persona in between masculine and feminine positions. While Kingsley “attempted to locate herself within the masculine tradition of exploration” to demonstrate her expedition’s importance (58), her descriptions differ from the language of “vision and surveillance” characterizing many men’s imperialist writings (63). 9  Stevenson uses categories from T. D. MacLulich’s “Canadian Exploration as Literature.”

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with research on the nature of women’s autobiographical writing, Stevenson generalizes that while men more often “write formal, distilled autobiographies” which accent and evaluate the journey as a whole, women tend to “produce more private, fragmented, episodic autobiographies … which impose no overarching design on their lives or travels” (9–10). If women’s works are more often defined by wandering thoughts and unusual digressions, this explains their exclusion from the typically male canon. Revealingly, Cheryl J. Fish’s research on the invasive editing of Margaret Fuller’s 1843 travel narrative Summer on the Lakes by Fuller’s brother reveals that the passages expurgated were her “digressions” and “case studies” which made her work most innovative (19). It is this tendency toward digression and excursiveness in the narratives of nineteenth-century women writers, further developed by early twentieth-century writers, that connects the genre and, particularly, women’s role in the genre to explorations in modernist fiction. While critics have tended to focus on Victorian women travelers, highlighting their ability to cross boundaries and escape the domestic sphere through world travel, modern women travelers’ excursions are equally significant. Indeed, their wandering and inward exploration at a time when introspection was being celebrated in modernism give them a fascinatingly strategic position in the development of modernist writing. Twentieth-Century Imaginations Many women travelers of the first few decades of the twentieth century reveal an awareness of being a woman moving through a strange land, writing against the grain of the male genre. They are cognizant and proud of their status as traveling women, and the titles of their works often present their journeys to the public as distinctly feminine and therefore innovative. For example, the titles A Woman’s Journey through the Philippines on a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route (1907), A Woman’s Way through Unknown Labrador (1908), The New North: Being Some Account of a Woman’s Journey through Canada to the Arctic (1909), Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage: A Woman’s Unique Experience During Thirty Years of Path Finding and Pioneering (1911), Across Siberia Alone: An American Woman’s Adventures (1914), Five Months in the Argentine from a Woman’s Point of View (1920), A Woman Alone in Kenya, Uganda, and the Belgian Congo (1924), Through Khiva to Golden Samarkand: The Remarkable Story of a Woman’s Adventurous Journey Alone Through the Deserts of Central Asia to the Heart of Turkestan (1925), and “Yes, Lady Saheb”: A Woman’s Adventurings with Mysterious India (1925) highlight not only that the writer is a woman but also that she is alone in a foreign and potentially dangerous region. They bring her vulnerability as well as the rarity of her quest to the forefront, and her selfinscription as a female traveler suggests a redefinition of the genre with a woman hero and a feminine subjectivity.

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Other titles similarly stress the “Mysterious” or “Strange Lands” surrounding the woman adventurer. While the foreign scenery and civilization are alluring, many of these women writers find in the native people the epitome of the strangeness that they seek. Moreover, they emphasize their own curious position in the midst of these native inhabitants. Titles such as A White Woman in Central Africa (1900), A White Woman in a Black Man’s Country (1914), The Hill of Goodbye: The Story of a Solitary White Woman’s Life in Central Africa (1920), and My Journey to Lhasa: The Personal Story of the Only White Woman Who Succeeded in Entering the Forbidden City (1927) identify the writer as a specifically white woman traveling into mysterious non-white lands. As these women journey into foreign spaces, it is crucial to note, as Mary Louise Pratt has articulated, the “contact zones” of colonial encounter—“social spaces where disparate cultures meet,” places where bodies come together (4). As these Western women travelers remark on the bodies of the persons around them, they also begin to see their own bodies differently. For instance, in her title Gringa: An American Woman in Mexico (1934), Emma-Lindsay Squier emphasizes her status as a foreigner in the eyes of the Mexican people. Squier remains uncomfortably conscious of the physical differences between herself and the people around her, perpetually feeling the gaze of the Mexican men on her body. On her trip to Tibet, Dr. Susie Rijnhart recounts that “so accustomed had our eyes become to oriental attire” that their own European clothes seemed fantastic and even “grotesque” (29). As she ventures out to witness a native ceremony, she finds her white body an equal source of interest: natives flock to see her, “overwhelming” her with their curiosity (32). Even as these women travelers remark on the foreignness around them, they cannot help seeing themselves likewise positioned as “Other,” a strange minority in a different world. As my introduction suggests, part of these women’s attraction to the “Otherness” of the colonized person may relate to their own marginalized positions. Aligned traditionally with those holding less power in society such as children and minorities, traveling Western women inhabit an in-between space in their interactions with foreign people.10 Writers like Cheryl McEwan theorize that the authority held by white Victorian women in imperial settings overturned their subordinate status at home; this continues in early twentieth-century texts.11 While women still held a feminine position, whether traveling alone or making an extended visit as a colonial wife or missionary, the influence gained by their 10

 In the late nineteenth century, explorer Mary French-Sheldon exemplified this slippage between male and female positions; African porters called her “Bebe Bwana” (“grandmother sir”). Tracey Jean Boisseau has noted French-Sheldon’s “gender-blending strategies” (10), “womanly” in her demeanor but undertaking a more “masculine” geographic expedition without a husband or white chaperone. While French-Sheldon was directly involved in imperial agendas, she also focused attention on women, children, and domestic spaces (Boisseau, 29). 11  See McEwan’s “Encounters with West African Women” in Writing Women and Space.

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race and Western identity gave them a more dominant position characterized as “masculine” by several critics.12 As Simon Gikandi writes, the curious placement of Western women in foreign spaces demands that we reconsider “the binary opposition—between self and other” (124). Reina Lewis agrees, arguing that women’s shifting identities abroad within constructs of nation, race, and gender “could produce positions from which to enunciate alternative representations” (15). Contemplating foreign bodies in a strange land compelled a woman writer to consider the position of her own body as a foreign object and to make choices about the presentation of that body on paper. Writing about a foreign country also entailed writing about her experiences there, giving credence to her own feelings and thoughts. While some travel narratives remained a simple record of facts and scenic descriptions, others evolved into a deeper, more inward exploration. The flexibility of the travel narrative form gave writers the ability, in purporting to write about Timbuktu, for example, to write about whatever else came to mind as well. In certain instances, this freedom gave rise to a modernist mode of expression, one formed from a combination of foreign stimuli and the pleasure of mental wandering that many women writers associated with physical travel. Just as nineteenth-century women’s travel works often emphasize their divergences from traditional accounts, fin de siècle and twentieth-century texts frequently offer disclaimers stressing narrative difference—difference which allows for modernist innovation. For instance, in a forenote to her 1896 travelogue Lazy Tours. . . . . in Spain and Elsewhere Louise Chandler Moulton asks her readers to “forgive me … that I have travelled in pursuit of pleasure, or of health, rather than of ‘very hard facts;’ that I have recorded impressions more often than details” (n. pag.). In her foreword to A Woman’s Winter in Africa (1913), Charlotte Cameron similarly writes, “I wish to add that this book is in no way historical, statistical, or political—simply the impressions of a woman traveler” (n. pag.). In America as I Saw It (1913), Ethel Alec-Tweedie acknowledges in her preface that she has produced a “curious jumble” of a book (vii), yet ultimately dubs her work a “cubist-impression picture of a great country,” aligning it with radically new experiments in art (v). Cheryl McEwan remarks that women’s texts actually were expected to be more “amateurish and subjective” than men’s (Gender, Geography, and Empire, 87); nonetheless, as Alec-Tweedie’s comment suggests, reliance on subjectivity and independence from a more masculine model provided a more freeing, experimental form, and opened up a new variety of narrative for women. Certainly, any writer’s description of a locale foreign to him or her would be “subjective.” Edward Said emphasizes this idea in Orientalism, discussing how the Orient was endowed with meaning by the European explorer, scholar, and poet. Fact seldom can triumph against the romance of fiction; as Said writes, “space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us 12  See, for example, Alison Blunt’s “Mapping Authorship and Authority,” Shirley Foster’s Across New Worlds, and Stevenson’s Victorian Women Travel Writers in Africa.

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here” (55). Said terms this formulation “imaginative geography.” “Imaginative geography” is usefully extended to include not only a preconception of a foreign geographic space but also the reconstruction through narrative of such a place by a visiting outsider. The term creates a bridge between travel writing and fiction; we may consider how any view of a country from an outsider’s perspective intrinsically is a kind of fantasy. If women’s narratives are allowed, even expected, to be more intent on self-exploration, they are also more free to investigate “imaginative geographies.” The very “impressions” Moulton and Cameron describe, roundabout thoughts not constrained by an anxiety for conformity or accuracy, carry the genre into new spaces. This chapter examines the intersection of self, writing, and Otherness in three travel narratives by early twentieth-century British and American women, investigating how the woman traveler constructs her body next to her perception of the Other in narrative and photograph, and how she sees herself affected by the encounter. While all three of these texts show fascinating interactions between the traveling woman and the native inhabitants, the second and third works especially reveal genre-bending experiments with the travel writing form. The three main sections of this chapter explore increasingly “imaginative geographies,” showing a progression from corporeal study to inward exploration. In Nettie Fowler Dietz’s A White Woman in a Black Man’s Country (1914), a more traditional African travel narrative which contains descriptions and photographs of native peoples, the African body becomes the focal point for the Western reader’s escapist desires. The narrative exemplifies the tension between the white woman’s body and that of the native; as the African body is analyzed and categorized, the body of the white woman is relegated to the margins of the text and itself ultimately emerges as “Other.” My second section examines Grace Thompson Seton’s A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt (1923), an unusual text which collapses the boundaries between fact and fantasy, external and internal voyage. While Dietz’s text relies on contrast, Seton’s work is designed to reveal similarities between the Western woman and the “New Woman” of Egypt. Seton’s narrative becomes sidetracked, however, as she reveals, despite all her progressive leanings, that her true interest lies in Egypt’s occult past. Her text moves travel writing over the threshold into fantasy; what Seton cannot find in Egypt she seeks in her own mind. My final section concerns the movement of travel literature into modernism with the stream-of-consciousness style of Vita Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran (1926), a text I will, in conclusion, connect to Virginia Woolf’s writing. Atypically, Sackville-West’s narrative gives no intention of revealing the “true” Persian peoples but consciously uses her sense of their inscrutability to inspire the foreign fantasy world she inhabits. Although each of these women undertakes a different kind of “excursion,” both in geography and in writing, the key to each text is not what each woman actually sees on her adventures but what the adventure becomes for her and how she chooses to present it.

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“I was a white woman once”: Curious Constructions of Self and Other in Nettie Fowler Dietz’s A White Woman in a Black Man’s Country As we turn to more modern travel texts, a new element arrives to affirm the author’s record of travel: the photograph. Travel writers have long desired to illustrate through words what they see on their adventures, and, beginning in the latter decades of the Victorian period, photographs could always stand in when words failed. Many Westerners share the belief that something is “real” if you can take a picture of it, but a photographer’s image can be as susceptible to the artist’s influence as a painting. For instance, consider this scenario from Adventures beyond the Zambesi (1913) by Edith Maturin. A butcher who keeps a half-grown lion as a pet offers to photograph the author with the lion to illustrate her African adventures for readers at home. The butcher exclaims excitedly, “let’s get some … long grass and things and rig it up to look like the jungle, and then she can describe some thrilling adventure where, wandering in the brush, she came across the lion lying asleep and made friends with it, and—and—I came along and snapped ’em.” This is precisely the kind of image a Western reader might long to see: a striking juxtaposition of the savage and the familiar, with the savage ultimately tamed by the traveler. As the dashes illustrate, even the butcher begins to sense the ridiculous nature of his request as he tries to imagine his own implausible position in the fantasy. To her credit, Mrs. Maturin refuses his offer: “‘No one would believe it,’ said I. ‘I don’t want to. I won’t’” (24). Moments later, when the butcher is attacked by his own lion “friend,” the author is convinced she made the right choice. By recounting this story, Maturin assures her readers of the honesty and veracity of her tale. At the same time, she alerts them to the possibility that not all travel narratives or images reflect what is “true”; instead, they can be constructed to show whatever the writer or photographer desires. In this case, the butcherphotographer builds his own narrative from an invented image, revealing how pictures tell stories, too. Maturin refuses his tall tale; instead, her frontispiece photograph shows the opposite of a woman amidst “thrilling adventure.” Here “The Authoress,” as the photo is captioned, wears a very large bow in her hair, has her shoulders alluringly revealed, and gazes wistfully into the distance. Yet the picture provides for the careful reader another exercise in spotting the tame lion: Maturin’s image is just as consciously constructed, though with a message of domesticity rather than foreign adventure. It also reveals a very different persona from the one we see in the narrative and, as such, it is no more “believable” than the photograph with the lion that the author refuses. Elizabeth Edwards writes in her introduction to Anthropology and Photography: 1860–1920 that although “It has been argued that the photograph is an analogue of physical reality and that the assigning of meaning, interpretation, is a secondary activity,” it might be of more use “to consider the photograph as an analogue of visual experience, and as such, a culturally based ordering of the world in which the signifier and the signified are read at one and the same time” (8). Thus the photograph, along with the caption or narration, can reveal as much about the

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photographer as it does about the photographic subject. Similarly, as we read about and visualize a traveling individual’s experiences with non-Western people, the distance between viewer and viewed is not always clear. In books of travel published since the advent of photography, the frontispiece often depicts the author the way he or she wishes to be perceived, while additional photographs in the text indicate how the author wishes for the reader to perceive others. For instance, the cover of Charlotte Cameron’s 1909 travel narrative A Woman’s Winter in South America shows a child in native dress, beads, and decorative face paint looking straight at the camera; posed with a bow and arrows, the youth appears solemn with a hint of hostility (Figure 1.1). The child wears dark colors and the picture highlights the young person’s dark hair, skin, and eyes. In turning to the book’s frontispiece, however, we discover this image’s antithesis: a photograph labeled “Mrs. Charlotte Cameron” in which the author, dressed in a hat with a gigantic ostrich plume, elegant earrings, and a startlingly white lace dress emphasizing her feminine form, delicately leans upon a black unopened parasol (Figure 1.2). Her gaze, in contrast to that of the native child, turns demurely away from the camera, perhaps admiring a foreign setting. Both bodies are adorned and hold a weapon of choice, whether arrows or parasol, and yet they are strikingly different, offering a fascinating juxtaposition of the body of the native with the body of the woman observer. The images, both carefully posed, uphold different fantasies of self and Other, although it is Cameron who has the agency to choose her self-presentation. Although Mrs. Cameron may want us to remember her as she appears in the photograph before us, she could not always have looked so spotless and pristine while traveling. Because the focal point of Cameron’s narrative is intended to be the foreign land, she chooses the image of the native youth and not herself for her cover art; impossible to miss, this photo draws in the reader with a visual glimpse of the foreign body. The reader’s notion of the non-Western Other relies heavily on the Western traveler’s lens, a lens that embraces difference. As Hight and Sampson note in their introduction to Colonialist Photography, photographers long have contributed to race “as a cultural, social, and political fabrication” by “creating visible markers of racial distinction in their photographs” which encouraged stereotypes of nonWestern people (3). These stereotypes were perpetuated when the photographs were reproduced in books, displayed in exhibits of empire, or even exchanged as picture postcards, as Mark Wollaeger has shown.13 Such postcards represent the extreme in imaginative travel since the image represents what neither the reader nor the sender has seen or experienced. In Wollaeger’s words, the tourist “assumes the subject position of the colonizer by appropriating the exotic site” and yet “the familiar subject also appears to have ‘gone native’ by merging with the space of the exotic, a transformation typically triggered within the recipient as well” (47). Even within a travel narrative, the construction of a foreign locale can be somewhat fantastical, and photographs help lend credence to this “imaginative geography.” 13

 Please see Mark Wollaeger’s article “Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race.”

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Figure 1.1 Cover of A Woman’s Winter in South America (1909)

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Figure 1.2

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Frontispiece from A Woman’s Winter in South America (1909)

The unusual relationship between tourist and native and the curious collision between “Other” and non-Other emerge particularly in Nettie Fowler Dietz’s travel narrative A White Woman in a Black Man’s Country: Three Thousand Miles up the Nile to Rejaf (1914, republished more widely in 1926), a relatively unexplored

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text which contains many visual and written depictions of African native peoples.14 From the outset, its title foregrounds the concept of a lone woman thrown into a land of racial (and gender) difference. Although fairly traditional, the text is useful for demonstrating how much the act of travel revolves around the body, in this case that of a woman trying to situate herself in a foreign land. Dietz’s text is full of descriptions and photographs of native bodies while that of the “White Woman” almost disappears, only later to be itself reconfigured as “Other.” Dietz, a wealthy Nebraska native, assembles her narrative from letters she wrote to her sister during a six-month voyage up the Nile with her husband. The text follows the course of these letters, placing them in order by date and location; this gives Dietz’s text a quality of immediacy and keeps her observations fresh.15 Dietz also includes two fold-out maps as well as more than 200 photographs that she and her husband took en route, lending her observations visual representation. Consistent with the works of many women travelers, Dietz’s letters are full of many small details of their journey; she soon realizes this herself after one letter was “so fat it got stuck going into the mail box and they had to push it in with a stick” (35). Travel usually encourages close attention to the body as a traveler strives to become acclimated to transportation and foreign conditions. Surprisingly, Dietz’s detailed accounts rarely extend to her own body. While a Westerner’s trip down the Nile would not be an easy journey, the only hardship Dietz describes is one brief bout of motion sickness. This general sense of comfort may be due to the luxurious accommodations the couple enjoyed as they traveled first class by train and boat for most of their voyage.16 Unlike other African travel writers such as Dr. Janet Miller, Dietz does not attempt to brave the elements of the region she explores. She has come to see Africa, but from a sheltered position. In so doing, Dietz ensures that the narrative is less about herself and more about those she encounters on her journey. 14

 Dietz’s text is infrequently discussed critically. For a biography of Dietz and her husband, see Oliver B. Pollack’s “Capitalism, Culture, and Philanthropy.” I offered an earlier version of my discussion in “Increasingly ‘Imaginative Geographies’: Excursions into Otherness, Fantasy, and Modernism in Early Twentieth Century Women’s Travel Writing,” published in the Journal of Narrative Theory (Fall 2005). 15  While her original audience may have shaped Dietz’s travel narrative, Dietz had ample opportunity to alter her letters once she arrived home. The tone of the letters remains informal, but they bare no trace of familial talk and remain clearly focused on the scenes before her. 16  Dietz begins the journey commenting, “Really I think this is one of the most delightful boat trips I have ever taken … !” and the conditions do not seem to worsen as they travel (33). Since the boat contains a cook and other workers, Dietz spends much of her narrative praising their delightful meals and sleeping quarters and occasionally ventures to give a brief account of a bath. The narrative offers a good example of a Westerner experiencing comfortable conditions even while traveling through a region very different from her own.

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“We were much interested in the natives,” Dietz begins in one telling understatement (43). The African men and women become a crucial part of the land’s attractions. Like many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women travelers to Africa, she shows great interest in women’s domestic activities, such as a fascination for the way native women use sand to wash their clothes in the Nile (130), and in their choice of dress. She is equally fascinated by the Africans’ lack of clothes. Dietz remarks in a curious moment of childlike awe, “This country will always stand out in my mind as one having the largest marshes, the greatest quantity of papyrus, the most hippopotami, crocodiles and naked men” (177). There is something perhaps humorous but also denigrating about the way the “naked men” get slipped in among the hippopotami. Dietz’s narrative, like much travel writing, locates the exotic quality of the region in the appearance of the native peoples; this occurs especially in African travel narratives in which the bodies of the natives are often so markedly different from those of their white observers. To offer a point of comparison, in Jungles Preferred, Dr. Janet Miller treats Africans suffering from leprosy, sleeping sickness, hunger, and infection, but she finds healthy black bodies equally curious and disturbing, demonstrating a judgmental scrutiny of them down to their very skin color and body ornamentation (which she calls “grotesqueries of personal adornment” (74)).17 Although Dietz tends to be more sensitive in her observations of the African people, offering a more open-minded view in her descriptions of their dress and body art, her comments reveal her fascination with native bodies and, to her, their strangeness. In one instance, she recounts, “The native woman is a light dresser. I saw many of them with no covering above the waist and only a strip of cotton cloth wound about them from the waist to the knees. No one seemed abashed and so we were not” (60). Though her natural impulse is to feel “abashed” by the women’s state of undress, Dietz makes an attempt to see them as their society does. This does not keep her from being intrigued by them, however, or from including on the facing page of her narrative a close-up image of “Native Maidens at Khartoum” with two women wearing nothing but necklaces above the waist (61). While Dietz is merely recording these women in their common state of attire, the image may hold a different meaning for viewers at home, giving the reader a voyeuristic window into an exotic African world. Dietz always tries to remain tactful in her descriptions. For instance, she notes of the African women: “The love of personal adornment is evidently as strong with these native women as with all women of other nationalities but their method of showing it is somewhat different. The operation of hair dressing, which was done in full view of every one, was specially interesting to me” (77). Again Dietz 17

  Miller rarely records her visual observations without adding her own aesthetic judgment. She writes, “The black woman’s color is like a garment, so that her lack of raiment does not offend the eye as much as might be expected—except when the woman is old; then her nakedness is an indescribably hideous thing to see” (130). Indeed, her eye seems more “offend[ed]” than the average doctor’s should be.

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shows interest in the public quality of displaying the body, the hairdressing being “done in full view of every one.” The accompanying image is not as subtle as Dietz’s words, however. To illustrate “personal adornment,” Dietz includes an image of “An Omdurman Belle,” a close-up of a young woman with her hands placed somewhat defiantly on her hips and a contemplative gaze focused slightly away from the camera (79). Her half-naked form is adorned with large bracelets, a beaded belt, necklaces of beads and coins, and a nose ring connected to a clothlike head ornament. The tassels that partly obscure her chest make the woman’s form simultaneously hidden and tantalizingly revealed to the viewer. Dietz shows equal interest in the men’s bodies, especially their hair styles. Four photographs depict Shilluk men’s styles of hairdressing—one fashion “like a broad brimmed hat pushed onto the head” (136) and another “like spokes of a wheel” (136–138). “I was really lost in admiration of their art,” Dietz notes (138). The photographs are, in turn, Dietz’s own artistic composition. Carefully posed, each shows the men holding spears or sticks, adding an element of fierceness to their stance. Several men clutch what appear to be drum mallets, though one could mistake them for weapons due to the stern, solemn manner in the men’s pose. Each image is carefully presented to show the exotic quality of the costume, and in other pictures Dietz does not shy away from presenting the nude male form from the front or back. Her photographs may merely serve as a visual record of the hair “art” Dietz describes, but they also reveal Dietz’s aspiration to transcribe that which is most strange and most foreign to Western eyes. Photographs and written descriptions of foreign peoples display a degree of dominance over the subjects as they are “captured” for an audience; as David Spurr writes in The Rhetoric of Empire, “as any visual artist knows, the gaze is also the active instrument of construction, order, and arrangement” and “conveys a sense of mastery over the unknown and over what is often perceived by the Western writer as strange and bizarre” (15). Dietz’s position in the text is often one of “mastery,” shown in the ease with which she describes these foreign bodies. Like Dr. Miller, Dietz is fascinated by the blackness of the skin that surrounds her, commenting on several occasions that one man or another is “black as the ace of spades” (155). Dietz’s use of familiar Western terms (“broad brimmed hat,” “ace of spades”) to describe unfamiliar African bodies creates a strange collage of images, ultimately making these men and women appear even more exotic to the Western reader. Dietz’s narrative also details the African body art: We saw some Congo women, jet black, and in infancy they were ornamented (I suppose you would call it) by a new method to me. One of these women had her arms, neck, breast, and back done … . On this one’s arms were flowers and leaves from the shoulder to the wrist … . They are very proud of all this ornamentation and as they wear nothing above the waistline it shows to good advantage … . Their skin was, as I said, black as jet but as smooth as if polished. (198–200)

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The Africans, “smooth as if polished,” appear as art objects for her to observe. Dietz reveals an intimate knowledge of their bodies, as with the woman who had “her arms, neck, breast, and back done.” In such instances, Dietz does not seem uncomfortable in the role of the viewer and it gives her a position of power, an atypical position for a Western woman usually figured as the object of the gaze. Her contradictory position as both woman and empowered observer makes her uneasy in only a few telling moments of the narrative. She writes in one instance, “It is a bit disconcerting as I stand on deck with the other passengers about me to have a few dozen of these naked natives line themselves up on shore in full view, making a full exposé of their person” (175). “Exposé” suggests a kind of intentional, even sexual display and Dietz finds this bold presentation unnerving. When she stands among other Westerners, feeling her gaze desired by those she sees, thus having her spectatorial authority challenged, she senses her own out-ofplace, exposed position. During Dietz’s voyage, she becomes hyper-aware of her position not only as a white person but also as a woman. For one stretch of the journey she finds herself the only woman passenger on the boat amidst a group of Englishmen on safari. A sense of decorum keeps the men minding their manners around her, but she senses their discomfort. “All were in their khaki uniforms and boiling hot but naturally they felt they must remain dressed up,” she recounts. Once she retires to her room, the men “stretched their legs, opened their coats, smoked and had coffee” (96). The more awkward Dietz feels, the more her freedom on the boat becomes limited. We find her staying in her room in the morning while the men roam about the boat “in their pajamas and other undress” (100). It seems significant that there are no photos of these Englishmen; the fact that their undressed state is not worthy of a photograph reveals not only that Dietz believes they (in contrast to the African men) are not appropriate “foreign” material for her reader but also that she cannot submit them to the dominance imposed by the photographic gaze. The way Dietz hides in her room during this section of the voyage is similar to the way she hides her body in the photographs of her own text, again suggesting, contrary to her title, that the text’s purpose is to reveal a foreign land and not her placement in it. Often a travel writer chooses a frontispiece that gives the reader clues about how to imagine her; frequently, as with Charlotte Cameron and Edith Maturin, it depicts the author in a domestic setting, in a stage of pre-adventure in direct contrast to her position in the narrative to follow, thus widely separating her body from foreign ones that may appear in the travelogue. In Dietz’s book there is no frontispiece, and one has to look very closely to find an image of her at all. The first photographs of the author are not labeled as such and do not appear until over halfway through the text, long after the reader has grown accustomed to seeing only pictures of African men and women. Both pictures are so small that the persons in them are not recognizable. The tiny photo on the left-hand page is entitled “In the Mission Garden” and pictures a woman and man dressed in white. The faces are so shadowed that their features blend into the trees behind them; in effect, it is as if the faces are missing entirely. In the text, Dietz is similarly faceless;

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through these small and obscured images she silently reveals her motivation to record the bodies of others but not her own. This is even more strikingly reflected in the six small photographs on the following page (Figure 1.3). While pictures 1–3 show wide-angle images of the boat and the English mission house, images 4–6 show closer human figures. Pictures 5 and 6, straightforwardly labeled, respectively, “Woman in Native Village” and “A Tall Native Dinka,” depict dark Africans near dwellings. Oddly different is image 4, “Tame Gazelle in Native Village at Bor.” There are two individuals in this picture, however, and only one is a gazelle; a reader might not even see the strange, bright white shape of the author were it not for her parasol. The photograph’s title excludes the author, whose ghostly form seems more of an absence of shape and color in the photograph, a white blot on the film, than a true presence. Her expansive white dress stands in stark contrast to the dark, bare bodies in the other photos. While their bodies are presented, displayed, revealed, her body remains hidden, protected, almost erased from her surroundings. Dietz feels out of place in this land, as the title of her narrative, printed atop every page, continually reminds the reader. She also underscores this notion in her text on multiple occasions, writing, for instance, “As you travel over this country, choking with the dust, burning with the heat and with sight almost obliterated by the savage glare of the sun on the yellow sand, you more than ever realize, as has often been said, that the Sudan is not a white man’s country” (46, Dietz’s italics). She adds her own sex to this notion when she remarks, “it is no place for a white woman to live out here” (160). In a land foreign to her, Dietz herself has become a veritable foreign body. Dietz shows her awareness of this reversal when, in the only moment like it in the text, she confides, “Barring the missionary women up on the Sobat river I am the only white woman for 1000 miles south of Khartoum, and I really seem to be as much of a curiosity to the natives, and perhaps more so, than they are to me” (183). Here Dietz reveals that, as much as her text revolves around the bodies of others, she herself feels the gaze returned even more intently. Becoming “Othered” herself, she acquires an unexpected relationship with the native people so central to her text.

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Figure 1.3

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Images from A White Woman in a Black Man’s Country (1914)

We can observe this tendency in several other African travel narratives of this period. In The Road to Timbuktu (1924), Lady Dorothy Mills describes her embarrassment at the attention she receives from curious Africans. First commenting upon her skin (“‘White, white!’ they would murmur” (38)) and then her hair, they next turn a skeptical eye on her clothes:

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They could not understand my riding breeches. “The face of a woman and the legs of a man!” I have had that phrase hurled at me also in North Africa! Taking my coat off, they would make intimate and indiscreet examination of my figure, commenting on my thinness, and sometimes one, chuckling, would run off to where her menfolk waited discreetly round the fire, to tell them, I am afraid, all about it. (38–39)

Mills is made to feel that her body is not only racially different and peculiar in build but also strange in gender, androgynous because her riding pants suggest a masculine physique. In Jungles Preferred, Dr. Miller equally shows her discomfort at being scrutinized so avidly. When she arrives, she finds herself “inventor[ied] … from head to foot” (16–17). Native children run from her because she is the first white person they have ever seen. Although throughout the text she uses animal imagery to describe the African people she depicts, the doctor receives a taste of her own medicine when the native people comment of her, “Has she not lovely eyes! … big and bright—like a wild pig’s eyes … . And her hair … it looks like an elephant’s tail wrapped around her head like that” (136). While Miller takes this as a strange compliment, the native people’s words create an uneasy break in the careful boundary kept in the text between black and white, Other and familiar. In A White Woman in a Black Man’s Country, Dietz takes such pains to keep her body isolated from the “blackness” of the text that she reduces her own image to a white smudge sheltering itself from the rays of the African sun. Even small pictures of the Dietzes inserted late in the narrative reveal no close-up images of the author, and Nettie is never shown with a group of natives. Nonetheless, the distance between her body and the native body collapses in curious moments. First, Dietz seems all too ready to take home exotic souvenirs and mark her body with signifiers of Otherness, continually admiring, buying, and being given native jewelry. She receives a bracelet of elephant hair as a gift and takes home the tail of a maraboo to “have a fan made of it” once home (216). Because of Dietz’s admiration for African art and jewelry, these feminine accoutrements function as more than spoils of empire, and show a curious conjoining of native and white body. Second, no matter her caution, Dietz notices the African environment making subtle changes to her body, particularly her skin, the marker of her identity as the text’s “White Woman.” She observes, “I am getting to be as black as the Dinkas from being out in the wind and sun so much” (155). Significantly, the Dinkas are the natives shown in the photos surrounding Dietz’s “tame gazelle” image; now these dark and light figures have elided. Dietz later takes this elision a step further by remarking, “I am frightfully tanned and my bracelet watch which I wear all the time has kept an untanned rim about my wrist which shows I was a white woman once, as I laughingly told some one yesterday” (237). Dietz’s words, though intended in humor, imply that in travel she has come to see her body differently. Dietz’s final excursion, then, extends into the position, even the body of the Other, and she seems both amused and unnerved by the prospect.

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While Dietz enjoys experimenting with the position of the Other, some Western women travelers show an even more developed desire for “going native” which, as Patrick Brantlinger describes, sometimes involved Europeans “displac[ing] their own ‘savage’ impulses” onto native peoples (“Victorians and Africans,” 196) and which is a fairly common trope in both adventure fiction and travel narratives. In The Road to Timbuktu, for instance, Lady Dorothy Mills echoes both Heart of Darkness and Peter Pan in describing her desire to run away from civilization “into the heart of the great Dark Continent, to the nethermost fringe of the NeverNever Land” (199).18 She continues, “I have felt that some day … the great Dark Gods will be too strong for me, strong enough to beat down civilised instincts, and that I shall go forward, forgetting all things, and slip over the edge of the horizon” (201). This fantasy of “slip[ping] over” into the primitive strongly compels her with an almost erotic drive. Going forward into the “Dark Continent,” she can locate herself in the Other and the Other in herself. Similarly, Vita Sackville-West once commented in a letter from Persia, “I foresee the day when I shall have gone so far into myself that there will no longer be anything to be seen of me at all” (LSW, 119). The idea of a woman writer turning her perspective inward in this way is precisely the focus of the other works of travel this study will investigate. The journey into the self relies largely on the perceived foreignness of spaces abroad which serves as a catalyst for self-exploration. The journey into Otherness and the journey into the self are closely connected, as we will see in the following section. With these movements come increasingly imaginative revisionings, showing the movement of travel literature into fantasy. The Fantasy of the Other: Grace Thompson Seton’s Kaleidoscopic “excursion into the fourth dimension” in A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt Louisa Jebb19 opens her travel narrative By Desert Ways to Baghdad (1908) with an epigraph from Thoreau: Oft have I said, I say it once more, I, a wanderer, do not stray from myself; I am a kind of parrot; the mirror is holden to me; What the Eternal says, I, stammering, say again.

This passage is extremely suggestive in considering travel writing as a genre. The second line presents the author as an introspective “wanderer,” someone who travels and yet cannot “stray” from her own person. The author is continually  This allusion to Peter Pan raises the intriguing implication of Never-Never Land as a fantasy colonial space. Laura Donaldson discusses Never-Never Land in chapter 4 of Decolonizing Feminisms. 19  Jebb here calls herself Mrs. Roland Wilkins. 18

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writing about the self, even as she writes about the Other. The third and fourth lines suggest a different conception, that the author, merely repeating the words of “the Eternal,” is an objective (yet imperfect) transcriber of her world. So the question remains: which way should the travel writer hold the figurative mirror? Dietz, in trying to position the mirror away from her, captures her own image in odd corners, making it appear strange and out of place. In other texts, the mirror swings in and the author’s image predominates while the external world becomes more skewed. When a travel narrative begins to move from exterior journey into interior spaces of the mind and imagination, the gap between the object of study and its description on the page begins to widen. Travel accounts then grow more fantastical and may draw inspiration from fiction. For instance, Isabel Savory’s 1903 travel narrative begins with a quote from an adventure story: “The vague and hazy ideals which the white light of an English upbringing relegates to dreamland and dismisses as idle fancies, rise up in the glare of African sunlight, alive, tangible, unashamed” (qtd in Savory, 3).20 Traveling holds the promise of bringing an individual into a fantasy world, and the author must choose carefully whether to perpetuate these fictions for the reader. Some twentieth-century travel writers even anticipate their readers’ desires for such a fantasy space and enjoy subverting these expectations. Lady Warren’s Through Algeria and Tunisia on a Motor-Bicycle (1923) begins, “As the magician of the fairy tales, I will now take you as on a wishing carpet straight to Algiers” (13). She soon adds, however, that, “alas! a motor-bike is not a wishing carpet, and no genii attended the rubbing of our lamps!” (16). Lady Warren’s text then explodes these pre-travel, Orientalist fantasies, comparing what she and her husband expected to encounter in the African desert with what they actually found there: We suffered from the usual ignorance of other countries. Finally we realized that if we were to hear lions roaring in the desert we must take our own; if we wanted music as entirely super-oriental as our ear had been accustomed to at Drury Lane, a gramophone and records of “The Garden of Allah” music were absolutely essential. When some one finally said, “There is no sand in the desert,” and added a cart-load to our hypothetical luggage, it was too much. (11)

The couple traveled to Northern Africa expecting the exotic, the “super-oriental,” the fantasy they had seen and heard so often at Drury Lane (a West End theater). Learning that their fantasy is no reality changed their perceptions about foreign

20

 This slightly misquoted passage comes from A. J. Dawson’s work of fiction “The Powder Play” published in Pearson’s Magazine 5 (Jan.–June 1898): 153–164. This typical Oriental romance concerns a young English girl visiting Tangiers who is whisked away on horseback by her Arab lover. Savory similarly may wish to be carried away.

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travel; they realized that the only way to reproduce their fantasy world would be to create it themselves. Isabel Savory similarly begins In the Tail of the Peacock by remarking, “There was no desert in Morocco.” She continues: If a country has not been “read up’’ beforehand, the imagination has free play and forms many false conclusions: yet though it suffer on the one hand rude awakenings, it is on the other compensated by certain new lights—indelible and unique impressions—which come only in the train of things inconnu. (3)

What these writers suggest about the imagination’s tendency to form “many false conclusions” is again a kind of “imaginative geography.” Savory’s text suggests compensatory “impressions” then replace these former presuppositions, with fact replacing fantasy. This is not always the case, however, for a traveler’s eyes are not a passive lens and an active imagination can create a fantasy world en route. Lady Warren’s humorous comments about having to bring along what they wanted to find in Africa become less absurd if we consider the imagination itself as a kind of “luggage” which can create a world of its own making wherever it goes.21 The imaginative geographies of the aforementioned texts all center around the vision of the Orient, a traditional source of Western fascination. There is a contradiction at the heart of Orientalism, for while the study of the Orient educates Westerners about the culture and geography of another region, these facts are compromised by what Said calls a “second-order knowledge” located in “the ‘Oriental’ tale, the mythology of the mysterious East, notions of Asian inscrutability … what V. G. Kiernan has aptly called ‘Europe’s collective daydream of the Orient’” (Orientalism, 52). This very “compromise” Grace Thompson Seton exemplifies in her 1923 travelogue, A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt.22 Seton was a leading activist for women’s causes in the United States, working for women’s suffrage and becoming a charter member of the Society of Women Geographers.23 Although Seton embarks upon her journey to Egypt with the 21  For example, travelers sometimes report seeing mirages in the desert. Mirages can be true optical phenomena, but elaborately constructed images seen in a mirage may signal that the viewer is projecting what he or she wants to see onto the given image. 22  Critics have tended to overlook Seton’s remarkable work. For biographical information about Seton and a list of Seton’s works, see Marion Tinling’s Women into the Unknown, 249–254. 23  Seton’s narrative belongs to a larger tradition of women who traveled to Egypt and wrote about their experiences, including the Victorians Mary G. E. Dawson Damer, Sarah Haight, Sophia Poole, Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, Lady Lucy Duff Gordon, and Amelia Edwards. In Under Egypt’s Spell, Mursi Saad el Din and John Cromer remark that, of the travel narratives from Egypt they have encountered, those by women contain “the most revealing and descriptive scenes of the country” and perhaps the most blunt view of the Egyptian people and their lives (24). They describe Lady Lucy Duff Gordon, who lived for seven years alongside Egyptian peasants in the 1860s, as one of the first “to reveal

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premise of writing about the efforts of the Egyptian women to liberate themselves socially and intellectually, an attempt to remove the inscrutable Oriental veil and reveal them as “New Women” like their English and American counterparts, she cannot complete her task without being seduced by the lure of the Orient and by making her own “excursion” into the ancient past, transitioning her text into fantasy. The resulting narrative, divided into three main books,24 “Egypt Today,” “Adventuring in the Land of Ammon-Ra,” and “Egypt of Long Ago: Memories Old and New,” is surprisingly disjointed; while in her first book Seton succeeds in casting Egyptian women in a modern light, the Orientalism of her travel narrative’s other books undermines her feminist agenda.25 Brantlinger writes of India that it becomes in Western literature a “realm of imaginative license … a place where the fantastic becomes possible in ways that are carefully circumscribed at home” (Rule of Darkness, 13). The same could be said of the way Seton sees Egypt. The frontispiece of Seton’s text depicts “The Author” posed before the Temple of the Sphinx while a dark-skinned, turbaned man holds her camel in the foreground (Figure 1.4). Seton’s placement in this photograph mimics her position in the narrative to follow: Egypt’s mysterious past serves as a backdrop for her extraordinary adventures while the native people must step aside to support her own constructed image. The looming relic of ancient Egypt is especially significant. The November before Seton’s text was published, King Tutankhamen’s tomb was opened, an occurrence Michael North has termed “the first truly modern media event” (Reading 1922, 19). The British empire’s opening of the tomb, representing a titillating unveiling of a secret past, coincided with a fad for all things Egyptian. Soon “Egyptomania” had taken hold, influencing styles from shoes to architecture. Michael North suggests that this discovery created a curious union of present and past. In the words of Howard Carter, who opened the tomb:

some of the facts behind the romantic fiction” of Egypt (26). Seton’s attempt to reveal more fact than fiction is less successful. 24  “Book IV” is composed of two appendicies; I do not count it with Seton’s main three books. 25  The relationship between feminism and imperialism is exceedingly complex. Some Western women writers cited the mistreatment of women in Eastern countries to support the need for imperialism. In an extreme example like Mother India (1927), Katherine Mayo focuses on women’s issues but her imperialist agenda (writing against Indian self-rule) causes her to distort the truth. As Mrinalini Sinha notes, Mayo should not be “reclaimed” today for “progressive feminist politics” (12). Other women writers like Seton try to approach the East with an open mind and wish to rid themselves of an imperialist mindset. Nonetheless, when Western women want to apply Western models of women’s progress to other countries, their feminism remains tinged with a “West is best” mentality. Seton’s desire to find the exotic, the savage, and the fantastic in Egypt also seems to pull her in a separate direction from any feminist or humanitarian impulses.

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Figure 1.4

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Frontispiece from A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt (1923)

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For the moment, time as a factor in human life has lost its meaning. Three thousand, four thousand years maybe, have passed and gone since human feet last trod the floor on which you stand, and yet … you feel it might have been but yesterday. The very air you breathe, unchanged throughout the centuries, you share with those who laid the mummy to its rest. (Qtd. in North, 20)

Whether or not Seton’s romantic views of Egypt’s past have been awakened by the media coverage of the tomb’s opening, for her text to spark interest and take advantage of Egypt’s new-found popularity, she cannot simply write about Egypt’s modern women. To make her narrative more appealing she must, like Carter, delve back into the past and reveal the alluring mysteries hidden there. Her resulting narrative is two-faced, just as the Sphinx, caught at an unusual angle, appears in her frontispiece. Seton’s narrative raises provocative questions about the relationship between fact and fiction in travel literature. The first page of A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt contains the revealing lines: “One gets out of Egypt, as elsewhere, pretty much, what one puts into it. If your magic carpet is spread to catch the beauty, the history, and the mystery of a race, … then, one may learn something of the spirit of this unique people” (1). Seton’s Orientalism encourages her to envision the traveler’s mode of transport as a “magic carpet,” a mythical Eastern image particular to “the ‘Oriental’ tale” Said references, and to invoke the “mystery of a race” to entice her audience. Her words glisten with imaginative possibility as she implies that travel and sightseeing involve not processing and learning from what one sees but instead gleaning “what one puts into it,” as if the landscape and its people are but a reflection of the traveler’s predisposed mind. Seton goes on to define her text as “not a guide-book for the tourist, but a kaleidoscope of People and of Animals and Things, Animate and Inanimate” (8). A “kaleidoscope” implies anything but a plain view of something. Indeed, with its double mirrors revealing infinite and beautifully distorted patterns of an internal stimulus, it is perhaps the perfect example of what Seton calls getting out of Egypt “pretty much, what one puts into it”; certainly, it does not give us much hope of an objective view, no matter what Seton may intend. Although in her preface she offers the book “to those whose egos permit them to be interested in the other person,” the text becomes less about “the other person” and more about Seton until by the text’s end the author ultimately maneuvers herself to occupy the space of that “Other.” Seton’s travelogue of her trip to Egypt with her female friend “The Poet”26 begins as feminist and progressive, though her feminism is particularly driven by Western models. She dedicates her book to The Poet and “to all women who have the vision” (n. pag.), ostensibly to women everywhere who strive for further personal freedoms. She announces with immediate purpose her stately mission: to reveal to the Westerner the “complex picture of womanhood in Egypt, shot through with the 26

 Seton later reveals “The Poet” to be Celia Louise Crittenden.

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crimson and gold outlines of the Militant and of the New Woman.”27 The first book addresses “Fatima as she is today,” divided into the sections “The New Woman” and “The Other Woman and Her Education.”28 Seton discusses her encounters with the free-thinking, upper-class women of Egypt who are striving for freer mobility and higher education. She demonstrates how these women “have broken out of purdah (seclusion of women) and are using all the modern methods both for their political opposition and for their general welfare work” (17). She knows this will be “a surprise to most readers of the Occident” (16) and works to dispel any false preconceptions. She herself had expected to find in the women’s homes “A vision of … a marble fountain: some one tinkling a nakkareh, or making other native music while the Shâ ïr, the singer story teller, spun yarns of bygone heroes or new-made love affairs; and, surely, a cockatoo and a gazelle upon the marble floor.” Instead of this imaginative geography, itself an elaborate invented “yarn,” she finds “a modern interior, furnished in French fashion with Oriental touches, a conventional drawing-room fitted with fine rugs, … and, in the midst of it all, a slim, middle-aged woman of fragile body, but dauntless spirit” (24). Orientalism fades to reveal the strong Egyptian woman beneath, Seton’s intended focus. Mme. Zaghlul Pasha, the wife of Egypt’s banished leader and the head of the “Ladies’ Wafd (Delegation) for the independence of Egypt” (18), asks Seton to “Please correct the idea in America that we are barbarians, or even worse” (41). Seton expresses her shame in witnessing American tourists asking Egyptian women how many wives their husbands have and whether their homes contain bathrooms. Taking it upon herself to enlighten Westerners about Egyptian women, she prints in her text photographs of the upper-class women she has visited, capturing many of these Moslem women on film for the first time. Many of these images convey Eastern beauty with a modern Western update. One photograph shows a woman in habara and boukra, but the shoes she wears are striking high-heels. Other women are pictured in hats, bobs, and gowns ranging from a more Victorian look to a twenties flapper style. Seton compliments the educated women’s multilingualism and political prowess, while asserting that “there are more beautiful faces and voices to be met with among them than in any similar group among European or American circles” (42). This subtle placing of East and West in the same league, even championing the Egyptian, demonstrates how Seton encourages her Western audience to accept these women and envision them as similar to themselves. In this way, many of the photographs in this section of Seton’s narrative seem to have a purpose opposite to those in Dietz’s. At the same time, Seton plays up the exotic features of these women in her descriptions. Even while she lauds the 27

 This quote comes from the preface, “What the Author Says to the Reader” (n. pag.).  Seton contrasts the “New Woman,” a term which, for her, includes the Queen and the upper-class wives of important politicians, with what she terms the “Other Woman,” the illiterate, the poor, and others who have no opportunity to challenge the system in which they live. Though Seton shows sympathy for the lower classes, she implies they are more different from “us,” the presumed Western woman reader. 28

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“usual luscious eyes and clear skin” (85), the “light skin and refined features” of the women (85), she also seems to become obsessed by the “full lips and almond eyes of the true Egyptian” (38). As she strives for an open-minded perspective, Seton criticizes British rule in Egypt and their “settled policy of colonization” (127) by describing the antiBritish perspective of the politicians’ wives. She also repeats with a hint of scorn stereotypical ideas espoused by the British. One English doctor says of the Egyptians, “We must seem arrogant, for we will not open our houses and our clubs to them. The Oriental traits make this unwise. The Oriental man is keen about the white woman” (127). Although Seton does not contradict his words, she distances herself from his opinion by categorizing it as the “Anglo-Egyptian angle” (128). She also politely listens while American Egyptologist Herbert Winlock suggests that what characterizes “any Oriental … however cultivated” is “facility of mind,” to always “see the thing as he wants to see it” (134). Seton’s detached presentation of these opinions implies that the average Westerner is equally guilty of seeing from only one angle. She proudly regards her own quest as uninfluenced by Western mindsets. “The people themselves told me their story—from the Queen in Abdin Palace, through all the varying grades of Pashadom … , down to the humblest fellah woman in her mud-hut,” she asserts, calling these individuals “human documents, which gave the high lights of Modern Womanhood and her background, in this country whose history travels back 6,000 years to the borderland of fact and fiction” (138). While Seton’s first section ends on this anthropological suggestion of truthful “human documents,” the remainder of her travel account explores Egypt’s “borderland of fact and fiction” with a strikingly different narrative ambition. Despite Seton’s readiness to exhume fact beneath Egypt’s fable, her vivid imagination vies for expression. She comes to Egypt with a very romanticized view of its culture, assuming that past rituals and traditions still endure. When she asks about the tradition of sacrificing a virgin to the Nile God, her hostess answers that this has been practiced only in effigy for over a hundred years. Seton confesses that her hostess thereby “exploded another myth I had been treasuring” (35), a strange sentiment for a modern feminist. We realize Seton yearned to find in Egypt’s modern life more of its mysterious and dark traditions, key components of the Western world’s fascination with the East. Her comments support Said’s claim that the Western notion of the Orient “vacillates between the West’s contempt for what is familiar and its shivers of delight in—or fear of—novelty” (Orientalism, 59). Suddenly the romantic, adventuring side of Seton, tired of patiently waiting, seems to grab away the pen. Book II’s title “Adventuring in the Land of AmmonRa” alerts the reader immediately to the change of tone to follow. We find ourselves immersed not in a book of social interest but in one motivated by adventure. The first “adventure” Seton chooses to recount is her dramatic battle with a scorpion in her bed on the night train, “one that might have been draped with crêpe” (141). Her second “nearly-bitten thrill” (143) is with a cobra which she claims “invited

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me to do the Cleopatra act” as she stands “[a]bsorbed in the strange power which the dusky, turbaned Bedouin seemed to have over [it]” (143).29 While the scorpion encounter transcribes the daily danger of travel in the Orient, the snake incident reveals Seton’s absorption with that danger. Although Seton does not succeed in charming the cobra and it has to be removed before it bites her foot, she admits, “I have thought many pleasant things about myself but never have got into the group of reincarnated Cleopatras” (143). Her words imply that, although she cannot include herself in that anomalous group, she would not mind being a part of it. This episode suggests the depth of Seton’s obsession with losing herself in the mysticism of the culture around her. The more dangerous and occult, the more enticing to this new Seton. Next, Seton goes “caravaning in the Libyan Desert” with The Poet and “eleven black men.” The women are forewarned against making such an excursion, “[b]ut,” Seton writes, “the adventure appealed to us” (150). Eager for the journey, Seton describes herself as “a worshiper at the Shrine of the Out-of-Doors” (150). The pyramids, which they pass (on camel and donkey), “lured us like age-old beacons to a new life” (151) but contrarily repel “with a power dark, sinister, colossal, infinite” (152). It would be difficult to imagine two travelers more obsessed by the ancient mystery of their environs. As The Poet writes odes to the ancient structures, Seton goes to watch the sun rise, to “capture the atmosphere of a bygone priestess … , worshipping at the Temple of the Sphinx” (152). Seton’s choice of dress reveals her desire to be an Eastern figure of fantasy: “winding a rose chiffon veil, turban fashion, over tumbled hair and throwing a long coral cloak about me,” she leaves her tent before dawn, having “business” with “the Great God Ammon-Ra” (168). Near the oasis where they have camped, she observes “young men of magnificent proportions, naked save for a breech cloth … assisting the Water God in his beneficent offices. Their pale brown bodies … shone like living bronze statues” (168–169). This voyeuristic moment is captured in mythic language; the men’s bodies, “like living bronze statues,” are reminiscent of museum pieces, present images evoking a glimpse of the past. The desert has awakened sensual feelings in Seton. She later adds, “The lure of the Desert was pervasive, languorous. The wanton night was in a most provocative mood. It made one lonesome, an urge to share its beauty” (178). The text soon slips into fantasy as Seton succumbs to the lure of the erotic East. In the straightforward, political-minded Book I, Seton distanced herself from the stereotype that “The Oriental man is keen about the white woman” (127). Here her opinion wavers. Seton becomes the only woman in attendance at a Bedouin feast followed by a veiled girl’s provocative dancing. Afterward, her guide’s 29

 Cleopatra may have been killed by an Egyptian cobra, possibly by her own arrangement. In the early twentieth-century imagination, Cleopatra was associated with exotic beauty, snake charming, and the occult. I have found at least one reference to an “Egyptian” snake charmer and performer in England named “Cleopatra,” advertised to charm snakes with her gaze.

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cousin, Gameel, his “blood … stirred by the weird moonlight revelries of his people” (182), refuses to lead her back to camp until she quenches his desires. Seton’s narrative switches from feminist travel writing to prurient romance as she becomes the damsel in distress, the desired “white woman,” casting the Oriental in the lusty and animalistic role she once dismissed. In exaggerated poetic language reminiscent of both the rake character of Western romance and a stereotypical Eastern figure, Gameel declares: “For weeks your glorious white face has filled my heart. I cannot sleep, I cannot eat, because of you … . May Allah forgive me. If I live, or if I die in a thousand torments, still you shall be mine.” … . To match my puny muscles with his magnificent physique was futile. I had no weapon of any sort. There was no possible hope of rescue. Alone in the desert with a passion-driven animal! Something must be done, and done quickly. The adventure was becoming too colourful. He flung an iron arm around my waist to sweep me off the saddle. (183–184)

The turn of events is all part of Seton’s “adventure” and might imply how Seton, in plunging so impetuously into an unfamiliar culture, has begun to lose her control. “Many white ladies come to the desert for this,” insists Gameel (184). “This” we might read not only as sexual acts but also as the desire of these “white ladies” to immerse themselves in the exoticism of an Eastern culture. It is likely no accident that Seton’s escapade into sexual danger remarkably resembles E. M. Hull’s scandalous novel The Sheik, published in 1921 and quickly followed by the popular film with Rudolph Valentino. In Hull’s novel, Diana Mayo, a strong-willed and powerful young woman, takes a tour through the Algerian desert as the only white lady in her traveling party. En route she is captured by the handsome and savage Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan, who, in a passage similar to Seton’s last sentence above, “flung a pair of powerful arms around her, and, with a jerk, swung her clear of the saddle and on to his own horse in front of him” (52). Whether consciously or unconsciously, Seton seeks inspiration from familiar fiction in writing her own narrative. However, while in Hull’s version Diana is subsequently raped by the Sheik, Seton supplies a different ending to the story, one which empowers her in turn. In a scene that reworks the former cobra and snake-charmer spectacle, Seton hypnotizes Gameel by urging him to look into her eyes: What he saw there, caused his body gradually to relax, his arms loosened their grasp, dropped to his side, his face became drained of every drop of blood, his eyes wide and staring. For an eternity were we posed thus. Then, dropping to his knees in the sand before me, he wailed: “My God, what are you? Who are you? What have you done to me? … . You are a goddess. I am your slave.” (185)

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What Seton could not achieve with the cobra she achieves with Gameel. While one “weapon” Seton finds to use against Gameel is an instrument of her own body, another, we must remember, is her pen, with which she is able to describe the situation in her favor and propel herself to godlike status. “My whole soul swelled with power. I, I would conquer him!” she exclaims (184–185). The “strange power” she admired in the Bedouin snake-charmer she claims here as her own, coming a step closer to a “reincarnated Cleopatra.” As it progresses from Book I to Book II, A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt shifts from an enlightened account of Egypt’s women to an exaggerated adventure narrative in which a white Western woman tries to blend into an exotic Eastern world. Her second book’s adventures conclude as, after ascending the Great Pyramid with great difficulty (fighting vertigo and aided by three “dusky attendants”), Seton describes standing “on the very top of Egypt and watched it floating away in waves of memory that lapped the shore of eternity itself” (198). Although Seton stands atop the pyramid like a champion climber, this is not the “Monarch-of-allI-survey” stance that Mary Louise Pratt locates in Victorian men’s travel writing; instead, Seton describes a dreamlike experience reliant on the mythos of ancient Egypt. Nonetheless, Seton claims Egypt for her own imagination by inserting herself into its history. In Book III Seton takes her narrative a step further over the line into fantasy, dissolving herself completely into the lure of the past.30 The key to Seton’s third book can be found on its first page. In a line reminiscent of her preface, Seton remarks, “I do not know what persons usually find when they travel in Egypt. Pretty much, I fancy, what they are looking for,—as elsewhere” (203). Seton’s astute remark reveals she knows exactly what travelers have the ability to do: to see only “what they are looking for” in a country, to find in Egypt the imaginative geography they have brought to it. Revealing that she went to Egypt “seeking the past, to reconstruct the life that had blossomed, fruited and died, so very long ago” (203), Seton recounts two extraordinary visions that give her what she is “seeking” and cannot find in modern Egypt, revealing the ultimate version of the Westerner’s “collective day-dream of the Orient.” After watching a performance of Aïda in front of the Pyramid of Gizeh, Seton goes to sleep, “drift[ing] off to the borders of the real from the unreal” (208). Awaking to the call of a jackal, she kneels outside her tent and prostrates herself “before the rising sun-god, Ammon-Ra” (209). In a moment she acquires a new consciousness with new memories:

30

 Seton is certainly not the only writer who has found more romance in ancient Egypt than in its modern counterpart. Florence Nightingale wrote in the mid 1800s, “without the past … I conceive Egypt to be utterly uninhabitable” (qtd. in Sattin, 17). Both Seton and Nightingale reveal how Egypt’s relics inspire a Westerner to feel transported in time. Nightingale commented that “No one could trust themselves with their imagination alone here” (76). What Nightingale imagines, however, Seton actually claims to experience.

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Down in the sand, prone on my face I dropped, and with a strange wonder in my heart found myself performing some strange rite of worship and repeating strange words of an unknown formula. I certainly was not asleep, for I was up and moving—but the tent and the Poet had gone out of my consciousness, and I was again in the Fire Chamber of the Great Pyramid, the interior of which I had visited the morning before as a preliminary to the evening’s performance. (209)

Seton seems convinced that this is not a dream but that she has been transported in place and time, even given a familiarity with the occult, a “strange rite of worship.” It is her ideal fantasy: an opportunity to discover Egypt’s past firsthand and become a traveler not only over distance but through time. In the “Fire Chamber,” Seton witnesses a scene from “the XXIII Dynasty” (211). Here King Sethron (“with whom I felt identified,” writes the similarly named Seton) must pass a difficult trial to gain access to “the Chamber of the King” and “the Territory of the Dead.” Seton watches Sethron cross perilous chasms, separate walls of fire by invoking the gods, and finally scale an almost vertical wall by changing “the polarity of his physical atoms” (218). With her detailed description of Sethron’s trials, seeing what he sees and knowing what he thinks and feels, Seton’s fantasy allows her to assume the perspective and position of this powerful, godlike man. One cannot help remembering the difficulty with which Seton scaled the Great Pyramid in Book II, and the agile, super-human Sethron seems a fantasy figure for the woman who could only climb up and slide down with the help of three nimble, male assistants. As Sethron completes the tasks and passes on to another world, Seton awakes in her own: I heard the cry of a jackal, shivering in from the outside. The Poet and the tent and I in it, came back, as a curtain rolls up on another scene. Was it the same cry that I had left when I went excursioning into the fourth dimension? (219)

When Seton describes her return “as a curtain rolls up on another scene,” we may suspect that she has been influenced by that performance of Aïda which unveiled so vividly a story of ancient Egypt in a present landscape. Seton’s phrase “excursioning into the fourth dimension” is also notable as she makes herself, like Howard Carter who opened King Tut’s tomb, a traveler through time, her journey out of the present established by the bookends of the jackal’s cry. Her work not only progresses into fantasy but echoes temporal experiments of modernism as she employs an idea of time elasticized by mental journeying.31 31

 The bookends of “the same” jackal’s cry establishes that Seton’s journey occurs out of present time; this use of expanded interior time echoes modernist narrative experiments with temporality as Seton takes to an extreme what Virginia Woolf would later term “time in the mind” vs. “time on the clock” (Orlando, 98).

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In an effort to prove that her experience was not “just a ‘pipe dream’ of a busy imagination” (220), Seton transcribes a second vision for her reader. Watching the scenery at sunset from a Nile steamer, she recounts, “I slipped into the doings of the past” (222). This time, Seton realizes that she is seated on a camp stool with her eyes open, but at the same time “I heard and saw the following drama enacted before me” (223). In Edfu Temple the High Priest Rahotep selects a young woman named Meral as a sacrificial gift for the god Ammon-Ra. Although Rahotep claims he will give Meral to the god, there is some question about whether he wants her for himself, and the ending of Seton’s story is somewhat ambiguous concerning who claims her, the sun-god or the robed human man bending over her. Either way, the girl has been stripped of her clothes, and is caught by Rahotep as she tries with “graceful, though frantic, movements” to escape (230). Again the lure of Eastern ritual and sexuality infiltrates Seton’s tale. The vision fulfills for Seton what modern history could not; in Book I Seton was disappointed when she discovered that sacrificing a virgin to the Nile God was no longer practiced. In her fantasy of the past, Seton’s myth of the strange and lurid comes alive, making women the sacrifice of men. What Seton worked so hard to show in Book I—the strength and ambition of Egypt’s women—falls apart under the pull of Seton’s counter-desire for the savage and the sensual. Even the book’s dedication “to all women who have the vision” now seems more occult than feminist. The next day, Seton seeks out the Edfu Temple of her dream to investigate the accuracy of her vision. In the perfect ending to any story of the fantastic, Seton rides ahead of the other sightseers and discovers that “I, in the flesh of a twentiethcentury body, beheld the court of my vision of the evening before” (232), finding each room exactly as she had seen it, though now empty and unfurnished. Crawling around through passages, Seton even succeeds in discovering how the music she heard in her vision was piped into one room from another. Overwhelmed by her discovery, Seton writes: Strange indeed were the emotions I experienced, standing there in that secret passage after a lapse of two thousand years … . Strangely confusing was the reality of the twentieth century, combined with the occult and the ancient rituals. The mind is an unplumbed reservoir of forgotten things, and truth may be found at the bottom of the well. (235)

While the “truth” Seton refers to may be questionable, for the first time she acknowledges the strangeness of her text, a work whose intent to transcribe the modernity of Egypt’s present gets lost in the “unplumbed reservoir” of her own idea of the past. In a final flourish to show her acquired status as a woman inducted into the secret world of Eastern mystery, Seton emerges from a hole in the temple, surprising the rest of her party, then “put on her Oriental look and said nothing” (235). At the end of Seton’s Book I, a man learning of her connections with a rebellious group of Egyptian women refused to allow her into a school, putting on his mysterious “Oriental look”—a stereotyped inscrutability (138). Now it is

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Seton who has taken that “look” for herself, both as an appearance and as a gaze. Its Otherness becomes a part of the way she “sees” Egypt and it allows her to find the Oriental tale she desires. Seton’s final task is to share her version of Egypt with readers at home. A photograph near the end of A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt includes the caption, “The Grand Outer Court of the Temple at Edfu” (Figure 1.5). In most travel books, this label would suffice. Nevertheless, below this caption Seton has penned additionally: “Where Rahotep, the High Priest, watched Meral dance, and where she bade farewell to freedom” (facing p. 224). Seton has altered the significance of Egypt’s geography with her own experiences there, mapping for us the geographies of her imagination.

Figure 1.5

Photograph from A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt (1923)

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Moving into Modernism: Vita Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran Seton’s “excursion” into fantasy, moving across boundaries of time and place, demonstrates the extraordinary extent to which travel of the body may invite mental journeying. A voyage into the spaces of the mind may result in the kind of formal experiments involving competing discourses that we see in Seton’s text. It may also encourage experiments in language evoking the second definition of “excursion” I wish to explore in this project, with a “journey, expedition, or ramble from one’s home” that inspires linguistic wandering and “digression” (OED) and embodies modernist aesthetics. Women travelers often characterized themselves as wanderers, revealed by the titles of works such as Madeline Dunlop’s How We Spent the Autumn; or, Wanderings in Brittany (1860), H. Ellen Browning’s A Girl’s Wanderings in Hungary (1896), Lucy Broad’s A Woman’s Wanderings the World Over (1909), Mary Gaunt’s A Broken Journey: Wanderings from the Hoang-Ho to the Island of Saghalien and the Upper Reaches of the Amur River (1919), and Ethel Mannin’s Forever Wandering (1934). Wandering implies an enviable freedom of movement evident in Florence Nightingale’s words during her travels up the Nile in Egypt: “I do long to be wandering about the desert by myself, poking my nose into all the villages and running hither and thither” (42). Similarly, in The Road to Timbuktu (1924) Lady Dorothy Mills writes that “One’s arrival in a new continent or a new country is always rather thrilling. One’s instinct is to do nothing of importance, but to wander about absorbing the new aura, trying to guess what lies behind the novelty of it all” (17). Feeling the difficulty of being a true wanderer at home, women travelers located new-found freedoms in their wanderings abroad. For this discussion, it is important to consider the relationship between the woman writer who “wanders” in the travel narrative and the concept of the modernist flâneur, the urban stroller and observer. In contemplating this influential figure of urban modernity, literary critic Walter Benjamin famously turned to the writings of nineteenth-century poet Charles Baudelaire, who defined modernity in terms of “the ephemeral, the fugitive.”32 Baudelaire was looking for an artist who could capture the extraordinary in the everyday; the flâneur, in Baudelaire’s discussion, is a kind of “modern hero” with the freedom to move about the city, seeing everything and being seen without mingling with the crowd. As Janet Wolff notes, this modern figure is particularly characterized as male; nineteenthcentury Western women could rarely be alone in the street without being labeled and stigmatized. Reading modernity through influential early critics like Benjamin has encouraged scholars to visualize a particularly masculine conception of modernism. Nonetheless, in moving Wolff’s discussion forward historically, Deborah Parsons has argued that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women “were achieving greater liberation as walkers and observers in the public 32  Baudelaire is quoted in Janet Wolff’s “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity” (35) from his essay “The Painter of Modern Life.”

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spaces of the city” and that we should extend the idea of the flâneur to women, while allowing for different articulations of women’s urban experiences.33 Travel writing, however, even in the nineteenth century (and certainly in the twentieth), was already allowing for the creation of a flâneuse that could scarcely exist at home; women gained freedom and authority in stepping out of geographically and socially bounded spaces, observing the life around them, and writing about their experiences. While this travel venture might or might not be explicitly urban, it is similarly founded on the powers of close observation and the ability to render that observation into artistic expression, ideas that became central to many women modernists. Conceptualizing the flâneuse within the genre of travel writing shows women’s own version of flânerie and provides a new way to examine women’s relationship to modernism.34 Certain travel narratives of this period, especially those by middle- or upperclass women with the leisure to wander, to witness, and to write, draw attention to a new kind of language and expression inspired by this type of movement and observation. As early as 1883, W. H. Wynn introduces Mrs. Lucy Yeend Culler’s travel narrative Europe Through a Woman’s Eye with these laudatory words: There is a certain rapidity of narrative, free-flowing, conversational … resembling very much what might be familiarly communicated by a cultured lady to a circle of parlor friends … . Only it is not gossip. You see at once that every point visited, every noted locality upon which this woman’s eyes have fallen, has received just that kind of attention that has made conspicuous the objects and aspects of things that, out of the multiplicity of details, are most likely to answer the spontaneous prompting of the reader’s mind … . [T]he details of daily observation are infinite, and the woman’s art consists in instantaneously catching at the events and sights which out of the great throng of impressions, will best secure … a vivid realization of the time and place. (viii)

While there may be something a bit condescending in Wynn’s tone as he compares the narrative’s style to the way “a cultured lady” communicates to “a circle of parlor friends,” the connections he makes between the writer’s style and her gender are striking. He seems to suggest that there is something innately feminine about a narrative that is “free-flowing” and “conversational.” Although we cannot tell whether he refers to Culler or to women authors in general when he states that “the woman’s art consists in instantaneously catching at the events” from “the great throng of impressions,” his words anticipate later ideas about modernism

33

 Approaching modernism through the lens of feminist geographies, Parsons examines women’s written connections to the urban spaces of London and Paris, and shows that women produced a “female city consciousness alternative to that of the male” (7). 34  Parsons admits that “urban travel writing” was one of the genres she had to leave out of her discussion (2).

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articulated by Virginia Woolf in her 1925 essay “Modern Fiction.”35 There she rejects the current Edwardian realism and seeks a kind of literature which can capture more accurately “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” when it “receives a myriad impressions … . From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms” (106). Woolf asserts that a writer freed from convention can “record the atoms as they fall” (107) just as the mind takes in “myriad impressions”; this is akin to the “throng of impressions” Wynn already sees Culler “catching” in her narrative in 1883. Over a decade before Woolf was formulating her theories about the modern novel, Louisa Jebb was writing in By Desert Ways to Baghdad (1908) that in the middle of the desert “[what is] almost unnoticed in the ordinary routine of daily life, becomes out there of enormous importance” (15). She remarks that as you travel in an unfamiliar country “your pores are wide open to receive passing impressions” (16). Again, we might compare this to Woolf’s words, for, like Woolf, Jebb is celebrating the way the mind “receives a myriad impressions.” When traveling in a large open space away from home, Jebb emphasizes, the mind becomes receptive to “the little details of life” (15). This, in turn, affects her writing style. Similarly, Woolf discusses how, in the works of those she terms the “materialists” of fiction, “Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while” (“Modern Fiction,” 105). Many of these women travel writers thus anticipate Woolf and her quest for a kind of narrative that catches the “atoms as they fall.” The act of travel encourages this attention to the everyday, the “trivial,” which becomes so important. “These are all little things; but little things make up life,” remarks Mrs. Alec-Tweedie in America as I Saw It (1913) (31).36 Some of these women writers’ styles are formed in response to their disappointments about the limited perspectives of others’ travel accounts. Isabel Savory writes in her travel narrative about Morocco, In the Tail of the Peacock (1903), that her personal interest lies in “the silent places” which “are often overlooked” (iv). This gives her viewpoint an introspective quality. In Alone in West Africa (1912), Mary Gaunt complains that when she tried to read travel narratives about West Africa prior to her trip, “every traveller left so much undescribed and told nothing of the thousand and one little trifles that make ignorant eyes see the life that is so different” (7). Similarly, Lady Dorothy Mills begins the introduction to The Road to Timbuktu (1924) lamenting the lack of detail in “the travel books of other people”: “I always feel a sneaking curiosity to know the things they have not told one; the purely personal things, the little jokes and mistakes and tiny tragedies of every day; … all the little trivial things that help to bring the writer before 35

 This essay’s first incarnation, “Modern Novels,” appeared in 1919.  Other writers suggest that loneliness in an unknown region inspires an active imagination and a more verbose writing style that approaches stream of consciousness. Margaret Cotter Morison writes in her “Apologia” to A Lonely Summer in Kashmir that, because she had no traveling companion, “From default of natural conversation I perforce grew garrulous on paper” (x). 36

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one as a live human being” (11). As Woolf says in “Modern Fiction,” too often “life escapes.” In the popular conception of the travel writing genre, narratives needed to include adventure and excitement to be appreciated by audiences, to make readers themselves feel involved in the act of travel. Here, however, we encounter a different way to involve the reader as Savory, Gaunt, and Mills stress the importance of recording everyday detail. Mills’s call for “all the trivial things” is, in a sense, a call for modernism in travel writing. It is perhaps in Passenger to Teheran (1926) that we see modernism most at work in the travel narrative. In January of 1926, English writer and aristocrat Victoria (Vita) Sackville-West traveled to the Middle East to meet her husband, diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson, in Teheran. The journey from London lasted six weeks, and once in Persia Sackville-West remained with her husband for four months before returning to England. It was during these months that Vita made much progress on her long narrative poem The Land. As Sackville-West went East, she also wrote a large portion of a travel narrative, some of which she gleaned from the letters she penned abroad to her intimate friend Virginia Woolf.37 Passenger to Teheran, a pleasantly loquacious description of her trip to Persia, also includes a discussion of her journey through nearby geographical regions, beginning in Egypt and ending in Russia. In her first mention of the text to Woolf, Sackville-West writes on February 8, 1926, “But by the time I come home I shall have written a book, which I hope will purge me of my travel-congestion, even if it serves no other purpose. The moment it is released, it will pour from me as the ocean from the bath-tap” (LSW, 99). Vita also describes herself as “a sponge, just drinking things up” (100). Sackville-West’s language nicely depicts the fluid nature of her writing. As well, the mixed image of the ocean and the bath-tap suggests a grand adventure combined with a very personal one. The resulting narrative is a curious amalgam of personal speculation, images, and emotions, and creeps into modernism in its stream-of-consciousness approach, or, to use Sackville-West’s own term, “mental pilgrimage” (Passenger, 120).38 Passenger to Teheran and its sequel Twelve Days are the only two works of travel writing Sackville-West produced, and they come at a curious moment in her career as a writer. In 1924, when Sackville-West was already a well-known author, her fifth novel, Seducers in Ecuador, became her first work published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. Sackville-West soon saw her work moving in a new 37

 Woolf and Sackville-West first met in 1922. As Mark Hussey explains, their friendship “grew into love and then passion” by 1925 and remained “intense” until 1928 (247). 38  Vita Fortunati also examines this travel narrative in her essay “The Metamorphosis of the ‘Travel Book’ in Vita Sackville-West’s A Passenger to Teheran.” For a discussion of the relationship of Sackville-West’s work to the tradition of travel narratives about Persia, please see this essay. Like me, Fortunati also notes how “reality appears to be transfigured by the author’s subjectivity” in her narrative and calls attention to the way these “impressions and sensations are described through a ‘stream of consciousness’ technique” (69).

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direction. In a letter to Virginia from January 29, 1927, Sackville-West describes her view of the “crossways” she has recently come to; a rough sketch of two roads and a sign-post shows “Bad novels” to the left and “Good poetry” to the right (LSW, 165, 166). There is no path marked “travel narratives” despite the fact that Passenger appeared that autumn and Sackville-West would soon return to the genre, an indication that she enjoyed the travel writing form. This suggests that Sackville-West did not consider these more personal and spontaneous works to be in the same category as her other writing; perhaps, to extend Sackville-West’s own metaphor, they were off the beaten track. The arrival of Passenger was eclipsed by Vita’s well-received but more traditional work The Land, which appeared in late September.39 Woolf did not greatly admire the poem and defended Edith Sitwell’s critique of it by reminding Sackville-West in a letter on June 24, 1927, that she was a “natural traditionalist” while Sitwell was a “natural innovator” (LSW, 213). Nothing about Sackville-West’s travel writing shows her to be a “natural traditionalist,” however, and when Woolf punningly complained of SackvilleWest’s poetry and intellect in her diary, “She never breaks fresh ground” (D3, 146), she was neglecting to mention the “fresh ground” Vita had been able to cover in her foreign travels and in writing Passenger to Teheran. Beneath Sackville-West’s narrative lies the palimpsest of her letters to Woolf. Sackville-West believed that “letters certainly deserve to be approached as good literature, for they share this with good literature: that they are made out of the intimate experience of the writer, begotten of something personally endured” (Passenger, 11). Mitchell A. Leaska calls the letters between Woolf and SackvilleWest “hieroglyphs of emotion,” revealing childlike affection and ardent passion, elaborate daydreams, and beneath it all the “little dramas” of daily life (11). In Sackville-West’s travelogue the figure of the reader disappears, leaving Vita musing to herself. It is, nonetheless, similarly composed of “hieroglyphs” in that it gives vibrant images of the people and scenery Vita sees on her journey, all transcribed through the creative lens of Vita’s imagination. Leaska says of Vita the aristocrat that she “saw only what she wanted to see” (13). Perhaps the same could be said of Vita the traveler, who invents a text that is not a guide to Persia so much as a guide to her own feelings about Persia, less a travel narrative than a meditation on the form of travel narratives. In Passenger to Teheran, Sackville-West insists that if a book on travel does not set out to be a “scholarly” or “informative book” then “by all means let it be frankly personal, reflecting the weaknesses, the predilections, even the sentimentalities, of the writer; let him be unashamed; let him write to his public as to a familiar friend” (Passenger, 21). Virginia is the ideal reader for Vita, but we have taken her place, given the opportunity to enter not only Teheran but also the intimate space of Sackville-West’s mind.

 Reviewed more favorably and enjoyed more widely than Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the poem won the prestigious but conventional-minded Hawthornden Prize in 1927. Woolf satirizes The Land in Orlando, where it becomes “The Oak Tree.” 39

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The “Introductory” to Sackville-West’s narrative foregrounds its unconventional approach. Neither here, nor anywhere else, does she provide even a hint of why she is traveling; as if disconnected from any persons abroad or at home, neglecting to mention even her husband or his foreign office, 40 Vita floats in upon a steady stream of contemplations. She begins, “Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong” (9). At once Sackville-West has hit upon the problem of the travel narrative, of publicizing a private experience: to the writer there is “pleasure” in the original but to the reader there may be none. She stresses that an intimate relationship between writer and reader must be formed for the reader to visualize the writer’s travel experience: “The link between two persons must indeed be close before one of them is really eager to visualise the background against which the other moves; to see with his eyes, hear with his ears, be transplanted to the heat of his plains or the rigours of his mountains” (11). This sensual description which aligns the traveler’s body with the body of his manuscript may remind us of Sackville-West’s intimate connection with her original reader. In this moment of eros she offers herself as the vehicle through which Persia may be experienced, moving the travel book genre away from its traditional guise of more impersonal, objective truth. Indeed, Sackville-West is quick to understand that her writing about Teheran can reveal no absolute image of its reality; recognizing the gap between even an event and its description, she teases out the relationship between travel writing and fantasy. On March 9, 1926, she lamented to Woolf in a letter from Teheran, “But all this, as you say, gives no idea at all. How is it that one can never communicate? Only imaginary things can be communicated, like ideas, or the world of a novel; but not real experience” (LSW, 112). Thus would Sackville-West’s communication of “real experience” in her travelogue be colored by more “imaginary” stimuli. Sackville-West’s text is not called Passage to Teheran; instead, Passenger, similar to Dietz’s and Seton’s titles, suggests that the journey is not as much about the act of traveling as it is about the woman traveler herself. Unlike these other writers, however, Sackville-West is intent on exposing the fiction innate in travel writing. Vita wryly remarks that while the traveler may write, “I am sailing along the coast of Baluchistan,” when the letter arrives, “I am driving in a cab in Bagdad, or reading in a train, or asleep, or dead; the present tense has become meaningless” (9). Writer and reader join in creating an imaginative geography: at home, the reader creates her own meaning from descriptions of travel, working to “reconstruct a landscape” and “capture” the atmosphere from the description (11) until a “lovelier unreality … emerges, a country wholly of the invention, like those roseate landscapes of the romantic Italian painters” (12). This imaginary landscape, in turn, becomes problematic for the traveling reader:

40  She does dedicate the volume to him, however. The title page reads, “To Harold Nicolson,” but does not identify him.

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We expect regret on the author’s part that no scene can ever be accurately described in writing or viewed in reality as it is seen in daydream. Instead, in this passage Sackville-West curiously concludes that “our actual beholding” of reality does not necessarily give us a “truer impression.” Remarking that “Nothing is an adventure until it becomes an adventure in the mind” (17), she reveals that for her the external geographic venture cannot compare to the internal one. Traveling to Luxor, Egypt, to see the Pharaohs’ burial-ground, she hangs back, for “Never again would that delight [the delight of speculating] be within my reach; for the pleasures of the imagination I was about to exchange the dreary fact of knowledge” (30–31). Like Seton, who is disappointed that Egypt’s ancient rituals are no longer practiced, Sackville-West prefers fantasy to reality. To this end, Sackville-West approaches the Middle East as an open space for her own imaginings. To her, Persia is “a country made for wandering onward; there is so much room, and no boundaries anywhere, and time is marked only by the sun” (99). Sackville-West observes these foreign spaces as a flâneuse; although she does not wander the traditional Western cityscape, she moves similarly through Eastern field and marketplace, freely ambling where she likes, observing and being observed. In fact, she likes to roam where most Western tourists do not and to visualize herself as separate from them; while still in Egypt, she walks near peasant laborers who are startled by her proximity, “for the tourists stick to the tombs and temples, and do not wander in the fields” (33). Once in Persia, she prefers to frequent the bazaars, “where the Europeans never go” (99), and in Teheran she observes the crowd dynamics, watching the “wedges” of men and women (150). She likes best the feeling that she might wander on forever, with nothing to stop her: “you may travel along any of those three roads for hundreds of miles in any direction, without meeting anyone or any thing to control you … . If you prefer to leave the track and take to the open, then you are free to do so” (94). Sackville-West speaks of her trip in the first definition of “excursion,” relating to an “escape from confinement,” a “progression beyond fixed limits” (OED). Noting how her traveling party is going to Isfahan by motor-car, yet moving “after the Persian fashion … with camp beds and blankets, food in knapsacks,” she remarks how “very pleasant was the resulting sense of freedom, all the finicky clutter of ordinary life and unnecessary possessions cleared away” (110). The freedom she finds abroad involves a time to think and to locate a sense of self, an opportunity difficult to obtain in the busy social life of England. She quotes Alexander William Kinglake, who once remarked that Eastern travel differs from Western because it gives time to develop “new mental habits” and mold “your very identity” (qtd. on 107, 108). Leisurely travel in Persia becomes a time for

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Sackville-West to reflect on England anew, to “approach the old ideas with a new eye” (88), and to develop a new kind of language for transcribing her experiences. Sackville-West’s text revolves around this notion of wandering, whether on land, in the mind, or on paper. It is full of digressions inspired by her freedom of movement: “But all this is irrelevant,” she announces, realizing she has reached page 22 without yet discussing any details of her voyage. Similarly, after a digression about her friends in England she remarks, “I had, however, strolled as far as the gate, with no intention of speaking of any of these things, but the amplitude and leisure of the place lead me into discursiveness” (88–89). Passenger takes the form of an excursion in language as Sackville-West glimpses one image, then another, and transcribes them for the reader. She grapples with a means of expression that can grasp the world around her and finds that ordinary words are not adequate: Crudely speaking, the plain is brown, the mountains blue or white, the foothills tawny or purple; but what are those words? Plain and hills are capable of a hundred shades that with the changing light slip over the face of the land and melt into a subtlety no words can reproduce. The light here is a living thing, as varied as the human temperament and as hard to capture; now lowering, now gay, now sensuous, now tender … . (89)

The phrases she does employ to give a sense of her surroundings are modernist in style. The feeling of immediacy transcribed in her present participles and her repetition of the word “now” may remind us of Woolf’s own writing style which Sackville-West so deeply admired.41 Sackville-West’s narrative is unusual for a travelogue in that it seeks to pin nothing down but instead encourages the reader’s mind to blossom with possibilities of images. She describes her own search for life in the desert as a search within her own imagination: it is “a keen excitement in not knowing what one is going to see next; the mind, strung up, reaches forward for an image to expect” (30). Anyone can travel, asserts Sackville-West, but to achieve “an adventure in the mind” requires a certain spirit. “We must have the sharpest sense of excursion into the unknown; into a region, that is, which is not habitually our own,” she declares (17). Here, as in other women’s travel texts, mental adventure is linked to “the unknown,” the exotic, the unfamiliar. Her text, too, is unfamiliar in form, ridiculing its own genre, confidently suggesting a crossing of borders into the land of fantasy. Sackville-West is different from Seton in her appreciation of Oriental Otherness, however, for in all her longing for an exotic landscape through which to wander in body and mind, she does not try to become an Eastern Other. Woolf,  For instance, Sackville-West read Mrs. Dalloway in May of 1925 and later expressed in admiration of Woolf’s novel, “There is 100% more poetry in one page of Mrs. Dalloway (which you thought I didn’t like) than in a whole section of my damned poem” (September 2, 1925, LSW, 64). 41

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nonetheless, envisioned her as such, replying to Sackville-West’s letters, “I believe, at this moment, more in Teheran than in Tavistock Square. I see you, somehow in long coat and trousers, like an Abyssinian Empress, stalking over those barren hills” (L3, 238). Quite in contrast, Sackville-West never characterized herself this way or tried to show too much familiarity with the countries or cultures she saw on her journey. A flâneur traditionally has a kind of scopic power over those he sees. SackvilleWest’s scopic authority would come from her status as a Westerner, which abroad might, in certain ways, trump her status as a woman. Though select passages of her narrative show her negatively categorizing, judging, or deeming inferior the native people she observes, as when she sees a coronation crowd as “ignorant people … allowing the police to beat and hustle them” (150), thus demonstrating a Western, imperial gaze, the thrust of her travel narrative is to reject such a gaze. While the wife of a foreign diplomat might be expected to uphold certain imperial ideologies, Sackville-West is partly able to remove herself from this position by leaving Harold out of her narrative entirely. She even critiques the desire of authors to “pretend initiation” into a foreign world they do not really know—and she is wary of doing this herself (104). Indeed, the majority of her work contradicts and even deconstructs the traditional, masculine, imperialist text which is straightforward in focus and goal and claims to know all. Scrutinizing the Western traveler’s gaze, she posits, “Possibly the [outsider’s] judgement is warped from the start because one instinctively applies the ordinary standards of Western Europe” (173). She even urges herself to rethink her accustomed processes of seeing and understanding; when she goes looking for gardens in Persia and cannot find any, she realizes she must revise her Western definition of a garden, for here they have “gardens of trees, not of flowers” (91). She adds, “having emptied the mind of European preconceptions, one is at liberty to turn round and absorb an entirely new set of conditions” (100). Unlike most travel writers, Sackville-West chooses not to give her reader special insight into the people of the foreign countries she visits. She writes of Teheran, “I prefer the bazaars to the drawing-rooms [of England]; not that I cherish any idea that I am seeing ‘the life of the people’; no foreigner can ever do that, although some talk a great deal of nonsense about it; but I like to look” (100). Here we find Sackville-West admitting her participation in the traveler’s gaze yet recognizing that she, the true “foreigner,” has no power to interpret another culture accurately based on what she sees. Perhaps no other travel author of this period writes so boldly about her inability to observe the people of a country, often deemed the travel writer’s most important task. When she does “look” at a bazaar, she notes, after her poetic rendering, that what she sees is partly in her own mind: [I]t is a darkness not only of fact, but also of impression; a sense of obscure and pullulating life, hurrying about unknown business. Strange, harsh faces pass by; and women secreted behind the eternal veil … . [O]ne is oppressed only by the sense of dark life; then one imagines these separate, hurrying people coagulated

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suddenly into a mob … with some ardent purpose uniting them, and the same intent burning in all those dark eyes. This is simply an effect of one’s own strangeness; there is nothing really sinister about these people. But a life of which one knows nothing, seeing only the surface, does suggest something cabalistic and latent. (102–103)

Here Sackville-West teases out the Westerner’s view of the Easterner. On her travels she finds not just “fact” but “impression”—her own sense of what is real. It is the traveler’s own “strangeness” that causes her to misread the scene before her. When “one knows nothing,” the mystery of the scene can emerge, ushering in the “darkness” reminiscent of a Conradian adventure tale.42 Repeatedly in her text, Sackville-West emphasizes the joys of ignorance for the imagination, though here her words suggest that with ignorance comes Orientalism and xenophobia, that the darkness is an illusion and that the Eastern “veils” and “dark eyes” merely represent “something cabalistic” to the Westerner who knows no better. At the same time, seeing simultaneously inside and outside the system of Western perception, she seems to acknowledge that something of her excitement with Persia stems from this ignorance. The works of Dietz and Seton show two examples of how the white woman traveler chooses to situate herself in the world of the Other. For Sackville-West, the physical journey becomes less important. She writes, “It seemed to me that, since I had embarked on this journey, I had shed everything but the primitive pleasures of sensation” (39). As a result, she describes objects “not as I knew them to be, but as they seemed to me—and to read into them, I might add, a great many attributes they could not really possess” (40).43 The author’s interpretation is crucial and yet her image is absent from the text; no photograph reveals her to the reader. While there are a handful of photographs of buildings, Persian rugs, and even people scattered throughout Passenger, an image of Sackville-West herself is not among them.44 She is hard to locate on the page, simply an eye showing us glimpses of a foreign world, digressing into the hows and whys of image making. Oscillating between England and Teheran in her mind, she asks only, “what am I? and where am I?” (106). We might equally ask where “Persia” is located in her text. Vita herself puts it best when she writes, “Who amongst us could boast that, transplanted into the mind of another person, even though that person be his nearest, he would not find himself in a strange country … ?” (16). Here Sackville42

 Indeed, while sailing across the Persian Gulf, Sackville-West admits she typecasts a steward as “to my disordered mind … merely sinister, a figure out of a Conrad novel” (52). 43  Sackville-West here refers to her own text in the same terms that she uses to describe Kingslake’s Eothen earlier on: “he tells you of objects not as he knows them to be, but as they seemed to him” (qtd. on 19). 44  This fact was apparently so unsettling to Sackville-West’s friends and family that a 1990 reprint of Passenger by her son, Nigel Nicolson, includes photographs of SackvilleWest that were not part of the original narrative.

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West is embodying her own geography; the “strange country” of her text comes from her own imagination. Passenger emerges as strikingly modern: resisting clearly laid-out maps of geography, time, and purpose; questioning the accuracy of perception; fixated on contemplating the relation of the self to the act of travel; endlessly filled with scattered images and digressive interior monologues. The life Sackville-West finds in Persia is not to be seen with the typical traveler’s lens, for, she remarks, “those who say that it is bleak have not looked, or, looking, have not seen. It is, rather, full of life; but that life is tiny, delicate, and shy, escaping the broader glance” (90). Like women travelers before her, Vita’s intent is to find the life that has escaped traditional accounts, and her narrative emerges as one of the most untraditional of all. Decades later, Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson would write of his mother’s trip: “Vita went to Persia (the journey which she described in Passenger to Teheran) in March 1926, driving across the desert from Baghdad to meet Harold in a snowbound village on the Persian frontier late one night … . She much enjoyed her visit, and attended the coronation of the Shah” (209).45 This straightforward account of familial reunion sounds nothing like the playful narrative of delighted estrangement from the familiar, the self-proclaimed “excursion into the unknown” that Sackville-West produced. As we have seen with these accounts of travel, many narratives operate on the premise that a foreign place is stimulating because of its difference and that the foreign people are enticingly exotic because they are not like “us,” the assumed Western readers. A text like A White Woman in a Black Man’s Country fits into this category; however, while it operates on the premise of locating difference it also hints at hidden similarities between native and woman traveler. Seton’s A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt is a reaction to this first kind of text, striving to show connection instead of division between peoples; however, her focus cannot hold. After a number of pages dedicated to feminist issues of the present, Seton slips away into the fantasy of an exotic past and brings her text with her. In Passenger to Teheran the people as real individuals have ceased to become points of similarity or difference as Sackville-West reveals that they serve merely as fodder for the tourist’s imagination, part of the background of difference which serves as a backdrop for her thoughts: “What were Arabs to me or I to them, as we thus briefly crossed one another?” she questions (62). These three early twentieth-century texts follow a progression from outward to inward spaces in women’s travel narratives, from “excursion” in body to “excursiveness” in language inspired by these encounters with Otherness. Sackville-West’s is most honest about the curious placement of the Western woman abroad, exposing the fantasy of her perspective. Her work suggests numerous unexplored connections between travel narratives and fiction. Vita’s exposure of “imaginative geographies” for what they are does not lessen the Western reader’s 45  Nicolson relies on his father’s diaries for these descriptions. See Harold Nicolson Diaries and Letters 1907–1964.

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interest in them; on the contrary, it becomes the reader’s turn to go “exploring” with enjoyment someone else’s imagined nations. Postscript: Intimate Relations Between Travel Writing and Fiction: Woolf and Sackville-West In this chapter I have explored travel narratives crossing over into the realm of fiction and the language of travel writing moving into modernism. The intimate alignment between these genres is best illustrated in the interlocking writerly careers of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. In the late 1920s, while Woolf was busy revising the form of the novel, Sackville-West was reinventing the form of the travel narrative. While Sackville-West undoubtedly was influenced by Virginia Woolf’s work, the influence may have worked both ways. In 1928, Sackville-West produced a supplementary travel work to Passenger to Teheran called Twelve Days, where she writes, in an obvious allusion to Woolf’s “Modern Fiction”: [I]t is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. (9)

Sackville-West’s travel writing is inextricably linked to Woolf’s call for modernist fiction. Indeed, even more striking connections between the two authors emerge when we consider the moment in Woolf’s career when she read Passenger for the first time. On September 15, 1926, Woolf overcame an early-morning bout of depression and feeling of “failure”46 well enough to read at last the manuscript of Passenger to Teheran that Sackville-West had given to her at the end of August.47 Woolf had not always been overly complimentary about Sackville-West’s writing, saying, for example, of Vita, “She is not clever: but abundant and fruitful, truthful too.”48 On this day in 1926, however, as Woolf was turning to read Sackville-West’s travelwriting-as-narrative for the first time, the manuscript must have lightened her mood, for Virginia immediately wrote to Vita of Passenger, “I have swallowed [it] at a gulp. Yes—I think its [sic] awfully good … . I didn’t know the extent of your subtleties … . The whole book is full of nooks and corners which I enjoy 46  Woolf writes in her “Wednesday 15 September” diary entry of her early-morning fight against a “wave” of horror enveloping her (D3, 110). 47  The narrative was to be published by the Hogarth Press, and Sackville-West reported feeling “such qualms” when Virginia “sent it off without even reading it” (September 17, LSW, 140). 48  This is quoted in Caws, Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings (106).

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exploring” (L3, 290–291). What Woolf seemed to enjoy most about the book was its sense of inward exploration.49 Her words reveal the personal connection she felt with the text; perhaps she sensed in it the influence of her own writing style. Certainly, thinking about Sackville-West’s narrative must have had a profound effect on Woolf’s ability to write, perhaps even inspiring her creatively, for she records in her diary that it was the next day, September 16, that she finally was able to finish her draft of the novel often considered her masterpiece, To the Lighthouse.50 These interconnected events of inspiration and publication leave us with an important question: what was it about Sackville-West’s travel narratives that so interested Woolf and what impact did they have on Woolf’s own imaginative output, especially during the years that the two women were closest? Certainly, other critics have noted the effect that the two women had on each other creatively. Louise DeSalvo writes of their long friendship, “It was the most productive period of each of their lives; neither had ever before written so much so well” (“Lighting,” 197). Suzanne Raitt remarks that the two women never collaborated, but wrote “in parallel,” remarking, for example, how in Sackville-West’s 1931 novel, All Passion Spent, one can see the influence of To the Lighthouse (Vita, 91). While fewer scholars focus particularly on Sackville-West’s travel writing in examining the influences of the two writers on each other, this comparison is crucial for teasing out the intimate connections between travel writing and modernist fiction.51 It is not surprising that Virginia felt so moved by Passenger to Teheran that day in September 1926, likely envious not only of Vita’s travels but also of the work she had produced.52 Sackville-West’s narrative was using Woolf’s ideas about capturing an image in writing to create a new form of literature inspired by the experience of travel. Most significantly, Woolf was seeing not only Persia but also Passenger as a space of exploration when she wrote of its “nooks and corners

49

 Using a similar metaphor of travel, Vita had written to Virginia in May with some regret after reading Mrs. Dalloway, “the first surprise of following you along an unknown road is over” (LSW 59), comparing the reading of the novel to a journey with Virginia. The threads between travel narrative and modernist novel grow tighter if we consider Clarissa Dalloway as a local flâneuse wandering through London, “plung[ing] into the very heart of the moment” (Mrs. Dalloway, 37). Woolf’s novel, too, explores more interior spaces than exterior ones. 50  This is included in Woolf’s September 28th entry when she notes parenthetically of To the Lighthouse, “(finished, provisionally, Sept 16th)” (D3, 111). 51  Although Raitt’s study does not specifically look at Sackville-West’s travel narratives, there are a few critics who have examined her travel works alongside Woolf’s works. See especially Louise A. DeSalvo’s “Lighting the Cave” and Susan Bazaragan’s “The Uses of the Land.” 52  In a later (February 12, 1927) diary entry, Woolf criticizes Vita’s prose in Passenger as “too fluent,” remarking that she would have devised a clearer “method of attack” (D3, 126). I agree with DeSalvo, who remarks that Woolf seems to show a “hint of envy at Vita’s ability to toss off books so quickly and effortlessly” (“Lighting the Cave,” 202).

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which I enjoy exploring.” A new relationship was coming into being, not only between two women, but also between these women’s writings. One can only wonder whether passages near the end of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), a novel structured around the anticipation of a journey, might have been inspired partly by Sackville-West’s narrative. The last scenes of the novel revolve around the idea of an imaginative construction of a place in the mind. When James and Cam Ramsay at last reach the lighthouse they have longed to visit, it is not what they had envisioned: “So it was like that, James thought, the Lighthouse one had seen across the bay all these years; it was a stark tower on a bare rock” (203). Comparing it with his preconception, he thinks, “No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too” (186). This may remind us of Sackville-West’s comment that “a place that we knew in childhood” can be “dispelled … under the fresh but not necessarily truer impression of our actual beholding.” Cam similarly sees how the island becomes changed when viewed from the sea: “It was like that then, the island … . She had never seen it from out at sea before” (188). Suddenly, Cam’s imagination inspires her to travel, lighting up the geographies of her mind: What then came next? Where were they going? … . And the drops falling from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell here and there on the dark, the slumbrous shapes in her mind; shapes of a world not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constantinople. (189)

Although Cam has never seen these foreign places, they suddenly become real for her. Woolf was similarly inspired by Sackville-West’s journey, able to finish To the Lighthouse after visualizing her journey’s end, just as imagining the Ramsays reaching the lighthouse finally gives Lily the imaginative drive to finish her painting at the end of Woolf’s novel. Woolf’s one criticism of Passenger to Teheran that she confided to SackvilleWest was that it had “one or two dangling dim places” and “Sometimes one wants a candle in one’s hand” (L3, 291). It is true that there is something “dark,” hidden about Sackville-West in her own text; we are reminded of her comment that a reader “transplanted into the mind of another person, even though that person be his nearest” would “find himself in a strange country” (Passenger, 16). SackvilleWest may have meant this as a challenge to Woolf, presenting her mind as a “strange country” for exploration.53 It is not surprising that the next novel Woolf

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 Woolf perhaps responds to this in her September 15, 1926, letter to Sackville-West where she remarks, possibly only partly in jest, that as she read Passenger she was thinking to herself, “‘How I should like to know this woman’ and then thinking ‘But I do,’ and then ‘No, I don’t—not altogether the woman who writes this’” (L3, 290).

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began was about Sackville-West herself, writing it as she awaited letters from Vita’s second trip to Persia.54 Critics have suggested numerous reasons for Woolf writing Orlando (1928), but one of the most compelling is Suzanne Raitt’s suggestion that “In writing Sackville-West’s life, she established her own claim to it” at a time when their relationship seemed to grow more tenuous. “By writing Sackville-West’s life for her, Woolf recaptured Sackville-West” (Vita, 34). Woolf subtitles the novel “a biography” and even includes several images of Orlando which are actually photographs of Sackville-West.55 In her own narrative, Vita chose no image for her self-depiction, but in Orlando Woolf tries to pin down Sackville-West in a way that Passenger to Teheran does not.56 Perhaps most significantly, sections of the novel approach a form of travel narrative; like Sackville-West, Orlando travels, and these excursions similarly take him/her into foreign, Middle Eastern spaces enlarged by fantasy and colored by eros.57 We are reminded of SackvilleWest’s insight in Passenger that “The link between two persons must indeed be close before one of them is really eager to visualize the background against which the other moves.” Woolf’s intimate textual connection to Sackville-West and her wanderings has allowed her to visualize her own version of the East and of Vita herself. Orlando is not only a parody of the biographical form but also, on occasion, a parody of Sackville-West’s own travel writing. The young poet wrestles with description in a manner strikingly similar to Sackville-West in Passenger to Teheran where she writes, “the plain is brown, the mountains blue or white … ; but what are those words?”: “The sky is blue,” he said, “the grass is green.” Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods … . And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection. (Orlando, 102) 54

 This timing is noted on p. 256 of Karen Lawrence’s essay “Orlando’s Voyage Out.”  See Talia Schaffer’s analysis of these photos in “Posing Orlando.” 56  Perhaps we also can see something of Sackville-West’s influence in the structure of Orlando, which does not fit neatly into the category of either novel or biography. We might connect her attempt to recreate the form of the travel narrative to Woolf’s attempt to revise the biography. Woolf writes in Chapter 3 of Orlando, the chapter in which Orlando leaves to become “Ambassador Extraordinary” to Constantinople, that sometimes, when facts are lacking, it is “necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to make use of the imagination” (119). Certainly, the idea of recreation through imagination is central to Passenger to Teheran. 57  Of course, in the role of Ambassador to Constantinople, Orlando additionally satirically embodies a position similar to Harold’s. For an extended look at foreign travel in Orlando, see Karen Lawrence’s chapter “Woolf’s Voyages Out” in Penelope Voyages. 55

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Woolf is having a little laugh at both the poet’s visionary ability (which is floridly exaggerated) and his “dejection,” a poet who sounds remarkably like SackvilleWest. Thus do we find a complex cycle of Woolf parodying Sackville-West imitating Woolf, until it is impossible to tell where one writer’s influence starts and the other’s ends. These connections reveal striking alignments between travel writing and modernist fiction and suggest that more remain to be discovered. In the end, we must see these women writers as equally exploratory, making parallel adventures. Although Woolf’s writing is much better known today, something new can be gained by reading these women’s works in tandem. Passenger to Teheran is essentially modernist in nature, moving away from the limitations of literary realism by exploring the landscapes of the mind; Woolf’s fascination with the text likely stems from its unique engagement with a subjective experience of travel and its modernist style, which is as exploratory as one of Woolf’s own novels. The close connections between these women’s works remind us that the pathways to creation of new forms of art are rarely linear. Ultimately, Sackville-West’s words speak for both women’s quests when, in Passenger to Teheran, she draws a connection between the exploration of unknown geographical space and literary space, saying: “So one is drawn onward, over miles of country as over reams of paper, and still there is a hill to climb, and still a sentence to write, and no reason why either should ever come to an end, so long as something remains to be discovered beyond” (98–99).

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Chapter 2

Narratives of Passing: Transdermal Excursions in Larsen, Rhys, and Hall

Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me. —Hélène Cixous, “Sorties”

As we have seen in Chapter 1, for many Western women travelers of the modernist era, the impetus to write often paralleled the urge to immerse the self in the Otherness of foreign spaces. Leaving home instigated a movement away from familiarity and a journey into difference, allowing for exploratory adventure and imaginative possibility. The act of writing itself can become a kind of journey as differences are investigated and indulged, sometimes leading to a reconceptualization of the self. Julia Kristeva argues in “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident” that “Writing is impossible without some kind of exile” (298). The only way for a writer to avoid “sinking into the mire of common sense,” of stasis and tradition, she asserts, is to become “a stranger to one’s own country, language, sex and identity” (298). Both journeying and writing offer transgressive opportunities and provide a traveler with the ability to enter another world as an outsider. These opportunities extend not only to white Western women travelers but also to women of color, including multi-racial or multicultural authors, who may journey abroad with an even more eminent desire to “find themselves,” locate alternate homelands, or pose challenges to old dichotomies of self and Other. In their writing, as in their travels, a variety of early twentieth-century women journey into Otherness to explore and articulate new aspects of themselves. In envisioning the self anew in new spaces, a traveler must reconsider the way that self will be seen, analyzed, and positioned. Although traditionally women have been stereotyped and trivialized for caring about surface appearance and complexion, women long have known how to empower themselves by using these external expressions, such as costume and cosmetics, to showcase, disguise, remake, or reposition the body. As Iris Marion Young writes in her essay “Women Recovering Our Clothes,” while the masculine gaze traditionally has constructed women’s self-perceptions, clothes have liberating possibility, giving a “potentially subversive” vision of, in Young’s words, “fleeting and multiple possibilities of who I might be, character types I try on, situations in which I place myself imaginatively” (185). If early twentieth-century women felt trapped at home as the

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traditional focus of the spectatorial gaze, in other countries they could more easily assume the role of observer, an opportunity enhanced through careful choices of self-presentation. For these women, such as those considered in Chapter 1, aligning the self with a foreign culture sometimes involved adopting styles of native dress and manner, even, in Grace Thompson Seton’s case, putting on an “Oriental look” and claiming a common “reservoir” of past experience and occult connection. In a revealing quote from Seton’s later travel book “Yes, Lady Saheb”: A Woman’s Adventurings With Mysterious India (1925), she articulates in her preface the idea of trying on different identities abroad: “Even as a chameleon, the author found herself taking on the color of the spot where she was” (xvii). While for Seton taking on a region’s “color” may merely imply imitating local culture, the term literally suggests a change of skin tone. Immersed in a strange land, the Western woman feels foreign and may attempt to refashion herself as a variety of ethnic or racial Other. This idea of self-transformation can extend far beyond the whim of costume, right to the heart of a traveler’s identity. For women travelers, motives for donning Otherness abroad ranged from casual amusement to serious survival technique. The latter was certainly the case for white Canadian missionary Dr. Susie C. Rijnhart, who found herself alone and vulnerable in a hostile region of Tibet after her son died and her husband disappeared. In With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple (1901), Rijnhart details her perilous situation traveling with a group of Tibetan men: “I was almost petrified when they said we were approaching a lamasery where there was an intense hatred of foreigners, and that if it were discovered that I was a foreigner we would all be killed; so that everything that would betray my nationality must be destroyed” (339). Caught in the midst of xenophobic hostility, Rijnhart must assign herself a new identity. When the traveling party is approached by a stranger, the guides assert that Rijnhart is a “Chinaman.” Rijnhart instantly assumes this doubly different identity through remaining mute, covering her body, and feeling protected in her weathered and thus non-“white” skin. She affirms, “My hat and fur collar concealed the most of my face, which was far from white, and my garments were by no means unlike those worn by a merchant of the Celestial Empire” (340). Ultimately, she is able to obtain a passport stating that she is “a Chinese woman from Sining sent by … officials” (345). This piece of writing supplements and seals her physical reassignment; literally allowing her to “pass” as Chinese, it officially recodes her nationality and ethnicity, enabling her to journey back to a place of safety. While Rijnhart’s transformation can be considered a temporary disguise, the concept of “passing” is often more ideologically complex, involving both a repositioning and a reconceptualizing of the self as Other. As such, passing implies not just a costume but also an identity in transition. In “Sorties,” part of Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément’s 1975 feminist collaboration The Newly Born Woman, which argues for a new kind of “feminine” writing transcending traditional oppositions, Cixous articulates that “Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me—the other that I am and

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am not, that I don’t know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live” (85–86). Cixous’s word “passing” here usefully suggests a fleeting presence, a state of transition and movement that transcends binaries, a liminal space between self and Other where new identities and articulations become possible. The “dwelling place” of Otherness thus seems an unstable place, but a space, as Cixous implies, that can be achieved in writing. “Passing” implies a similar instability. In considering issues of writing and travel, “passing” is a doubly useful term, integrating a sense of motion and mobility with a term of racial resonance. In her work The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature, Juda Bennett surmises that the term “passing” is derived from the “pass” once given to slaves “so that they might travel without being taken for runaways” (36). In this way, the slave’s “pass” was like a passport enabling a traveler to enter another country. Such a pass would require a master’s signature; ostensibly, if a slave learned to write, he or she might be able to forge a pass to enable a journey to freedom. In a post-slavery era, the transgressive potential of “passing” was transferred from written note to human body; for instance, if a light-skinned African American woman could convince others to read her body as “white,” she could travel to locations open only to white society. “Passing” suggests using the skin as a vehicle through which one can move to occupy new spaces; it usually does not actually involve changing one’s skin color but instead calls for a repositioning of the self geographically and ideologically. The skin as a marker of identity becomes a vehicle of transport between spaces in works of several women modernists who investigate ideas of travel. Writers of fiction basing their texts around geographic movement utilize many of the same concepts we see in women’s travel narratives, including a key interest in Otherness and racial repositioning. Early twentieth-century writers Nella Larsen, Jean Rhys, and Radclyffe Hall allow their characters to undertake what I call “transdermal” excursions, voyages both through and beyond the skin, enabled by a reconceptualization of skin tone and racial body. These writers explore both the possibilities and the hazards of moving the body into spaces of racial difference, revealing both the liberties possible in racial reassignment and the limitations inherent in it. In connecting this concept of “passing” with modernist authors, I agree with Pamela Caughie, who argues in her article “Passing as Modernism” that “Passing came to signify the dynamics of identity and identification in the modernist period—the social, cultural, technological, and psychological processes by which a subject comes to understand his or her identity in relation to others” (387).1 As Caughie emphasizes, it is the multifaceted nature of passing and the complex “processes” it involves, transcending a simple dichotomy of self and

1

 Caughie looks at real-life passing figures of the modernist era and claims that the “postmodern notion of subjectivity as constructed, discursive, and fluid—has as much or more to do with the historical conditions in which modernist art was produced” (387).

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Other, that make it so fascinating to writers of this period, and, as I will argue, this interest is enriched by the aura of travel conveyed by this term. The women writers whose works I will discuss use fictional narrative to explore various facets of their identity, whether familiar or remote; often this involves investigating the presence of a cultural heritage they felt akin to but not completely part of. These three women all combated feelings of displacement throughout their lives. While Larsen was American and biracial, the daughter of a white Danish mother and a black West Indian father, Rhys was a “creole” Caribbean in England whose colonial roots complicated her “white” identity. Hall, a native of England, felt at home there but out of place in her own physical form, feeling like a man caught in a woman’s body. Like Rhys, the whiteness of her skin hid a complex ancestry: her mother’s family was rumored to have Native American roots and her closest companion termed her “a compound of many races” despite her blond, blue-eyed appearance (Troubridge 9). All three of these women use the idea of travel in their works to show how a change of place can enable an exploration of racial Otherness. Though their works are novels and short stories, not travel narratives, these authors incorporate aspects of their own identities into their fictional characters and write about the impact of places they themselves visited. While the type of travel the characters undertake is different in each of these works, the effect is similar. In Larsen’s Quicksand, Helga Crane has the opportunity in Europe and various areas of the United States to explore facets of her race and identity that she cannot locate at home. Helga learns that identity, while mobile, is a complex composition of personal identifications and others’ constructions. In Passing, Larsen focuses on movement across the color line; travel between smaller, more regional spaces parallels a larger desire to move to another country (Brazil) where racial boundaries can be redrawn. In Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, Anna finds her white Caribbean body reconstructed in England as exotic: AfroCaribbean and even African. Finally, in Hall’s “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” a journey to an island in southwest England brings about an “excursion into the realms of the fantastic” in which Miss Ogilvy travels into another time, gender, and even race. I conclude by briefly looking at Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” and by connecting my overall discussion to primitivism, demonstrating that the modernists’ impulse to investigate Otherness sometimes derives from seeking out “foreign” parts of the self. Nella Larsen’s Novels of Movement and Stasis: Quicksand and Passing Considering aspects of travel in the works of Nella Larsen, a biracial and bicultural author more narrowly categorized as “Negro” in the United States, necessitates that we approach her characters through a wider history of black travelers. The story of black women’s travel in the last few hundred years of course begins differently from that of most whites; in the words of Alasdair Pettinger, the very notion of “the Black Atlantic began with the trauma of the

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enforced movement of people” between Africa, Europe, the West Indies, and the Americas (xiii). Nonetheless, voluntary travel away from places of slavery could mean liberation—from others’ control, from bondage, even from constrictive definitions of race and personhood. As Katherine McKittrick has remarked in studying black women’s geographies, “space and place give black lives meaning in a world that has … deemed black populations and their attendant geographies ‘ungeographic’” (xiii); (re)writing these spaces can thus be especially empowering for black authors. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were times of great actual and conceptualized movement for African Americans, from journeys north during the Great Migration to ventures to places of original ancestry, such as those spearheaded by Marcus Garvey.2 Not surprisingly, in travel writing of this era, “African American mobility” is greatly linked to “the impulse for increased opportunities” (Griffin and Fish, xiii). Although black travelers have only begun to receive the attention they deserve through anthologies, including Pettinger’s Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic and Griffin and Fish’s A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of AfricanAmerican Travel Writing, and a handful of reprintings of original narratives, these publications help to challenge narrow definitions of the genre.3 While Griffin and Fish note that many black women explorers and adventurers left no stories behind (4), those accessible to us reveal tales of great bravery and perseverance. Especially notable are Nancy Prince’s A Black Woman’s Odyssey Through Russia and Jamaica (1850), a description of her years in Tsarist Russia and then as a missionary in Jamaica, and Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), accounts of her time spent in Panama and nursing the wounded at the Crimean front.4 While intriguing similarities appear across accounts by black women travelers due to issues of racial identity, similarities also appear along gender lines. For instance, Griffin and Fish align many black women’s narratives with those of white women as both groups “link travel with freedom from narrow definitions of womanhood” and achieve “this sense of liberation through religious and educational outreach and artistic self-expression” (xvi).5 The quest for an augmented sense of personal freedom—though that 2

 Garvey, who began the “back to Africa” movement of the 1920s, also started the short-lived Black Star Line, a response to the famous White Star Line cruise line. While the steamships mainly transported goods, a main idea was to encourage travel to places of origin for diasporic African peoples. 3  Pettinger laments, “If anthologies of ‘travel literature’ ignore women and Black men, anthologies of ‘women’s travel literature’ ignore Black women” (xii). 4  Significantly, both these texts appear in the same decade as the first African American novel, Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), again showing how travel narratives’ history coincides with that of fiction. For a discussion of African American writing as “matrilinear,” see the foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to the Oxford UP reprint of Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures. 5  Similarly, Cheryl J. Fish comments that Prince and Seacole, along with their white counterparts, envisioned through “the process of travel” how they “might escape or revise

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freedom might take different forms for different people—connects much black travel writing to women’s travel writing.6 Accounts of more modern black women’s experiences with travel include Mary Church Terrell’s autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World (1940). The very title, reminiscent of publications such as Dietz’s A White Woman in a Black Man’s Country, plays off the standard format of the white woman’s travel narrative, revealing that, for people of color, estrangement can happen much closer to home. A classically educated and wealthy American, Terrell traveled and studied in Europe from 1888–1890, beginning on a Cook tour with her father and then enjoying her independence after he returned home. Echoing a sentiment that was becoming increasingly popular for young women of her day, she continues, “From the time I first began to travel, I preferred to go by myself” (106). While Terrell sought an education in European art, history, and languages, her trip had another purpose: she confides, “I was trying to flee from the evils of race prejudice, so depressing in my own country” (106). Unfortunately, Terrell cannot fully escape this prejudice; although most Europeans are accepting of her race, this is not the case for white Americans abroad. Several complain that there is a dark-complexioned woman staying at their lodgings, and this proves to Terrell that “some Americans cannot lay it [race prejudice] aside even in a foreign land” (121). Terrell anticipates other early twentieth-century black women writers in looking to Europe as an alternative space for social and intellectual stimulation. As Griffin and Fish recount, after World War I, even “less elite African Americans began to travel abroad, pursuing the vision of Paris printed by black American war veterans—of a land of a people who loved jazz and who did not frown on interracial liaisons” (168). While joining in the “New Negro” movement involved travel for many African Americans as Harlem served as a gathering place for artists and authors, many black writers also spent time in Paris in what Griffin and Fish term “the second home of the Harlem Renaissance” (168). Poet and short story author Gwendolyn Bennett wrote about France in her diary, and novelist Jessie Fauset composed travel essays for The Crisis after visiting France, other European countries, and North Africa (Griffin and Fish, 180). Nella Larsen, no stranger to travel in her youth, also spent time abroad in Spain, Portugal, and France on a Guggenheim Fellowship in the early 1930s. Larsen found France particularly appealing; biographer Thadious M. Davis notes that in Paris “she found a social sphere that extended and magnified what she had experienced in Harlem during the heyday of the Renaissance in the 1920s” (Nella Larsen, 383). Portugal’s racial composition also fascinated Larsen: she remarked in a letter that over half the population was darker than she, and that many people in high positions had African narrow confines based on gender, race, class, marital status, or age” (2). 6  Black travelers of both genders often saw themselves as pioneers for their race, for instance, just as white women travelers did for their gender. Matthew A. Henson’s A Negro Explorer at the North Pole (1912) catches the reader’s attention by highlighting his race, though not his gender.

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traits (373). It is through these fresh concepts of race and identity and exhilarating glimpses of social freedom which travel revealed that we should read many works of the Harlem Renaissance, including Larsen’s fiction. Though Larsen traveled to Western Europe after the publication of her novels, she led a mobile existence throughout her life and often linked ideas of racial mobility to travel. Nella Larsen completed only two novels, but both these texts reveal her passionate absorption with issues of race, geographic movement, and identity. These concerns stem largely from her own experiences growing up as a biracial American. She was born in 1891 to a black Caribbean father and a white Danish mother, both foreigners trying to make a home for themselves in the United States. Coming from the Danish West Indies, Larsen’s father would have shared a common language with her mother; biographer George Hutchinson has surmised that this drew them together across racial boundaries (19).7 When her father died and her mother remarried a white man, Larsen became racially out of place in a white family. The years she spent in Denmark with her mother as a child likely only increased her sense of racial difference.8 She spent her life roaming from place to place, visiting Denmark again as a teenager and living in various locations in the United States, including Nashville, New York, and Tuskegee, thus remaining “unsettled,” as Deborah McDowell writes (x). In opposition to her parents, who “settled” from other regions, it appears that Larsen rarely felt a part of the places she already inhabited. In her two novels, she explores the idea of migratory subjectivity, both in local movement and in foreign travel. In Quicksand (1928), Helga Crane experiments with her own racial placement as she refashions her identity through travel. Helga seems to share Larsen’s own ethnic background and moves through some of the same spaces as Larsen: first an elite black school of the southern U.S., then Chicago, New York, Denmark, and finally Alabama.9 As McDowell and others note, Quicksand plays upon the theme of the “tragic mulatto,” the eternally alienated, mixed race heroine, but the novel is also a fascinating depiction of the way a character tries to locate herself through geographic change. When Helga moves from place to place, her body is re-visioned by those around her as they “read” her physical appearance in a new way. Helga adjusts her body and her clothing as she adjusts her geographic location, almost but not quite “passing” into a niche in the society around her. The modernist innovations of the text largely emerge from Helga’s internal struggles with place and from Larsen’s efforts to capture these rapidly shifting alignments 7

 Hutchinson also mentions that most racially “mixed” families in Chicago at this time “involved blacks and recent white immigrants from Northern Europe and Scandinavia” (20). 8  While several biographers doubted Larsen’s word that she visited Denmark as a child because of lack of evidence, Hutchinson successfully located the passenger records (4), showing that Larsen traveled to Denmark and lived there with her relatives “before the age of seven and again in her late teens” (35). 9  While Larsen does not state that Helga’s father was West Indian, she makes it clear that he was black while her mother, from Denmark, was white.

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and perceptions of self. The title Quicksand resonates with the novel’s theme on multiple levels; primarily it implies Helga’s movement to escape a debilitating stasis of conformity that continually pulls at her, a stasis that makes her feel “shut in, trapped” in any one locale and denies her the ability to embrace her multifaceted heritage and nature (Quicksand, 47). Secondarily it suggests a mixture of water and sand, two very different substances that can create a volatile combination, perhaps implying the two races in Helga which cannot seem to stably coexist in 1920s America. Helga spends the novel feeling as if she is on unstable ground, and thus keeps shifting geographically. Helga rebels against categorization, embraces Otherness, and alternates between the black and white identities that compose her. The opening of the novel finds Helga reading in her room at Naxos, an elite Southern school for black students where she currently teaches, surrounded by a “blue Chinese carpet” and a stool covered in “oriental silk” (1). Already we see her accompanied by luxurious, exotic objects, to which Larsen later adds “Chinese-looking pillows” (15). These Asian accoutrements suggest a culture different from that of either of Helga’s parents and imply a powerful investment in the exotic. The light in which she sits is described as “a small oasis in a desert of darkness” (1), locating Helga’s body geographically apart from the “darkness” of the black educational system surrounding her. Throughout Quicksand, Helga’s choice of clothing, a kind of second skin, reveals the way in which she carefully places her body in each geographic location she inhabits. Her efforts echo Young’s articulation of clothing’s transformative potential: “character types I try on, situations in which I place myself imaginatively.” Here at Naxos, where Helga can “neither conform, nor be happy in her unconformity,” where she feels anger that “there were parts of her she couldn’t be proud of” (7), she lives on the edge of appropriateness by indulging herself in color, wearing “dark purples, royal blues, rich greens, deep reds” (18) in an atmosphere advocating only “Black, gray, brown, and navy blue” (17–18).10 The school patterns black behavior and dress on white models and asks students to avoid “yellow, or green or red” (18). These colors are not only bold and vibrant but they are also symbolically Pan-African; in Larsen’s day they were representative of the Ethiopian empire which proudly resisted European control throughout the nineteenth century.11 Quite in contrast, Naxos values the benefits of white influence. When the dormitory matron tells the students to “try to act like ladies and not like savages from the backwoods” (12), her chiding words combine the idea of living in the “backwoods,” signifying a poor rural region of the U.S., with “savages,” a term traditionally used by whites to describe Africans or “primitive” 10

 Larsen herself strongly believed in clothing as a marker of individuality, of “freedom and personal agency” (Hutchinson, 41); Hutchinson suggests that Naxos’s dress policy is similar to the one Larsen encountered at Tuskegee Institute. 11  Inspired by Ethiopia’s colors, Marcus Garvey in 1920 adopted similar colors for the flag of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

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tribes. In the Naxos system, to be poor and uneducated is to be primitive, while to be educated is to emulate upper-class “white” manners. Swept away are “love of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naïve, spontaneous laughter,” all of which Helga identifies with the black race (18). It is as if the students are trying to come as close to their perception of “white” as possible, approximating the Anglo-Saxon anagram of their school’s name.12 For some time Helga has “affected” the dress and attitude deemed proper by the school, but she ultimately resists them (18). She impulsively departs in the middle of the semester, “in love with the piquancy of leaving,” delighted by the possibility of travel to bring her a new future (15). Unfortunately, the fact that she must leave in a “stuffy day coach” reserved for black passengers (22), and must pay double price to secure a berth, foreshadows the way her attempts at liberation will be hindered throughout the novel. Helga thus begins a pattern of escape through travel, followed each time by disappointment. She continually searches for “home,” but she remains by necessity “Helga Crane, who had no home” (30). Characterized, too, by her local wandering, she briefly enjoys in Chicago “the leisure, the walks,” learning to be a woman of the crowd (32). As Davis writes of Larsen, she “understands fluidity and mobility as marks of all modern people, especially of city residents,” showing “fast-moving scenes … of modern life” and working in her fiction to “reclaim” the metropolis for women (“Black,” 106). When entering a “moving, multicolored crowd” on a Chicago street Helga at first feels she has “come home” (30), emphasizing her comfort in movement and multiplicity. This freedom is limited, however: the propositions Helga receives on the street by “men, both white and black” remind her how difficult it can be for a young woman to feel at home while alone in a public space (34). When a temporary job takes her to Harlem, Helga shuts out the “white world” and embraces the largely black community around her (45). Harlem represents Helga’s Africa: she is drawn to and yet repelled by a Harlem cabaret where people dance “to a thumping of unseen tomtoms” (59). She rejects the sensual stirrings, telling herself she has been “in the jungle” and must “cloak herself in a faint disgust” to remind herself that she is not “a jungle creature” (59). In Harlem, she eventually feels claustrophobic, “shut up, boxed up, with hundreds of her race, closed up with that something in the racial character which had always been, to her, inexplicable, alien” (54–55). Helga considers herself black and yet not black; those who are black are “alien” to her, as if she and they come from different places. She even finds that “alien” quality in herself, but she thinks defiantly that “She didn’t, in spite of her racial markings, belong to these dark segregated people. She was different” (55). Helga searches for a space in her world that can be hers, a place where she can articulate or embrace this “difference.” She begins to make “lonely excursions to places outside of Harlem” (47) and to “dream delightful dreams of change, of life somewhere else. Some place where at last she would be 12  Naxos is a thinly disguised anagram for “Saxon,” as Deborah E. McDowell also has pointed out (xvii).

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permanently satisfied” (56–57). Helga’s “excursions” involve a quest for location without stasis, where she ironically seeks permanence. It is an exotic fantasy space, a foreign land where she can find herself: she enjoys “the blissful sensation of visualizing herself in different, strange places, among approving and admiring people, where she would be appreciated, and understood” (57). Helga hopes to find this acceptance in Denmark, her mother’s homeland, where she naïvely assumes there will be “no Negroes, no problems, no prejudice” (55). Her decision echoes the dreams of many black intellectuals of her day who sought in Europe alternative spaces with less racial discrimination; at a talk in Harlem, Helga has heard proselytized “the advantages of living in Europe, especially France” (51). While Helga also ostensibly travels to Denmark to explore the white, Danish part of her heritage, she has little opportunity to do so. Denmark’s starkly white population causes Helga to be an immediate curiosity, and she finds her broken Danish more enjoyed than her attempts at fluency. While her wealthy white aunt and uncle are unique in the novel for appreciating the color of Helga’s skin, they merely desire her presence as a kind of exotic art object to exhibit before their friends. When Helga taught at Naxos, she yearned to wear showy clothes full of vibrant color; once in Copenhagen, she is allowed to wear nothing else as her aunt and uncle encourage a performance of her racial Otherness. To a black dress with purple and cerise trimmings, a dress she once liked because of its outrageousness and which made her feel free and “about to fly” (56), her relatives add long earrings and shoe-buckles until Helga feels “like a veritable savage” (69) as pedestrians stop “to stare at the queer dark creature, strange to their city” (69). She finds herself embodying the idea that the Naxos teachers were trying to erase: black persons as “savages.” Her aunt and uncle use outlandish clothing to call attention to Helga’s dark skin, just as Naxos enforced dull clothing to make the students appear more “white.” The garments also make the Danish people hyper aware of Helga’s geographical difference by placing an emphasis on impartial, pell-mell exoticism: There were batik dresses in which mingled indigo, orange, green, vermilion, and black … . There was a black Manila shawl strewn with great scarlet and lemon flowers, a leopard-skin coat, a glittering opera-cape. There were turban-like hats of metallic silks, feathers and furs, strange jewelry, enameled or set with odd semi-precious stones, a nauseous Eastern perfume, shoes with dangerously high heels … . … . And after a little while she gave herself up wholly to the fascinating business of being seen, gaped at, desired. (74)

The clothes bought for Helga to wear do not represent one geographic locale; instead, exotic influences of Indonesia (“batik”), the Philippines (“Manila”), Africa (“leopard”), Southwestern Europe (“opera-cape” and “high heels”), the Mediterranean region and Southern Asia (“turban”), and East Asia (“Eastern perfume”) are “mingled” as indiscriminately as the colors and decorations on

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them. Earlier in the text, Helga noted the variety of skin colors of the people in a Harlem cabaret, seeing “Africa, Europe, perhaps a pinch of Asia, in a fantastic motley of ugliness and beauty, semi-barbaric, sophisticated, exotic” (59–60). Now Helga is asked to wear such an assortment on her own body as if she is satirized for being a mixture of different cultures. Her body is on display; wearing, for example, a dress that is “practically nothing but a skirt,” Helga feels “exhibited” (70), and is “seen, gaped at” and sexualized (74) until she feels “As if I had horns, or three legs” (70).13 Helga hereby becomes a mobile exhibit of empire in a monotonously white, Northern European community. Helga’s mother’s family has attempted to patch together an exotic identity in order for her to create, as her aunt says, “an impression.” Instead of journeying somewhere else to seek Otherness, her Danish relatives have brought it home to them, similar to the way Helga adorned her room with Asian decorations. Crucially, Helga cannot recognize herself in these costumes; her own image is “alien” to her (73), the very term she used to describe that part of her “racial character” that she did not understand (54). This becomes even more apparent when Helga sits for a portrait done by Herr Axel Olsen, an artist who, with his own theatrical nature, sees Helga only as her external markers (skin tone, outlandishly exotic clothes, make-up) reveal her to him: a presentation of ethnic difference and sensuality. Olsen sees in Helga “the warm impulsive nature of the women of Africa, but … the soul of a prostitute” (87); his portrait reveals to Helga “some disgusting sensual creature with her features” that “wasn’t … herself at all” (89). So Denmark, too, must be left behind, though Helga enjoys spending “hours driving or walking about the city” once its citizens become “a little used to her” (76). She makes plans to depart after realizing her “incompleteness” in hearing Dvorák’s “New World Symphony” where European orchestral artistry and African American spirituals combine to form a transatlantic concoction, not unlike Helga herself. She finds she is “homesick, not for America, but for Negroes” (92). Her thoughts recall the narrator’s comment that Helga has “no home,” and it seems significant that here “home” has more to do with a group of people than with a single location. Upon returning to New York, she realizes that no one geographic region can satisfy her. She haughtily tells an old beau, “I don’t think that any of us who’ve lived abroad for any length of time would ever live here again if they could help it” (101). She envisions herself as a seasoned traveler who must keep on the move now that her worldview has widened, but she also regrets her inability to find contentment. “Why couldn’t she have two lives, or why couldn’t she be satisfied in one place?” she wonders (93), seeing herself with “physical freedom in Europe and spiritual freedom in America” (96). She must endure “the division 13

 Hutchinson reveals that people of African heritage were so unusual in Copenhagen that a whole village of people from Ghana was transported there around the turn of the century “to be gawked at by visitors” and “entertained by diplomats” (34). Larsen seems to equate Helga’s presence there with a similar frenzy of curiosity.

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of her life into two parts in two lands” and she visualizes “moving shuttle-like from continent to continent” to keep herself from stagnating in any one place (96). For Helga, identity is best located in movement, but at the end of Quicksand Helga’s love for wandering the streets, “walking rapidly, aimlessly” with “no definite destination” (110), takes her to a dead end when she is mistaken for a streetwalker, vividly demonstrating the difficulty of unstigmatized mobility for lone women in the city. When she stumbles into a black church where the congregation punningly calls her a “scarlet ’oman” in her “clinging red dress,” Helga’s clothes mark who she is for the last time (112). In a scene bearing echoes of Heart of Darkness, Helga becomes the center of attention of a chanting congregation, facing the “horror of an unknown world”; in “the presence of a nameless people, observing rites of a remote obscure origin … . the horror held her” (113). Faced with a primitive and captivating Otherness, she cannot resist being a part of it. Embracing this new identity in the same way she has, in turn, embraced each new outfit she has worn throughout the novel, and momentarily driven by the power of her own sensuality on the black preacher, Helga gives up everything for a life with him in Alabama, ironically returning to the South she once left in disgust. At first, Helga sees this life as an exciting new voyage to a foreign place where she can find new purpose; almost like a missionary or traveling social worker, she wants only to help the impoverished rural Alabamians. For the first time in her life, however, Helga cannot escape. She can dream “about freedom and cities” (135), but in her physical reality there is only the agony of one pregnancy after another, chaining her to her newly chosen life. The vehicle that she has used to pass from place to place, her own body, her own skin, has become grounded. Her last attempt to find comfort in a place of Otherness has failed. Helga ironically comes closest here to locating a home community; ultimately, however, she finds home too homogeneous, something that she can never embrace. “Home” for Helga can be no one geographic locale; it exists only in the body where multiple identities can coexist. Yearning for that in-between space, Helga can only be happy lying in bed in a self-created “borderland on the edge of unconsciousness” (128). Though she began the novel seeking a “berth” on a train (15), a space in a moving vehicle signifying a new beginning, the novel closes with a debilitating stasis as Helga, who has hardly “become able to walk again without pain” (135), begins to give birth to her fifth child. Larsen uses her first novel to investigate these ideas of travel and identity, displacement and relocation, following Helga through the same geographic locales she herself once explored. While Helga shares certain predilections for travel with many white American women of the early twentieth century, seeking exciting escape in going to new places and finding pleasure in flânery, her impetus to travel is largely driven, and complicated, by her biracial heritage. Familiar with the complex associations between race and place, Larsen reveals a deep investment in exploring the relationship between mobility and a volatile sense of self. In her second novel, Passing (1929), Larsen again takes up ideas of travel but on a

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smaller scale, exploring movement across the color line.14 For African Americans, “passing” as white implies both shifting geographically through different local spaces and repositioning the body in a racial context. Larsen explores the nuances of this with two light-skinned women characters, one a tourist in white spaces and one a more permanent resident. The central action of the novel begins with a scene of passing as two African American women with light-colored skin reunite unexpectedly in a “white” restaurant at the top of Chicago’s Drayton hotel. As Irene Redfield enters the cool air conditioning of the hotel she feels she has found “another world, pleasant, quiet, and strangely remote from the sizzling one that she had left below” (147). Already her passing into white society is characterized as geographic travel, movement into “another world.” Irene’s feeling of tranquility diminishes, however, once she catches a woman’s eye. Irene does not feel she is passing so much as trespassing; in her sudden fear of being identified as “a Negro” (150), she fails to recognize former friend Clare Kendry (151). Irene continues to perceive Clare as white after contemplating the way whites try to read black bodies, including her own: White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means, finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot. They always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gipsy. Never, when she was alone, had they even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro. (150)

This passage suggests that race cannot necessarily be signified or defined in society by physical attributes. As Elaine K. Ginsberg writes in Passing and the Fictions of Identity, the act of passing “forces reconsideration of the cultural logic that the physical body is the site of identic intelligibility” (4). Just as Irene says to a white friend later in the text, “Nobody can [tell someone’s race]. Not by looking” (Passing, 206).15 Ironically, Clare’s husband calls her “nig” because he thinks she is white (170); while he can see her slightly tan skin, he can only envision her as a white woman in his home. Similarly, Irene, as mistaken as the white people she criticizes, only recognizes Clare at the Drayton after Clare introduces herself. In these instances, Larsen demonstrates how place codes the body even more than color. Both Clare and Irene understand that there is no one label that allows the body to be read as black or white. Irene comments that white persons usually 14

 Both Irene and Clare have already been to Europe; Irene wonders at first if Clare is someone she met in Europe (151) while Clare discusses returning to Chicago after her “long absence in European cities” (166). Passing very consciously moves away from transatlantic travel to examine more local movements. 15  Neither can we tell race by reading Larsen’s descriptions. Larsen chooses not to reveal Irene’s race to the reader until this moment; because she has been treated royally by a cab driver and escorted into the Drayton, we, too, may assume she is white.

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identify her as a variety of foreigner but not as a black woman: “They always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gipsy,” groups whose interactions with American whites were more socially acceptable. She has discovered how to use this slippage between black and white to move occasionally into spaces that otherwise would be closed to her in a society with such a firm color line. Similarly, Clare has used her body to gain social mobility and to move more permanently into whiteness, but she is not altogether “white”; her face remains throughout the text an “ivory mask” (157), a “dark-white face” (218) with “ivory lids over astonishing black eyes” (221). Like Irene, in passing she becomes a “dark-white” figure of Otherness, underscored by the reader’s epistolary introduction to her in the text. When Irene reads Clare’s letter at the novel’s opening, the envelope is “Italian” with “Foreign paper of extraordinary size” and the writing is not an ordinary black but is composed with unusual “Purple ink” (143). For Irene Redfield, “passing” is a whim, a short and pleasant transdermal excursion into Otherness made possible by her light skin. Irene has not accomplished the more permanent “passing” that her former friend Clare Kendry has undertaken; Clare’s decision is an attempt to distance herself from a difficult family past and to acquire “all the things [she] wanted and never had” (159). Clare has married a white man who does not know she has black ancestry, has given birth to a child regarded as white, and has settled into a white community. She has “withdrawn to that other life of hers, remote and inaccessible” (224). Her crossing is seen as a permanent geographic one by the black community, and as such it fascinates Irene, who wonders with curiosity about “this hazardous business of ‘passing,’ this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chances in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly” (157).16 Irene characterizes Clare’s passing as a kind of voyage into a “strange” unknown land. The geographic as well as figurative nature of Clare’s journey from black to white, enabled by the way she uses her body as a vehicle for movement, is further highlighted in the text by the similar voyage away from prejudice that Irene’s husband wishes to make. Throughout the novel, there are allusions to Brian Redfield’s aspiration to take his family to Brazil. Brian retains his “craving for some place strange and different” no matter how much Irene resists (178), hoping to help his children escape American racism; “I wanted to get them out of this hellish place years ago,” he explains (232). Critics tend to overlook the importance of Brazil’s ideological resonance in this novel. It is not Africa, which might represent a locus of black ancestry, nor is it akin to Helga’s Denmark in Quicksand. It is an exotic in-between space with a more diverse community and more flexible notions of race than could be found in the United States. Not unlike 16

 Mary Church Terrell similarly observes that passing halts mobility in previous directions. She writes, “When a colored person decides to ‘pass for white’ in the United States it means that he must pursue a course which is both hazardous and hard. He must make up his mind to renounce his family if he has one, and give up his friends” (414).

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the women’s concept of passing in the novel, Brazil has become in Brian’s mind a kind of refuge of foreignness. As such, it is similar to the space of ethnic Otherness Irene has learned to occupy, the appearance that suggests an “Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gipsy.” Brazil’s population at the time was approximately half white, 15 percent black, and 30 percent mixed race,17 with other small percentages including Brazilian Indians.18 In a book-length study of race in Brazil, Thomas E. Skidmore points out that the difference between racial categorization in Brazil and in the United States has hinged around the third social caste of the mulatto. In America, those of mixed African ancestry were classified as “Negro” according to the concept that “one drop” of black blood signified blackness, while ideas of race were much more fluid in Brazil. “Brazil was already a multi-racial society. Unlike the United States, there was no institutionalized color bar,” Skidmore explains (54). Once in Brazil, the binary categorization which encouraged “passing” in the United States would not exist; indeed, the Redfields’ high social class, rather than the color of their skin, might speak for their “race.”19 South America in Passing represents a space where both black and white Americans seek what they most desire. While for Irene’s husband it signifies a more equalized racial society, for John Bellew, Clare’s husband, it is a place of monetary wealth. Before marrying Clare, he had just returned “from South America with untold gold” (159); once in the U.S. he chooses a woman with hair of “pale gold” and eyes which hold “something exotic” (161). There is a curious link in Larsen’s work between Clare and South America. While Brazil beckons Brian, Irene is captivated by Clare: this woman “who had done this rather dangerous and, to Irene Redfield, abhorrent thing successfully … had for her a fascination, strange and compelling” (161). Just as Brazil is “strange and different,” Clare is “strange and compelling.” Unable to escape to Brazil’s foreign shores, Brian seems to escape through Clare. Irene begins to believe that Brian is having an affair with her friend; meanwhile, Irene herself seems so obsessed with Clare that critic Deborah E. McDowell reads the novel as the tale of Irene’s “awakening sexual desire for Clare” (xxvi), which enables Irene’s “imagination of an affair” (xxviii). The irrefutable triangle of attraction in the novel underscores the desire for Otherness expressed by both Irene and Brian. At the core of the novel is an investigation of this desire, highlighted at a dance Irene organizes for the Negro Welfare League. It is here that Larsen introduces Hugh Wentworth, the character most directly linking passing, desire, and geography in the novel. While it is unclear whether Hugh is a novelist or a travel writer, he is a 17

 See, for example, the graph of census figures in Schwarcz, 109.  These data are approximate; official census results appear only from 1890 and 1940. I have extrapolated late 1920s racial data from a graph in Skidmore’s Black into White (45). 19  In his autobiographical work, Coal to Cream (1999), Eugene Robinson explains, “American society sees race but not color; Brazilian society sees color but not race” (25). While an African American could only “pass” as white in the United States, an “upwardly mobile” person with some African ancestry could reclassify as white in Brazil (27). 18

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white author who has “Lived on the edges of nowhere in at least three continents” and has been “through every danger in all kinds of savage places” (198).20 Back in the United States, he becomes one of a growing group of white persons who have come, in Irene’s words, “to see Negroes” and “to get material to turn into shekels” (198). Wentworth is a traveling writer turned Harlem spectator, a veritable globetrotter come to Harlem. Thus going to Harlem to find “material” on black men and women to use for literary purposes is directly connected in Larsen’s text with traveling to a foreign country to observe and write about “savage places.” This attraction for Otherness exists equally at home and abroad; at the dance we see both blacks and whites drawn to members of the opposite race. Irene explains to Hugh that she sees it as “a kind of emotional excitement. You know, the sort of thing you feel in the presence of something strange, and even, perhaps, a bit repugnant to you” (205). This is precisely the way Irene has described passing. Most alluring about Clare to Hugh is that he cannot tell at the Harlem dance whether she is black or white; again, it is that space of Otherness between black and white which Clare occupies that is highlighted in the text. “Passing” may be romanticized as a voyage to another culture, but it is to a place, as Larsen’s text emphasizes, from which one can seldom return without complication. Making an enjoyable excursion by re-coding the body is, for Irene, transgressive but temporary, but Clare’s immersion in another cultural space closes off possibilities for a voyage home. The “passport” of her body will become invalid in white society the moment someone discovers where she has come from, but Clare feels returning to her roots may be worth that danger. Although she has immersed herself in the white community and has bound herself to a white husband, Clare yearns for “that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of” (145). Although whiteness gives Clare the power of a new societal position, she cannot be permanently satisfied with a social change that erases a key part of her identity. Clare’s use of the word “other” reflects how she has come to see her own heritage, even her own body, as strange and different. Although she now yearns to be absorbed in that Otherness, her plan has tragic results. Clare wants to have the ability to be at once both black and white, to, as Irene put it, both “have her cake” and “nibble at the cakes of other folk as well” (182). Brian remarks that the trouble with those who experiment with crossing the color line is that they too often “give way to the urge and slip back” (185). This “slip”page, this shuttling back and forth across personal narrative, race, and geography, can be problematic. Clare has no real desire to stay “white,” and is no longer satisfied by white culture; similar to Helga Crane, her experiences around white people only cause her to yearn for black society. She feels caught on the other side of that invisible barrier she has crossed, complaining that Irene is the one who remains “free,” “happy,” and “safe” (196). Significantly, Irene refers to passing 20

 In this aspect, Hugh is reminiscent of William Seabrook, the travel writer who wrote of dining with African cannibals in Jungle Ways in 1931. Seabrook reviewed Passing but Larsen did not meet him until her trip to France.

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as “go[ing] native” (227), which curiously suggests a movement into a more primitive culture. She articulates a kinship with those white travel writers who yearn to be immersed in a foreign land, as Lady Dorothy Mills expresses in The Road to Timbuktu when she writes of her yearning to voyage further into Africa where “something … promised me things that as yet I did not understand—things beautiful, or fierce, or tragic” (199–200) and where she might “slip over the edge of the horizon” (201) and not come back at all. Critics debate whether Passing participates in or revises the “tragic mulatto” tradition, for Clare’s act of slipping back causes her outraged husband to discover the truth about her racial identity. It is Irene, however, who pigeonholes Clare as a tragic figure. Throughout the text, Irene demonstrates her jealousy of Clare and admits, even with her own ability to “pass” at will, that race is the “thing that bound and suffocated her” (225); she feels an inescapable pressure of group identity which encourages her to protect Clare even as she yearns to reveal her. Thadious M. Davis has even suggested that Clare’s “visible mobility” in the text “signifies a break with concepts of female space” as she ignores not only “race proscriptions” but those of gender (107). While Clare does remain somewhat bound by her domestic choices, including limiting her childbearing for fear of a “dark” child, she is quite bold in asserting her right to cross societal lines when and where she pleases. It is Clare’s power to navigate between spaces that Irene desires, and it is Clare’s successful movement within the space between Irene and Brian that Irene most detests; fittingly, Irene pushes Clare out of her world, through the liminal space of the window to her death, with the same ease that she lets fall a migratory “Confederate” teacup at a party a few chapters before.21 While Quicksand investigates traveling broadly from place to place to locate identity, Passing portrays more regional and figurative travel over black/white borders. By investigating ideas drawn from her own experiences with travel, Larsen makes fascinating points about the way the skin is read and coded by the eyes of others, and the way the traveler can reposition herself in new spaces, whether actively seeking difference or simply blending in. Larsen’s texts hint that the beauty of “passing” is in the mobility of identity, not in stasis, but that there are intense difficulties and dangers inherent in such transdermal excursions. Returning to Cixous’s words, refiguring the self in travel to feel “the dwelling place of the other in me” might be a means of feeling more complete, even more “alive,” but the pull of multiple strands of self can lead to confusion, instability, or a torn sense of identity, as we will also see in the work of Jean Rhys. 21

 The teacup, a symbol of racial movement and a parallel for Clare, has been brought North via the “underground,” changing from white to black hands (222). Though from Brian’s family, the teacup still appears foreign to Irene. In a moment of anger, she breaks it so that “Dark stains dotted the bright rug” (221), giving the spilled tea the feel of a crime scene. The real crime comes later, when Irene pushes a smiling Clare out of the window just when Clare is confronted by her husband and seems to shift from white to black allegiance. As Irene said earlier about the cup, “I had only to break it, and I was rid of it for ever” (222).

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“A pretty useful mask that white one”: Jean Rhys’s Representation of the “Voyage” of Racial Identity While Larsen, a writer of both black and white ancestry, uses the concept of travel to explore a biracial woman’s feelings of displacement and a light-skinned black woman’s ability to “pass” between spaces, the idea of transdermal movement becomes just as complex in the work of “white” authors from colonial spaces, as shown in the novel Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys. As Anna Snaith has argued, the “impact of colonialism on metropolitan modernism needs further examination” (“Little,” 93); certainly, the cross-currents of travel to and from colonial lands left behind complex intersections of race and nationality, even before England’s post World War II influx of colonial immigrants. Rhys was among those who left a colonial space to find new possibilities in the metropole; born in Dominica, an island in the Caribbean, she left her homeland for England as a teenager. Like Quicksand, Voyage in the Dark can be read as a fictional travel narrative inspired by real-life journeys, documenting a young woman’s experiences in a new locale. At the heart of this novel lie Rhys’s own complex feelings about the connections between place, race, and travel; though her West Indian protagonist has white skin, she is symbolically marked as “black” as she moves into white, Western spaces. While Rhys revisited similar ideas of travel and dislocation in subsequent texts using black voices and a black West Indian perspective, playing with a kind of authorial racial passing, in Voyage she most clearly represents the double bind of the white colonial traveler whose notions of home and abroad are endlessly complicated by her outsider status. In her unpublished and undated poem “Tourists,” Rhys reveals the mixed emotions West Indian children can experience when sightseers visit their homeland.22 A child narrator describes a group of tourists in protective sun-gear; while they are likely white, the native child (whose race is not revealed, but who is accompanied by black boys) sees the tourists as dirty and foreign. When the visitors return from their tour, they have only a nonchalant response to the island’s beauty. Although the poem begins with contempt for such tourists, it ends with the children wistfully watching the white ship sail away to other lands, longing in turn for exotic shores. “Tourists” is like a travel diary told from the other side, the side that the white European reader is not accustomed to seeing, and it reveals Rhys’s own complex position. As a white colonial woman from the Caribbean, Rhys’s in-between status offers an atypical view of the colonizer/colonized dynamic, allowing the colonizing nations to appear as “Other” in turn. Sunburned and travel-weary, white Nebraska native Nettie Fowler Dietz once remarked at the end of her African travel narrative, “I was a white woman once, as I laughingly told some one yesterday” (237). Dietz can laugh at her statement of self-Othering because, no matter what it reveals about her position in relation to the “Black Man’s Country” around her, she is comfortable with her race and 22

 “Tourists” is housed in the Jean Rhys Collection at the University of Tulsa.

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the privileged position that her whiteness signifies. Dietz also finds humor in the idea that a person can be white and then become someone racially different; she presumes that racial categories are stable, genetically determined, not environmentally achieved or evolving. Rhys had a very different understanding of race and place. She once wrote in a letter to Francis Wyndham, “As far as I know I am white—but I have no country really now” (JRL, 172). In contrast to Dietz’s statement, Rhys’s implies uncertainty and homelessness: “As far as I know” expresses doubt at her own racial origin, while “I have no country really now” implies an unsettled quality which would rarely be seen in a work of travel literature. After all, a typical travel narrative shows an exploratory journey to a new and different geographic space, followed by a return home. The reassurance and stability of home give the narrative its feel of new but temporary excitement, and the reader waiting at home gives that work an appropriate welcome. While Dietz could return to the United States at the end of her journey, Rhys found she could never really “go back” to the Dominica of her youth once she left for Europe, although she tried without satisfactory results in 1936. Just as it is rarely possible to reexperience the wonder of childhood after achieving adulthood, a sentiment often heightened by nostalgic distance, Rhys found that she could never again locate the same island she left as an adolescent. Instead, her memories of Dominica persisted in her imagination and emerged in her writing, appearing in her short stories and two of her novels. In Voyage in the Dark, Rhys’s most autobiographical novel, Rhys investigates the ideas of cultural and geographical dislocation that haunted her throughout her life.23 She uses the character of Anna Morgan, a young woman from Dominica, to tell a story like her own: a tale of the bitter reality faced by a displaced teenager seeking a career on the stage in London, and of the men she relies upon who leave her, in the end, almost dead from an illegal abortion. Even more, it is a story about place, indeed about two places that have little in common, and about a girl whose body lives in one while her heart and mind remain in the other. Rhys’s father was Welsh, but her mother was what West Indians call “Creole,” a Caribbean descendant of European immigrants.24 Seventeen-year-old Rhys (then Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams) left her home in Dominica in 1907 to attend the Perse School in England; after her father’s death in 1908, Rhys decided to remain in England to try to make a living as a chorus girl. Thus began Rhys’s life as a 23

 With Rhys’s work it is sometimes difficult to tell where life ends and fiction begins. In Diana Athill’s foreword to Smile Please, she explains how Rhys saw writing as a tool for giving life shape. According to Athill, Rhys would say that “a novel has to have a shape, and life doesn’t have any” (7). It is illogical to read Rhys’s work solely as autobiography, although much of it has grounding in real life. It is equally dangerous to read Smile Please or Rhys’s journals as pure nonfiction. These works simply present different variations on crafting literature from life. 24  See studies on Rhys and the concept of the Creole by Veronica Marie Gregg, Anna Snaith, and Judith L. Raiskin.

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“woman in passage,” to borrow Helen Nebeker’s term, moving from one locale to another in Europe to find a supportive place for herself.25 Rhys’s initial transition as a teenager from the warm West Indies to cold, blustery England was difficult, and she never really learned to like the country. Instead, she preferred France and, most of all, her homeland of Dominica, as she professed in a 1959 letter: When I say I write for love I mean that there are two places for me. Paris (or what it was to me) and Dominica, a most lovely and melancholy place where I was born, not very attractive to tourists … . Both these places or the thought of them make me want to write. (JRL, 171)

Rhys’s attraction for place cannot be overlooked: her associations with specific geographic locations inspired her writing and triggered deep emotional responses in her. As a West Indian teenager living in England, Rhys felt like an outsider. She recalls thinking that “I would never be a part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing” (Smile Please, 100). Even in Dominica, Rhys did not quite feel easy about her societal position; this was in large part due to her status as a descendant of slave owners, and as a white woman in a country composed largely of peoples of African descent.26 She recalls in Smile Please her hatred for her black nurse (24), her close relationship with a black friend, Francine (23), and also her rejection by black girls at the convent (39). Although Rhys seems to have had conflicting feelings about people of color throughout her life, she recalls that she felt a “wariness” of black people but also an “envy” of them (39). She assumes this might have come from a memory of her mother saying that “black babies were prettier than white ones” (33). A larger clue to Rhys’s feelings about race emerges when she writes of black Caribbeans, “They were more alive, more a part of the place than we were” (40). The black West Indians she knew seemed to her more “free” from societal codes (33), and she strongly admired Afro-Caribbean music, dance, and carnival. Race and place were always intimately linked for Rhys, and being “a part of the place” is something she felt she had been denied. In what has come to be known as the “Black Exercise Book,” a journal kept around 1938, Rhys expresses her difficulty fitting in racially both in Dominica and in England.27 In one passage, she writes that she “felt akin” to black Dominicans; 25

 During her adult life, Rhys lived briefly in Holland and Germany, remained for years in Paris, and spent her later years in England. 26  See Elaine Savory, 4. Slavery had ended in Dominica in 1834. Snaith makes a useful observation in her essay “A Savage from the Cannibal Islands” that Dominica was unusual in “its relative lack of sugar production” and its large inland population of “free blacks and mulattos,” making “the position of Creoles more precarious than on other islands” (77). 27  The “Black Exercise Book” is housed in Special Collections of the McFarlin Library of the University of Tulsa and is part of the Jean Rhys Collection. O’Connor dates

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it made her sorry that they did not care for white persons and called them “white cockroaches.”28 Rhys recalls a conversation she had with a family member,29 in which she was told that she would never “be like other people,” leading her to imagine a long lonely road in front of her.30 We discover in the following lines that “other people” meant “white people”; her family was alarmed by her AfroCaribbean attachments. In a passage signifying both narrative and social correction, Rhys writes that her mother was trying to “drive out something she saw in me that was alien that would devour me. She was trying to drive it out at all costs.”31 Rhys reveals a bitter awareness of being forever isolated and out of place, a traveler on a “lonely road.” While in this passage she highlights and savors the “alien” quality her mother locates in her, it is also this piece of her, though it cannot be seen on her physical body, that draws notice once Rhys goes abroad. In England, Rhys found herself facing “smug” students who labeled her as inferior, particularly because of her West Indian accent. No label seemed to suit them to classify her identity. “If I said I was English they at once contradicted me,” Rhys explains, and if she claimed another European identity, they would grow more annoyed. “Neither one thing nor the other. Heads you win tails I lose,” Rhys laments, regretting her lack of a stable cultural position.32 In England, Rhys at first kept many of her feelings private; later, she excavated some of her personal writings and reworked them for Voyage in the Dark.33 The novel investigates a situation of “passage” in a young woman’s life, showing her feelings of displacement by juxtaposing two opposing worlds. In a letter written to Evelyn Scott, Rhys describes her wish to show in her novel “that the past exists—side by side with the present, not behind it” (JRL, 24). Rhys’s words suggest abstractly that the past and present operate spatially on geographic planes of existence. In the novel, Anna seems to live in the past while subsisting or “passing” as a tourist of the present. Frequently, when another character is speaking in the present time, the journals to 1938. For an extended note on the nature and date of the exercise book, please see O’Connor, pages 219 and 220. Since the Rhys estate is not currently granting permission to quote passages other than those already transcribed by critics, the passages included here come from other sources and are cited appropriately in the following footnotes. 28  Quoted in O’Connor, 36. Originally on page 16 of the “Black Exercise Book.” Rhys later uses the term “white cockroaches” in Wide Sargasso Sea. 29  This is likely either her Aunt Clarice in England or her mother. Anna’s step-mother, Hester, plays a similar role in Voyage in the Dark. 30  Quoted in Thomas, 32. The original passage is on page 24 of the “Black Exercise Book.” 31  Quoted in Thomas, 33. Originally in the “Black Exercise Book,” page 24. 32  Quoted in O’Connor, 19. Originally on page 39 of the “Black Exercise Book.” 33  In Smile Please Rhys describes how in London she filled three and a half exercise books with recent memories, then packed them away (105). Mrs. Adam, the wife of the Times correspondent in Paris, later edited the journals and called the result “Triple Sec.” Although Rhys was not pleased with the editing, this renewed her interest in the journals, which became, in her own words, “the foundation for Voyage in the Dark” (125).

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Anna is thinking about her childhood days at home. These digressions appear throughout the novel and flow in quickest succession in the Dominican carnival scene in Part Four, where they combine with Anna’s near-fatal hemorrhaging; they are further extended in the original ending in which Anna dies.34 The original title for the novel, “Two Tunes,” reflected well this present/past binary. The revised title brings a more active image of travel, and the sense of a passage into darkness suggests a familiar titular trope of the travel narrative genre. Evoking texts such as Henry M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa or even Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, both of which suggest a descent into a less-civilized, frightening, and literally “black” world, Rhys offers a surprising “Othering” of England as most Westerners know it, changing it into a place of moral darkness. In contrast to the usual perspective of a white person penetrating these dark spaces of the earth, Rhys presents a woman who is made to feel un-white by her very journey. Reminiscent of the unusual position revealed in the poem “Tourists,” Voyage in the Dark becomes a variety of “inverse” travel narrative, giving English readers a new perspective of their home country. The text juxtaposes England with an often idealized Dominica both saved and savored in Anna’s memory. Although Anna may be recounting the savageness of English society in her narrative, the natives here are white people, enunciated by the repetition in Anna’s depiction of “hundreds of thousands of white people white people rushing along” (Voyage, 17) and by her uncomplimentary descriptions of their skin, which she calls “the colour of woodlice” (26). In theme this line approaches the casual racism sometimes seen in travel narratives, similar for instance to Janet Miller’s insect-like description from Jungles Preferred of “A swarm of black woolly-headed aborigines” and their extreme blackness, but the key difference is that the Englishmen’s white skin is also Anna’s skin. Anna is “Othering” the English while she herself is a similar color, showing an estrangement both from them and from her external self. The longer she remains in England the less “white” she becomes. Anna’s separation from English society begins with initial sensations of climate and culture shock. The symbolic divide in her mind between England and the West Indies is revealed in the book’s opening lines as Anna recounts her geographic “rebirth”: It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colors were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey … . I couldn’t get used to the cold. Sometimes I would shut my eyes and pretend that the heat of the fire … was sun-heat; or I would pretend I was standing outside the house at home, looking down Market Street to the Bay. (7) 34

 The original ending can be found at the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa. It is published both in Nancy Hemond Brown’s essay “Jean Rhys and Voyage in the Dark” and in Bonnie Kime Scott’s collection The Gender of Modernism.

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For the duration of the novel, the West Indies remains, in name and notion, “home” to Anna. In a metaphor appropriate to a young actress, she considers one act of her life ending, hidden as if by a curtain falling, and another beginning. Though the scenery before her has changed, through memory she can transport herself back to the Caribbean, which she later calls “some other world” (52). Throughout the novel her travels, both real and imagined, move her in two directions: confusedly forward through the urban spaces of London in actuality and, in retreat, back to her island home in memory. In this opening passage Anna reveals a binary opposition between these two places by presenting England as “cold,” “dark,” and “grey” in contrast to the “heat,” “light,” and “purple” of her homeland. It does not take long for Anna to link these adjectives with a racial duality in her mind: “Being black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad” (31). To Anna, the presence of AfroCaribbeans is so fundamental to her conception of home that she feels almost lost without them. In fact, we discover that her white skin sometimes made her feel out of place in Dominica. In thinking about her childhood friend Francine, Anna recalls, “I wanted to be black, I always wanted to be black” (31). Once in London Anna should, theoretically, blend in racially for the first time in her life, but there is a cultural divide she cannot cross. Veronica Marie Gregg calls Anna, as a West Indian Creole, a “peripheral Other” (129), a useful term for seeing Anna’s in-between position as a foreign ethnic presence in an outwardly white body. Like Rhys in the “Black Exercise Book,” Anna finds that her Caribbean body is viewed in England as foreign and sometimes not even as “white.” For instance, the other chorus girls nickname Anna “the Hottentot” (13), a colonial term used to refer to Southwest Africans. The name links her to the “Hottentot Venus,” a black woman brought from Africa in 1810 and exhibited naked publicly in Piccadilly.35 Europeans saw the Hottentots as the “most savage of all people” and became obsessed with the sexuality and body shape of this particular “specimen” (White 96).36 Sander L. Gilman explains that Westerners often saw black women as “more primitive, and therefore more sexually intensive” (83), and connects the Hottentot body with that of the prostitute, similarly viewed by nineteenth-century scientific minds as an “atavistic subclass of woman” (98). Anna bears both the Hottentot nickname and the associations that come with it; as Gregg has argued, “Anna is constructed not only as a sexualized object but specifically as a black sexualized object” (118). Like the Hottentot Venus, Anna has positioned her body for all to see in her vocation on the stage, a venue traditionally equated with the male gaze and female depravity. As soon as Anna’s friend Maudie mentions her nickname to Anna’s future lover, Walter Jeffries, Anna notes, “He didn’t look at my breasts or my legs, as they usually do” (13–14). The  On the “Hottentot Venus,” see E. Frances White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies, 97, and the chapter “The Hottentot and the Prostitute” in Sander L. Gilman’s Difference and Pathology, 78–108. 36  Sander L. Gilman claims the Hottentot was “the lowest exemplum of mankind on the great chain of being” according to nineteenth-century white European categories (83). 35

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idea of men looking at Anna in such a markedly sexual appraisal draws a further connection between Anna’s body and the displayed “Hottentot Venus.” Through Anna, we see the way the colonial woman is categorized, racialized, and sexualized, and ultimately the way others’ conceptions of her country of origin become part of her identity. The labeling of her body goes beyond skin-deep; a landlady dismisses her for “crawling up the stairs” during the night, insinuates that she’s a “tart,” and comments, “You and your drawly voice” (30), thereby linking Anna’s West Indian accent with depraved behavior. The “drawly voice” even takes on racial meaning since Anna’s English step-mother, Hester, has informed her that she has a “sing-song voice” like her black friend Francine (65). In sending her step-daughter to England, Hester is trying to give Anna a new, white-washed beginning. Hester complains of her “never seeing a white face from one week’s end to the other and you growing up more like a nigger every day” (62). “I tried to teach you to talk like a lady and behave like a lady and not like a nigger and of course I couldn’t do it,” Hester acridly insists (65). All of these labels suggest that Anna is “black” in a white skin and insultingly contrast the black body with that of the white “lady.” From her landlady’s and aunt’s perspectives, Anna has been stepping over boundaries into an inappropriate realm. Anna, too, characterizes her social position racially. When Anna is with Walter Jeffries, she remembers once seeing slave names written on a list: “ … Maillotte Boyd, aged 18, mulatto, house servant. The sins of the fathers Hester said are visited upon the children” (53, Rhys’s ellipses). After Anna and Walter sleep together, she again remembers, “Maillotte Boyd, aged 18. Maillotte Boyd, aged 18 … . But I like it like this. I don’t want it any other way than this” (56, Rhys’s ellipses). Anna equates her position with that of the eighteen-year-old mulatto slave, for whom the “sins of the fathers” are certainly sexual ones, before she rejects her own comparison by insisting that she is happy this way. This self-comparison further complicates Anna’s position in English society: first, like the mulatto slave girl, she is a mixture of cultural influences but is ultimately categorized as Other and inferior; second, she is being used by white men for their sexual pleasure. Anna’s position echoes Rhys’s own; as a young woman she, too, became an exoticized sexual object. In the oft-noted “Mr. Howard” section of the “Black Exercise Book,” Rhys describes a relationship with an older man in Dominica who may have used the fourteen-year-old to indulge his sexual fantasies, although perhaps more mentally than physically.37 In a less-noted section of the notebook, Rhys reconstructs Mr. Howard’s fantasy. In this dream world, she lives with him in a large home on a nearby island. Bracelets cover her arms and rings adorn her fingers as she laughs and dances. Without wearing clothes, she waits on the house’s guests with a long earring touching her shoulder.38 In this description, the portrait of the girl/Rhys as imagined by Mr. Howard vacillates between mistress  Please see Chapter 2 of Sue Thomas’s The Worlding of Jean Rhys for an extended discussion of the “Mr. Howard” section. 38  The original passage is on page 33 of the “Black Exercise Book.” 37

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and servant/slave. The laughter and dancing are consistent with the way Rhys often writes of black Caribbeans, and the bracelets, rings, and long earring combine with the nakedness of the imagined body to give the fantasy Rhys a very exotic quality. The passage shows how Mr. Howard’s strong associations between sexuality and race have been mapped onto Rhys’s body, and it demonstrates that Rhys in later life remembered her body being exoticized even before she left Dominica. Just as Rhys as a young adolescent found herself caught passively in someone else’s imaginative fancy, in Voyage in the Dark Anna sees herself pinned down, made exotic in others’ eyes. It frustrates her that no one in England can accurately understand her or her Caribbean homeland. “You don’t know anything about me,” Anna thinks, when talking to Walter (98). To other characters, Anna is a quiet presence, but we as readers constantly see her mind in motion or lost in memory. Anna seems most comfortable when she speaks about her homeland. She is protective of her island, calling it “a little one” (124) and proclaiming its beauty. “I’m a real West Indian,” she tells Walter proudly when a bit tipsy. “I’m the fifth generation on my mother’s side” (55). In this scene she seems to be attempting a moment of connection, telling Walter of her father and “Black Pappy,” the boatman at home, and explaining, “I wanted to make him see what it was like” (53). Unfortunately, Walter is not really interested, and quiets her by taking her upstairs. Later, when another man jokingly pretends to know about the West Indies and claims to have known Anna’s father, Anna becomes especially indignant. Anna cannot reconcile her memories of Dominica with the English perspective of the island. The text gives us clues that her English-influenced education only presented her with a view of Dominica that was detached and scientific. She recalls in a voice foreign to her usual one: Lying between 15º 10’ and 15º 40’ N. and 61º 14’ and 61º 30’ W. ‘A goodly island and something highland, but all overgrown with woods,’ that book said. And all crumpled into hills and mountains as you would crumple a piece of paper in your hand—rounded green hills and sharply-cut mountains. (17)

This passage sounds as if it has been copied from a geography textbook, and is little like the lush, vibrant Dominica so full of bright colors, strong scents, and music that Anna’s memory conjures. Its perspective is that of an outsider to the “goodly island,” a potential colonizer eyeing a piece of land. In fact, this passage is a reference to Columbus’s account of Dominica; according to Dominican legend, when Queen Isabella asked Columbus to describe the island, he “crumpled up a piece of parchment in his hand” (Angier, 3). This recollected history lesson is followed in the novel by Anna’s first view of England, a very different island, from the train. “I had read about England ever since I could read,” she says, but the England she sees from the train-window when she arrives is not like the England in her mind: “smaller meaner everything is never mind—this is London—hundreds thousands of white people white people rushing along and the dark houses all alike frowning down one after the other all alike all stuck together—the streets

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like smooth shut-in ravines and the dark houses frowning down” (17). Her own claustrophobic perception of a dark, inward-turning, “frowning” city is also likely very different from the one Anna learned about in school. The repetitive bombardment of negative visual stimuli reveals Anna’s utter bewilderment at the disapproving world around her, including these “white people” who seem so separate from herself. In Part Two of the novel Anna similarly observes of England that “all the houses outside in the street were the same—all alike, all hideously stuck together” (103). Anna Snaith, who is interested in Anna Morgan as a colonial flâneuse and who examines her cartographies of London, reads such passages as showing London’s “fixity: the pressure to conform” (“Savage,” 80).39 Anna sees only ugliness in this conformity, and has no desire or ability to belong to English society. Following this second description of English homes appears another scholarly quotation embedded in Anna’s consciousness: “‘The Caribs indigenous to this island were a warlike tribe and their resistance to white domination, though spasmodic, was fierce’” (105). This shows the sort of colonialist rhetoric that Anna has internalized about the Caribbean, and her attention to the “resistance” of white domination may echo her own feelings of resistance to English culture. Anna is surrounded by characters loyal to their own country who have difficulty seeing her outsider perspective. When Anna tells her English friend Maudie, “I don’t like London. It’s an awful place; it looks horrible sometimes,” Maudie responds, “You must be potty … . Whoever heard of anybody who didn’t like London?” (46). Other characters resent foreigners altogether. The xenophobia Anna finds in London is epitomized by Ethel, the masseuse, who comments that when the police examined her place of work, “I was wild. Treating me as if I was a dirty foreigner” (139). To Ethel, activities of a “dirty foreigner” are synonymous with prostitution. Anna, as ethnic Other, similarly becomes associated with these stereotypes. Altering her clothing with Walter’s money only allows for temporary release from her feelings of estrangement. At first, putting on a new expensive English outfit causes Anna to see differently, with a more empowered and confident gaze (“The streets looked different that day” (29)) and to be seen differently as well. Yet even then her landlady merely reads her body as too well dressed, wearing a thin façade over a working-class and foreign self, and thus as sexually suspect. In a further symbolic conjoining of body and geographic space, Anna’s body is labeled and colonized in the text. A chorus girl calls Anna “The virgin” (16), a nickname contrasting “The Hottentot” and linking Anna’s body to virgin land, a site ready for exploration and conquest. Before Anna takes Walter Jeffries as a lover, she describes Walter and the waiter at dinner, sniffing the wine together with their distinguishing noses, as “the Brothers Pushmeofftheearth,” twin colonizers of a sort, representing wealthy white society (20). After Anna allows her body to 39  For a discussion of Rhys’s characters as flâneurs, see Deborah Parsons’s and Anna Snaith’s analyses.

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be used by men for their pleasures, it is only a matter of time before she becomes pregnant. Right after she discovers her condition, Anna recounts: I dreamt that I was on a ship. From the deck you could see small islands—dolls of islands—and the ship was sailing in a dolls’ sea, transparent as glass. Somebody said in my ear, ‘That’s your island that you talk such a lot about.’ And the ship was sailing very close to an island, which was home except that the trees were all wrong. These were English trees, their leaves trailing in the water. I tried to catch hold of a branch and step ashore, but the deck of the ship expanded. (164)

This dream-passage shows a parallel between Anna and Dominica clearly established in Anna’s subconscious. The islands are small and sweet, “dolls of islands,” just as Anna appears as a “doll” when dressed with the clothes bought by Walter’s money (28). When Anna sees her island, she finds it pregnant with foreign, English seed and discovers that the situation is beyond her reach or control. She finally seeks an abortion to combat these feelings. As ethnic “Other,” Anna tries to find her place in English society, and she succumbs to the labels this society applies to her: first a sexual anomaly (“Hottentot,” and even “virgin”), then a “tart” with a “drawly voice,” later a girl in a position like a mulatto slave, and finally a prostitute, a label assigned by Ethel who identifies prostitutes with “dirty foreigners.” Nonetheless, behind the labels lies a more comforting sense of Otherness that Anna makes for herself, one which connects to Rhys’s descriptions of her own feelings about race. In the “Black Exercise Book,” Rhys talks about the “shame” she feels when hearing about slavery and continues, “But the end of my thought was always revolt, a sick revolt and I longed to be identified once and for all with the others’ side which of course was impossible. I couldn’t change the colour of my skin.”40 When Rhys mentions “the others’ side” she means that of those who are black, but her words also suggest she is thinking in terms of geographic boundaries. Since she is writing in her exercise books long after her departure from Dominica, perhaps going to England brought out for Rhys these longings for Otherness, for “the other side.” Anna, too, labeled as foreign and racially different throughout Voyage in the Dark, ultimately embraces Otherness in the text’s last section as she bleeds profusely from an illegal abortion. In her final illness, Anna’s mind fills with memories of West Indian masquerade in the most extensive memory sequence in the text as she is able to escape geographically, through imagination, from her current circumstances.41 In the italicized portions representing Anna’s memory, people classified as “they” by Hester, non-white inhabitants of the island, celebrate and dance in bright colors and masks. The masks conceal external features, including racial ones; the masquerade subverts social sign and custom, creating 40

 Quoted in O’Connor, 36. Originally on page 17 of the “Black Exercise Book.”  Please see Chapter 3 for a further analysis of Anna’s illness.

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what Mikhail Bakhtin in his discussion of carnival has called “liberation … from the established order” (45) and “a world inside out” (46).42 In this scene of West Indian carnival there is one white mask which draws the onlookers’ attention, and someone in Anna’s memory calls it, perhaps jokingly, “a pretty useful mask that white one” (184). Here, the odd word “useful” possibly implies that such a mask could enable the wearer to “pass” as white. The line may remind us of Anna’s own external whiteness, which the English treated as an easily recognized “mask” placed on an exoticized body. Anna is trying to “pass” the colonial body as white in English society, but she cannot, and her own personal identification with black West Indians and rejection of whiteness completes her racial shift. In this passage, Anna identifies with the dancers and imaginatively passes over into the space of the black carnival participants. Anna remembers Uncle Bo saying, “You can’t expect niggers to behave like white folks all the time … it’s asking too much of human nature” (185). In the next italicized section, Anna relates, “I’m awfully giddy—but we went on dancing” (186). The pronoun switch from “they” to “we” here indicates that Anna has joined the dancers herself. Just as Anna at the end of Voyage in the Dark crosses back to a more comfortable space by aligning her body with those of the black dancers, Rhys herself was able imaginatively to “change” the color of her skin by writing several texts from the perspective of a black woman in England. In the University of Tulsa collection, two thematically similar unpublished poems by Rhys appear side by side, each written in a different racial voice. In “Negress in Bloomsbury,”43 Rhys uses black vernacular to critique the night, trees, and rivers that others claim to experience and to remark on their lack of easy living.44 Like many of Rhys’s heroines, the speaker is a woman out of place, and she criticizes Bloomsbury and the way the English experience it. In “Prayer to the Sun,” a second speaker also prays to be delivered from an existence without these rivers and trees, without a restful lifestyle, but in language more consistent with Rhys’s usual voice. Curiously, even the “white” voice of “Prayer to the Sun” has an outsider’s insight into her own life and seeks deliverance from her position. “Negress in Bloomsbury” seems a “black” rewriting of this poem; Rhys may identify with an Afro-European woman’s perspective and

42

 Please see Mary Lou Emery’s chapter “Voyage in the Dark: Carnival/Consciousness” in Jean Rhys at “World’s End” for an extended discussion of Bakhtin and Rhys’s work. 43  “Negress in Bloomsbury” might remind readers of a line in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929): “It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her” (50). Woolf is making a wry point about imperialism, and is using the “fine negress” as an object. “Bloomsbury” might be a reference to Woolf; while the “negress” receives no voice in Woolf’s work, Rhys assumes the negress’s voice in her own. Thinking ahead to Wide Sargasso Sea, we can certainly see Rhys as an author determined to let the silenced woman speak. 44  “Negress in Bloomsbury” and “Prayer to the Sun” appear in Series I, Box 3, Folder 9 of the Jean Rhys Collection at the University of Tulsa library.

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may feel she can express her sense of dislocation more adequately through a figure of more pronounced ethnic Otherness than herself. A similar narrative “passing” occurs in “Let Them Call It Jazz,” a 1962 story Rhys began over ten years earlier.45 Like Voyage in the Dark, it concerns a Caribbean woman out of place in London: Selina, a light-skinned black woman from Martinique, finds herself depending on the funds of a stranger who seems a little too generous. Selina’s neighbors assume that she is up to no good; the woman next door comments, “At least the other tarts that crook installed here were white girls” (57). After breaking a prized stained-glass window in an argument, Selina is sent to prison. As Judith L. Raiskin aptly explains, “Selina’s primary crime is not breaking the window but being an outsider with no place of her own” (159). When Selina is released, a white man hears her singing a melody she heard sung by another woman prisoner, “jazz[es] it up,” and sells it (67). Selina’s story, with its pattern of a woman’s wandering, her reliance on a man’s money, her trouble with others’ stereotyping, and her final release, mimics in general form Voyage in the Dark.46 In fact, Elaine Savory claims that “Let Them Call It Jazz” is based in part on Rhys’s own experience “of being arrested and confined in Holloway prison” (30). Again, Rhys rewrites a feeling or experience of her own from a black West Indian’s perspective. In contrast to the white man who has “jazz[ed] … up” the overheard prison melody, employing others’ ethnic roots in remaking a song from a socio-economic situation he has not experienced, Rhys’s authorial “blackface” works as an expression of her own experiences and colonial origins. Like Nella Larsen, Jean Rhys writes about the relationship between race and geography from a personal familiarity with such feelings of racial uncertainty. Rhys implies that the relationship between geography and identity is complex and delicate, often relying on others’ perceptions and sometimes transcending the actual color of one’s skin. Travel between regions may reposition the body, but may additionally complicate one’s own conception of race and place. To further understand these connections, it is useful to see how a white, noncolonial, early twentieth-century woman writer also seeks out racial difference to help articulate key pieces of her identity. Finding Miss Ogilvy: Following Radclyffe Hall’s “excursion into the realms of the fantastic” White English author Radclyffe Hall adds a distinct third voice to this discussion of travel and racial positioning. While Hall is not often regarded as a modernist, her short story “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself,” written in 1926, varies from her 45

 This date is referenced in a 1949 letter under the title “Black Castle” (JRL, 66).  Selina is a more forthright and confrontational character than Anna, but even Selina’s retaliative action parallels an incident in Voyage where Anna defiantly breaks the glass over Ethel’s picture of a dog. 46

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usual reliance on a more old-fashioned style and examines, as Richard Dellamora has remarked, “split subjectivities … depart[ing] from the norms of conventional realism” (“Engendering Modernism,” 87).47 The work demonstrates Hall’s own take on the relationship between geography and self-conception, after personal travel inspired her to write the story. Like Larsen’s and Rhys’s texts, Hall’s shows a fictional revision of the author’s own travel experiences; however, Hall’s adds a degree of fantasy that makes it a story of wish-fulfillment rather than just a story of travel and reflection. In this fantastical journey, the masculine woman Miss Ogilvy has a dream-vision of herself as a warrior of an ancient, brown-skinned tribe. She transcends her own time, gender, and ethnic identity simply by reconnecting with a specific geographic space; as she does so, Hall channels pieces of difference and displacement that she locates in her own identity. Radclyffe Hall, the pen name Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall used for her seven novels and her short story collections, began a life of travel at a young age. In 1880, when she was only a few months old, her parents divorced, and her mother brought her first to London and then to Belgium (Franks, 12). After her mother’s remarriage, Hall stayed in Devon, England, for several months with her father’s relatives at the Derwent family estate. Hall fantasized later on that her life might have been happier had she been brought up there in Devon, instead of with a mother who disliked her for looking so much like her father (Souhami, 10). From childhood on, Hall developed a restlessness with place similar to that of Larsen and Rhys; for Hall this meant traveling around England or to other countries, continuously buying homes that she would remodel and then vacate. As Michael Baker describes in Our Three Selves, Hall always felt the urge to travel “whenever she began to put down roots” (25). Although she loved England, she often was eager to journey away. Hall went twice to visit her mother’s relatives in the United States, spending time in Washington and embarking on a tour of the southern states with her cousin. She later looked back on her youthful travels as a period of freedom (Baker, 26). In her adult years, travel took on new significance for Hall. When she became a friend and lover of a married woman, Mabel Batten (“Ladye,” who called Radclyffe Hall “John”), the two visited Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Although the trip was prescribed to help Hall recover from a horseback-riding accident, this was the first of many trips the women were to take together, journeys that kept them safely away from Batten’s husband. Together the women returned several times to the Canary Islands and traveled to Morocco, Monte Carlo, Genoa, Florence, and Rome (Franks, 20). Baker notes how “dear abroad” became a favorite phrase of theirs, suggesting how their journeys “meant being able to enjoy each other’s company in a way that was impossible in England” (37). Although Hall could never stay anywhere for long without becoming homesick, these trips gave her 47

 In “Engendering Modernism,” Dellamora terms Hall a “vernacular modernist,” meaning that she “splits and mixes genres” (86), combining conventional approaches with fantasy.

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brief escapes from her life at home and became a central part of her lesbian love life. After Mabel’s death, her trips abroad continued with Una Troubridge, her companion and professional assistant. The two started living together in 1920 but took frequent trips to Capri, Sicily, Paris, Florence, Bath, and other locales. In Una’s memoir of her life with Radclyffe Hall she describes spending their holidays “in the country, at the seaside or abroad (we hardly ever stayed in other people’s houses, much preferring our own independence)” (The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall, 74). Again, her word “independence” seems key to describing what these holidays were about, giving them more freedom and space to write, to be together, and to explore a lifestyle condemned at home. For these women, travel became a way to “find” themselves. Perhaps fittingly, the aptly titled “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” was inspired by one of these trips. As a narrative of exploration, it fascinatingly combines issues of travel, identity, and the body. Una Troubridge’s diary records the series of events which led to the creation of this unusual story.48 In early May, 1926, Hall and Troubridge were intently listening to information about the General Strike on their brand new Burndept wireless radio; Una records that the “strike began at midnight” on May 3, and by May 5 the wireless had been installed.49 While the workers’ strike continued, the couple volunteered to drive citizens needing medical attention to the hospital; for instance, on May 10 Una wrote, “In afternoon to Charing + [Cross] Hospital to offer to drive patients to & from Hospital.”50 Two weeks after the strike ended, the women left for a vacation at a hotel on Burgh Island, a small private tidal island off the coast of Devon. Una writes on May 27, “reached the Burgh in pours of rain—but a divine place & very nice people & good food.”51 Even today, Burgh Island contains a certain mystique, advertised to tourists as “the great escape” and with the alluring line, “take an ocean voyage on dry land and escape to another time.”52 For the women, the get-away was a chance to relax, read, and enjoy each other’s company. Most of the three-week trip, recorded in brief notes in Troubridge’s diary, consisted of strolling along the island’s beaches, exploring the rocks, photographing the coves, and sometimes crossing over to the 48  The materials I use come from Library and Archives Canada, Lovat Dickson Fonds (MG 30, D 237), Una Troubridge Diaries, vol. 2, Archival reference no. R3608–27-E, Diary 1926. I would like to thank the research librarians at LAC for their valuable assistance. All quotations from the diary are used with the permission of Alessandro Rossi Lemeni Makedon, M.D., Estate of Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge. 49  Una Troubridge Diaries, vol. 2, Monday, May 3, 1926. The Wednesday, May 5, diary includes the words, “came home to find Burndept men come to fix the wireless.” The couple continued to listen to the radio when home; Una wrote, for instance, of listening to St. Martin in the Fields (Sunday, May 9) and Ruby Helder (Sunday, May 16). 50  Troubridge’s diary, Monday, May 10. LAC. 51  Troubridge’s diary, Thursday, May 27. LAC. 52  http://www.burghisland.com, first accessed August 2, 2011. It is not clear whether “another time” refers to the 1920s (since the hotel on the island is 1920s Art Deco) or to an even earlier time because of the ruins of a monastery found there.

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mainland. For instance, on May 28 Troubridge writes, “then on beach & round the Island—In afternoon we mooned about beach & rocks & explored.”53 On June 1 the women photographed Herring Cove on the western side of the island; on June 13 they walked the sands to Cockleridge on the mainland.54 The island provided an interesting retreat spatially: when the tide was out, it was easy to cross to the mainland; for instance, on June 10 the couple returned just in time when the tide came in early.55 The tidal island gave them an intimate retreat; they could leave by way of land during the day, but high tide again assured them the seclusion of a private island. On June 17 Hall and Troubridge left the island and visited Brockenhurst before returning home. There followed a feverish period of work for Hall; for instance, on July 6 Una writes that Hall was “at her story all morning.”56 On July 8 Una reported that she had finished the new story “‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself’ & we fetched Audrey for luncheon to hear it read.”57 The odd little tale later lent its name to the title of one of Hall’s story collections, published in 1934. Hall here calls the story a “nucleus” for parts of her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), the tale of a woman’s “sexual inversion” that was to define her career,58 and describes the short story as “a brief excursion into the realms of the fantastic” (“Author’s Forenote,” 2). These aspects of an “excursion” blending with “the fantastic” make Hall’s story what it is: a transtemporal, transgender, and transdermal travel narrative taking both Miss Ogilvy and Radclyffe Hall away from, respectively, the constrictions of real life and the confines of literary realism. Hall creates a travel fantasy that is a kind of “imaginative geography” and that may remind us, thinking back to Chapter 1, of a travel narrative like Seton’s.59 The first half of the story “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself,” comprising the first three of seven short sections, may be inspired by Hall and Troubridge’s impromptu 53

 Troubridge’s diary, Friday, May 28. LAC.  Troubridge’s diary, Tuesday, June 1, reads: “out photographing Herring Cove.” Sunday, June 13, reads: “we walked on sands as far as Cockleridge.” LAC. 55  See Troubridge’s diary, Thursday, June 10. LAC. 56  Troubridge’s diary, Tuesday, July 6. LAC. 57  Troubridge’s diary, Thursday, July 8. LAC. 58  “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” looks ahead to The Well of Loneliness in its frank rendering of a manly heroine experiencing war, a woman feeling like a man caught in a woman’s body, and her struggles to find a place for herself. The novel, deemed obscene because of its suggestion of lesbianism, caused Hall an exhausting controversy and legal battle in 1928. 59  Like Seton in Egypt, Miss Ogilvy immerses herself in the lure of the past. The most striking connection between the two texts (written only three years apart) is the similarity between Seton’s waking dream where she experiences the thoughts and abilities of an ancient mystical, powerful man and Miss Ogilvy’s “dream” as a strong, primitive man. Both dream personas seem to function as a kind of wish-fulfillment, a projection of the desire to find agency and a place of belonging, and for both women this involves a transgender journey. 54

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“ambulance” driving in May 1926. It focuses on the disbanding of Miss Ogilvy’s World War I ambulance unit in France and the resulting inability of a woman (identified by Hall as a “sexual invert”) with many conventionally masculine qualities to settle back into life with her sisters upon returning home.60 “Her tall, awkward body with its queer look of strength, its broad, flat bosom and thick legs and ankles” (3) is only an outward show of the nature of a woman who “loathed sisters and dolls” as a child (6) and insisted petulantly “that her real name was William and not Wilhelmina” (7). “If only I had been born a man!” Miss Ogilvy laments at age fifty-five when the war breaks out (11). Hall, far ahead of her time, paints a picture of gender dysphoria which Miss Ogilvy’s heroic service in the war can only temporarily amend.61 After finding an outlet for her ambitions by helping the wounded in the war, there joining other emerging “Miss Ogilvies” with their “cropped heads” (12) and embracing as an ambulance driver what Laura Doan has aptly called the “mobility of modernity” (Doan, 13), Miss Ogilvy’s return to everyday life in Surrey is insufficient and unsatisfying, and she quickly finds herself out of place and stagnating amid narrow definitions of gender and domestic life.62 When a member of her unit comes to visit and announces her engagement, Miss Ogilvy seems stunned by this regression to heteronormative domesticity and is forced free of the “blissful illusion” which had surrounded her on the battlefield (“Miss Ogilvy,” 12). Other scholars have noted that, in the creation of Miss Ogilvy, Hall draws on a woman of her acquaintance named Toupie Lowther, a very masculine woman who formed an all-female, twenty-car ambulance unit that accompanied the French

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 In her “Author’s Forenote” written for her 1934 short story collection, Hall calls Miss Ogilvy one of the “sexually inverted women” who found purpose “during the Great War” (2). Among sexologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “sexual inversion” was a common term for homosexuality; the idea of being “transgender” was not yet defined. For a discussion of how Hall both relies on and complicates Havelock Ellis’s definition of the “invert,” see Michael Kramp’s “The Resistant Social/Sexual Subjectivity of Hall’s Ogilvy and Woolf’s Rhoda” and Richard Dellamora’s Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing. 61  As Richard Dellamora notes in his book Radclyffe Hall, Hall’s story anticipates “postmodern concepts of transsexual and transgendered identity” (216). Nonetheless, recent critics have been hesitant to label Miss Ogilvy either “lesbian” or “transgender”; Dellamora, for instance, when revising a 2000 article on “Miss Ogilvy” into a book chapter, changed the word “transgendered” to the word “crossgendered” so as to “avoid anachronistic usage” (216). I agree that for Hall the word “invert” implied multiple possibilities of sexuality and gender association outside the bounds of the heteronormative (see Doan, 10). 62  Doan carefully traces Miss Ogilvy’s use of cars, boats, trains, and travel on foot through the story, rightfully glimpsing Miss Ogilvy as a figure of modern travel. Though she does not discuss Hall’s own preoccupation with travel, Doan offers a compelling reading of the story where she notes that Miss Ogilvy’s restlessness with place begins with her journey to war and links this “compulsion to travel” with “self-understanding” (12).

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army on the Compiègne battlefront (Baker, 125).63 Hall and Troubridge saw Toupie often, and Hall envied her involvement in the war. While Miss Ogilvy’s character may be derived from Toupie, reading Una’s diary alongside the story reveals how Hall also begins to infuse Miss Ogilvy’s adventures with her own experiences. In the second half of the story, Miss Ogilvy defiantly packs her bag and travels away from a limiting existence at home where her family has resorted to telling others she has “shell shock” to explain her unusual behavior. Her journey takes her to a familiar-sounding island. Section 4 of the story begins, “Near the south coast of Devon there exists a small island that is still very little known to the world, but which nevertheless can boast an hotel, the only building upon it” (18). It is obviously Burgh Island, where Hall has just visited, though Hall does not use that name. In travel, Miss Ogilvy seeks layers of her self that cannot manifest themselves at home. Similar to Helga in Larsen’s Quicksand, who also feels composed of multiple and sometimes conflicting pieces of identity, Miss Ogilvy finds in travel and mobility hope and opportunity for a new beginning. Seeking adventure and a change of scene on this island, Miss Ogilvy finds more than she bargained for: a memory of a past-life experience and an extraordinary journey into that past. On the battlefield, Miss Ogilvy once formed “blissful illusion” out of “appalling reality” (12); what she creates for herself on this island provides another kind of “illusion” to replace the grim reality of her present circumstances. What becomes fascinating about Miss Ogilvy’s adventure is its dip into the “realms of the fantastic,” but the story also contains real and important geographical, autobiographical, and even archaeological elements that critics have overlooked. For Miss Ogilvy there are three journeys, one in distance, one in time, and one in body, and the geographic location of these journeys is of interest since the second half of the story narrating Miss Ogilvy’s adventures on the island serves as a fictional travel narrative running alongside Hall’s own visit there. Hall always had used her travels as a kind of escape; here we see her escaping through the power of narrative in a new way. When Miss Ogilvy arrives on the island, she makes a comment which even the narrative itself announces as “a curious thing”: “On the south-west side of that place there was once a cave—a very large cave. I remember that it was some way from the sea” (19). Even though Miss Ogilvy has never been to the island before, she remembers this cave, although her memory is “distorted and coloured—perhaps by the endless things she had seen since” (21). The memory seems to derive from a former life. The island was inhabited by an ancient people; the modern residents have found “bronze arrow-heads, pieces of ancient stone 63  Toupie was a tall woman of masculine physique and a great athlete. Baker notes that Toupie even had the Ogilvian habit of rocking back and forth with her hands in her pockets (Baker, 187). Legend had it that Toupie once was arrested at the Franco-Italian border for dressing as a man; returning in appropriately feminine dress, she then was arrested for masquerading as a woman (Baker, 125). Though Hall once commented that Toupie’s lesbianism was too “obvious,” she greatly admired her (Souhami, 127).

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celts; and once they had dug up a man’s skull and thigh-bone” (21). When Miss Ogilvy’s hostess, Mrs. Nanceskivel, shows her the skull “thousands and thousands of years old” with a gash in it from an axe that “was bronze,” Miss Ogilvy feels a sense of inexplicable outrage (22). As if “by instinct” she remembers “how such men had been buried” (23). The artifacts found on the island are called “curious things” of a former age; notably, this is the exact phrase used to describe Miss Ogilvy’s comment about the cave, suggesting that this kind of remembering is another variety of archaeological artifact. Miss Ogilvy’s memories suggest a past-life experience, a phenomenon Hall discussed and wrote about on many other occasions.64 Although she converted to Catholicism, Hall was also an avid believer in spiritualism. After Ladye’s death, Hall and Una Troubridge visited a medium on many occasions to “converse” with the departed Ladye, and they reported their experiences in a paper presented to the Society for Psychical Research (Baker, 103). Ladye had believed in reincarnation, and she and Hall thought they had known each other in a former life (Baker, 34, 84). Perhaps most importantly, travels to new places sometimes triggered feelings of déjà vu for Hall, seeming to signal to her a memory of a past life. When visiting Florence, Hall became sure that she had lived there before and wrote in a letter, “One feels a strange and yet familiar aura of the 15th and 16th centuries the moment one sets foot in the streets. As I know that I lived in the 15th century myself it appeals to me strongly” (qtd. in Souhami, 62–63). In “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself,” Miss Ogilvy appears to travel back into the past and become her former self, whether in reality or in dream. In section 6 of Hall’s story, Miss Ogilvy goes up to her room and lies down; the next moment she becomes “herself … and yet she was not Miss Ogilvy at all” (24).65 Instead, she is a hairy, heavily tattooed tribal man wearing a “leathern thong” and holding a stone celt, like those reputed to have been found on the island (25); her new gender assignment is reinforced by these distinctive outward markers of primitive and rugged masculinity. As this man, she experiences “a glorious sense of physical well-being” (26) and finds she is the strongest in the tribe. Perhaps even more than in her ambulance unit in the war, here Miss Ogilvy’s strength can be acknowledged and celebrated; in a man’s body, her “look of strength” is no longer “queer” (3) and she can fight to defend what she loves. Her companion is a beautiful young girl 64  A similar idea of reincarnation appears in Hall’s 1925 novel A Saturday Life, where the child heroine is believed to be in her seventh incarnation, one where all other “experiences previously gained” are reexperienced (213). At the book’s beginning, for instance, seven-year-old Sidonia is taken with a Greek style of dancing, though never having seen it before, and remembers vaguely that “we always danced all together … . under some big dark trees” (47). 65  As Michael Kramp has noted in his close reading of section 6, Miss Ogilvy’s switch into the body of the primitive man is not immediate; for a little while the narrator still refers to the man as “Miss Ogilvy.” This aids in Kramp’s reading of Miss Ogilvy as “embodying a multiplicity of sexes, genders, and sexualities” (32).

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with “smooth, brownish skin” and black hair (26). The man and woman speak in a “primitive tongue” and communicate their love (28). The girl expresses her fear of another tribe, the “Roundheaded-ones” who have weapons “not made of good stone like ours, but of some dark, devilish substance” (31), but the two put aside their worries to consummate their love inside a cave. The man lies “defenceless with tenderness” thinking only “of life”; the next morning Miss Ogilvy is found dead, “sitting at the mouth of the cave … with her hands thrust deep into her pockets” (35). The cave “On the south-west side” of the island echoes the rocky inlet of Herring Cove on the western side of Burgh Island where Hall and Troubridge took pictures during their stay. Most immediately, the space represents one of their many special places where they were able to escape together. The imaginary cave of the story also mirrors in form the geography of Burgh Island, enclosed and yet open; Miss Ogilvy is found at the “mouth of the cave,” the part that allows for connection between spaces or bodies. Like the cave it contains, itself a symbol of feminine sexuality, this island is sheltering for Miss Ogilvy, though not necessarily for her ancient counterpart, who is destined to be killed by another tribe. In the prelapsarian moment of the fantasy, however, both island and cave provide the primitive man and woman with a place to experience the sweetness of love. The island setting gains further significance if one considers it in relation to Hall’s last book of poetry, The Forgotten Island (1915), a collection which “represented someone’s recollection of a previous incarnation on a mythical island like Lesbos” (Baker, 57).66 Perhaps an island setting evoked for Hall these earlier notions of reincarnation and love outside heteronormative spaces. “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself,” however, tells a story much more complex than one woman’s dream of experiencing sex with another woman. Most curious is the way Hall uses the “Otherness” of gender and race to replace the “Otherness” of Miss Ogilvy’s sexual “inversion”: for Miss Ogilvy to experience a fantasy of love with a young woman, she must first become male and a member of an ancient race with primitive language, flat heads, and darker skin. Indeed, the story takes Miss Ogilvy back to an ancient past, but it is not the only past resurrected by the tale. There are clues in the story that suggest Hall is evoking a literal “past life” of her own: her ancestry and the pieces of it which comprise her present identity. To see how this works, it is necessary to first examine the archaeological aspects of “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself,” aspects which, to the best of my knowledge, no one has considered before.67 After visiting Burgh Island, Hall and Troubridge 66

 The poems speak of a sweetness of long ago, love and lovers, Greek gods and goddesses, Cypress maidens and music, and concern an island lost from memory. 67  Richard Dellamora is the only scholar I have found to give any attention to the story’s historical moment being both late Stone Age and early Bronze Age. He intriguingly connects archaeological labeling with labeling by sexologists, saying, “Their simultaneous existence [of Stone and Bronze] qualifies the taxonomy that assumes that it is possible to delineate neat categories of human development” (“Engendering Modernism,” 96).

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journeyed to Brockenhurst in the New Forest (June 17) where they stayed while making day trips to Bournemouth (June 18), Salisbury (June 19), Lyndhurst (June 20), and Bowling Green (June 23), among other places.68 This area is rich in late Stone Age and Bronze Age monuments and perhaps helped generally inspire the latter parts of Hall’s story.69 The story more specifically, however, relies heavily upon the presentation of the excavated human skull which represents Miss Ogilvy’s past. Hall may be mapping one geographic site onto another, for in 1926 there was a story in the English news about someone finding an ancient skull, though the skull did not come from a cave on Burgh Island but from a much more famous cave, Kent’s Cavern. A site of archaeological interest since the 1820s, the famous caves are “on a small peninsula which forms the northern side of Tor Bay,” with cavern entrances “located within the eastern limits of the town of Torquay” (Campbell and Sampson, 1). Devon historian W. G. Hoskins writes that Kent’s Cavern contains remains of “the oldest recognizable human dwellings in Britain. Here Neanderthal man sought a winter refuge from the cold of the last Ice Age.”70 Although there are some important discrepancies between the description of the archaeological finds in the story and those found in Kent’s Cavern, I believe that Hall had the Torquay area in mind for personal reasons. On May 1, 1926, the Western Morning News ran an article called “15,000-yearold Skull” with the sub-heading “Notable Find in Kent’s Cavern.”71 The article describes how, in the autumn of 1925, Mr. W. F. Powe, the Owner of Kent’s Cavern, was enlarging his garden by digging into the limestone on the north side of Kent’s Cavern when he unearthed fragments of a human skull. The fragments were sent to the conservator of the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England “in order that a reconstruction might be effected and a report made on characters of the skull by him.” The characteristics of the skull are reported here, as in a similar article in The Times from May 3, 1926, called “The Kent’s Cavern Skull” and subtitled “New Light on a Prehistoric Invasion of England.” According to the analysis performed, the skull was reported to be between 12,000 and 15,000 years old (Figure 2.1). The articles assert that “all the characters of the skull were feminine” (Western Morning News) and that the skull was remarkable for its roundness, its high-vaulted quality, and its forehead bulge, characteristics that made it similar to skulls found in Aveline’s Hole, a cave in Somerset. The woman was thought to be around age twenty-five, with healthy teeth, a snub68

 This information comes from Troubridge’s diary, LAC.  Brockenhurst particularly has Bronze Age burial mounds, and Salisbury lies just north of Stonehenge. 70  This material is quoted in the editorial “Kent’s Cavern,” supplied to me by James Hull, the General Operations Manager of Kent’s Cavern. I would like to thank Mr. Hull for his kind assistance. 71  I would like to thank Barry Chandler, the assistant curator of the nearby Torquay Museum, for sending me this newspaper article from the Western Morning News and that from The Times. 69

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nose, and a face “flat and the cheeks projected forwards,” reports the article from The Times. The skull was a significant find and provided further evidence that “round-headed … intruders” appeared at a much earlier date in Britain than was formerly assumed.

Figure 2.1 Illustration from the Western Morning News, May 1, 1926. By kind permission of the Western Morning News. While the skull in Hall’s story and the Kent’s Cavern skull both were unearthed inadvertently and are “thousands and thousands of years old” (“Miss Ogilvy,” 22), a number of differences distinguish them. The skull in “Miss Ogilvy” was a man’s skull with a gash in it made by Bronze Age weapons, and Bronze Age, roundheaded “Beaker People” did not arrive in England until the end of the Neolithic Period (The Times), with the Bronze Age beginning around 2,500 B.C. or even later. A skull “thousands and thousands of years old” suggests a skull older than this and implies that part of Hall’s idea may have come from hearing about the skull found at Kent’s Cavern. It seems likely that a comment about “round-headed people” may have stuck in her mind and encouraged her to study the better-known round-headed invasion that heralded the Bronze Age. The second reason I believe that Hall’s story was inspired by the Kent’s Cavern skull is that, in 1926, the curator of the nearby Torquay Natural History Museum, which then and now houses the Kent’s Cavern finds, was an archaeologist named Arthur Ogilvie. Mr. Ogilvie began excavating the caves in 1925; the May 1926 Western Morning News article mentions “Mr. A. H. Ogilvie” as “the curator of the Torquay Natural History Museum” and heralds him as the man who sent the skull fragments to be examined and reconstructed. “Ogilvie” may have become “Ogilvy” in Hall’s story if Hall heard the news story instead of reading it; for

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instance, Hall’s dyslexia often encouraged Una Troubridge to read to Hall aloud.72 Most importantly, the newspaper articles concerning the skull were published the same week that Hall and Troubridge listened avidly to reports of the General Strike: Una’s diary describes them listening to the radio at a friend’s home on May 3, and receiving their own wireless on May 5. Although it is doubtful that a radio report or newspaper article would have been titled “Mr. Ogilvie finds—,” since Ogilvie was not actually the one to unearth the skull, it does seem significant that Ogilvie’s name is tied to this discovery and may have remained in Hall’s memory.73 It is important that Hall in her story refers geographically back to Torquay because the area had personal significance for her: this is where her father’s family made its fortune. Her father’s father, Charles Radclyffe-Hall, son of John Radclyffe-Hall, established a sanatorium for consumptives there in 1851, helping to make Torquay a “fashionable spa” (Baker, 8). Derwent, the “gray-stone estate” where Hall stayed as a young girl, its library walls lined with portraits of her ancestors, also was located there (Souhami, 5). Thus, with the Torquay association, Hall journeys back to a happier time in her childhood. It is also significant that John, Charles’s father, is the man from whom Radclyffe Hall took the familiar name which Ladye, Una, and other friends called her. Una Troubridge reported that Hall owned a portrait of John Hall and that he had “a fierce expression whose resemblance to his great-grand-daughter in a bad temper is quite remarkable” (Life and Death, 7). John Hall, though just a face from the past, may have represented for Hall a familial masculine self, inspiring her to take his name as her own. These Torquay associations suggest a connection with the male ancestors of the Radclyffe-Hall family, proceeding down to the father whom young Marguerite so resembled, and imply that the story of Miss Ogilvy may represent a very complex and personal wish-fulfillment for Hall. The striking features of Miss Ogilvy’s fantasy include not only her journey through time but also her gender crossing. Hall felt that she was a man caught in a woman’s body and Miss Ogilvy seems to feel similarly; through dream or mystical experience, that internal self can physically become manifest, showing, if even for a short time, the triumph of the imagination over the limitations of the body. There are a number of gender switches that take place in my reading of Hall’s story. Assuming that the story was inspired by the discovery of the skull at Kent’s Cavern, there is Hall’s decision to change the archaeologist Mr. Ogilvie, a man who finds human relics, into “Miss Ogilvy,” a woman who “finds herself” by digging into a past life.74 To Hall, the study of reincarnation and spiritualism may have represented a new kind of archaeology of the body. Through her embodied 72  For more information on Troubridge and Hall’s reading habits, see Diana Souhami’s The Trials of Radclyffe Hall. 73  In 1927, Mr. Ogilvie (I have seen it mistakenly spelled Ogilvy) was again in the news for finding a 31,000-year-old jaw bone, but this happened after Hall wrote the story. 74  This is not the first time Hall juxtaposed an archaeologist with a woman with past lives. In A Saturday Life, Sidonia’s parents were archaeologists in Egypt seeking “among the

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journey, Miss Ogilvy can discover something deeper and more personal than an archaeologist like Mr. Ogilvie. Another significant gender change involves the skull itself. In the archaeological world of the 1920s, men including Ogilvie were part of the process of investigating a woman’s skull; in Hall’s story a woman “investigates” what lies behind a man’s. The man’s skull found in the story, cut by a bronze axe, suggests that the idyllic moment of the story soon will be ended by war. Hall carefully places Miss Ogilvy’s fantasy between two very different ages, Stone and Bronze, in an interim period which prefaces a war won by the more modern society with more advanced weapons. The Stone Age man symbolizes a primitive world that is dying out, while his soon-to-be enemies, harbingers of the Bronze Age, suggest a society more representative of the present day. It is only in this pre-modern past that Miss Ogilvy can truly “find” herself. Though she is found dead at the story’s conclusion, her mind may remain forever in this longgone past moment, implying a happier ending for her. Central to Hall’s story is this historical moment which anticipates a takeover of the people with stone tools and flat heads by the bronze-wielding “Roundheadedones” (31). By mentioning repeatedly the differences in head shape between the two groups, the story suggests that the conflict between these tribes may result not only from their cultural differences but also from their physical distinctions. The study of skull shape, while central to the Kent’s Cavern find, also is key for phrenology and other pseudoscientific methods traditionally used to claim certain races as more evolved and to justify the subjugation of others. In this story, Hall sympathizes with the racial group characterized as less evolved and more vulnerable. Hall once said, “I always write about misfits” (qtd. in Souhami, 68), suggesting that she could identify with others who did not fit with the dominant culture, whether because of sexual preference, ideology, or race.75 In “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself,” Miss Ogilvy moves to occupy a body that is not only temporally removed but also racially different. Miss Ogilvy’s “excursion” into Otherness goes beyond a simple relabeling of her body; through fantasy or miraculous spiritual event, she has become able to “pass” as a member of a primitive and persecuted brown-skinned race. Though on the surface level “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” concerns ancient Britons, certain qualities of the story suggest that Hall may have had in mind another group of people deemed “primitive” by white European society: Native Americans. When Europeans visited North America for the first time, explorers saw American “Indian” society as a kind of Stone Age culture; in turn, the native peoples themselves might have seen the gun-toting white settlers as carrying weapons “of some dark, devilish substance,” as in Hall’s story (31). The tribesmen in “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” have black hair, black eyes, tattoos, and “smooth, ruins of a dead civilisation for the beauty they missed sub-consciously in their own” (12). Emerging from their relationship is the reincarnated Sidonia, a living artifact of the past. 75  For instance, in an unpublished story called “The Career of Mark Anthony Brakes” Hall attempted to paint a sympathetic portrait of a black man.

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brownish skin” (26). The language Hall uses for these people might represent any common early twentieth-century depiction of a primitive person or Noble Savage; for example, missing articles make sentences sound choppy, perhaps reminding us of the speech of Burroughs’ Tarzan who appeared in 1912. Yet, certain phrases of the primitive man and woman resemble stereotypical depictions of Native American speech, particularly “Little foolish white teeth” (32) and “blue smoke—home” (29). Other lines seem a caricatured depiction of Native American lifestyle (“I have ground much corn since the full moon”) and poetic metaphor (“My father is still a black cloud full of thunder” (30)). Although Hall was white and English, Una called her “a compound of many races,” revealing that Una (if not Hall as well) conceived of her heritage as a mixture of influences. It is possible Hall had Native American ancestry on her mother’s side; her relatives claimed Pocahontas as an ancestor, an assertion that both intrigued and amused Hall. Hall had visited the United States on two separate occasions; in the Washington area she likely learned something about Pocahontas’s people, the Powhatan tribe from eastern Virginia, and their annihilation by the British. This example of a more modern racial group extinguishing one more primitive may have had personal resonance with Hall. Perhaps even more significantly, Hall dressed up as a Native American on at least one occasion, even darkening her face. Una Troubridge writes of Hall (“John”) in The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall: In spite of her blue eyes and fair colouring, there was about the construction of John’s face and features something distinctly reminiscent of the North American Indian, and on one occasion when I persuaded her to colour her skin and go to a fancy-dress party in the costume of a brave, wearing the war bonnet, the effect was very surprising … . Since her death, seeing for the first time photographs of the North American half-breed, Grey Owl, it struck me at once that he might have easily passed as her brother! (9)

Troubridge writes of Grey Owl “easily pass[ing]” as Hall’s brother; in reality, here we have Hall “passing” as Native American.76 Thus in “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” we see Hall tracing both a maternal and a paternal ancestry that celebrates “Otherness”: from her father’s side is the masculinity of the John Hall she resembles; from her mother’s side is the “primitive” ancestry, the Native American link to Pocahontas. Hall, along with Miss Ogilvy, digs back into her past, including her ancestry and its geographic placement, to “find herself.” 76

 Grey Owl’s real name was Archie Belaney; he was an Englishman posing in Canada as a man of Native American ancestry. He dressed in Native American clothes and presented himself as a “half-breed conservationist” (Billinghurst, 61). Archie created his Native American persona by combining elements from popular romanticized notions of “Indians” with what he learned from Ojibway elders in Ontario (Billinghurst,13). Belaney’s cross-cultural masquerade makes Troubridge’s comparison more appropriate than she likely realized.

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The fictional works of Larsen, Rhys, and Hall all similarly use the concept of travel to explore transdermal possibility. Each woman character, feeling the pull of competing parts of the self and unable to fit into rigid binaries such as black/ white, local/foreign, or masculine/feminine, seeks in both real and imagined travel the possibilities of a more fluid and multifaceted conception of identity. Seeking the “dwelling place” of Otherness and crossing boundaries into racial difference, each explores a familiar Otherness in herself. In the following section I both align these tendencies with ideas of modernist primitivism and seek to complicate primitivism’s usual definitions. Passing and Primitivism In “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself,” Primitive culture creates a separate dream space of possibility for Miss Ogilvy and similarly enables Hall to escape from realism, a remarkable step since she is a writer known for her old-fashioned prose and her “shunning” of modernism in art.77 Although Hall claimed to dislike modernist experimentation, there is no doubt that behind “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” lurks a desire to seek out a primitive and elemental muse, including a more rudimentary language. Hall may envision this tribal language as preferable to modern conversational English. In the language she creates for her characters, words are closer to the earth and the body and a single word has multiple resonances. She implies that there is “one word” the warrior speaks which means “Little spring,” but also “Hut of peace,” “Ripe red berry,” and “Happy small home” (27). She does not tell us what the word is, but the last word the warrior has spoken is “woman.” Hall may imply that this word has many definitions and cannot be limited to one image or idea. Hall suggests that there is no space for Miss Ogilvy’s sexuality or sense of gender in this world of rigid binaries, no room for her definition of “woman,” so she has to make room for it in another; once she has found this happiness, this proper body, there is just no coming back. The inspiration Hall draws from a more primitive culture ties the story to a larger context of racial primitivism used by modernist authors.78 In the tradition of Western travel writing, voyagers long have reveled in the differences found in people and cultural practices of distant lands, but modern primitivism indulges in these differences and collapses (rather than accentuates) the boundaries of self and Other, creating Western art inspired by foreign elements. While African art first inspired primitivist art in Europe, the art and culture of other “primitive” societies, 77  As Diana Souhami writes of Hall in her introduction to The Trials of Radclyffe Hall, “She distrusted stylistic innovation in literature or art … . She shunned the modernist heresies of Edith Sitwell, Hilda Doolittle and Gertrude Stein” (xix). 78  Primitivism is frequently discussed in the context of modernism in the visual arts, music, and literature. See Lemke’s Primitivist Modernism for a consideration of scholars’ frequent over-simplification of primitivism.

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including that of Native Americans, also influenced works of modernism. Leah Dilworth discusses how artist Marsden Hartley in 1914 began a series of paintings with “abstract assemblies of geometric shapes incorporating Indianesque figures” while writers including Amy Lowell, Alice Corbin Henderson, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg wrote poems emulating Indian songs (175). As Dilworth notes, to the modernists Native American art and song “seemed modern in their formal qualities” (181). Dilworth’s comment implies that new forms of art were sometimes found in “old” places, in cultures that were not influenced by Western thought. To a Westerner, these ideas and customs were new, exciting, and thus “modern”—appropriated to be deliberately different from mainstream cultural values. Behind the practice of primitivism lurked a desire to return to a simpler, premodern age and to infuse literature, music, and visual art with a newness inspired by art perceived as exotic and rudimentary. T. S. Eliot wrote in an article in the Athenaeum in 1919 that primitive art and poetry had the ability to “revivify the contemporary activities,” bringing new life to modern artistic pursuits (qtd. in Crawford, 98). The modernists’ use of racial primitivism is intimately linked to these authors’ own travels. Modern writers such as Eliot and D. H. Lawrence sought out foreign cultures to study and borrow from for their artistic purposes. This type of aesthetic primitivism was, as seen in works of travelers like Seton, “motivated by the belief that a fusion with the other will result in a transformation, or revivification, of the self” (Lemke, 27). There is a fine line, of course, between appreciation of a culture and cultural theft, between racial admiration and racism, a line which scholars of primitivism endlessly reposition and debate. For example, while D. H. Lawrence was inspired particularly by Native Americans of the southwestern United States, observing them while staying in Taos, he later was blamed for not really getting to know their culture.79 Behind any writer’s desire for ethnic artistic “infusion” may lurk an imperialist agenda to take and claim pieces of a culture for one’s own, to immerse oneself in foreignness and then borrow fragments of this exotic material for oneself. Carole Sweeney, however, argues that seeing primitivism only as subjugation is too reductive and reminds us that modernist primitivism, while objectifying the Other, was for “countercultural” purposes of defying traditional values and forms (7). She connects this impulse to a kind of “historical amnesia” (20), escaping from the present and recent past into a more simple, Edenic society, “a site of premodern plenitude in which alienation does not exist” (25). This is clearly what we see in “Miss Ogilvy” with Hall’s alienated and then relocated character. While some writers traveled to find primitive influences, others discovered those they deemed modern “primitives” living closer to home. Carl Van Vechten  Dolores LaChapelle notes in D. H. Lawrence: Future Primitive that some “have disparaged Lawrence and claimed he did not really study the Indians so he knew little about them. Of course he did not study them; he was against forming any mental ideas of any sort. However, he had more living contact with them than many other white writers” (108). 79

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warned black Americans that whites would steal elements of African American city life to add new zest to their own work; meanwhile, many black writers were afraid of perpetuating racial stereotypes by tapping into the deemed “exoticism” of their own culture (Tillery, 98). White patrons who urged young black artists to discover the primitive, revealing a belief that “primitive peoples had access to an energy and intuition that had been lost to the overcivilised,” put their clients in a tricky position (Lively, 212). When black writers such as Claude McKay tapped into these sources, they were criticized by some, lauded by others; the question remained whether these works were “counter-primitivist” or merely racist in utilizing white conceptions of black culture instead of engaging in an ethnic celebration free of European stereotype.80 The ways in which the women writers examined in this chapter navigate between these spaces are subtle and reveal that the idea of “the primitive” is not simple or singular but encompasses many possibilities and uses, just as the word “woman” functions in Hall’s story. Larsen’s Quicksand, for example, employs scenes inspired by primitivist ideas, such as that of the Harlem cabaret that repulses Helga, but it does so in complex ways that investigate both sides of the debate about primitivism.81 The more removed the author from the race she portrays in her fiction, the more problematic the portrayal may seem. Though inspired by another culture’s ideas of artistic expression, primitivism reinscribes these ideas through the lens of the Western artist. As this occurs, there is the danger of resorting to stereotypes or merely reinforcing preconceptions about native peoples. The “primitivisms” that emerge in Rhys’s and Hall’s texts reveal, from one perspective, a narrow-minded or at least limited view of another race. A reader might even insist that Voyage in the Dark makes use of stereotypes of blacks held by whites, citing, for example, Anna’s concept of black persons as “warm and gay.” Similarly, if Hall intentionally gives her characters “Native American” speech, her transcription is so similar to traditional white mimicry of American Indian language that it easily may seem depreciative. At the same time, these authors express a desire for this Otherness and an identification with it. Their agendas go beyond stereotype to something more personal and complex. All three women are using race as a tool to explore a part of themselves and to create a new kind of self-articulation. Each author uses a piece of her identity, no matter how remotely connected to the race she investigates, as a passageway into exploring different kinds of Otherness. This use of racial primitivism, then, transcends more general ideas of artistic renewal that authors such as Eliot sought in the movement.

80  See Tyrone Tillery’s discussion of McKay’s Home to Harlem in Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity, 98. 81  Gina M. Rossetti reads Quicksand as Larsen’s view of “the difficulties of finding a representative discourse that is outside of either the culture’s fetishization of the primitive or the call for racial uplift” (162). She argues that the call for uplift that we see at Naxos relies on moving the race away from a believed “natural” state of primitive Otherness.

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A final example of this transfer of Otherness is Gertrude Stein’s short story “Melanctha.” Stein, a white lesbian expatriate American living in Paris, explored issues of race, sexuality, and identity in this central story of Three Lives, first published in 1909. Stein wrote confidently of “Melanctha” that it took “the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature” (qtd. in Loeffelholz, 118). The story follows a young light-skinned African American woman through her childhood wanderings and into her adult relationships with a biracial doctor and a white gambler. Because Melanctha “did not know what it was that she so badly wanted” (132–133), she spends the story in search of this unnamable thing. Even through local wanderings, she joins our list of modernist characters who travel to find themselves. According to Elizabeth Sprigge, the story seems to have been created as a study in movement; Stein noted her thoughts and observations while walking around Paris and incorporated what she saw into her work. To these observations as flâneuse she added her ideas of black Americans established during her two months of obstetrics practice at Johns Hopkins (see Sprigge, 35–38; Pavloska, 43). Stein uses Melanctha to explore, among other ideas, a woman’s sexual liberation and search for fulfillment, and she uses a black character to do so. Because of this choice, it is unclear whether Stein celebrates or stereotypes African Americans. Gina M. Rossetti argues that “‘Melanctha’ reflects the culture’s and Stein’s notions of the racial primitive” by showing a black character who is “sexual, passionate, and mysterious” (162). Although Rossetti does not mention the characters’ language in her analysis of the story’s dependency on racial stereotype, the characters speak in Stein’s perception of black dialect and storytelling technique. In fact, the modernist quality of the text relies partly on the characters’ African American identities. Behind the text is a white American author-in-exile crossing over to appropriate black dialect and conversational rhythms, thus accessing what she saw as a new kind of writing. Stein uses the racial Otherness of the characters to permit a kind of rhythmic pattern of speech that had interested her since she was seventeen.82 It is of further significance, however, that Stein developed the black characters of “Melanctha” by rewriting the lesbian characters in her work “Q.E.D.,” a text that remained unpublished during her lifetime.83 Stein based the 1903 “Q.E.D.” on her relationship with May Booksaver; thus she replaces characters close to her own identity with those embodying an identity foreign to her, though perhaps both 82

 In her essay “Portraits and Repetition,” Stein writes that she realized at seventeen “the inevitable repetition in human expression that was not repetition but insistence” (289). Insistence (as opposed to repetition) implies that the accent, and thus the meaning, changes slightly from line to line. Stein captures this in the colloquial speech patterns of her characters in “Melanctha” as they think through and expand on their own ideas. 83  For a discussion of similarities between these texts, see Richard Bridgman’s essay “Melanctha” and Pavloska’s chapter “The Fact of Blackness in Melanctha” in Modern Primitives.

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identities would be equally “foreign” to many readers. As Juda Bennett notes, this blackening is signaled by the name and title “Melanctha,” a name similar to the word “melanin” for skin pigmentation (Bennett, 22), and reveals a curious re-“Othering” of a white lesbian relationship recoded as a black heterosexual one. Many critics see Stein’s authorial “passing” into a black character to find a new medium for expression as part of a larger incorporation of the “primitive” in art emerging in Paris at this time. Stein was well acquainted with Pablo Picasso, who was developing a fascination with African art during this period, and critic Michael North explicitly compares the revision of “Melanctha” to Picasso’s revision of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” a painting in which the artist replaced images of women’s faces with African masks.84 Although North’s analysis of “Melanctha” is intriguing, in the context of other works of racial passing examined here, Stein’s work seems to represent more than a new façade over an old canvas. Robin Hackett has noted this, too, in her study Sapphic Primitivism where she uses Stein’s “Melanctha” to introduce other white women writers’ use of “figurations of blackness and working-class culture” (3) as “place-holders for lesbianism” (4). She points out that this replacement is possible because of the conjoining of race, class, and sexuality as sexologists borrowed the “comparative ethnography” of race science to discuss sexuality (21),85 arguing that sexual experimentation or “deviance” was often seen in more primitive cultures.86 Yet Stein’s (and Hall’s) articulation of racial Otherness is not necessarily about reinforcing sexologists’ categorizations or about using coded markers for lesbianism; it simply seems to involve the excitement and newness of exploring further identities countering white hegemonic norms, identities to which these authors may feel akin. Stein’s sense of self, for instance, was composed of many points of difference from mainstream Western European and American norms; Charles Bernstein has called Stein’s identity as a lesbian, Jewish, and woman writer her “triple marginalization” (487). Stein explores her own varieties of difference by making use of a distinctly culturally demarcated racial replacement, for blackness signified in ways that “lesbian” and, even more particularly, “Jew” (as less definite, though also stigmatized, identity modifiers) did not. Pavloska even considers Stein’s text a variety of “literary blackface” (36),

84  See North’s chapter “Modernism’s African Mask: The Stein–Picasso Collaboration” in The Dialect of Modernism. 85  The scientific world categorized lesbians’ and black women’s sexuality together, which Lorna J. Smedman argues Stein must have known from her medical studies on women’s “nervous diseases” (571). 86  Though she does not mention Hall’s “Miss Ogilvy,” Hackett’s connection between sexology and primitivism might be applied usefully to Miss Ogilvy’s descent into a primitive, Stone Age past; Havelock Ellis in his discussion of homosexuality among the people of British New Guinea even goes so far as to call them “practically still in the stone age” (qtd. in Hackett, 26).

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a term suggesting a comparison with American minstrelsy.87 In Love and Theft, Eric Lott intriguingly gives voice to what he calls “the dialectical flickering of racial insult and racial envy” in the minstrel tradition, for it was simultaneously a mockery and a celebration of black culture by white performers in blackface (18). This “dialectical flickering” resembles what occurs in the primitivist text where caricature and celebration can be combined in varying proportions. Jewish and Irish Americans often played minstrel roles in what Michael Rogin sees as “a form of racial cross-dressing” (12).88 Irving Howe speaks of Jewish performers who incorporated Yiddish ideas or musical themes into their blackface acts. He writes, “Black became a mask for Jewish expressiveness” and argues, “Blacking their faces seems to have enabled the Jewish performers to reach a spontaneity and assertiveness in the declaration of their Jewish selves” (563). This is the kind of enunciation of one Otherness through another that Stein’s text demonstrates, an exchange of one difference for a related but more visually and linguistically representable difference. It is similar to the way Rhys replaces her own experiences with a “negress” voice or black Caribbean character in her poems and short story. Where a modernist author finds an outlet for Otherness is key to our understanding of her work. An exotic influence might be derived from a stranger in a land half a world away or it might come from a person slightly different from herself living in the same city. It might even come from something not originally “primitive” at all. The simple process of recontextualization, of removal and replacement, can make something or someone appear exotic that was not so before, as Helga discovers in Quicksand and Anna learns in Voyage in the Dark. Movement over boundaries is key to this process of primitivization. A good example can be found in T. S. Eliot’s original title for “The Waste Land” which was “He do the police in different voices.” The title emphasizes the polyvocal nature of the text while the curious verb choice makes the text sound as if Eliot is employing a kind of stereotyped vernacular—though whether signifying class or ethnic difference it is impossible to tell. The voice might even be “black”; certainly, elsewhere in his poems Eliot uses black characters satirically. Surprisingly, Eliot’s working title comes from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Simply through moving a Victorian woman character’s words to a new location, Eliot has made them seem exotic. Many critics assert that modernism could not have developed 87  Although “Melanctha” employs problematic stereotypes, it is important to remember that the novella “broke from the minstrel tradition of … orthographic distortion” (Blackmer, 250). In fact, certain African American authors heralded the text as a sympathetic depiction of black American life. Nella Larsen wrote in a letter to Stein of “Melanctha”: “always I get from it some new thing—a truly great story. I never cease to wonder … just why you and not some one of us should so accurately have caught the spirit of this race of mine” (qtd. in Blackmer, 230). 88  Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise argues that Jewish Americans negated their origins and aspects of difference by donning blackface and thus whitewashing themselves; this is somewhat different from Howe’s point which I use more for my argument.

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without white European and American writers and artists using other cultures’ ideas to challenge nineteenth-century aesthetic models. In this case, Eliot throws a nineteenth-century model back on itself, enabling a canonical Victorian text to “pass” for modern. Thus we might locate the heart of racial primitivism in displacement, an important concept for those authors who themselves felt displaced due to race, heritage, or sexual identity. The “passing” of Stein’s text into blackness reveals her attraction for a different racial space which resonated with her own feelings of difference. Like the protagonists examined here who make transdermal excursions in the novels of Larsen and Rhys and in Hall’s short story, Stein has embraced Otherness, showing how power lurks in the ability to rearticulate the self from a new perspective. Although these characters’ lives end in stasis and death as their societies fail to support the coexistence of the multiple identities which comprise them, each author welcomes the fluidity of “passing” and the opening up of new spaces for the self.

Chapter 3

Modernist Fever: The “Undiscovered Countries” of Illness

English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. —Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill”

Illness is in part what the world has done to a victim, but in a larger part it is what the victim has done with his world, and with himself. —Karl Menninger, The Vital Balance

In his studies of perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously remarked, “I am conscious of the world through the medium of my body” (Phenomenology of Perception, 82). As the modernists seek out experiences of estrangement to enable artistic exploration, the body serves as the mediating vehicle. When that body goes abroad, the mind is “moved” by foreign sights, and the body moves away from its everyday habits. In travel, the usual becomes unusual, and even small changes in routine can call for large adjustments. An unsettled body in movement may lose its sense of balance or stability, feeling motion sickness or traveler’s fatigue. As an “Other” in a foreign place, the body also foregoes its accustomed immunity, and just as a traveler may be exceptionally receptive to foreign stimuli, his or her body may be particularly vulnerable to foreign illness. Accounts of illness are common in narratives of travel, and are emphasized with other deviations from normal routines. For the women modernists, such illnesses may instigate journeys into even more unusual and imaginative spaces. When we are sick, we are defined and limited by what our bodies can and cannot do, making us more aware of our corporeal selves. Women of the modernist era have an intimate knowledge of such limitations: Western society traditionally envisioned women as confined to their bodies because of a natural proclivity for bodily weakness and illness. Biologically “Other” to men’s bodies, women’s were deemed fragile, leaky, irregular, and in need of firm control. Women’s susceptibility to particular illnesses and ailments, sometimes brought on by constricting clothes and lack of exercise, as well as women’s menses and pregnancy, kept women

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situated in the domestic sphere.1 When women travel, they push back against old confinements of self. While demonstrating the health and fitness of the body proves women’s strength, women can also reclaim their bodies by articulating and re-figuring illness. If illness is part of women’s “place,” it is a place that can be reclaimed for further pursuits. Drawing upon the tradition of aligning illness and travel, women writers locate in illness a niche for subversive expression. In this chapter, I move from discussing the external signification of the traveling body to exploring internal spaces of the somatic system which, in illness, influence the mind and the imagination. Travel and illness become intimately linked as travel leads to illness and illness enables metaphorical travel, opening an internal geographic plane of exploration. Modernist women’s articulation of illness is ahead of its time in emphasizing the ill person’s experience and downplaying the physician’s authorial role. The expression of the ill body by these writers anticipates recent trends in the medical humanities to give power back to the patient during illness by letting the ill body speak.2 In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur W. Frank compares the individual experiencing an illness to the politically colonized person, aligning doctors and techniques of modern medicine with efforts to control, restrict, and speak for the colonized (11). He writes that patients “need to become storytellers in order to recover the voices that illness and its treatment often take away” (xii). He articulates the importance of giving the ill body expression or, in his words, “hearing the body” (xii). While the authors in this chapter do not provide a true empowerment of the body by allowing the character-patients an intentionally shared first-person narrative of their illnesses, they do allow us to “hear the body” speak by giving us a window into their characters’ perceptions and language during illness. In contrast to traditional narratives of illness, where the power and narrative authority rest with doctors or nurses, in these novels many of the medical caretakers seem incompetent, disdainful, or even sinister, and our sympathy lies with the patient, whose pain and delirium we sense acutely. As these authors capture ill voices, they reach toward an embodied subjectivity, portraying a more intimate and internal side of the illness experience and a more artistic one. In privileging circumstances that provide a new way of seeing the world, several modernist writers find illness a useful tool. As the body’s natural temperature creeps into uncharted regions of the thermometer, an ill person’s perception of the world begins to change. Although many would consider this process disorienting and disruptive, Virginia Woolf writes in her essay “On Being Ill” (1926) of its  Even the relatively recent ABC of Healthy Travel (1997) groups women travelers with children, the elderly, and “Those with a Physical Disability,” implying that women have an innate problem with mobility because “When travelling, women may have to consider menstruation, pregnancy, contraception, and also the possibility of sexual attack” (Walker et al., 53). 2  See, for instance, Sayantani DasGupta’s “Personal Illness Narratives” and Rita Charon’s “Narrative Medicine.” 1

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positive aspects. Explaining her views on the relationship between illness and inspiration, Woolf expresses surprise that illness has not become one of “the prime themes of literature”: Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals … . (193)

Woolf recognizes that illness is both a “common,” ordinary experience, shared by many, and an extraordinary one of “spiritual change.” She writes of illness as if it brings about a dramatic performance; once the “lights of health go down,” new scenes can open to the mind. Through Woolf’s poetic rendering, illness enables artistic expression. Perhaps most intriguingly, in this passage Woolf speaks of illness as if it were a destination apart from the everyday world, “undiscovered countries” filled with “bright flowers” opening to the mind. Flannery O’Connor once suggested a similar notion of illness-as-location in a letter, writing: “I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense illness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow” (qtd. in Sue Walker, 33). O’Connor, too, figures illness as a “place” one travels to on an “instructive” journey, and as a trip one necessarily makes alone. Woolf agrees, adding that the notion that “however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you” is “all an illusion … . There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so” (“On Being Ill,” 196). In this description, illness allows for a kind of solitary colonial expedition into a land of yet undiscovered sights and images. Woolf’s reference to a “virgin forest” suggests the way explorers of the New World like Sir Walter Raleigh traditionally linked lands unsettled by Western progress with women’s bodies; here this trope is reversed as the body becomes a space for women’s exploration. Woolf and O’Connor imply that even while one’s physical form is colonized by disease, one’s mind can explore new worlds. Two journeys occur side by side: a voyage in for the pathogens and a voyage out for the imagination. This “voyage out” is especially symbolically significant for the female patient. Alison Bashford writes that the nineteenth-century woman “always needed purifying” and “was constructed as always having a capacity to ‘fall’” (37). In the Victorian novel, as in Victorian society, women were frequently ill; while nineteenth and early twentieth-century Western society generally considered upper-class women naturally frail and “inherently sick,” working-class women were suspected of “harbor[ing] germs of cholera, typhoid, or venereal disease” (Ehrenreich and English, 12, 14). Since common belief held that women were naturally prone to sickness, the threat of illness became a means of regulating women’s activities.

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Illness, as in Karl Menninger’s famous quote opening this chapter, is often problematically equated with a person’s bodily misbehavior. Some physicians saw illness as the consequence of women stepping out of moral or sexual codes or indulging freely in education. Illness thus was seen as the expected response to women’s transgressions, and fiction depicting debilitating illness resulting from misconduct reinforced this perspective. Nonetheless, if the experience of illness itself could be figured as transgressive, even useful, imaginative, and artistic as Woolf presents it, this entirely would subvert the traditional connections between illness and punishment. In “On Being Ill,” Woolf calls attention to the social and linguistic boundaries broken by illness: “There is … a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals,” she writes (196). The literary portrayal of illness can both enable a character to break through social restrictions of language and allow an author to explore and articulate new linguistic forms. Several women’s works from the first few decades of the twentieth century adapt and subvert the stereotype of women’s illness as retribution in this way. Through their illnesses, young women protagonists acquire voices that permeate boundaries of both traditional societal and literary structures. Illness becomes not a hindrance but a constructive altered state of being (the state, in Woolf’s words, of “being ill”) from which emerges a new art form. This chapter examines three modernist works, each increasingly experimental, depicting illness as a byproduct of travel. Through the portrayals of these illnesses, these writers use the female body as a text on which to move beyond the usual boundaries of fiction or, to borrow Rachel DuPlessis’s words, to “write beyond the ending” of the Victorian novel. In The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf (1915), Voyage in the Dark (1934) by Jean Rhys, and HERmione by H.D. (completed in 1927) the young female protagonists, all reserved and inexperienced, still seeking expression as adults, succumb to illnesses which allow for the release of a new kind of art, a new modernist language. On a broad structural level, Woolf, Rhys, and H.D. do not move their heroines beyond traditional paths, for all three seem to become ill as a consequence of going where a young woman is not supposed to go. It is on a closer linguistic level that these authors are progressing radically beyond former literary applications of illness. Woolf, Rhys, and H.D. invert tradition by using the ill body as a medium for female voice and for a parlance that disrupts convention and enables artistic exploration. Each author creates modernist language by “dis-easing” realist tradition, drawing upon the instability of the mind and body and the simultaneous heightening and imbalance of the senses during feverish illness to redefine the bounds of consciousness and thus reshape language. Illness and Geographic Space Illness and travel share a long history of association. For centuries, travel has been prescribed as a remedy for many varieties of illness. Health professionals

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traditionally recommended journeys to warm, European seaside resorts for the ailing or convalescing patient who had the monetary means. Beth’s trips to the seashore in Little Women, for instance, show a common attempt to cure a longstanding illness by taking the patient to a place “where she could live much in the open air, and let the fresh sea breezes blow a little color into her pale cheeks” (Alcott, 340). Doctors also suggested travel as a diversion for those experiencing depression or family difficulties. As Birgitta Maria Ingemanson writes in an essay on Victorian women travelers, “the open expanses and dynamic motion of the journeying itself gave the travelers health and purpose” (13). Ingemanson mentions how women travel writers often found “miraculous” cures for depression and physical illnesses on the road, and suggests that it was the sedentariness of the home which made these women ill to begin with (13). Shirley Foster similarly remarks on the “link between physical weakness and geographic mobility” (9), noting the “curative” potential of journeys for many nineteenth-century women (10). The spaces opened by illness could thus be liberating, removing a woman from domestic duties and relationships and taking the body out of the cramped confines of the home. Nonetheless, while an illness might instigate a voyage, a voyage might more often instigate an illness. The dark side of the illness/geography connection is that Western travel to “exotic” or tropical areas has long been associated with the acquisition of foreign illness and fever. Journeys abroad, whether for tourists, adventurers, or social workers, were not always round-trip affairs. For instance, the Textbook of Travel Medicine and Health notes that between 1873 and 1929, 11 percent of Presbyterian missionaries traveling abroad died from cases of illness and infection (Reid, Keystone, and Cossar, 6). Other travelers perished from journeying to countries invaded by visiting illnesses, such as the early twentiethcentury cholera pandemic which began in India and spread through the Middle East, Russia, and parts of Europe. Western travelers were also vulnerable to intestinal parasites and to typhoid fever and other bacterial infections contracted from unsanitary water or food. Guide books written for travelers-to-be have long warned sightseers that if you invade foreign spaces, something might invade you. Baedeker European travel guides as well as books directing travelers through non-Western regions traditionally contained not only descriptions of suggested travel routes and sights to see, but also advice for avoiding contact with local illnesses. For instance, a John Murray Handbook for Travellers in Constantinople (1871) contains a section on “rules for the preservation of health” in which it vaguely reminds Western travelers to keep away from “all known causes of sickness” and more specifically to avoid Asia Minor in autumn “on account of the prevailing intermittent fevers” (19). It quotes a physician that “a single night’s stay” in an infected place can bring “fever, often in a most deadly form, especially to strangers” (qtd. on 19). A 1909 Baedeker handbook to Central Italy similarly warns travelers that “excursionists from Rome … should be back in the city before sunset” (xxviii) to avoid malaria-

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carrying mosquitoes and reminds sightseers that the healthiest place for foreigners is always hotels in the “best quarters of town” (xxviii). Acquiring a disease abroad may come from not having the native body and its acquired immunity; as the 1909 Baedeker warns, “strangers” to an area may be most susceptible. Many travel texts published throughout the twentieth century discourage Westerners from contact with natives and warn against venturing into countries “with a lack of adequate economic resources, such as deficiencies in water supply and basic sanitation services” (Adachi, 69). Even relatively recent texts such as Geographic Medicine for the Practitioner (1985) define the “lowrisk traveler” as “the businessman staying in first-class hotels in the large cities of developed countries for short periods” (Warren and Mahmoud, 1). In contrast, at high risk is “the special-interest traveller” who “wants to experience something new” (qtd. in Rudkin and Hall, 91). In these travel books, the novelty of an experience becomes connected to the danger inherent in it. Similarly, the peril of coming into contact with a disease increases directly with “the active involvement of travellers in the cultural and/or physical environment they are visiting” (91). A 2003 text warns that this style of travel “can be associated with an increased risk of serious illness, especially if an individual resided with natives or participated in an ‘adventure tour’” (Liles and Van Voorhis, 293). The idea persists that the further one goes into less “civilized” society, the easier it is to contract a foreign illness. Thus is illness popularly equated in travel texts with transgressing inappropriate spaces, moving the body into proximity with foreign people, and straying into locales that are “new” and therefore unknown, dangerous. Travel narratives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries display both a fear of and a fascination with foreign illness as part of the Otherness of foreign spaces. While Western scientists were just beginning to have a better understanding of tropical diseases such as yellow fever and malaria, and were intent on discovering how these illnesses were spread, authors showed an equal absorption with the perils of venturing abroad into a world of potentially deadly pathogens. This occurs especially in tales of trips to African, Indian, and South American regions, as well as warm coastal areas of Europe. In Grace Thompson Seton’s 1925 travel narrative “Yes, Lady Saheb”: A Woman’s Adventurings With Mysterious India, published roughly two decades after a physician working in Calcutta proved malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes, she describes her efforts to escape those potentially deadly insects: I crawled under the mosquito net, tucked it in carefully and felt better inside its flimsy protection … . The lamp smelled … . No, I would not lift the net to fix it and risk getting punctured with a malarial germ from several mosquitoes fighting to get in. How hot it was! Thoughts ran zigzag over the day’s happenings … strange country of so much beauty—with death grinning at you just around the corner. It lurks in the water, the milk, the vegetables, the meat, animals—even humans. (105)

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In this stream-of-consciousness passage where Seton seems feverish from mere anxiety, she contemplates her position of vulnerability. While Seton is adventuring in the East, her “protection” is “flimsy,” unable to keep out the dangers to which she is exposing herself simply by being in a foreign environment. While soon she will discover that the most threatening animal lurking outside her mosquito netting is actually a hungry leopard, at the moment she worries about smaller dangers. Seton’s “zigzag” thoughts detail her simultaneous amazement at the beauty of the country surrounding her and her terror of its many perils which may lurk in the very air around her, in the food and water she needs to survive, or even in the people she meets on her journey. Of all places on the globe, Africa most frequently is conceptualized as dangerous to white Western travelers because of the threat of disease. In The Road to Timbuktu (1924), Lady Dorothy Mills writes that Sierra Leone was called the “‘White Man’s Grave’ … before its coast was cleared of its fever traps, and generally tidied up” (242). Mills warns potential travelers about the hazards of drinking West African water, suggesting boiling rather than filtering to remove “the little deadly ones,” and calling untreated ice “nothing but frozen disease” (243). In Jungles Preferred (1931), Dr. Janet Miller spends a good portion of her narrative discussing the illnesses of the African men and women she treats, but at one noteworthy moment in the text she speaks of a white American friend, Helen, who has developed a serious case of amebic dysentery. Miller comments, “Some one has said, ‘The white man can no more become acclimated to Central Africa than a deep-sea diver can become acclimated to the sea.’ She has been out a little too long, and this is the penalty she is paying” (174). Miller speaks of her friend as if she is suffering from overexposure to a dangerous environment. Her description of Helen’s illness is also revealing: Helen Harlow is very ill. Just as she was getting better, a complication came suddenly and without warning, like some stealthy human foe creeping out of the darkness. It is stifling hot, and she is burning with fever. If only I had some ice! A whiff of fresh air from the open sea would be like a breath of paradise to her now. (177)

Miller describes Helen’s relapse as if it is caused not by a microorganism but by a “stealthy human foe,” a personified enemy of Otherness “creeping” beyond its usual bounds. To relieve Helen’s suffering, Miller calls upon a familiar Western geography foreign to this hot land: the very seaside atmosphere traditionally prescribed for ailing patients. In this description, the geography of Africa itself sounds as if it is harming Helen; indeed, once Helen recovers enough to be out of danger, she is shipped home. Works of fiction of this era similarly depict connections between foreign travel and illness from tropical fevers or other contagious diseases contracted abroad. The dangers of tropical climes are alluded to in Jane Eyre (1847), for instance,

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when Jane considers traveling to India as a missionary with St. John Rivers; Jane’s cousins forecast that she will die if she goes, and at the novel’s end Rivers dies there himself of an unnamed illness. In the opening pages of The Secret Garden (1911), Mary Lennox’s parents and their servants die suddenly in India of cholera and the orphaned Mary is sent away to England. While in these examples the illnesses of tropical colonial spaces remain only a peripheral threat, in fiction centering on foreign travel the issue of illness often becomes more prominent. In Heart of Darkness (1899), for instance, Kurtz dies in the Congo of a feverish illness, long after other changes have “take[n] place inside” (11). Works of travel fiction with significant focus on characters’ illnesses include Death in Venice (1912) by German author Thomas Mann. Here writer Gustav Aschenbach leaves Germany in search of “the invigoration of a distant climate.” Not wishing to travel as far as “where the tigers were” (27) but desiring “a fantastic mutation of normal reality” (34), he travels to Venice and becomes infatuated with a beautiful, long-haired boy. Although he quickly realizes Venice’s “stagnant air” is bad for his health, Aschenbach remains to observe the object of his infatuation (46). He discovers the city’s “secret” all too soon—an invasion of Asiatic cholera suppressed by locals for fear it will hurt tourism—but the pleasure of discovering the city’s “guilty secret” becomes “merged with his own innermost secret” (69) and he remains where he is, succumbing to the cholera. Mann’s story suggests the dangers of both casual, careless geographic crossings and repressed, obsessive erotic longings; the desire for a “fantastic mutation” of the usual—perhaps for becoming lost in foreign fantasy while ignoring reality—is what kills Mann’s main character.3 Although Aschenbach has been cautious enough to stay within Europe, the cholera has come down from “the sultry morasses of the Ganges delta … where tigers crouch in the bamboo thickets” (78); though he initially resisted the lures of the Orient, the Orient has found him anyway in his imprudent ventures abroad. Henry James’s Daisy Miller similarly equates illness with taking too many social liberties while traveling. Mr. Winterbourne follows a socially unaware but pretty young American girl and her family to Rome, where he observes her “habitual sense of freedom” in doing what she likes without any regard for social norms (65). At first delighted by her incautious manner, Winterbourne later begins to scorn Daisy’s behavior when he sees her venturing off with other male admirers whom she has no intention to marry. Daisy is warned by her mother and other women that seeing the gardens in the evening air will lead to Roman “fever” (75), a particularly virulent strain of malaria, but this caution against disease seems a larger metaphor for not letting Daisy “ruin herself” by naïvely spending time with 3

 Since Mann himself was attracted to other men, it might be going too far to read Aschenbach’s illness as a punishment for his homosexual desire. Nonetheless, his erotic desire keeps him from prudent actions and kills him. For further discussion of homosexuality and Mann’s novella, see Robert Tobin’s “The Life and Work of Thomas Mann: A Gay Perspective.”

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passionate admirers (79). When Winterbourne finds Daisy sitting in the Colosseum at night with an Italian lover, he is shocked at this flagrant disregard of social mores—and health precautions. Within a few pages Daisy becomes “dangerously ill” and then dies, punished for straying outside the proper bounds for a young, prudent American girl. In a final example, Edith Wharton’s short story “Roman Fever” (1934) at first seems to revise these connections between illness and misbehavior by showing two middle-aged women reflecting on the fact that, in a Rome cleared of malaria (and a Western world cleared of Victorian social dictates), their daughters have nothing to fear in running around at night with young men. Mrs. Slade remarks on “what different things Rome stands for to each generation of travellers. To our grandmothers, Roman fever; to our mothers, sentimental dangers—how we used to be guarded!—to our daughters, no more dangers than the middle of Main Street” (10). Yet the city Wharton concerns herself with is not the daughters’ Rome but that of the mothers and the grandmothers. Perhaps paying homage to Daisy Miller, Wharton introduces a similar tale: Mrs. Slade reminds Mrs. Ansley of a family story of hers—of a great-aunt who sent her younger sister “out to the Forum after sunset” (13) to expose her sister to malaria and thereby remove her from a young man’s affections. Mrs. Slade then confesses she tried something similar on Mrs. Ansley when they were young, sending her to the Colosseum at night to keep her from Mr. Slade’s attention, and regrets Mrs. Ansley became ill as a result of her “expedition” (14). When Mrs. Ansley startlingly reveals that she actually did meet Mr. Slade that night at the Colosseum, and that her resulting “illness” was really pregnancy, Wharton’s response to James seems less a modern revision and more a similar tale of foreign illness, especially women’s illness, resulting from social or sexual indiscretions. In these texts, writers rely on the familiar association between dangerous illness and foreign travel to introduce a larger message about social transgression. Little time is given to the characters’ experiences with these illnesses, which merely seem a means to an end. In Death in Venice Mann is unusual for playing experimentally with the symptoms of his character’s short illness, though we learn that Aschenbach is feeling dizzy and unwell only at the very end of the novella.4 In Daisy Miller, Daisy is sick for only a few short paragraphs. Daisy’s mother, who is nursing Daisy, mentions that “Half the time she doesn’t know what she’s saying” (99), but Daisy relays a perfectly clear message to Winterbourne before dying in the next paragraph. In “Roman Fever” there is no description of either malaise. In contrast, while Woolf, Rhys, and H.D. draw on these very traditions of 4  As I interpret it, the expected symptoms of a cholera patient who will “suffocate with convulsions and hoarse cries” (79) are enacted not in Aschenbach’s own body but in that of his love object; he sees, whether in reality or in a vision, another boy wrestle Tadzio until he “seemed to be on the point of suffocation. His attempts to shake off the weight of his tormenter were convulsive” (87, my italics). Punished in watching his own symptoms manifest in the body he loves most, it is Aschenbach who dies.

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illness, travel, and transgression, they place emphasis on giving the ill body voice. By privileging the articulation of the body through illness, they focus on illness as a means of interior expression and employ it as an artistic tool. Moving Beyond the Victorian Novel into “unknown places”: Woolf’s The Voyage Out Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, involves a parallel “voyage in” for her young, shy, and naïve main character, Rachel Vinrace, as Rachel discovers a world of sexuality, love, and, ultimately, illness and death.5 Leaving behind her sheltered English home, Rachel accompanies the Ambroses, her aunt and uncle, for a prolonged journey abroad. After a sea voyage aboard Mr. Vinrace’s cargo ship, the Euphrosyne, Rachel and her aunt Helen join the social circles of other tourists on holiday in South America, participating in activities at their hotel and taking an excursion by donkey up Monte Rosa. On an expedition upriver into “the great darkness” of the forest to observe native life, Rachel becomes engaged to young writer Terence Hewet but yields to a strange and serious illness upon her return (265). Despite the novel’s Victorian characteristics, its “emphasis on the … ambiguities of perception,” in Howard Harper’s words, make it strikingly modern (13), and Rachel’s fever brings out the most developed sequence of such modernist moments. Lytton Strachey observed this just after the novel’s publication when he wrote to Woolf in a letter that there was something “very unvictorian” in her treatment of Rachel’s illness (qtd. in Richter, 93). Through Woolf’s imagining of illness and its distorting effects on reality, she breaks new literary ground. Woolf understood all too well the connections between illness and foreign travel. As Harvena Richter points out, The Voyage Out was “Begun shortly after the death of her brother Thoby from typhoid fever,” which he contracted abroad in 1906 (25). In September of that year Woolf was visiting Greece with her friend Violet Dickinson and sister Vanessa when her brothers Thoby and Adrian joined them there. Vanessa became ill in Greece (and later in Constantinople) with appendicitis. Thoby returned to London before his sisters, but they came home to find him terribly sick. For weeks, Virginia did little but assist with Vanessa’s and Thoby’s care, writing in a letter, “I have been talking nurses for 24 hours” (L1, 245). Violet too had contracted typhoid, and Woolf wrote her encouraging letters describing Thoby’s improved health. In reality, Thoby only grew worse, and Violet recovered while Thoby died. His death was a striking blow to Virginia, 5  Many critics have noted this internal journey for both Rachel and the reader; Harvena Richter named her 1970 study of Woolf The Inward Voyage and remarks of The Voyage Out, “this first fictional voyage, in the narrator’s words, went ‘farther inland than any one’s been yet’” (vii). Frederick McDowell calls the novel’s voyage “not only a voyage of psychic discovery but also the longest and most absolute voyage of all, the journey to death” (91).

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and it influenced the writing of her first novel.6 While other critics have shown interest in Woolf’s use of illness in The Voyage Out, these critics do not remark on the geographic transgressions inherent in Rachel’s illness.7 To fully understand the significance of Rachel’s fever, it is important to glimpse it as part of a larger discourse of illness present throughout the text connected to travel and geographic crossings. Rachel’s illness and subsequent death ultimately are figured as no incidental mishap: Rachel’s illness serves as the culmination of her journey into spaces unknown to her. Rachel’s aunt, Helen, argues that the expedition party members have “ventured too far and exposed themselves” (286), a comment which may remind us of Janet Miller’s remark in Jungles Preferred that her dangerously ill Western friend had “been out a little too long, and this is the penalty she is paying” (174). Both these statements imply an improper transgression made with the body. Although some of Woolf’s characters argue that Rachel could have contracted the fever anywhere, there is a general consensus that Rachel’s illness comes as a penalty for taking “risks” with her body in a foreign space. Since Rachel is the only member of the expedition party who becomes ill, this prompts us to question what it is about Rachel that makes her so vulnerable. Simply considering her position in terms of immunology, we could conjecture that little contact with the outside world has provided Rachel with no immunity. Rachel is described throughout the novel as living “in a little world of [her] own” (60), and the novel traces her voyage out of this carefully circumscribed “world.” Although twenty-four, Rachel has had a very narrow experience of reality. The “smooth unmarked outline of the girl’s face,” showing no record of hardship, prompts Helen to remark of her niece, “She really might be six years old” (25). Rachel has had little knowledge of life outside her own home: “she had scarcely walked through a poor street, and always under the escort of father, maid, or aunts” (64). The text elaborates extensively on her sheltered childhood: “Her mother having died when she was eleven, … . She was of course brought up with excessive care, which as a child was for her health; as a girl and a young woman for what it seems almost crude to call her morals” (34). Rachel is delicately raised, kept enclosed for her “health,” as so many young women still were at the turn of the twentieth century. In this passage we can see how what is considered preserving “health” for  Woolf, born in January 1882, was twenty-four when her brother died; in The Voyage Out, she makes Rachel twenty-four. Passages discussing Rachel’s illness also echo Virginia’s comments on Thoby’s illness in her letters. For instance, she writes to Clive Bell that the doctors “give us hope as his pulse is good” only three days before Thoby’s death (L1, 246). In The Voyage Out, Dr. Rodriguez similarly tries to reassure everyone about Rachel’s high fever by remarking, “It is the pulse we go by … and the pulse continues excellent” (333). 7  Patricia Laurence’s The Reading of Silence most directly relates illness to creativity; she connects Rachel’s illness to hysteria. Harvena Richter reads the novel as Woolf’s “attempt … [to] come to terms with the tragedy [of Thoby’s death]” (25–26) and assumes Rachel’s illness is typhoid, but does not examine the geographic significance. 6

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a child becomes preserving “morals” for a young woman; both constrict activity to protect from outside influences, striving to keep a woman well or pure. We infer that Rachel’s upbringing has been handled clinically; when pressed to describe her aunts at home, she comically responds that they are “very clean” and that “they tidy their drawers a good deal” (142). Helen even remarks of Rachel to Hirst, “She’s been brought up practically in a nunnery” (163).8 Stepping out of the home for the first time, Rachel moves beyond the “clean” and bounded space she has always known. Rachel’s first awakening to a wider world comes from the rough, unsolicited kiss given to her by fellow passenger Richard Dalloway. Disturbed by the kiss, Rachel dreams of a long tunnel and of being locked up with a “little deformed man who squatted on the floor gibbering” (77). Rachel’s fear of Richard’s sexual advances combines with a fear of the Other and the primitive as, in her nightmares, “All night long barbarian men harrassed the ship” (77). Woolf then complicates this image of a stunted, deformed creature by connecting it to Rachel’s own stunted development. After coming to a larger understanding about desire and sexuality, Rachel sees herself differently: “By this new light she saw her life for the first time a creeping hedged-in thing, driven cautiously between high walls, here turned aside, there plunged in darkness, made dull and crippled forever—her life that was the only chance she had—the short season between two silences” (82). Here Rachel’s “life,” figured as a “crippled” being “driven … between high walls,” echoes Rachel’s nightmare. Throughout the novel, Rachel is shown to be bound and enclosed by her upbringing and inexperience and thus “crippled” or “deformed.” Evelyn tells her, “you look—well, as if you’d lived all your life in a garden,” suggesting a childhood spent in a carefully controlled, bounded space (248), and echoing Rachel’s own realization that her life is a “hedged-in thing.” While South America unveils a new space for Rachel, she continues to be frustrated by the continuing constrictions of everyday life: their day seemed “cut into four pieces by their meals. These divisions were absolutely rigid, the contents of the day having to accommodate themselves within the four rigid bars. Looking back at her life, that was what she saw” (214). Rachel seeks something beyond the familiar structures imposed on her life, beyond the walls which enclose her. She is the true explorer of the novel, willing to journey out beyond established pathways into something completely new and different, even if she must die to experience it. Tracing Rachel’s adventure through new social and geographic spaces, Woolf’s work of travel fiction examines one woman’s response to the new world around her.9 As it does so, Woolf creates her own imaginative geography, 8  Mark Hussey points out that “Santa Marina is another name for Saint Euphrosyne, a fifth-century Greek saint who hid from her father in a monastery after her mother died when she was eleven” (249). Likewise, Rachel’s mother, Theresa, died when Rachel was eleven, and Woolf seems to be portraying Rachel as a similarly secluded figure. 9  Several critics look at issues of travel and colonialism in The Voyage Out. See particularly Linden Peach’s third chapter, “Pent-up Voices,” of her study Virginia Woolf;

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writing of a South America she has never known. Like many early twentiethcentury women, Woolf enjoyed the freedom that travel gave her, but her journeys abroad tended to be brief and confined to Europe.10 As Karen R. Lawrence so aptly points out in Penelope Voyages, “Although she had visited Italy, Greece, and even Turkey by the time she completed her novel, Woolf chose a destination for her protagonist that she herself had never seen” (157). Nonetheless, Woolf’s conception of a prominent Westernized hotel attracting tourists to South America is not unrealistic. While mass tourism in South America developed only after the second world war, tourist resorts had “emerged by the end of the 19th Century” in locales such as Viña del Mar, Chile; Pocitos, Uruguay; and Santa Marta, Colombia (Schlüter, 54). Woolf’s similarly named “Santa Marina” is an imaginary place that is likely inspired more by Woolf’s reading of Hakluyt and other Elizabethan travel works than by any knowledge of these resorts.11 The colony of Santa Marina is therefore missing three hundred years of Western influence, having arisen “in the past ten years” with the only settlement predating it founded briefly by “five Elizabethan barques” (88). Later passages describing the party’s expedition up the South American river bear resemblance to Heart of Darkness, showing Conrad’s Africa as another imaginative influence. For Woolf, South America serves as a space of the mind influenced and cultivated by other geographies, an unspecific exotic space useful for artistic exploration. Woolf’s characters similarly know little but imagine much about the place they plan to visit. On the boat, Helen makes her own imaginary scene of the tropics in brightly colored embroidery, “a great design of a tropical river running through a tropical forest, where spotted deer would eventually browse upon masses of fruit, bananas, oranges, and giant pomegranates, while a troop of naked natives whirled darts into the air” (33). Slightly less outlandish and more lovely is Rachel’s mental image of “a great river, now blue, now yellow in the tropical sun and crossed by bright birds, now white in the moon, now deep in the shade with moving trees and canoes sliding out from the tangled banks” (86). Both Helen’s embroidery of an impossibly lush tropical landscape complete with “naked natives” and Rachel’s mental picture prefigure Woolf’s imagined version of South America. The visitors’ conceptions of this foreign land also crucially include the dangers of foreign illness. Perhaps to avoid the image of South America depicted in her embroidery, Helen decides en route that she wants Rachel to accompany her and her husband to their coastal villa instead of letting Rachel join her father further inland. Helen insists that “Instead of wandering on down the Amazons until she Karen Lawrence’s chapter “Woolf’s Voyages Out” in Penelope Voyages; and Erica L. Johnson’s article “Contours of Travel and Exile in The Voyage Out.” 10  See Jan Morris’s collection of Woolf’s travel reflections taken from her diaries, letters, and essays. 11  In Virginia Woolf and Literature of the English Renaissance, Alice Fox demonstrates how “in ten pages of Hakluyt” one can find the source for Woolf’s entire description in Chapter VII of Santa Marina (23).

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reached some sulphurous tropical port, where one had to lie within doors all day beating off the insects with a fan, the sensible thing to do surely was to spend the season with them in their villa by the seaside” (84). From the trip’s beginnings, foreign spaces are bounded by the fear of illness; here, lurking within the suggestion of a “tropical port” with swarming insects (such as mosquitoes) is a link between journeying and contagion. Although not explicitly mentioned in the text, malaria and yellow fever were serious dangers for travelers to Central and South America; Woolf may have been aware, for example, of the severe problems these diseases were currently causing for those building the Panama Canal.12 Another threat of foreign illness in the novel arrives with the introduction of Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway. Traveling abroad in France and Spain and expecting to go to “Petersburg or Teheran,” they found their journey cut short prematurely when “a disease had broken out in the East, there was cholera in Russia” (39). Referencing the very real cholera pandemic happening in the East, Woolf sends her characters out of harm’s reach. Consequently the Dalloways wind up on board the Euphrosyne, where they suffer instead from seasickness. In their discomfort, they remain for some time in what our narrator calls “the borderland,” the place in between sickness and health (72). This fascinating description marks the first time in the novel that illness, as in Woolf’s essay, is characterized as a separate space of existence. Woolf’s fastidious Western travelers worry constantly about illness. The conditions on board the Euphrosyne are less luxurious than many of the travelers would like, and Rachel’s uncle Ridley sardonically inquires, “Did I come on this voyage in order to catch rheumatism and pneumonia?” (30). Once in Santa Marina, Mr. Pepper even deems the Ambroses’ villa unsuitable for habitation, vacating it for a nearby hotel after grumbling that “No private cook can cook vegetables” and sitting at lunch “lifting fragments of salad on the point of his fork, with the gesture of a man pronging seaweed, detecting gravel, suspecting germs” (93). Before departing, he announces, “If you all die of typhoid I won’t be responsible” (93). While Woolf introduces an element of comedy into this scene through Mr. Pepper’s paranoia, she also clearly recognizes typhoid as a very real danger for the foreign traveler. The fears of foreign illness are swept into the background as Woolf’s main characters emerge to explore the world around them. Rachel and Helen become fond of “strolling through the town after dark” (98) where they enjoying peoplewatching. Woolf indicates that in this foreign space Rachel is becoming more mobile and less bounded in a way she could not in England, and she is “more definite and self-confident in her manner than before” (97). Going as far as the tourist hotel one night, Rachel and her aunt encounter other English travelers with whom they will interact for the rest of the novel. The hotel is portrayed as an  Mark Hussey estimates that The Voyage Out takes place around 1905 (roughly the time Woolf began writing the novel) (328). This time period coincides with renewed efforts to build the Panama Canal. When the United States took over supervision of the canal in 1904, thousands of workers had already died from yellow fever and malaria. 12

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insular dwelling removed from the Santa Marina community. The hotel guests have chosen a “safe” way to see South America, satisfying the modern travel book definition of the “low-risk traveler.” For many of these visitors, there is only one standard of accommodation suitable for residing abroad; as Mrs. Paley queries, “unless one goes to a hotel where is one to go?” (121). St. John Hirst, speaking wryly about the other guests at the hotel, comments, “You could draw circles round the whole lot of them, and they’d never stray outside” (107). There is no need to “stray outside,” for the hotel exhibits carefully selected objects from its exterior environs, bestowing the semblance of the exotic while the guests remain sheltered in a safe environment. The hall contains “a thicket of native spears” (177) and Mr. Elliot and Mr. Pepper play chess “behind the stuffed leopard” (181). There is also a case “where highly polished crosses, jewels, and bits of embroidery, the work of the natives, were displayed to tempt visitors” (183). Yet, even in Rachel and Helen’s first visit to the hotel they overhear Terence Hewet and St. John Hirst planning to venture beyond this carefully controlled space: “We’ll get up an expedition,” Terence exclaims after St. John remarks, “I like observing people. I like looking at things” (109). Hewet and Hirst are conventional young adventurers, but Rachel is exploratory in a different way. In venturing out to observe the life of the town, watching the merchants, the wine drinkers, and the musicians, one of whom is crippled, Rachel and her aunt are already seeing far more than the average tourist. While Rachel’s mind is “in the state of an intelligent man’s in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth,” Woolf ensures she is no traditional colonial adventurer (34).13 In Penelope Voyages, Karen Lawrence argues that Rachel, unlike the Elizabethan explorers Woolf had in mind when writing her novel, seeks “to preserve rather than conquer” (162). South America becomes a space of personal growth for Rachel. Lawrence even sees “the New World” as a “phenomenological space” in the novel, “as if perception and poetic image could be reinvented for the woman protagonist” (166). Lawrence is insightful in arguing that Rachel’s exploration goes beyond geography. As with many other women travelers of her age, while Rachel’s movement in the novel is outward geographically it is also inward in terms of perceptive awakening. Before either of her excursions beyond the town, Rachel demonstrates her ability to journey imaginatively alone in her room through literature and music. Rachel’s room, or “world” as Helen calls it (123), is for Rachel “an enchanted place, where the poets sang and things fell into their right proportions” (123).14 Chapter X shows her reading “with the curious literalness of one to whom written 13  Johnson also discusses this, noting particularly how Rachel’s “failure to identify with England” or to take pride in her homeland complicates her position in the novel (67). 14  As James Naremore remarks, The Voyage Out is particularly modernist in showing the “internal, purely subjective experience of the characters” (33). He notes that this particularly occurs during characters’ “trancelike” moods, often moments between sleeping and waking in which characters “experience a different, timeless world” (40).

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sentences are unfamiliar, and handling words as though they were made of wood” (124). This scene prefigures her later illness, which also will confine her to her room and alter her perceptions. Like the fateful day to come, here “The morning was hot, and the exercise of reading left her mind contracting and expanding like the mainspring of a clock” (124). As Rachel feels her own “dissolution” into the existence of the world around her, she “forgot that she had any fingers to raise … .” (Woolf’s ellipses) and sees Helen as only a “tall human being” when she interrupts Rachel’s trance (125). In this passage, new works of literature distort reality for her. Perhaps the “exercise of reading” gives Rachel her first taste of “illness,” of experiencing a separate reality deviating from the normal routine of life. This suggests that “illness” is as much an exploratory vision as a somatic condition. Rachel’s first external South American adventure is her journey by donkey up Monte Rosa. Here Rachel discovers she can “obscur[e] the whole of Santa Marina and its suburbs with one hand” (129), realizing the smallness of her former world and discovering “firsthand” that there remains a whole body of land left to explore. The gesture of the body supplanting topography looks ahead to Rachel’s final excursion into her own body. Rachel’s appetite for exploration has been whetted, and the lure of adventure creeps inside the hotel’s domestic spaces to affect her during traditional social events. At the hotel dance, after St. John hurts Rachel’s feelings with callous remarks about her ignorance, she gazes out of the window at the trees beyond and imagines for herself another world entirely: “She would be a Persian princess far from civilisation, riding her horse upon the mountains alone, and making her women sing to her in the evening, far from all this, from the strife and men and women” (155). Lured away imaginatively by this exotic fantasy, Rachel envisions herself as a lone, brave traveler with authority and power. In direct contrast to her recent trip by donkey, escorted by native guides, Rachel imagines having her own horse and exploring alone. Rachel eagerly welcomes the idea of a second excursion, this time an expedition into the native villages. The journey is inspired by Mrs. Flushing, who buys native crafts cheaply and sells them in London for her own monetary gain. While the hotel displays native artwork “to tempt visitors” (183) to its lobby, Mrs. Flushing’s enterprising mind has been enticed to the source of such work: “It’s silly stayin’ here with a pack of old maids as though we were at the seaside in England. I want to go up the river and see the natives in their camps. It’s only a matter of ten days under canvas. My husband’s done it. One would lie out under the trees at night and be towed down the river by day, and if we saw anythin’ nice we’d shout out and tell ’em to stop.” (235)

The journey is designed to be leisurely, a kind of guided tour. While a tour has planned stops, however, this is a whimsical kind of adventuring where the tourists can pause to pursue anything “nice,” Mrs. Flushing’s all-inclusive term for the unusual or interesting. This is no “safe” journey within familiar parameters. It falls

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under a modern medical manual’s category of high-risk excursioning, “specialinterest travel” involving the desire “to experience something new.” The most tempting aspect of the tour is that it is a journey into unknown territory. Mr. Flushing himself has not been so far up river, but he imagines that wonderful treasures lay hid in the depths of the land … . He thought there might be giant gods hewn out of stone in the mountainside; and colossal figures standing by themselves in the middle of vast green pasture lands, where none but natives had ever trod … . Nobody had been there; scarcely anything was known. (237)

Rachel is transfixed by Mr. Flushing’s fantasy landscape of stone gods and native treasures where no Westerner has ever gone. The journey is doubly attractive for Rachel because it provides a chance to spend time with Terence Hewet, with whom she is romantically progressing into unknown regions. As Rachel becomes more and more affected by her interest for him, she becomes “conscious of emotions and powers which she had never suspected in herself, and of a depth in the world hitherto unknown” (224), echoing the South American jungle where “scarcely anything was known.” Rachel’s journey thus will be both outward and inward. The once contained, childlike Rachel is ready for her ultimate voyage out. As the travelers plan their journey, Woolf continues to align Rachel’s body with unseen and uninvestigated terrain. Badgered by the rest of the hotel group, Rachel feels strong emotions surge underneath her skin like a tropical river: “the steady beat of her own pulse represented the hot current of feeling that ran down beneath; beating, struggling, fretting. For the time, her own body was the source of all the life in the world, which tried to burst forth here—there—and was repressed” (258). In this description, Rachel herself seems a tropical geography, a whole bounded “world.” This passage is useful for exploring the role and position of Rachel’s body in the text. Erica L. Johnson refers to Rachel’s body as “a site of social, political, cultural, and geographical inscriptions” (71). It also parallels the South American wilderness, since both are unmarked virgin spaces attracting the male colonial gaze. Nonetheless, in Woolf’s work the body and imagination may present an equally uncolonized space for the individual: as Woolf explains in “On Being Ill,” “There is a virgin forest in each.” While Rachel is herself a “world,” she is becoming positioned as an explorer of her own body and imagination. In an unusual moment, Rachel is “no longer able to see the world as a town laid out beneath her. It was covered instead by a haze of feverish red mist” (258). Rachel’s frustration is changing her view of the world and turning her focus inward. The curiously “feverish red mist” seems to come from her own newly altered perception; it is not the world that is “feverish” but Rachel herself, though she has not yet caught any physical illness. The party’s adventure to a land unchanged in appearance from the time of “the Elizabethan voyagers” is characterized as a river voyage like Marlow’s in Heart of Darkness. When the exploring party embarks on the river steamer, they “seemed

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to be driving into the heart of the night, for the trees closed in front of them, and they could hear all round them the rustling of leaves” (265). Nonetheless, Woolf’s wilderness, while wild and uncontrolled, seems less ominous than Conrad’s. Once in the forest by daylight, Rachel and Hewet wander off together, finding a pathway which becomes “hedged in by dense creepers” that “burst here and there into star-shaped crimson blossoms” (270), echoing and revising the description of Rachel’s own life: “a creeping hedged-in thing … , here turned aside, there plunged in darkness” (82), and suggesting her ability to “burst” creatively from former confinements. This path leads the young couple into new territory, a place where they discover a new language for communicating. Nonetheless, Rachel’s journey ultimately will take her to spaces even beyond this, somewhere out of this domestic world where there are no borders. As the travelers progress deeper into the forest to encounter the natives, they pass the hut “where Mackenzie, the famous explorer, had died of fever some ten years ago,” the man who “went farther inland than any one’s been yet” (277). “Any one” here of course implies any white Westerner, and in venturing further than Mackenzie, the party is attempting to travel into spaces purely unmarked by Western feet. The explorer’s death by fever is an ominous foreboding, implying illness is lurking in the forest ready to strike even the most seasoned traveler. Eager for new experiences, however, the traveling party moves forward undaunted. Terence and Rachel use the opportunity of this removal from civilization to discuss love and marriage, and become entranced in a series of abstract visions. Words separate from their meanings and body parts seem disconnected, just as they will appear later in Rachel’s illness. The tropical forest provides a place where language can be remade; when Rachel and Terence finally confess their love, “The silence was then broken by their voices which joined in tones of strange unfamiliar sound which formed no words” (271). Here Rachel and Terence are learning and participating in a new language, but Rachel alone seems to take these fundamentals and transform them into a whole new rendering of reality. In what could be interpreted as a pre-illness delusion, Rachel envisions the heads of Helen and Terence towering over her: Both were flushed, both laughing … . Broken fragments of speech came down to her on the ground. She thought she heard them speak of love and then of marriage … . When this fell away, and the grasses once more lay low, and the sky became horizontal, and the earth rolled out flat on each side, and the trees stood upright, she was the first to perceive a little row of human figures standing patiently in the distance. For a moment she could not remember who they were. (284)

As she struggles to make sense of Terence and Helen’s congratulatory embrace, Rachel’s fractured vision, complete with “fragments of speech” raining down upon her, presages her later shifts in visual perspective during her illness. In a moment when Terence should seem closer to her than any other individual, Rachel loses

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connection with her external reality. The implication is that Rachel’s adventures will continue alone, and that she will use these new social experiences as a catalyst for more internal revelations. When the travelers journey into the natives’ village, the most daring geographic venture of all, the native women stare at the strange, white visitors with a gaze “far, far beyond the plunge of speech” (284). At this crucial meeting of tourist and native, geographic trespassing is linked to disease. The natives’ gaze seems to ooze contagion: “the stare followed them, passing over their legs, their bodies, their heads, curiously, not without hostility, like the crawl of a winter fly” (285). Once they are thus infected by the foreign gaze, “the life of the village took no notice of them; they had become absorbed into it” (285). After this intimate encounter, the travelers face the idea of their own mortality: Helen becomes aware of “the delicate flesh of men and women, which breaks so easily and lets the life escape compared with these great trees and deep waters” (286). These “primitive” people are also tied to a new, deeper kind of language, one “beyond … speech.” Perhaps this, too, is contagious. Rachel does not become sick right away and, once back to civilization, she and Terence become busy writing home with the news of their engagement. They are very happy, but we sense, too, that Terence cannot fill the gaps in Rachel, completing her with all that she desires. Terence sees that she is “always wanting something else,” and she, too, realizes she longs for far more than human intimacy: “she wanted many more things than the love of one human being—the sea, the sky” (302). Indeed, he is jealous of her ability “to cut herself adrift from him, and to pass away to unknown places where she had no need of him” (302). Rachel’s world is opening up; becoming progressively more mobile and more exploratory, she has the tools to venture out into imaginative “unknown spaces” where no one can follow. It is useful to extend to Rachel’s final illness the connection Karen Lawrence makes between exploration and female subjectivity; Rachel’s ultimate adventure is not through physical spaces but through the world created by her fever. Rachel’s late-onset illness, with symptoms resembling malaria or even typhoid, is left unnamed, affording it limitless symbolic power and allowing both characters and critics to ponder what Rachel “has done with [her] world” to become so ill.15 It seems a bit too simplistic to read Rachel’s illness and subsequent death as the result of Rachel binding herself to Terence or of her entrapment in patriarchal

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 Woolf may mean for Rachel’s illness to be a local one unknown to Westerners: “Rodriguez was understood to say that there were well-known varieties of this illness” (333). Of course, the inept Rodriguez may be wrong with his diagnosis. Characteristic of malaria, Rachel’s illness has an incubation period of over one week. Malaria can have a slow onset, with symptoms such as headache, fatigue, chills, and high fever beginning weeks or even months after one is bitten by an infected mosquito. However, typhoid fever has some similar symptoms (headache, fatigue, increasingly high fever ending in delirium) and also can have a delayed onset. Woolf likely used her experience of Thoby’s illness to inform Rachel’s.

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culture, as several critics have suggested.16 Nonetheless, Woolf’s novel does imply traditional patriarchal connections between illness and female transgression. When Rachel first finds that “her head ached” one morning as Terence reads aloud to her, Helen immediately figures the headache as a result of Rachel’s behavior, saying “that she must expect her head to ache if she sat up to all hours and went out in the heat” (327). Even when Rachel’s illness begins to grow more serious, Dr. Rodriguez casually remarks that “In this climate you must expect a high temperature” (333). Hirst comments, “I suppose the heat does something funny to people’s brains. Even the English go a little queer” (336). Once again, it is implied that foreign geography itself causes physical ailment, even mental “queer”ness. However, unlike other texts, such as Daisy Miller, that simply use illness contracted through foreign travel as punishment for transgressions, Woolf’s achieves something more extraordinary and subversive by showing this queerness from Rachel’s perspective. E. L. Bishop writes of The Voyage Out that “in the account of Rachel’s death, a scene paradigmatic of the work as a whole, the author succeeds in rendering experience beyond the usual reach of language” (355). I would like to make a similar reading, not, as Bishop does, of Terence’s reaction to Rachel’s death, but of the scenes of Rachel’s illness preceding her death. Here Rachel first detects the onset of fever when her mind begins to play with written language, and this experimentation corresponds well with Woolf’s modernist aspirations. “[T]o hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of language,” Woolf writes in “On Being Ill” (194); as a result, Woolf must reach beyond the conventions of realism in her novel. On a hot afternoon, as Rachel listens to Terence reading Milton, she begins to feel as if she can “almost handle” his words, and that they are “laden with meaning” (326). While Christine Froula argues that Milton’s verse about the mythical Sabrina is “the cause of Rachel’s illness” for it reflects “female destiny” and a constrictive marriage plot in which Rachel herself is trapped (84), what seems most important to this passage is perhaps not the poem’s interpretive resonances but merely the way Rachel’s mind reacts to the pure linguistic quality of the poem’s words. Rachel discovers in these words something similar to what Woolf describes when she writes in her essay: In illness words seem to possess a mythic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning … —a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause … . In health, meaning has encroached upon sound … . But in illness … we creep beneath some obscure poem … and the words give out their scent and distill their flavour. (“On Being Ill,” 200)

This passage stresses layers of depth, color, and sound resonating beyond surface appearance that are perceptible only through illness. Significantly, this new linguistic discovery approximates what Woolf would like to achieve in her 16

 For example, see Christine Froula’s “Out of the Chrysalis.”

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modernist writing where “the accent” should “fall[ ] differently from of old,” where “the moment of importance” might come “not here but there” (“Modern Fiction,” 106). What Rachel is experiencing is distinctly modernist, for the poetry fractures so that the words “meant different things from what they usually meant” (326). Just as modern poets may use words more for sound than for meaning, employing language as a springboard to suggest an array of different images, Rachel “went off upon curious trains of thought suggested by words such as ‘curb’ and ‘Locrine’ and ‘Brute,’ which brought unpleasant sights before her eyes, independently of their meaning” (327). Later, lying in bed, she tries to remember the poem but “the adjectives persisted in getting into the wrong places” (329). This rearrangement and reordering of language for Rachel is crucial to Woolf’s own project. As Rachel retreats to her bed, seeking relief from pain and fever, her illness also abolishes chronological time, another experiment of Woolf’s modernist fiction: “Hours and hours would pass thus, without getting any further through the morning, or again a few minutes would lead from broad daylight to the depths of the night” (330). Although earlier in the text Rachel thinks that their day “seemed … cut into four pieces by their meals” with “the contents of the day having to accommodate themselves within the four rigid bars” (214), in her illness she transcends these artificial constrictions: Helen “sometimes … said that it was lunchtime, and sometimes that it was teatime; but by the next day all landmarks were obliterated” (329). Space and proportion also change for Rachel as her eyes distort reality, what Woolf refers to in “On Being Ill” as “the great experience” of “how the world has changed its shape” (195). Recalling the earlier passage during the expedition, Helen’s stooping form “appeared of gigantic size, and came down upon her like the ceiling falling” (347). Rachel’s body itself even becomes fragmented; when the nurse speaks of a toe sticking out of the bedclothes “Rachel did not realise that the toe was hers” (331). As her vision distorts, things become “semi-transparent” (346), the very word Woolf uses in “Modern Fiction” to describe the “envelope” of life which the modern writer should try to grasp (106). Where Rachel has gone, there are no “landmarks”; just as Woolf articulates in her essay on illness, it is an unexplored realm, a blank page, “a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown.” Rachel’s fever makes all outer life remote while her body becomes her whole world: “every object in the room, and the bed itself, and her own body with its various limbs and their different sensations were more and more important each day. She was completely cut off, and unable to communicate with the rest of the world, isolated alone with her body” (330). Though bound to her own body, Rachel is exploring it in transgressive ways. As her fever increases, she grows delirious; by the seventh day, her mind has created for her a geography of her own: For six days indeed she had been oblivious of the world outside, because it needed all of her attention to follow the hot, red, quick sights which passed incessantly before her eyes. She knew that it was of enormous importance that she should attend to these sights and grasp their meaning … . The sights were

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all concerned in some plot, some adventure, some escape … . Now they were among trees and savages, now they were on the sea; now they were on the tops of high towers; now they jumped; now they flew. (340–341)

In Rachel’s excursion into her own imagination, illness has become a place; just as Woolf discusses in her essay, Rachel has found the “undiscovered countries” of illness, complete with landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes. Part of Rachel’s “adventure” here is into a new kind of language; particularly modernist and very much like Woolf’s later writing style, this description gives a feeling of flickering movement with the repeated phrases of “now” this, “now” that. Critics of Woolf’s novel interested in Rachel as a character have tended to focus on her lack of voice throughout the text. June Cummins, for example, notes Rachel’s “lack of access to language,” silenced “by others and by her own selfcensorship” (206). Indeed, Woolf’s novel in this regard approximates Hewet’s own inspiration, “a novel about Silence … the things people don’t say” (Voyage Out, 216). Throughout the novel Rachel is identified with such silences, closely approaching Kristeva’s definition of woman as “something that is not said” (“Woman,” 137).17 “I find it very difficult to say what I mean” (255), explains Rachel, searching for the right word. Evelyn accuses Rachel of “always thinking of something you don’t say” (251) and Rachel, when writing, laments “the gulf” between her world and “her sheet of paper” (296). What critics are less likely to note, however, is that Rachel is demanding a new mode of expression; “Why don’t people write about the things they do feel?” she asks (297). It seems highly appropriate that Woolf should choose such a person as the vehicle for her own artistic experimentation. During her illness, Rachel tries in vain to move from “her world” back into the “ordinary world,” but speaks of a “gulf” which she “could not bridge” (329), a “gulf” approximating the earlier one separating her sensory reality from her sheet of paper (296). In illness, Rachel herself becomes the paper on which Woolf is creating her work of art. While Rachel lies in bed, the nurse tells her, “And the quieter you lie the sooner you will be well” (331). Here, silence is equated with health, while language, especially unordered language, is equated with sickness. Resistantly, unnervingly, Rachel speaks that language, both out loud and to herself. While the doctor still claims Rachel’s illness is “not serious” (338), she proves otherwise by verbalizing scattered and sometimes violent bits of her delusions. Readers are further privy to Rachel’s hallucinatory visions which mimic her earlier dream; in both, a tunnel’s walls “oozed with damp, which collected into drops and slid down” (77 and 331) and now “little deformed women” (331) replace the “little deformed man” (77). This time it is not Rachel who is figured as bound or “made dull and crippled for ever” as she is elsewhere in the novel (82), it is the other women around her, for “the little old women became Helen and Nurse McInnis after a time, standing in the window together whispering” (331). For Rachel, all this occurs as she finds 17

 Maurel similarly quotes Kristeva in a discussion of Jean Rhys (81).

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“herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames” (331) as the fever creates for her a new geography and mobilizes her in imagination. Her mental adventure takes her beyond South America, beyond traditional experience, beyond life itself; her fever leads not only to the “undiscovered countries” of which Woolf writes, the internal expanses disclosed in illness, but to the one Hamlet refers to when he speaks of “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveler returns” (III.i.79–80). After Rachel’s death, her former companions dwell on the topic of travelers’ illnesses in their everyday chatter, laying blame and over-simplifying the connection between illness and transgression. The hotel guests persist in blaming the expedition for Rachel’s illness, especially Mrs. Flushing, who feels “in some way responsible” (358). Arthur remarks that “it was a foolish thing to do—to go up that river … . They should have known better. You can’t expect Englishwomen to stand roughing it as the natives do who’ve been acclimatised” (361). The implication is that Rachel, as English—moreover, as an English woman—and not immune to a new environment, has suffered as a consequence. Meanwhile, Wilfrid believes Rachel caught her illness not in the forest but at the Villa, saying, “That’s the worst of these places … . People will behave as though they were in England, and they’re not” and hinting that “Pepper tells me … they never washed their vegetables properly” (359). Again, illness is linked to imprudent behavior. Finally, Mrs. Paley, in a darkly comedic moment, remarks offhand of Rachel that she can’t “remember which she was” (362), but adds her opinion nonetheless: “But people will drink the water. I can never make out why. It seems like such a simple thing to tell them to put a bottle of Seltzer water in your bedroom. That’s all the precaution I’ve ever taken, and I’ve been in every part of the world, I may say—Italy a dozen times over … . But young people always think they know better, and then they pay the penalty.” (362, Woolf’s ellipses)

Mrs. Paley may be an experienced traveler, but she has been undertaking the kind of voyages travel guides describe as “low-risk” journeys to fashionable hotels. In this moment coming only pages after Rachel’s death, Woolf satirizes the shallow perspective that Rachel has been punished, made to “pay the penalty” due to her lack of precaution with food or water. While Woolf plays with the tradition of illness as punishment, she subverts the convention by showing Rachel’s illness itself as important, making it representative of a much larger mobilization, especially of Rachel’s embrace of a new space, a new language, and a new way of thinking. Although Mrs. Paley cannot remember Rachel, we cannot leave the novel forgetting her. She has progressed beyond her traditionally bounded world, leaving the other tourists far behind.

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“I’m not here I’m there”: Excursions into Illness in Voyage in the Dark Jean Rhys similarly explores illness in a novel founded upon the metaphor of a voyage. Originally drafted in the years between 1911 and 1913, two years before the first printing of The Voyage Out, Voyage in the Dark (1934) shares some remarkable similarities with Woolf’s text.18 In both works, the illnesses of the young women characters follow transgressions of acceptable boundaries, one geographical and one sexual, and both authors adapt and subvert the stereotype of illness as retribution. Though Anna and Rachel are identified with silence, both achieve voice through their illnesses. Both novels’ “voyages” may be read not only as Rachel’s and Anna’s awakenings in a foreign country but also as metaphors for the illnesses which carry both the young women and their authors into new linguistic terrain. In Rhys’s original ending of Voyage in the Dark, what she adamantly referred to as “the only possible ending” for her work,19 Anna Morgan, like Rachel Vinrace, dies; her transgression has been a sexual one, and she becomes ill after undergoing an improperly performed abortion. Bleeding to death, Anna suffers from fever and delusion. In the revised ending, Anna lives but wakes to a life filled with the horror of “starting all over again, all over again … .” (188, Rhys’s ellipses). Woolf and Rhys, with the published endings of their works, thwart traditional expectations; according to Victorian convention, the pure, love-stricken girl should move on to matrimony while the fallen woman should pass on to another world. It is on a closer linguistic level, however, that Woolf and Rhys more radically push beyond former literary applications of illness. Rhys, like Woolf, inverts tradition by using the ill body as a medium for the female voice and, particularly, for a parlance which enables artistic exploration. In her illuminating essay “The Blank Page and the Issues of Female Creativity,” Susan Gubar argues that in texts from Scott Fitzgerald to T. S. Eliot, “the female body has been feared for its power to articulate itself” (246). Indeed, using Isak Dinesen’s short fable “The Blank Page,” in which women’s bridal bloodstains are exhibited publicly like artwork in a gallery, she asserts that “many women experience their own bodies as the only available medium for their art, with the result that the distance between the woman artist and her art is often radically diminished” (248). Gubar’s essay is appropriate to apply to Rhys’s work, especially given the nature of Anna’s illness. “The woman artist” might be seen as the female author herself, while “her art” is inscribed on the bodies of her female characters. Anna, like Rachel, is far from home. As I have discussed in Chapter 2, eighteenyear-old Anna, born in the West Indies, goes abroad only to find a cold, lusterless 18

 Intriguingly, though critics such as Naremore, Laurence, and Richter comment on the relationship between illness and language in The Voyage Out, this theme does not seem to have caught the interest of Rhys scholars. 19  This is quoted in Nancy Hemond Brown’s essay, “Jean Rhys and Voyage in the Dark,” 41.

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England where she exists in a sort of waking dream. In Woolf’s text, illness is associated with the remote South American wilderness, following the traditional association between disease and exotic travel; in Rhys’s novel, although Anna also has had fever at home, the climate of England has made her sick, reversing the usual connection between the tropics and illness. When asked, “Are you often ill like that in the winter?” Anna replies, “Not the first winter I was here. I was all right then; I didn’t even think it very cold. They say it’s always like that—it takes a year before the cold really gets you. But last winter I got pleurisy and the company had to leave me behind in Newcastle” (35). Anna’s body, not used to the “cold” of England, is like Rachel’s which is not used to the heat of South America. Both young women are shown to suffer from illness because their bodies are out of place. Anna’s voyage away from her homeland leaves her with a disjuncture of self, and she can never quite fit her past and present lives together. The novel’s original title, Two Tunes, emphasizes this dichotomy. During the course of the novel Anna vividly recalls moments from her West Indian childhood, memories which interrupt and exist alongside her bleak London experiences. Paid little as a chorus girl in London, a transgressive position which gives her the status of “public woman,” lonely and naïve Anna soon finds herself in a relationship with a wealthy married man, Walter Jeffries. Chilled by the cold climate of England in comparison to her warm Caribbean homeland, Anna enjoys the way her lover’s money makes her forget “about feeling ill” (27). When that relationship ends, however, when he is, in turn, “sick of [her]” (141), Anna is left with little choice of vocation. Eventually, she turns to prostitution and subsequently becomes pregnant, suffers an inept abortion, and quickly becomes seriously ill. Although Rhys explores the boundaries between memory and present consciousness throughout her work, using italics to denote changes of inner voice and streamof-consciousness passages connected by dashes to imply snippets of a hanging, fractured past invading a present continuum, Rhys’s most radical experimentation with language comes at the end of her novel with the onset of Anna’s illness. In her study Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag poetically refers to illness as “the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who was born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick” (Illness as Metaphor, 3). In Sontag’s description, illness becomes a place of darkness, a country kept apart from the healthy world. Just so, Anna’s illness, her own “voyage in the dark,” fits in directly with her split sense of self and geographic displacement. During her illness at the novel’s end, where delirious Anna is lost in the past, scenes from Anna’s West Indian childhood are interwoven with present events to produce an astonishing result. The original ending, in which this scene is more extensive, is even more strikingly modernist in nature. Like Rachel, Anna is particularly tied to silence, she, too, “always thinking of something [she doesn’t] say” (Voyage Out, 251). Externally a somewhat quiet figure, most of Anna’s thoughts are never articulated, and Anna’s spoken words rarely reflect her interior thoughts. Mary Lou Emery in her work Jean Rhys at

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“World’s End” notes how some of Anna’s voices appear “not as memories but as commentaries”; in these voices Anna sometimes “coaches herself,” “makes naive wishes,” or “comments ironically, with an unaccountable sophistication, on her own situation” (68). In other places, Anna has internalized the words of others, repeating them and playing her own thoughts off of them. Rather than choosing to have a conversation with a current companion, Anna more frequently is having a private, perhaps unrelated thought. Anna lives mostly in this internal world of her own mind, making her seem talkative to us but quiet and reserved to others. “Don’t you ever talk at all?” Carl asks Anna, reminding the reader of her external silence (119). “You’re not all there; that’s what’s the matter with you,” Ethel insists (145), noting Anna’s patterns of distraction which remove her from the present moment, even from her present location. It is through Anna’s internal thoughts that she achieves voice and, specifically, it is through her final illness that this voice takes on new significance. As in Woolf’s novel, a discourse of illness linked to transgression runs throughout the text. From early in the novel, illness is associated with Anna’s sexual experiences with Walter Jeffries, a man who asks Anna if her aunt thinks she’s “disgraced the family or something” (21) and who may already envision her as a fallen woman because of her career as a chorus girl. After her first kiss with Mr. Jeffries, Anna thinks, “I felt giddy,” though she rejects his further advances (22). The next morning, Anna notes how “I felt ill when I woke up,” and seems to be suffering from a bout of influenza, though she describes it to Walter in a letter as “an awful cold” (30). It is during this time that her landlady tells her, “I don’t want no tarts in my house, so now you know” (30). After this confrontation, Anna has her first prolonged experience with illness in the text; she goes out to buy “ammoniated quinine,” a common fever reducer at this time, and returns to lie on the bed: “I felt as if there were weights on my legs so that I couldn’t move” (31). The illness serves as a vehicle transporting her to another place and time, anticipating Anna’s final experience with illness at the novel’s end. She is reminded of an illness she had as a child, “that time at home when I had fever and it was afternoon and the jalousies were down and yellow light came in through the slats and lay on the floor in bars” (31). The Dominican illness, later described as prolonged cycles of fever over “several months” that turn her “yellow as a guinea” with jaundice (222), is likely malaria. The quinine Anna has just taken, best known as an antimalarial drug, further cements a connection between Anna’s past and present illnesses, and shows Anna relying on familiar methods and memories to combat illness and bodily disruption in England. Anna’s and Rachel’s experiences of illness, both vividly recounted from the young women’s viewpoints and eschewing doctors’ narrative control, are notably similar. Anna, in her early bout of influenza, gives the contradictory and dizzying assertion that “When you have fever you are heavy and light, you are small and swollen, you climb endlessly a ladder which turns like a wheel” (33). Like Rachel, Anna notes a change in both her body and her perspective: “The room looked different, as if it had grown bigger” (34). She also remembers another time she

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was ill in Newcastle and thought the opposite, that “this damned room’s getting smaller and smaller” (30). When she is able to leave her room again with Walter, she notes how “When we went out the taxis and the lights and the people passing looked swollen, as if I were drunk” (35). Anna’s sexual transgressions are linked in the text to her experiences of fever and influenza, and both Anna’s pregnancy and her abortion are figured as “illness.” Late in the text, when Anna turns to prostitution and becomes pregnant, her friend Laurie suggests writing to Walter for help: “Say you’re ill and ask him to come and see you,” she advises (169). This not only directly recodes pregnancy as “illness” but also echoes the earlier scene in the novel where Anna, suffering from influenza, writes to Walter, “I’ve gone and got an awful cold. Would you come and see me, please?” (30). Even before the abortion, Anna begins to act ill, seeming disassociated from her own actions as she is writing the letter to Walter; “from a long way off I watched the pen writing,” she remarks (169). Similarly, when Walter’s friend Vincent brings her the money for the procedure she notes how “he went on talking, but I didn’t hear a word he was saying. And then his voice stopped” (172). On the way home from the abortion she feels as if it is her world and not she herself that is falling apart; she holds a fear that “the slanting houses might fall on me or the pavement rise up and hit me” (178). However, it is Anna’s own body that has been transgressing socially appropriate boundaries, ultimately moving out beyond even her control. The published ending of the novel opens with Anna lying on her bed after returning from the abortionist; the section begins with a line that helps to ground the reader in time and place: “The room was nearly dark but there was a long yellow ray coming in under the door from the light in the passage. I lay and watched it” (183). The line also evokes a previous textual moment. The image of Anna watching “a long yellow ray” of light recalls the “yellow light” that “came in through the slats and lay on the floor in bars” when Anna was sick with fever as a child (31). This connection suggests that the section to follow may be read as a similar experience of illness and fever, though Anna’s illness is not caused by any germ. Indeed, in the last paragraphs of the published version of the novel, the doctor brought in to try to stop Anna’s bleeding comments, “Quinine. Quinine … . what utter nonsense!” (187). The mention of the antimalarial treatment, which the doctor reveals Anna may still be taking to combat her current condition, demonstrates to what extent Anna’s final illness has become linked in her imagination with tropical fever.20 In her dizziness, Anna feels as if “the bed mounted into the air with me. It mounted very high and stayed there suspended—a little slanted to one side, so that I had to clutch the sheets to prevent myself from falling out” (184). Feeling that her world is changing underneath her, Anna’s thoughts descend into memories of West Indian carnival, which the revised edition places in italics.

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 Quinine will not help Anna now, though quinine was popularly (though falsely) believed to induce abortions, and thus serves as a connecting “remedy” for all three of Anna’s maladies.

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In contrast, Rhys’s original ending begins with no hint of Anna on the bed in London, opening instead with a West Indian childhood memory.21 Attempting to capture Anna’s quickly shifting hallucinations, Rhys begins by revealing Anna’s fractured memories in both small snippets and longer lines which run on, unhindered by punctuation: Smile please the man said not quite so serious He dodged out from behind the black cloth You tell her to madam He had a long black-yellow face with pimples on his chin he dodged in again under the black cloth I looked down at my legs and the white socks coming half-way up my legs and the black shoes with a strap over the instep and the doll in my lap it could say Maman Papa and shut its eyes for Dodo. (Brown 45, original ending)22

In this dream-memory, Anna is a little girl being posed for a formal photograph with dressy clothes and a doll in her lap. Anna cannot be the picture-perfect daughter her mother desires, however. No matter how the photographer begs, she cannot stay still for the image: “I tried but my hand shot up of its own accord,” she recalls (46, original ending). Anna’s body moves beyond the established pose, causing her to cry and her mother to exclaim, “I’m ashamed of you” (46, original ending). The memory echoes the way Anna has let her body transgress appropriate “postures” for a young lady and the sense of “shame” that accompanies this. Significantly, in the next two childhood scenes that Anna remembers, she is hiding her body. In the first, Anna plays a West Indian song on the piano and when her step-mother Hester comments, “I dislike that song,” Anna is “hiding behind the oleander trees singing it and singing all the songs I knew” (46, original ending). In a similar moment of resistance, her next memory23 begins: You come out from under there Meta said hiding under that bed always hiding She caught hold of my foot you come out now I kicked my shoe came off she caught hold of my ankle and dragged I held on to the bed-post but I felt my hands slipping … she started shaking me and my teeth shook and my hair shook and my flesh shook on my bones and I kept on saying black devil black 21

 All references to the original ending come from Nancy Hemond Brown’s transcription of the original manuscript in her essay “Jean Rhys and Voyage in the Dark.” I have tried to keep the unusual spacing Brown preserves in her reprint. Quotes not marked “original ending” are from the 1982 Norton published version of the text. 22  A similar revision of this passage begins Rhys’s autobiography, Smile Please (13). Here, quotation marks and other marks of punctuation distinguish it from the more streamof-consciousness version of the original ending. 23  I call this the next memory because of the slight narrative space between sections.

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devil and still she shook me and I felt it starting in my stomach very gently and I said take care take care (47, original ending)

In both these scenes Anna is trying to hide from view, much the way she seems to be attempting to hide in the past from her present misfortune, creating her own space for retreat. This mental refuge is Anna’s own voyage back home in the text; “I’m not here I’m there I’m not here I’m there,” she reiterates, willing herself to return after a momentary pause in the London present (49, original ending). In this second instance of concealment, Anna significantly hides “under the bed”; we may recall Anna’s earlier comment, after her first meeting with Walter and shortly after the landlady calls her “a tart” (30), that she was in a clean room with “the dirt swept under the bed” (31). The word “dirty” also appears early in the novel when Anna is reading Zola’s Nana (an anagram of Anna) and Maudie calls it “a dirty book” (9) that is “about a tart” (10). Anna’s childhood memory, linked to these earlier scenes, may imply how Anna now feels “dirty” or that the “dirt” (paralleled with her body and its misbehavior) could no longer remain in its place, “under the bed.” Dirt is understood culturally as “a site of possible danger to social and individual systems” (Grosz, 192), representative of “disorder” and “matter out of place” (Douglas, 36). In Purity and Pollution, Alison Bashford usefully connects this concept of dirt and displacement to the female body when she notes how women’s reproductive organs have been considered “dirty and contaminating” (37). Rhys draws on these traditional conceptions; it is in this memory of Meta shaking her that Anna feels herself start to bleed as a result of the abortion: “I felt it starting in my stomach.” The bleeding brings Anna back to the issue at hand in the present moment, but she soon slips away again into the past. It is at this point that the original ending explicitly begins to connect Anna’s current state to her sexual history. She remembers her relationship with Mr. Jeffries and how she became used to sexual intimacy: “I like it now I said weights on your arms weights on your legs” (48, original ending). This curiously echoes the way Anna described the feeling of influenza: “as if there were weights on my legs so that I couldn’t move” (31). Similarly, the line “shall I show you what everything is” (52, original ending), in which “everything” implies a loss of virginity, figures into Anna’s delirium and is followed by Laurie saying in the present moment, “Try not to be sick” (53, original ending). Anna also comments, “I’m giddy,” as the loss of blood makes her light-headed (53, original ending), reminding us of her statement “I felt giddy” after her first kiss with Mr. Jeffries (22). The most abstract sections of Rhys’s original ending concern Anna’s memories of West Indian masquerade, which alternate with more recent memories of Walter and their sexual contact. Every so often Anna surfaces in the present for an uncomfortable moment of “reality” (with the proper punctuation resuming) before plunging again deep below the surface. The masquerade sections are in a stream-of-consciousness style, mimicking the blood flowing from Anna’s body. In the revised ending, it is perhaps clearest that Anna has specifically connected the masquerade with her abortion because of a linguistic tie: Mrs. Polo’s reference

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to the bleeding, “It ought to be stopped” (185), recalls word for word a comment Hester once made about the carnival, “It ought to be stopped” (184). In addition, in the original ending, Rhys implies that Anna likely has linked Hester’s statement that “this isn’t a decent or respectable way to go on and it ought to be stopped” with her own actions (51, original ending). Carnival, whose root means “flesh” and has sexual connotations, is a public display paralleling Anna’s status of “public woman” or prostitute. Anna, too, has stepped over appropriate boundaries set for young ladies, taking her body into improper spaces, and now her body, dizzy with loss of blood, “went on whirling round and round” in dance (53, original ending). The masks that she sees, “more like their faces than their own faces were” (50, original ending), recall the accusatory gaze of the people she passes on the streets, people who “watch you, their faces like masks” (164). Rhys explicitly connects Anna’s illness with her breach of social custom, the “fall” off the horse she imagines at the end of her delirium consciously aligned with her sexual “fall.” “I’m going to fall nothing can save me now,” Anna thinks (55, original ending) shortly after she remembers her conversation with Mr. Jeffries the night she lost her virginity (53, original ending). The body of the prostitute has long been characterized as a site of disease and corruption.24 The British Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s officially zoned the prostitute body as unhealthy by forcing any woman perceived as a prostitute to be examined for contagion. Anna, as fallen woman, implicitly takes on this association between loose sexuality and disease. Indeed, Anna is doubly linked to this image through the connection of her body to the African “Hottentot,” seen as equally diseased and “unclean” (Gilman, 105).25 Sander Gilman examines how the Victorians obsessed over these icons of “deviant sexuality” (81) and categorized the prostitute, like the Hottentot, as an “atavistic subclass of woman” (98).26 In his discussion of the prostitute body, Gilman discusses Zola’s Nana, and connects Zola’s primitive description of Nana to the Hottentot.27 Nana is the novel Anna reads early in the text; she is the “tart” to whom Anna’s body is conjoined through a linguistic tie, and she echoes Anna in her roles of actress and lover. Anna’s body remarkably carries all of these layers of representation, as if Rhys were letting Anna take on the symbolic characteristics of the heroine she is reading about.  See Chapter 3 in Shannon Bell’s Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (40–72) on the ways those who studied prostitution in the nineteenth century found the bodies of these women to be pathological, prone to disease, and representative of pollution. 25  Please see my discussion of the Hottentot in Chapter 2. Several critics, including Veronica Marie Gregg, Sue Thomas, and Elaine Savory, also use Sander Gilman’s wellknown discussion of the Hottentot and the prostitute in their studies of Voyage in the Dark. 26  See Gilman’s chapter “The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality” in Difference and Pathology, 76–108. 27  Gilman deconstructs both Manet’s painting Nana and Zola’s novel Nana and finds in both the image of the primitive and of the African. Of Manet’s painting, he writes, “All her external stigmata point to the pathology within the sexualized female” (102). 24

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Nonetheless, Zola’s and Rhys’s endings crucially diverge. Though both women become seriously ill at the novels’ conclusions, Zola’s Nana dies a gruesome death of smallpox, symbolically showing on her decrepit face the inner pollution of her body; Zola figures the smallpox, whose symptoms resemble an advanced stage of syphilis, as a manifestation of “the virus she had absorbed from the gutters.”28 Anna’s final illness, while resulting indirectly as a result of her prostitution, is not the horrifying image of decay which Zola employs; Rhys’s finale for Anna is just the opposite, showing images of dance and vibrancy, of new life and form, and emphasizing not decomposition but recomposition. This sense of new life also contrasts with the stagnant rebirth inherent in the doctor’s comment in the published ending that Anna can now “start all over again” (187), a finale seen as darkly ambiguous by most critics.29 In “The Blank Page” Gubar suggests that “one of the primary and most resonant metaphors provided by the female body is blood, and cultural forms of creativity are often experienced as a painful wounding” (248). Rhys may be playing with traditional constructions of the prostitute (and the female body in general) as ill, polluted, and “dirty,” but she makes a feminist revision in using the blood emerging from Anna’s body as a creative tool.30 In the ending of Rhys’s novel, Anna is bleeding onto her sheets as a result of the abortion, and, perhaps reminding us of Molly Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses, streams of language flow out along with that bodily secretion. Of this scene, critic Sylvie Maurel concludes, “On the borderline between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, she seems to be able to articulate an aesthetic of continuity, … regardless of the script onto which she has been forced” (97–98). As Maurel implies, Anna, while dying, is producing a new language. Rhys subverts traditional ideas of illness as penalty for transgression by letting Anna’s illness give her a new voice. Anna has crossed boundaries inappropriately with her body; now she does this linguistically. Connections between illness and unfiltered expression have been established in the early passage of the novel in which Anna describes her childhood tropical fever resulting in delusional language:  This is quoted in a translated passage from Nana in Gilman, 105.  Most critics note that the doctor’s phrase, “Ready to start all over again,” which Anna internalizes in her last lines, is an unclear ending. Sue Thomas, for example, calls the ending “ambiguous”: “a feeble warming to the idea of a new start … or a loss of energy … . Either way her chances are slim” (110). Nancy R. Harrison even argues that the published final lines do not alter the grim implications of Rhys’s original conclusion (see 107–108). 30  Teresa F. O’Connor interestingly comments on a passage from Chapter 6 in Part One that Anna sees her first menstruation as “the beginning of her own uncontrollable decay” (O’Connor, 95). This reading gives new meaning to the novel’s ending in which Anna’s post-abortion bleeding mimics menstrual bleeding and literally symbolizes death. The passage O’Connor discusses also comes closely before another passage in which Anna describes having fever in cyclic patterns. In this way, all steps of the female reproductive cycle are construed, as in long-standing medical discourse, as forms of sickness. 28 29

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Excursions into Modernism I got fever and I was ill for a long time. I would get better and then it would start again. It went on for several months. I got awfully thin and ugly and yellow as a guinea, my father said. I asked Hester if I had talked a lot when I was bad and she said, ‘Yes, you talked about cats and a great deal about Francine.’ It was after that she started disliking Francine so much and saying she ought to be sent away. (73)

Although Anna’s discussion of “when I was bad” refers to the severity of her malaria-like fever, it also suggests misbehavior. Moreover, while Anna lies in bed she misbehaves verbally. Anna’s childhood delusions reveal her subconscious thoughts to her aunt, bringing internal ideas to the outside. Although we hear the nature of Anna’s feverish comments only through Hester, we infer that there is something inappropriate about them. While it may not be improper for a young girl to rave in illness about cats, we know that Hester sees something improper in her talk “about Francine,” Anna’s black friend, since it is after this episode that Hester wishes to separate the children. This also anticipates Anna’s final illness when Anna moves even further across established black/white boundaries by joining in the Caribbean masquerade. Anna’s unstoppable bleeding at the novel’s end becomes a symbolic representation of the unstoppable language flowing from her. Although we cannot tell how many of Anna’s thoughts appear on the outside, Mrs. Polo’s remark that “It ought to be stopped” (185), positioned between two italicized sections of Anna’s memory, would seem as applicable to Anna’s stream-of-consciousness narration as to the stream of blood coming from her. The idea of Anna creating conspicuous disruptive language in this scene is supported by an early draft; Sue Thomas mentions that in one version of the novel’s ending “A woman is taking down Anna’s feverish words” because, at the time, “British doctors were advised … to have a dying statement of women who had had criminal abortions taken down” (113). In this legal maneuver, the transgressive woman’s language becomes representative of her illegal act. Nonetheless, Anna’s delusional language does not cooperate with traditional codes; indeed, if Anna’s “feverish words” are a confession, it is merely a confession that she has been silent for too long. Elizabeth Grosz notes in Volatile Bodies that corporeal fluids reveal the body’s dangerous propensity to “collapse” into outside spaces (193) and that, in Western culture, they “are undignified, nonpoetic” attributes (194). Rhys has turned these fluids into something poetic as her language approaches Cixous’s definition of “écriture feminine.” In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous argues that for women to articulate themselves they “must write through their bodies” (256), the bodies which they have repressed, silenced, and ignored. To do this, they must write in a manner akin to poetry, “sweeping away syntax” (256), tapping into the unconscious: “Her language … does not hold back, it makes possible” (260). Rhys uses the female body to make possible a revolutionary writing style; as with Rachel, a new language arises out of Anna’s experience of illness. Significantly, when Mrs. Polo comments on Anna’s bleeding in the original ending, she

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exclaims, “Look at those sheets. And it isn’t stopping” (55, original ending). Anna is bleeding onto “sheets,” connecting her body’s response to a work of writing. Rhys makes explicit the parallel between “sheets” of paper and Anna’s bedroom sheets by providing an earlier scene in which Anna is writing a letter to Walter on her bed: There were sheets of paper spread all over the bed. After a while I crossed out everything and began again, writing very quickly, like you do when you write: ‘You can’t possibly do this you simply don’t know what you’re doing if I were a dog you wouldn’t do this I love you I love you I love you but you’re just a god-damned rotter everybody is everybody is … .’ And going on like that, and the sheets of paper all over the bed. (103–104)

The “paper spread all over the bed” is, like the language in this passage, both disorderly and fluent. Similar to the style Rhys uses at the novel’s end, Anna’s written expression in the letter is incessantly fluid, without punctuation between clauses or sentences and with much repetition. Moreover, this style once again is connected with illness; while Anna is in her room writing, those outside her room comment: “She says she’s ill … . What’s the matter with ’er?” (104, Rhys’s ellipses). The excursion into illness is again connected to a new kind of language, and here specifically a written language that is modernist in style. Throughout the ending of Voyage in the Dark, Rhys’s interweaving of past and present dialogue, image, and song creates a vibrant collage of stimuli, transcending ordinary expression. In the original manuscript, the novel ends with the doctor asking Laurie to shut off the gramophone which has, complying with Anna’s wishes, been playing all along: And the concertina-music stopped and it was so still so still and lovely like just before you go to sleep and it stopped and there was the ray of light along the floor like the last thrust of remembering before everything is blotted out and blackness comes … (56, original ending, Rhys’s ellipses)

When the gramophone is turned off and the “concertina-music” in Anna’s mind dwindles, “it,” the blood, also “stops,” and, appropriately, so does Anna’s voice. Anna’s Voyage in the Dark thus ends, like Rachel’s, with the “blackness” of death. Perhaps we feel that Anna and Rachel do not die in vain, however, for in their illnesses their voices have moved far beyond their former capabilities of expression. Early in The Voyage Out Rachel sees her life as “the only chance she had—the short season between two silences” (82). This “season,” however, coming before the “silence” of death, has proved fruitful in certain ways. Using the female characters’ illnesses as an artistic medium, both Woolf and Rhys have achieved a new modernist expression by writing through the bodies of their heroines. Letting the ill body speak, they allow their characters access to a new means of expression.

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The voyages of Rachel and Anna may end, but for Woolf and Rhys they are just beginning as both writers move forward into new, yet unexplored linguistic terrain. “the fearless explorer (my mind was)”: H.D.’s Hermione in the Hinterland of Illness In The Voyage Out and Voyage in the Dark, feverish illness resulting from crossing into inappropriate spaces creates a new experience for each female character. Between death and life comes an excursion into another realm of existence where language breaks free of external restriction. Illness taps into a world of altered perception, memory, and subconscious insights; removing the boundary of decorum between inner and outer worlds, it provides a channel through which interior thought can escape. The delirium of illness coaxes out internal rumination, bridging the gap between unspoken reflection and external language. This idea is developed even further in H.D.’s HERmione, an autobiographical novel completed in 1927, though not published until 1981.31 Though Hermione’s complex experience with fever takes up a significant portion of the novel, many aspects of her illness have been overlooked by critics. While HERmione is very seldom compared with the fiction of other modernist writers, reading the novel alongside Woolf’s and Rhys’s works productively reveals a remarkably similar engagement with issues of travel, transgression, illness, and language. Akin to Rachel and Anna in her quiet, introspective manner, Hermione rarely articulates what she thinks and often is reproved when she does: “There were things she would never get into words” (17). Although the text does not concern a young woman’s “voyage” to a new country in the ways Woolf’s and Rhys’s texts do, themes of travel and exploration permeate the novel, and Hermione is figured as an explorer of new linguistic worlds. After a three-month illness, Hermione reemerges holding a new sense of self, articulating the language of her mind, and grasping new power as an emerging writer. Of these three young women protagonists, Hermione’s experience is unique in that her author wishes for her to survive her illness, learning something from her experience that enables her own artistic expression. H.D.’s autobiographical künstlerroman recounts Hermione Gart’s ninemonth journey toward self-discovery and self-definition after she drops out of Bryn Mawr College. Susan Stanford Friedman and Donna Krolick Hollenberg both have called attention to the novel’s time frame, Friedman writing of its “gestational nine-month period” (Penelope’s Web, 69) and Hollenberg connecting this to “Hermione’s gestation of an autonomous self” (50).32 Set in the suburbs  This is noted in Schaffner’s introduction to HERmione, “Pandora’s Box,” viii.  The nine-month duration of the novel roughly connects to the same span of time used in The Voyage Out; other similarities linking the novels such as the experiences of a young woman emerging into a new world, an engagement plot which does not end in 31 32

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of Philadelphia, the novel explores Hermione’s relationship with her friends, her romantic companions, and her family, as she negotiates an identity for herself. At the center of the novel is a love triangle between Hermione, George Lowndes, and Fayne Rabb; while George alternately praises and condemns Her’s poetry and linguistic play and subsumes her voice with his own, Fayne is more encouraging and supportive of Hermione’s poetic language.33 Although the novel is an autobiographical exploration, it is equally an experiment with both the confining and the freeing attributes of language. The text most clearly calls into question the connection between language and illness and between art and “abnormality.” As with Woolf’s and Rhys’s heroines, Hermione becomes ill from transgressing boundaries deemed socially inappropriate for a young woman to cross. This time the illness is cultivated not through dangerous geographic travel or inappropriate heterosexual union and its repercussions but through Hermione’s homoerotic friendship with Fayne, deemed “unwholesome” by Hermione’s mother. The young women’s relationship acquaints Hermione with new habits of thought and feeling and ultimately inspires her to discover unexplored regions within herself. In Hermione we find another young woman protagonist who has had few experiences beyond the boundaries of her own home. She begins the novel walking in circles in the woods of her family’s “grange” in suburban Philadelphia, seeking self-definition, feeling “a failure” after having to leave college (4). The opening line, “Her Gart went round in circles” (3), introduces both her physical and mental confinement, and is soon mirrored linguistically: “Names are in people, people are in names … . Pennsylvania had her. She would never get away from Pennsylvania. She knew, standing now frozen on the wood-path, that she would never get away from Pennsylvania” (5). Her repetitive and roundabout language, here and elsewhere, suggests a “frozen” stagnancy of thought; as Susan Stanford Friedman notes in Penelope’s Web, “In this state of paralysis, Hermione has no muse to propel her forward into the linear plot of development” (112). Hermione feels she has “no place here” with her family (10) and wants to “escape Gart and Gart Grange” (24). Instead of the stasis of home, “She wanted to be alone on some stretch of sand with dunes rising at the back … . Another country called her, the only thing that would heal” (6–7). Here travel and geographic adventure are linked to the preservation of health and the regeneration of the self, but throughout the text Hermione can escape only in imagination. Although ideas of travel and exploration are central to H.D.’s text, HERmione does not fit easily into the travel narrative model. H.D. situates the novel at an autobiographical moment before she was able to travel abroad, and the novel marriage, and a delusional illness suggest that H.D. may have been inspired partly by Woolf’s novel, though the text is based on H.D.’s own life. 33  The fictional exploration of these relationships corresponds with H.D.’s real-life romantic experiences with Ezra Pound and Frances Gregg. Friedman in Penelope’s Web calls the novel “a fictional reconstruction of a five-year period in H.D.’s life from about 1906 to 1911” (101–102).

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largely investigates the frustration of that stasis.34 George Lowndes, not Hermione, is the enviable traveler figure in the novel. Always journeying to Europe or even Northern Africa, George provides an exotic glimpse into another world. George “had been to Tunis, to Bulgaria” (178), Hermione thinks, and she describes a picture she received of “George in a fez” in Algiers (61). The name George is visually similar to “Geography,” sharing the same terrestrial prefix. Just so, he provides for Hermione an alluring glimpse of foreign space through his stories and letters. Although linked in name to the earth, George never remains “grounded” for too long in one place. His voice first appears in the text as a letter from abroad. When George then calls Hermione from the U.S., her mother, Eugenia, comments accusatorially that Hermione told her he was in Venice. George is there no longer; he is a wandering figure who seems to have the ability to come and go as he pleases. Hermione responds: “I did say I thought, Eugenia, he was still in Venice. I said there was no postmark.” Her Gart felt she was groping toward some ill-defined landmark, toward some sort of path out of this dangerous shut-in Pennsylvania, herself bewildered pathfinder in some new uncharted region of thought, of aspiration. It is true “Venice” had meant nothing but George might help her get out. Was it possible that she wasn’t quite a failure? “I intend to ask George.” (44)

This rich passage reveals several of Hermione’s “aspiration[s].” First, it shows that Hermione hopes to use George as a “path” or “landmark,” a means of escape from her home life, which is becoming “dangerous[ly] shut-in.” Second, while Hermione’s outward comments suggest to her mother that she plans to ask George where he has been, her internal monologue indicates that she really plans to learn from George whether or not she is “a failure,” looking to him to help redefine herself through language. Third, the passage implies that Hermione’s desired path is ultimately a mental one rather than a geographic one (“‘Venice’ had meant nothing”), leading to “some new uncharted region of thought” instead of a region of land. Although longing to break out of Gart Grange, Hermione does not believe Europe holds the new world she is seeking, feeling it too well trodden: “She did not sigh as people did in those days, ‘Well, I’ll some day get to Europe.’ Europe existed as static little pictures, the green and mosaic of several coloured prints of Venice and Venice by moonlight … . Pictures were conclusive things and Her Gart was not conclusive” (7). Similarly, when thinking of George in Venice, “The name did nothing to her, recalled nothing but some tiresome prints in the volume of the Schools of Painting that she didn’t care for, and the general feeling of a crowd” (30). In both these passages, Europe is presented as a set of familiar “prints.” It is

34  H.D. remained with her family while attending local Bryn Mawr and did not travel abroad until 1911.

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too “conclusive,” too well explored and defined. It is also “static,” composed of familiar art, buildings, and scenic vistas that belong to the traditional grand tour. Lamenting her lack of mobility, Hermione thinks, “I have never been to Venice. I have, in fact, never been anywhere” (82). Imagining others going “Up the Nile,” she comments wryly that “upstairs is all I’ll get to and I wonder if I will get upstairs” (82). Meanwhile, Hermione imagines George as a volume of travel literature, remarking, “George smells of morocco bindings” (83). She pictures him, too, as an object of foreign art: “George, in perspective, was a figure in the Pitti Palace or something in the Riccardi Palace … . George was out of the Famous Painters’ Volume” (69). Representing the lure of foreign travel, George promises to take Hermione to Europe for their honeymoon after they are married. Nonetheless, their interchange reveals that she and George have very different ideas about what can be found in Europe: “Why should we go to Europe when we can travel on the moon, when we can follow tropic rivers through our oak wood, when we have the Farrand forest that is like the Chersonese before the oak trees rotted? In Greece, the old forests are dead, in Italy … ” “Italy—” he caught her hand raised upward to oak beams laid parallel on polished tree shafts, “In Italy, Hermione will find the heart to love me.” (94, H.D.’s ellipses)

If George-as-travel-volume represents the traditional sights of Europe, this escape ultimately cannot satisfy Hermione. Her quest lies beyond Europe to much more imaginative spaces, and there is something both naïve and beautiful about Hermione’s fantasy worlds. To George, in contrast, Europe represents a place where he can begin his life with Hermione, capturing this elusive young woman for himself, and there is an unpleasant coldness about George’s interruption of Hermione’s wanderings of imagination. H.D. depicts Hermione as an eager explorer of new spaces while most other young women her age are content to rely on conventional ideas. When Hermione and her former school friends engage in an intellectual discussion, the conversation is described as a failed geographic expedition that can go no further than what is already known. When the other girls encounter a foreign author unfamiliar to them such as “Dostoevski,” his name “should have … sen[t] out a fringe, … the very contour of a forest” lying beyond the continent’s edge, but the young women do not see it (58). The forest seems to represent an unexplored region of new thought, but the girls are more like sightseers than explorers, remaining in a comfortable space and returning the conversation to English author George Meredith: “George Meredith set a sort of standard for them and by that standard they must repudiate the forest. For how could they live then in that uncharted wilderness? The mind must have its landmarks. Theirs were false ones” (57). The girls are not really exploring the world of literature available to them but are remaining close to their familiar “landmarks” that will prove “false” or misleading. Similarly, while Hermione’s own “George” may function as the “ill-defined landmark” she is

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groping toward in a previous passage, he may not hold the “fringe” of forest her mind ultimately desires. She seeks a place even beyond the tangible, visualizing “climb[ing] through walls of no visible dimension” (7). Though our narrator, in the section on literary conversation, uses the term “pioneers in that Hinterland of imagination” to refer to twentieth-century psychologists labeling the human psyche (47), the term may be applied equally to the novel’s heroine who seeks to explore an imaginative “Hinterland,” a remote, undeveloped region. Hermione’s local geographic space for imagined foreign travel is the neighboring “Farrand forest,” a region with a name suggesting both distance (“far” or “foreign”) and romantic adventure (“far-and-away”). She says it is “like the Chersonese,” suggesting the Golden Chersonese, the fanciful name for the Malay Peninsula in ancient Greek geography.35 The woods become her space, her imaginary country, complete with the “tropic rivers” she imagines in a previous passage. Farrand forest is also the place in which she spends the most time alone with George. In his parody of Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” George dubs it, in a drawly, parodically American voice, “the fawrest pri-meval” while Hermione imagines it as something more idyllic, “almost … the forest of Arden” from Shakespeare’s As You Like It (66), a fantasy realm of nature. While George’s presence almost makes Hermione’s image of the romantic forest possible, his mocking voice ultimately dispels it. Now comparing Farrand forest to the forest of Arden, she realizes: This forest could never be affiliated with that forest. Back and back, hiding among tree trunks, abreast, crouched low among the sassafras and among the trailing vines of wintergreen, there were knees and brown flanks and the long low swirl of stone arrows that cut them forever and forever from the country they had that once repudiated. (66–67)

This unusual passage echoes the fragmented descriptions of native bodies found in the primordial forests of The Voyage Out and Heart of Darkness. For the first time, Hermione feels as if she is invading someone else’s territory. This forest is not the “uncharted wilderness” the Bryn Mawr women cannot find in their George Meredith conversation, though this passage is connected to the former passage, the country “repudiated” (67) linked to the forest which must be “repudiated” by the landmark of George Meredith (57). The passage shows that even in her own imaginative space Hermione is not welcome as an explorer, and another “uncharted wilderness” must be found. 35  Perhaps significantly, Isabella Bird published The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither in 1883, a description of her journey to Singapore and the little-traveled Western region of the Malay Peninsula. This connects the region in recent history to a woman’s explorations. Moreover, Bird left a sedentary home life marked by illness and disability to find a remarkable rebirth as an energetic female traveler; as Pat Barr writes of Bird, “for her, travelling was indeed an elixer” (19).

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Hermione ultimately cannot love the man who interrupts her imaginary visions. Instead, she is lured by a more foreign realm, one existing in the space of her own mind. Hermione lives in her own world of language, of word and image play and association: “The mind of Her Gart was a patchwork of indefinable association” (24). However, she rarely can give voice to these creative ideas. Instead, she relies on George as her “landmark.” George is a familiar, comfortable presence, easy to quote. In her conversation with her Bryn Mawr friends, Hermione comments of Meredith, “George Lowndes says Meredith shows in every other syllable that his father was a tailor” (58). When pressed on the issue, Her admits, “I mean I don’t exactly know what I do mean” (58). When Hermione calls those who condemn George “Provincials,” her mother admonishes her, saying, “Provincials. You’re getting on famously, Hermione. George Lowndes is teaching you, actually teaching you words, telling you what to say” (95). As her mother remarks, these comments demonstrate a social snobbery uncharacteristic of Hermione. If we simply examine Hermione’s out-loud commentary rather than her inner monologue, we can see her relying on George to do the thinking, the “exploring,” and this dependency stifles her own creative processes. It is Fayne who ultimately helps Hermione understand this. When Fayne meets Hermione at a party and asks about Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck’s work, Hermione answers, “The Bee—yes, George said it was nature faking.” Fayne will not let her escape so easily, however, retorting, “Did you think it was nature faking?” (61). Hermione realizes that Fayne is judging her by her words, words by which she “must stand forever” (62), and suddenly she is presented with a new “world”: colour seemed to have drawn a cycle across a world, to have marked out a zone, a continent. There was a zone she had not explored … . she had passed out in a twinkling of an eye into another forest. This forest was reality. There, the very speaking of the words, conjured up proper answering sigil, house and barn and terrace and castle and river and little plum tree. A whole world was open. She looked in through a wide doorway. (62)

Again H.D. uses the trope of geographic exploration, but it is different from the more static ideas of geography represented by George; here emerge the forests of the “continent” that the other young Bryn Mawr women could not see. The “zone” Fayne discloses for Hermione is one of language and its “sigil”-like magical power. Instead of exploring existing colonized worlds, Hermione discovers that language can “conjure” a world to inhabit. Hermione is not yet ready to journey into this “zone,” but Fayne has opened the door for her. In the second section of H.D.’s text, Hermione does make a journey to a new world, a journey brought about through illness. Here Hermione leaves behind what is familiar to make excursions into uncharted spaces. As Part One implies, a true explorer does not venture only into familiar, comfortable regions. Part of the journey involves moving into spaces and experiences less familiar and less

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inherently easy. Thus are the norms of Hermione’s world dis-eased: George is replaced by Fayne while Hermione’s “health,” her quiet external norm, is replaced by a linguistically disruptive illness. Although at least two dozen critics have looked at HERmione in published writing, few acknowledge the centrality of Hermione’s illness in Part Two of the text. Adalaide Morris briefly mentions a connection between illness and poetics early in her study of H.D.,36 while Dianne Chisholm links H.D.’s depictions of Hermione’s illness to Freud’s and Breuer’s studies of hysteria.37 Though others fittingly remark, like Hollenberg, that Hermione’s “breakdown becomes a breakthrough” (50), Hermione’s illness tends to be treated as “mental breakdown” rather than physical illness which instigates mental confusion.38 While I agree that Hermione’s illness is both physical and mental, ignoring the physical component overlooks important connections between germs and transgression operating throughout the text. Illness is introduced in HERmione as a maternal fear imposed upon the novel’s daughters. After Hermione returns from spending time in the forest with George, her mother comments, “You can’t come in late and tired and ill from the woods” (77). Hermione counters, “Ill?” She does not seem physically sick, rather the opposite, “whirling on forest heels” in what seems a kind of jubilation (77). Eugenia may be using the fear of illness, whether physical, sexual, or mental, as a way to try to control her daughter’s outings with a man who may not be a “gentleman.” The implication is that Hermione will catch something from “the woods,” a wild place beyond family jurisdiction, or from George, whom her mother sees as equally wild. If Hermione already is “ill” by her mother’s definition, Eugenia may be implying that Hermione’s uncontrolled feelings of elation or love, her strange “whirling” behavior, or the fast talking she takes up as a defense is a kind of “illness.” In this way, “illness” comes to mean anything that deviates from what is socially acceptable or “normal” behavior for a young, early twentieth-century, white, upper-middle-class woman. Following Victorian standards, the early twentieth-century home was similarly a space thought to be “kept physically and morally clean by the wife and mother,” while bodies at home similarly became equally “conceptualised as domestic spaces” to keep clean (Bashford, 10, 16). Here Eugenia is trying to enforce her position as guardian of a certain moral standard. “Ill” becomes a code word for Eugenia’s desire to keep Hermione under control, and the stigmatized space of illness is a forbidden zone Eugenia does not want her daughter to explore.

 See Morris’s How to Live/What to Do, 37.  See H.D.’s Freudian Poetics, 76–81. Chisholm’s discussion seems very similar to Laurence’s study of illness in Woolf’s texts in The Reading of Silence, although neither critic makes comparisons between these authors. 38  For instance, the back cover of the 1981 New Directions paperback uses the phrase “mental breakdown” to describe Hermione’s condition. 36 37

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Hermione demonstrates a fear of illness perhaps inspired by her mother. Midnovel, she reveals a terror of contagion when men arrive to clean the rain pipes: The job-lot man he had with him said there was stagnating dead moss and god knows what in their well … “Another three days and” … Hermione went dizzy … days … days … . typhoid. Someone said “typhoid.” They hadn’t any of them typhoid. Thank God Minnie is away. She would have blamed it all on mama and quoted House Beautiful. (114, H.D.’s ellipses)

Once again, the traditional view (represented here by her sister-in-law Minnie) would be to “blame” the mother for contagion entering the home. Associated in the popular imagination with foreign spaces as well as foreign bodies, typhoid fever can be contracted through any contaminated water. The illness is characterized by stomach pains, bodily weakness, high fever, and sometimes delirium, and even the thought of someone in the family acquiring typhoid makes Hermione dizzy. Curiously, while typhoid was contemporarily linked with members of the lower classes, especially in the instance of “Typhoid Mary,”39 this is the only disease in HERmione which is not explicitly associated with a person. Most important about this passage is that the onset of illness is linked with stagnation; it is the “moss” and unknown matter “stagnating” in the well that could have made them ill. Hermione has felt from the beginning that her life at home has been stagnant with “Words said over and over, over and over” (40). The well of language in which she finds herself trapped may similarly end in a dangerous chaos. The well additionally bears a second symbolic significance since moss often is associated with George in the text. Moss appears in the second line of Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” the trees “bearded with moss and with garments green,” a line spoken by George (65) and repeated by Hermione after George proposes to her (98). George and Hermione reach a level of intimacy in the woods where “moss spread in a circle for Hermione to lie on” (85). Most importantly, just two pages following the typhoid scare, moss emerges in a part of the moonlit love scene with George, where George “press[es] her head down into tufts of soft moss, moss now with moonlight on it” (117). Farrand forest is not a tropical space, or one, like the forest in The Voyage Out, where contagion traditionally might be thought to run rampant. However, it is certainly tropical in Hermione’s imagination: in the forest, the green of the trees is like “torrid tropic water” (70). After her mother’s warning, Hermione begins to fear illness, especially a contagion tied to domestic invasion and, indirectly, to George himself. Fayne’s mother presents a more severe version of this variety of parental control. First Fayne confides to Hermione that “mama won’t let anyone come near

39

 “Typhoid Mary” was a domestic servant who carried the disease without contracting it herself. She was first apprehended in 1907. See Ehrenreich and English, Complaints and Disorders, 57–59.

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me” (158), stressing her mother’s overprotective personality. Then she tells Her that when she had received a scholarship to study drawing, her mother intervened: “Drawing. I got so far. Then mama said I was ill. That the girls at the academy were bad for me. She made me ill.” “Yes.” “Then nursed me.” “Yes.” “She would make me ill and then nurse me. I used to think and think and think until I saw things. That’s why somedays I see things. You make me see things.” (158)

In this chilling and complex passage, we glimpse, from Fayne’s perspective, a mother so desperate for her daughter to rely on her as a caretaker that she bequeaths illness to bestow health. Hermione’s repeated response of “Yes” implies that she is not shocked by Fayne’s words, even that she may understand a version of this behavior from her own experience. Fayne’s mother blames her daughter’s illness on the “girls at the academy,” calling them “bad for [her].” What was deviant about these girls is left unspoken. Perhaps the girls were involved in sexual discussion or experimentation; perhaps they simply held perspectives or beliefs different from those of Fayne’s mother.40 It is this reading of any “difference” as a kind of contagious illness that HERmione especially invites. Fayne’s remark “She made me ill” may imply that Fayne’s mother worried her so much with the idea of illness that it was actually she who made her daughter “ill,” causing the very effect she was trying to avoid, or that it was Fayne’s mother’s act of labeling her as “ill” that made her that way. Both cultural historians and feminist theorists of the body point to the ultimate dangers of labeling/diagnosing the ill body because of the potential for this to remove a patient’s subjective experience of his or her own body. Sander L. Gilman remarks that medical science’s “peculiar power” can create “overt helplessness of the individual in the face of illness (or in the face of being labeled as ill)” (28). As in Gilman’s explanation, Fayne has been rendered helpless through “being labeled as ill” by her mother. The kind of “illness” Fayne describes herself developing is also worthy of attention, as it does not sound like an acquired illness of the common cold or flu variety. Instead its symptoms are psychological: “I used to think and think and think until I saw things.” Fayne’s illness suggests a kind of hallucination, although it is unclear whether her “illness” is causing the hallucinations or whether her method of recovery, lying in bed and “thinking,” is responsible.41 The illness fits  In Purity and Pollution, Alison Bashford mentions a book contemporary with this time period called The Modern Hospital (1913) in which a similar anxiety creeps into the discussion of a nurse’s school: “One morbid pupil, with erotic tendencies, can sometimes pollute a whole training-school,” the authors caution (qtd. in Bashford, 39). Certainly, this idea of sexuality as “pollut[ive]” or contagious is subtly suggested by Fayne’s mother’s comment. 41  Fayne’s predicament may remind us, for example, of the narrator’s in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” where her prescribed rest cure (forbidding the woman narrator from writing and keeping her confined to her room) encourages her to use the designs on the wallpaper as an imaginative outlet until she loses touch with reality. 40

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her character name, Fayne, which suggests “fey,” either “visionary” or “crazy,” and between these definitions runs a very fine line. Like Hermione’s mother, Fayne’s is guarding her daughter from new experiences which might prove dangerous. Fayne rebels by exploring the only world left open to her: her own mind. Fayne’s last comment, that Hermione also makes her “see things,” implies that Hermione similarly inspires her to push beyond the boundaries of what is deemed “healthy.” In her curious remark lurks her mother’s own tendency to link contagion with other young women, but Fayne’s words seem less an accusation than a curious compliment or, possibly, invitation. Hermione’s mother seeks to protect her daughter from Fayne, saying, “I think George is right. I don’t think that girl is good for you … . You ought to marry George Lowndes … . This girl—she’s all wrong. Lillian thinks her most—most unwholesome” (176). Eugenia echoes Fayne’s mother, who thought other girls were “bad for” her daughter (176). “Unwholesome” is an unusual adjective for a mother to use to describe her daughter’s young friend, and the loaded term suggests that Fayne is an unhealthy presence.42 Both Eugenia and George fear Hermione’s contact with Fayne for some unspoken reason. Certainly there is an intimacy between the girls which would be deemed inappropriate by contemporary societal standards, but, to Eugenia, Fayne also provides a doubly alarming intellectual influence. A clue to Eugenia’s fear comes when she next remarks of George, “I don’t mean that he looks ill exactly” but “looks more—more—normal. He looks much less eccentric” (176). Here, even eccentricity, literally meaning “off center,” is equated with illness.43 Fayne makes George look tame and traditional by comparison. Fayne encourages Hermione to see things differently and to express herself in ways no one else does. In an important passage following Hermione’s discussion with her mother, Fayne challenges Hermione by asking, “Have you no reality, no voice, no articulate self?” To this affront, Hermione ironically begins, “George says—” (177). Suddenly “The room shrank and quivered” (177), Hermione’s teeth begin to chatter, and she quivers with a “terror of the things that Fayne saw clearly” (178). With this new vision come physical symptoms of sickness. Most crucially, these symptoms develop as Fayne pushes Hermione to develop her own authentic voice, implying that it is Fayne who “infects” Hermione. Later, Hermione asks herself, “[W]hat is it Fayne Rabb does to people?” (185). As Fayne lies on the divan and encourages Hermione to speak to her, “Fayne Rabb spoke like a sick child” (179): “‘Oh George—and—you.’ The voice spoke like a child 42

 Eugenia’s phrase “All wrong” also suggests “unnatural,” the term that becomes coded for “lesbian” in Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour (1934). 43  Eccentric is thus an appropriate term for a spatial, geometric, or geographic examination of the text. For an interesting discussion of eccentricity and pathology in the nineteenth century, see Miranda Gill’s “A Little Bit Mad/Almost Mad/Not Quite Mad?” Gill writes: “Normality was framed in terms of a statistical biological norm; conversely, departure from this norm through excess or deficit was labelled morbid and pathological” (154).

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in a delirium ‘Oh you—and—George.’ The voice was drawn up, up out of a deep well, a prophet’s voice” (179). In this passage there are three links between Fayne and illness: first, Fayne is like “a sick child,” second, Fayne speaks “like a child in a delirium,” and third, the voice emerges as “out of a deep well,” reminding us of the clogged Gart well that could have bred typhoid. Here we find not a physical well but a metaphorical one, breeding a metaphorical illness. The entangled interactions between George, Fayne, and Hermione over the next dozen pages of text culminate in Hermione’s illness. Hermione promises not to marry George, and she links herself with Fayne: “She is Her. I am Her. Her is Fayne. Fayne is Her” (181). Once she learns of a relationship taking place between George and Fayne, however, her worldview shifts, and she must see herself from an uncomfortable, outside perspective. As she has an argument with George in a cab, she develops a sore throat and fever. Hermione’s “feet were cold, her head was hot” as her temperature creeps up and out of the appropriate bounds of health (191). She is trying to understand George, but their words are inadequate, “out of some bad novel” (190). George says of Fayne, “She was delirious at my house” (191), labeling Fayne a source of both illness and frenetic language. Conceptualizing George and Fayne together, Hermione now symbolically has taken Fayne’s former position, moved into Fayne’s “zone.” Hermione’s own delirium begins as her interior language, kept too long in the bounded space of her mind, starts to force itself out. She begins to talk quickly and tells George a previously internal thought that “I am not Hermione out of Shakespeare” (192).44 He replies coldly to her strange stream of consciousness, “I don’t understand this nonsense” (192). Hermione becomes more and more detached during this scene. Once on the train, she thinks: I am the word AUM. She said Em, Hem, Um, clearing her throat and her breath made a runnel in her throat like an icicle on a hot stove. Breath became red hot and melted an ice throat. Words made runnels in the throat, different shapes like frost on nursery windows. (193)

Throughout the novel, Hermione has said to herself in an attempt at self-definition, “I am the word AUM.” Once, she even mentions her thought to George, explaining that “Those little Wisdom of the East books, they seem to be the only thing that fits here” (68). Hermione has been reading books about Eastern philosophy in which a single word or the spoken name of a God can become all-powerful and transformative. The syllable “Om” or “AUM” is, as Julius Lipner explains in his study of Hinduism, an “empowering or transformative religious utterance” which alters the speaker’s conscious state (360). Frightened by the power of the word “AUM,” Hermione has always tried to cover or mask the sound of the word by clearing her throat apologetically: “UM, EM, HEM” (32). In this later moment of 44  Earlier in the novel, Hermione muses that she both is and is not “Hermoine out of Shakespeare,” the Queen in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.

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the text, this coughing becomes, after a sudden change in temperature, Hermione’s first sign of sickness. As she tells George in very plain language, “There’s something wrong here … . I’ve got a—sore throat or something” (193). A “seed syllable” for a mantra, “AUM” is used as a beginning and as an ending for other phrases (Flood, 222). Hermione’s “AUM” functions similarly as a “seed” (or germ) of illness, and what it begins indeed marks a shift in consciousness and, moreover, in language. For Hindus, the three sounds in “AUM” are believed to “constitute, symbolically, the entire universe of words,” thus representing “everything words can represent” (Krishnamurthy, 64). It is “the primeval word which stands for the entire universe permeated by Brahman and therefore Brahman itself” (64). “Brahman,” meaning “transcendent essence,” is, as Margaret Stutley notes, “beyond the categories of name and form” (163). It is similarly the “sound of the absolute which manifests the cosmos” (Flood, 222). As the primordial creative sound, “Om” or “AUM” represents the new space for Hermione that can transcend all earthly geographic spaces, opening an untrodden world for her. In the “primeval word” Hermione has found a new “forest primeval.” Hermione’s experience of illness is similar to both Rachel’s and Anna’s experiences. Certainly, H.D. might have been inspired by the end of The Voyage Out, since Woolf’s novel emerged about a decade before HERmione was written.45 Characterized by a high fever and prolonged periods of weakness and confusion, Hermoine’s illness, like Rachel’s, is left unnamed. Also similar to Rachel, Hermione in illness loses all sense of temporality and all ability to discern how much time is passing: “It might have been February. It might have been August,” she thinks (195). When someone speaks, it “went on and on and it went on through days, through years, through many years for the lilac bloomed again and this time it was purple” (196). Hermione cannot tell who is speaking and, like Rachel, is estranged from her body, knowing only that “Heat pulsed and burnt” (195). When Hermione answers someone, “Oh, I’m all right,” she observes how a “feeble voice came from a hollow,” though it is her own voice that she hears (196). The most unusual symptom of Hermione’s unnamed illness is not her fever or her swollen, raw throat, but her apparent delirium.46 While delirium may result from any high fever, it is a common symptom of typhoid, symbolically linking Hermione’s illness back to the idea of foreign travel and contagion. While she lies 45  In Psyche Reborn, Susan Stanford Friedman writes that “H.D. read and greatly admired the work of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce” (67) and in a footnote she explains, “Perdita Schaffner told me that H.D. owned many, if not all, of Woolf’s books and read them avidly” (305). 46  While Hermione’s sickness has important physical elements (that distinguish it from a purely psychological illness), its mental components allow critics to connect it to contemporarily recognized mental disorders. Chisholm, for instance, fascinatingly posits that H.D.’s depiction of Hermione’s illness is “reminiscent of passages” from Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria. H.D. taps into links between mental instability and creativity which long have interested scholars and psychiatrists.

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in bed, phrases, images, and ideas from the previous months come flooding back to her, bringing back conversations she has had, ideas about herself, her name, her identity. Her illness results in a kind of narrative regurgitation. Phrases rush through Her’s mind while she remains aware of Nurse Dennon sitting beside her. Suddenly Hermione’s internal narration is let out, an occurrence which startles the imperturbable nurse enough that she “dropped her sewing” to approach Hermione’s bedside (199). At several moments in the novel Hermione has let slip bits and pieces of her own imaginings, particularly to her mother or George. In general, her mother does not listen to her and George thinks she is silly, interrupting her or saying, “Don’t talk such rot Hermione” (137). Suddenly all these ideas and phrases start to emerge in out-loud expression. “People should think before they call a place Sylvania,” Hermione announces. Defining herself with her whole name, she says: “People, I always feel are in things and things I always feel are in people.” When the nurse responds, “Yes, Miss Gart,” Hermione replies, “You know, nurse, my name’s Hermione” (199). She also tells her nurse, of George, “He could never love a tree properly” (201). When the nurse finally inquires, “Are you a little tired of talking?” Hermione significantly responds, “No. I’m tired of not talking. It seems I have never talked. I want to talk and talk forever” (200). “I have only just begun” (203), she continues. Hermione’s illness has given her a freedom of voice she has never before experienced. Hermione’s flow of language becomes increasingly out of control. Once the light is put out, Hermione’s mind grows more stimulated as “eyes turned inward, words formed, made gigantic pattern” (203). As she speaks in run-on sentences, forming aloud the kinds of phrases that she has been thinking throughout, the nurse repeatedly answers, “Yes, Miss—Hermione” (204), recalling the way Hermione answers Fayne in the passage in which Fayne describes her mother making her ill and then “nurs[ing] her” (158). Again, the text hints that Hermione has moved into the alternative “zone” held by Fayne, adopting her position and perspective. Hermione’s stream of consciousness soon alarms the nurse as Hermione champions the sounds of words over their meanings and plays with word associations. In response to the nurse calling her “Miss,” Hermione begins to assert, “I am a miss” (204), and continues, “A miss is as good as a mile. Hit or miss. I am as good as a mile. I have missed everything” (205). Nineteenth-century psychologist Pliny Earle, who studied the artistic abilities of the insane, once wrote that “the only difference between the sane and the insane” is that “the former conceal their thoughts, while the latter give them utterance.”47 This parallels Woolf’s remark in “On Being Ill” where she writes of the “childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals” (196). Though Earle is discussing mental illness and Woolf physical, feverish illness, both allude to a resulting instability of the mind. In both cases, illness becomes a function of the deviant, 47  Quoted in Gilman’s chapter “The Mad as Artists” in Difference and Pathology, 220–221.

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from which a different kind of language is released, a language that poses an embarrassing challenge to the carefully constrained expression of healthy society. As in Voyage in the Dark, this disruptive response is seen as a disorder that “ought to be stopped.” In Hermione, it is not long before the nurse, “missing” the normal, quiet Hermione, advises, “I think you’d better take this, Miss Her” (209), offering a sleeping draught. It is several pages, however, before this spoken version of Hermione’s inner monologue can be brought to a halt. “I wasn’t talking, I was only thinking,” Hermione protests, when the nurse tells her that her talking is not doing her much good (209). The novel implies that a true release of language can come only in talking or writing the way one thinks, linking Hermione’s own language to H.D.’s modernist undertaking. Struggling to define herself throughout the text, Hermione is finally able to speak through illness those odd ideas of word play and identity formation that she would have had trouble uttering aloud at any other time. Illness becomes Hermione’s voyage into another world as her inside language comes out, and even in her delirium she gives credit to Fayne for helping her create this world: “There is me and Fayne for instance—brightness—burning … . There is always, isn’t there, in the heart of a new world that is forming, just that center, that pinpoint of incandescence that holds the thing together? There is a pinpoint of incandescence. George wasn’t” (206). In Hermione’s description, Fayne becomes the sun around which Hermione’s “new world” coheres. The description recalls the origin of Hermione’s fever in the word “AUM” or “Om,” the primordial mantra calling the universe into being. Crucially unlike Rachel and the original Anna, Hermione recovers from her illness: “The crisis passed last night,” the nurse tells her (211). The nurse’s word “crisis” implies that Hermione was approaching death as her linguistic chaos increased. Hermione’s recovery brings about a rebirth for her, so different from the bleak published ending of Rhys’s novel in which Anna survives with the horror of “starting all over again” (188). Hermione singularly learns from the experience of illness. She knows that she accessed something through it that she cannot find again: “Amy Dennon has given me some sort of dope. She has cheated me of my discovery,” she pouts (214). Hermione’s illness allowed her to lose herself in out-loud thought exploration and free association, and she would have liked to remain in that space. Pushing those words back inside, she must remain with only a lingering taste of her adventure. Early in the text, our narrator comments of Her, “Words were her plague and words were her redemption” (67). By the text’s end, this line has taken on new meaning. Hermione has pushed the bounds of language through the “plague” of illness, and her redemption or recovery is brought about by her choosing a form of linguistic order over pure delirium. Rejecting what she has striven so hard to find, Hermione decides, “I will draw back tenuous antennae of delirium … Her will be quite sane” (216, H.D.’s ellipses). For the moment, Hermione leaves behind George and Fayne. She muses that George wanted in her “fire to answer his fire” and “the fearless explorer (my mind was) that drew spark from him” (219). Here Hermione articulates that it is her

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mind that is the “explorer,” the wanderer of new thoughts, new places. She makes this even more clear when she thinks, “I have been wandering … too long in some intermediate world and Miss Dennon was nice about the nursing” (221). Again, illness is a place: Hermione connects her illness with a kind of “wandering” in an intermediary space, between life and death, conscious and unconscious thought. Now that Hermione has experienced illness, her ambition is to take up nursing. Hermione cannot remain in her “intermediate world” for long and survive, but she can learn, like Miss Dennon, to preside over her own formation of language. As Susan Stanford Friedman also has noted,48 by the end of the text, instead of walking in circles as she did at the beginning, Hermione is now moving forward: “Her feet were pencils tracing a path through a forest. The world had been razed, had been made clear for this thing … . Now the creator was Her’s feet, narrow black crayon across the winter whiteness” (223). The world is her paper: “The meadow lay like a piece of outspread parchment partially curled under” (224). The meadow and forest, left “virginal” at the text’s end for Hermione (223), may remind us again of Woolf’s “virgin forest … a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown” (“On Being Ill,” 196). Hermione becomes the roving woman explorer, an excursionist writing as she wanders and wandering as she writes. As she marks on the “parchment” of the land with her feet at the text’s end, she literally becomes a geographer, one who writes on the earth. She is not exploring to become like George “in a fez” or to smell “of morocco bindings.” Her discovery is to learn to negotiate these outer and inner spaces and articulate them. Although she has yet to venture out into the world, the text leaves her considering going abroad, implying a voyage out still to come. More immediately, though, she enjoys being back in Farrand forest, telling the Farrands that she wants “to be alone” outside “to—to—see things” (228), intoning Fayne’s exact expression of the visionary effect Hermione once inspired in her. Her choice of words links her exploration to Fayne, and it is with Fayne that we leave Hermione at the text’s end. Ultimately, the “landmark” of George is replaced by the landmark of Hermione’s writing as she finds her “path out” at last (44). As Fayne wisely commented earlier in the text, “Your writing is the thin flute holding you to eternity. Take away your flute and you remain, lost in a world of unreality” (161–162). Hermione’s illness represents a release of language in its rawest form, and in her writing she can express her inner ideas within a more contained medium that remains inspired by that “AUM,” the beautiful chaos out of which language arises. Her exploration, including that of the space of illness, has led her to new linguistic discoveries. “I am glad I was ill,” she thinks (226). Early in the text, the narrator speaks of “signposts, set by valiant pioneers in that Hinterland of imagination” (47). Hermione might be seen as one such “pioneer,” along with her authorial alter ego. In 1919, on a journey to the Scilly islands, H.D. wrote in an essay which came to be called “Notes on Thought and Vision,” “My sign-posts are not yours, but if I blaze my own trail, it may help to give you confidence and urge you to get out  See Friedman, Penelope’s Web, 223.

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of the murky, dead, old, thousand-times explored old world, the dead world of overworked emotions and thoughts” (24). Here H.D. calls upon her readers, too, to be explorers, to find for ourselves, as Hermione did, a new, unexpected world of personal vision, poetry, and imagination. The novels of Woolf, Rhys, and H.D. subvert traditional associations between illness and punishment by using feverish illness to give their women characters a new means of expression. Although Hermione may be the only one to emerge from her sickness saying, “I am glad I was ill” (226), each of these young women has achieved a new voice through her experience of illness, both for herself and for her author. These three women modernists, each relatively early in her experiences as a novelist, understood that there was only so much that could be said within the boundaries of the traditional novel form. To allow for a rupture in linguistic boundaries all three seized upon the idea of illness, a channel into the imagination, an excursion into an untapped reservoir. Though doctors and psychiatrists, often male, were at the time the guardians of illness and its language, these writers realized that the space of illness traditionally belonged to women. Thus at a historic moment when modernist writers were looking for new ways to articulate consciousness and experience, illness became a befitting vessel. While Woolf’s and Rhys’s heroines find no way to successfully or productively navigate out of these feverish journeys, perhaps suggesting an incompatibility of old and new forms of art, Hermione gives hope for integrating this germ of the new into modern expression.

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Chapter 4

“I am going on and on to the end of myself where something else begins”: Travel, Pregnancy, and Modernism

With my pregnant body it is different. My mind is filled with a kind of stillness of understanding. There is calm in my realization of myself—force that has surpassed motion. —Evelyn Scott, Escapade

As Billie Melman articulates, women’s travelogues involve a “redefinition of … feminine space” (17). Feminine space historically has been defined differently from that of men, since women have been more confined and restricted in movement to domestic spaces. The body, too, is a domestic space, a home, a “lived” entity. To take it on the road or overseas involves seeing it anew and rethinking its capabilities. As we have seen, women travelers begin to do just this; drawing upon areas of feminine physicality which usually ground the body in the domestic sphere, they begin to use the body for mobilizing, transformative journeys and imaginings. Just as women writers can undermine traditional negative connections between women and illness through artistic recreation, as shown in Chapter 3, women can reclaim pregnancy as a powerfully subversive corporeal tool.1 While women have long been celebrated in Western culture for their ability to bear children, pregnancy itself has often been pathologized. Historically, the Western medical community has categorized it with feminine illness. Even when a pregnancy is desired or intentional, medical discourse often encourages a woman, as Iris Marion Young notes, “to think of her pregnancy as a condition that deviates from normal health” (“Pregnant Embodiment,” 161). This is echoed in writings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when pregnancies seem too taboo to mention, and children suddenly emerge fully formed from characters in novels. A

 Susan Bordo has eloquently queried in Unbearable Weight, “[D]oes the unique configuration of embodiment presented in pregnancy … constitute a distinctively female epistemological and ethical resource?” (36). As Cristina Mazzoni has written in considering Bordo, the answer in feminist theory is often “a qualified yes” (105), and it is such in the literary works I will examine in this chapter. 1

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first step for twentieth-century authors is to bring the discussion of pregnancy into the open so that it need not be hidden or stigmatized.2 Within these more modern discourses, women have offered a wide range of personal responses to their own pregnancies, each response dependent on factors such as a woman’s economic situation, her society’s cultural views on pregnancy, and her personal situation in becoming pregnant. Pregnancy and motherhood are defining elements in feminist studies, but different generations’ views on these issues have tended to shift and cycle. While feminists of the suffrage era worked for women’s equality in education and legal representation, attempting to widen a definition of woman limited too narrowly to wife and mother,3 secondwave feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as some feminists today, have often reclaimed the female body, including chosen pregnancies, for women’s celebration. Kristeva generalized in “Women’s Time” (1981) that “the present generation”4 has shown “an increasing number of women who not only consider their maternity compatible with … their feminist involvement” but additionally “find it dispensible to their discovery … of the complexity of the female experience” (30).5 A reclaiming of pregnancy and maternity as women’s strength might be seen as subversive; as Kathy Davis notes in Embodied Practices, because the female body is the site for “processes of domination and control,” the work must start here “for self-determination and empowerment” (7). Cixous and other French feminists envisioned women’s action of writing the body as a way to escape masculinist language and conceptions of being. Challenging tradition to show pregnancy as a positive and useful state, women writers can tap into the creative act of reproduction; Kristeva, who connected pregnancy with powerful, pre-verbal language, wrote in her essay “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident” (1977) that “a woman is trapped within the frontiers of her body” (296), but suggested that for feminine innovation we should further explore the link between “maternity” and “female creation” (298). Cixous, in works such as “Laugh of the Medussa”

2

 There are surprisingly few studies of pregnancy in literature. For a cultural studies approach, see Parley Ann Boswell’s Pregnancy in Literature and Film. For a closer look at different theoretical articulations of pregnancy, see Mazzoni’s Maternal Impressions. 3  According to traditional Western views, motherhood was seen as natural, a “sacred occupation,” and a “duty” for women (McMillen, 24). 4  Even young contemporary feminists who wish to define their maternity against old traditions sometimes have trouble clearly articulating a new or non-contradictory position. As bell hooks has argued in Feminism is for Everybody, there is a contradiction in women both critiquing motherhood and enjoying its “privileges,” and she notes how feminists “who rejected or critiqued biological determinism often embraced it when it came to the issue of mothering” (83). 5  Kristeva notes how different this is from the ideologies of many feminists in the past: “The desire to be a mother, considered alienating and even reactionary by the preceding generation of feminists, has obviously not become a standard for the present generation” (“Women’s Time,” 30).

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and Illa, similarly conceptualized the womb as women’s “essence” and connected it with women’s voices and inner potential. While maternity thus has often been celebrated and reclaimed, some thirdwave feminists have worried that such techniques reinforce idealized views of motherhood and essentialize women’s experiences; for instance, in her essay “A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva,” Domna Stanton fears that this celebration of motherhood may return women to long-escaped notions of biological determinism.6 Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels in The Mommy Myth and Naomi Wolf in (Misconceptions) successfully demonstrate how “the idealization of motherhood” has often done a disservice to modern women. Other recent scholars as different as Hortense Spillers and Lee Edelman have called into question traditional ideologies of reproduction, cautioning readers of the dangers of buying into consistently positive rhetorics of pregnancy, maternity, and family.7 While these debates continue, we must remember that for women of the early twentieth century, simply articulating pregnancy, whether as a positive or negative occurrence, was something relatively new, holding great potential for expressing the usually unexpressed portions of women’s lives. Transnational women writers of the modernist period often write about the pregnant body and alternately portray pregnancy as either confining or liberating, revealing conflicting ideas about the role of the reproductive female body in the emancipation of women. As we have seen, Larsen’s Quicksand and Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark demonstrate how pregnancy may mark the end of a woman’s journey for self-discovery. Other authors, as I will show in this chapter, connect pregnancy with self-discovery and feminine artistry, anticipating ideas of the second-wave feminists. Remarkably, several of these works do so within the context of travel, showing the inner-mobilization of women through pregnancy.8 As these women travel externally, their focus shifts inward to contemplate the female body and its creative possibilities. This chapter will investigate three traveling women 6

 Stanton writes that her critique “is not to deny the importance of … a negation/ subversion of paternal hierarchies” but to insist that “the moment the maternal emerges as a new dominance, it must be put into question before it congeals as feminine essence” (174) and becomes “allied with the (re)assertion of ‘traditional values’” (177).. 7  Spillers in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” reminds audiences that for African American women slaves motherhood meant producing more slaves, sometimes by force, showing a powerful example of throwing “the customary lexis” of words such as “reproduction” and “‘motherhood’ … into unrelieved crisis” (399). In his controversial No Future, Edelman rejects what he calls “reproductive futurism,” where children symbolically (and sentimentally) represent the future of society, and urges individuals, especially those who are homosexual, to avoid this popular displacement of attention away from present societal problems. 8  While this occurs in key works, I do not mean to imply that all modernist women writers combine concepts of creativity and pregnancy or connect their personal or reproductive lives with their travels or writings. For instance, Vita Sackville-West clearly detached her travel writings from her family life.

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writers from different geographic regions, all pregnant, and all in their early to mid twenties. None of these women are in traditional married relationships, and all are at times stigmatized because of this, but they work to make the best of their situations. While these writers go through difficulties because of their pregnancies, their experiences of pregnancy abroad lead to a maturation of style in their writing, with each author producing a significant modernist, autobiographically inspired work from the experience. Pregnancy, Personal Geographies, and Mobility Though recent feminists are judicious in encouraging scholars not to essentialize women’s experiences of pregnancy, it seems fair to argue that, in very general terms, pregnancy provides a woman with the chance to rethink her relationship to her own body. Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, in The Second Sex (1949), suggests that pregnancy may bring confusion about bodily spaces and boundaries: But pregnancy is above all a drama that is acted out within the woman herself. She feels it as at once an enrichment and an injury; the fetus is a part of her body, and it is a parasite that feeds on it; she possesses it, and she is possessed by it; it represents the future and, carrying it, she feels herself vast as the world; but this very opulence annihilates her, she feels that she herself is no longer anything. (495)

While Beauvoir’s view of pregnancy is certainly not everyone’s, for many women the child in utero alters a woman’s conception of her body, until she may feel either “vast as the world” or a small, insignificant container. As Linda McDowell has argued in Gender, Identity, and Place, it seems pregnancy should hold a more central position not only within feminist geographies but also more generally within phenomenological studies. McDowell writes, “It is perhaps surprising that the subjectivity of pregnant women has been so little studied by the philosophers of embodied existence, as there is no clearer example of the limitations of the cohesion of the Cartesian assumptions of a singular unified subject” (58). In considering women’s lived experience, feminist phenomenologists often find more traditional, masculine-centered conceptions of the body image or body map inadequate; as Iris Marion Young writes, there has been an “inattention to embodied experience as specifically sexed and gendered” (163). Though MerleauPonty in Phenomenology of Perception (1945) examines how the body schema may shift to encompass other objects, and Schilder in The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (1935) suggests the ways in which a tool might become “a part of the body-image” (202), one “object” they fail to mention is the child in utero. Young writes that “We should not be surprised to learn that discourse on pregnancy omits subjectivity, for the specific experience of women has been absent from most of our culture’s discourse about human experience and history” (160).

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Bringing the issue of pregnancy to feminist geographies, she discusses “Pregnant Embodiment” and suggests that pregnancy is perhaps the “most paradigmatic” experience of “being thrown into awareness of one’s body” (165). Interested in the way “Pregnancy challenges the integration of my body experience” (163), Young notes that, when pregnant, “I literally do not have a firm sense of where my body ends and the world begins” (164). Similarly, in Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich discusses the fetus as neither “me” nor “not-me” (64). These theorists thus explore how pregnancy can “Other” the female body, while extending the body map of a woman’s personal geography to new spaces. Rich writes, “Far from existing in the mode of ‘inner space,’ women are powerfully … attuned both to ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ because for us the two are continuous, not polar” (64). A woman must also change her movement, including her walk and posture, to accommodate her pregnancy. Young writes that “Pregnancy … makes me conscious of the physicality of my body not as an object, but as the material weight that I am in movement” (165). Citing Robyn Longhurst’s studies of pregnant women in New Zealand, McDowell notes that a pregnancy might make some women feel “powerful” and others simply “awkward,” causing them to withdraw from social spaces (60). Though the personal “geographies” of pregnancy have yet to be fully investigated in feminist studies, in considering women’s traditionally “grounded” bodies, we must realize that pregnancy is high on the list of reasons women historically have rarely traveled as often or as widely as men. Pregnancy often brings not only a future child who will need years of constant supervision and attention but also, for many pregnant women, months of discomfort or decreased mobility. Women today still often conceptualize pregnancy as hampering women’s movements; in the words of contemporary social critic Naomi Wolf, who discovered she was pregnant while traveling in Italy, “My first thought was this: Thank God I traveled a lot in my life when I was young. Because now I will have to sit still” (16). Pregnancy and travel typically exist together in only limited scenarios. In a common example, a woman undertaking a journey may become pregnant and the pregnancy may require her to alter her travels plans in their timing or strenuousness. In another case, a woman may intentionally travel while pregnant to reach a more fitting home for her child, or to reunite with an absent partner before giving birth. In a final scenario, a woman whose family is ashamed of her pregnancy might be sent away from home to hide her body until she delivers. Although traveling while pregnant has rarely been encouraged, women of previous centuries were not rendered completely immobile by pregnancy but found ways and times to travel that were best for their bodies. In early America, for example, the rhythm of pregnancy, delivery, and nursing shaped women’s ability to travel regionally or even locally. In researching American women’s lives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich discovered that the journeys of these women “fall into a remarkably consistent pattern when keyed to their reproductive histories” (140). She continues, “it is hardly surprising that pregnancy restrained travel. What is surprising is the number of times …

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women undertook journeys in the middle trimester” (140). While the women Ulrich studies typically remained close to home as the time of childbirth neared, they would later take “weaning journeys” ten to fifteen months after their children were born (142), momentarily leaving behind their children and domestic duties. This seems a welcome excursion from the constraints of the body, particularly since these early American women often had ten or more pregnancies throughout their childbearing years. Very few women travel writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the means to travel for pleasure engaged in foreign journeys during the years in which they wished to start families. Travel was often easiest for young, single women or for older, married women, though women of all ages commonly chose to journey abroad with female friends. Traveling while pregnant sometimes led to tragic results, as seen in the experience of nineteenth-century American Susan Shelby Magoffin. A diary kept on her 1840s “extended honeymoon safari” along the Santa Fe Trail with her husband reveals the difficult journey of the pregnant eighteen-year-old (Lamar, xi).9 Consistent with her time period, Magoffin does not even confide to her diary that she is pregnant, but writes of her queasiness, “The idea of being sick on the Plains is not at all pleasant to me; it is rather terrifying than otherwise” (53). Her discomfort limits her movements, keeping her “too much of an invalid” to see one of the interesting landmarks they pass (54), and she soon writes, “I am obliged to lie down most of the time” (66). Though she is attended by a French doctor, she loses the baby, and mournfully illustrates how her experience differed from that of an “Indian woman” who “gave birth to a fine healthy baby” and went directly to the river to bathe (68). Canadian doctor and missionary Susie Rijnhart’s With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple (1901) is one of the few early twentieth-century travel narratives in which the author becomes pregnant and successfully delivers abroad. Continuing nineteenth-century tradition, Rijnhart does not relate details of her pregnancy to the reader, although when her husband is away she describes how “the natives bestowed on me the greatest kindnesses” and adds that “During these memorable weeks I learned to understand and sympathize with the heathen women as never before” (155). While Rijnhart retains certain prejudices against the native women she wishes to convert to Christianity, her shared experience of the female body enables her to see past more overt differences. Similarly, the kindness the Tibetans show to her child once he is born enables Rijnhart to remember, with fondness, “the love and tenderness of these dark-faced women” (203). Rijnhart’s text also takes a step forward in attempting to normalize the incidents of pregnancy and birth for the Western woman abroad. As a medical professional, she takes her pregnancy in stride, and she does not let the birth of her baby limit her movements. As far as we are aware, Rijnhart delivers the baby without hardship, and one and a half months later, she unhesitantly takes little Charlie with her and her husband 9  This diary was eventually published as Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico in 1926. I would like to thank Sandra Doe for introducing me to this text.

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as they spend twenty days living among the nomadic Tangut Tibetans. While the new baby seems to help the Rijnharts connect emotionally to the native families, tragedy later strikes when they decide to leave for Lhasa, the “forbidden capital” where Westerners do not normally venture. Although they try to provide the utmost care for Charlie along the way, carrying stockpiles of provisions and kindling wood “to make baby’s food” (237), he dies unexpectedly during a day of travel. Rijnhart’s work tragically illustrates the potential dangers of foreign travel for even the most capable of parents, and shows a poignant moment as the baby must be buried quickly en route. These nineteenth- and early twentieth-century examples illustrate the potential difficulties of mixing pregnancy with travel but begin to articulate the way pregnancy can change a woman’s conceptions of herself as well as her perceptions of the place she travels through. Continuing these contemplations of body and space, three young modernists present their own stories of pregnancy and travel largely based on their own personal experiences. While the accounts are not any less harrowing than those of Magoffin and Rijnhart, with one young writer losing the pregnancy, one pregnant while despairing the broken relationship with her lover, and one becoming chronically ill after delivering, all three women grew immensely as artists by articulating these experiences, using them to develop their modernist voices. In the case of young New Zealander Katherine Mansfield, her journey to Germany, enforced because of an unplanned pregnancy, molded her into the wry author the world has come to know. As she turned her writer’s eye on Germany she saw only the inside spaces, giving her a bitter view of women bound to their bodies, and she transcribed these feelings in the stories of In a German Pension (1911). It was only later in her career, when Mansfield both desired a child and mourned a younger brother lost to World War I, that she began to associate pregnancy with a more positive feminine creativity and expressed this in “Prelude” (1917). For young Canadian Elizabeth Smart, a world tour was not quite stimulating enough for her hungry imagination, but in traveling to California and falling in love, she turned to write about the geographies of the body, including pregnancy. In creating her work of poetic prose By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945) she became one of the first Canadian modernists. Finally, American writer Evelyn Scott’s journey to Brazil involved an internal awakening arising from her difficult experience with pregnancy abroad. Escapade (1923), her resulting narrative, occupies a liminal space between travel narrative and modernist fiction. Indeed, its focus on personal experience made it, for Scott’s adventurous husband who traveled with her, quite incomprehensible as a travel account. When studied alongside his own autobiography, Escapade illustrates the potentially radical differences between men’s and women’s narratives of travel as well as the subversive potential for women of writing through the body. Taken together, these women’s accounts, while showing pregnancy’s potential limitations on the body, also reveal pregnancy as a vehicle for women’s artistry and imaginative excursions.

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Rethinking the Experience of Pregnancy: Katherine Mansfield’s Journeys to Germany, France, and “Rome” Katherine Mansfield, née Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, was born into a family where the pleasures of travel were indulged. She was the third daughter and middle child of the Beauchamps, an Australian couple who were longtime residents of New Zealand. Neither country was fully “home” to her parents, who also had family in London’s upper circles. Socially prominent New Zealanders, the Beauchamps had the money to travel for leisure.10 After Kathleen was born, her parents left for England, leaving her with her grandmother. Her mother was gone for six months, delighted to escape her domestic life for a while. Years later in her journal, Mansfield transcribes a remembered conversation where her mother confides, “I do wish I hadn’t married. I wish I’d been an explorer” (169). Her mother’s preference for travel and exploration over her family life likely established a lasting connection between travel and freedom in the young girl’s mind. Even as a small child, Mansfield felt the allure of travel and foreign spaces; her short story “A Sea Voyage” took first prize at school when she was nine. She did not leave New Zealand until she was fourteen, however, when her parents decided that their daughters should continue their education in England. Mansfield attended Queen’s College for three years, where she edited the college magazine and studied the cello (Murry, v). Only briefly, as O’Sullivan and Scott describe it so well, did Mansfield believe “she could hold two worlds in balance” (ix). When she returned to New Zealand in 1906, she found her hometown much too provincial, and begged her parents to send her back to London. In travel she found escape, beginning a “habit of impermanence” that would continue into adulthood (Tomalin, 30).11 As Claire Tomalin asserts, “To become a writer, Katherine felt she had to begin by escaping from her family and country” (7). Even later in her career, Mansfield would continue to connect new geography with new creative possibility; she wrote to Ottoline Morrell in 1919 that she believed no one had yet fully “explored the lovely medium of prose. It is a hidden country still—I feel that so profoundly” (qtd. in Fullbrook, 35). Mansfield enjoyed the pleasures of travel throughout her life and developed a relationship in her writing between travel and creative insight. Two of her early published works are travel sketches she wrote for The New Age after a holiday spent

10

 Mansfield’s father was a well-off merchant who later accepted the directorship of the Bank of New Zealand (O’Sullivan and Scott, viii). 11  Claire Tomalin writes usefully of Mansfield’s early travels: “something more than the sense of being at home in Europe was stamped on her by this period: this was the habit of impermanence. The hotel room, the temporary lodging, the sense of being about to move on, of living where you do not quite belong, observing with a stranger’s eye—all these became second nature to her between 1903 and 1906” (30).

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alone in Bruges, Belgium.12 The young voyager seems delightedly exhilarated by the journey abroad, yet the sketches reveal the sometimes constricted freedom of the woman traveler. In “The Journey to Bruges,” the young narrator rushes around on a train platform only to be warned, “One could have a fit running in weather like this” (14). On the boat from England her eye is caught by the careful attention paid to a seasick young woman by a young man, reinforcing this sense of women’s delicacy. Only when the narrator goes below deck to sleep can she pleasurably lose herself in the movement of the boat, bringing herself new imaginative awareness. In a strikingly modernist passage, she notes: In the shortest sea voyage there is no sense of time. You have been down in the cabin for hours or days or years. Nobody knows or cares. You know all the people to the point of indifference. You do not believe in dry land any more—you are caught in the pendulum itself and left there, idly swinging. (17)

This beautiful, though unsettling, comment on the elongation of time and thought that sea travel enables seems to come about only because she finds a place to be alone, away from others’ concerned eyes. In a second sketch, “A Truthful Adventure,” young Katherine seeks a place of escape, but finds her path strewn with obstacles. After being promised “fantastic dreams” by a guidebook, she muses: “I shall dream away whole days, … take a boat and float up and down the canals … . At evensong I shall lie in the long grass of the Béguinage meadow and look up at the elm trees … listening the while to the voices of nuns at prayer in the little chapel, and growing full enough of grace to last me the whole winter.” (18)

The planned vacation is one of rest, relaxation, and joyful excursionings; echoing the whims of other women of her generation, she wants to delight in wandering alone, using these travel experiences for imaginative awakening. Like a hibernating animal, the narrator will store up these delightful memories for the winter ahead.13 Nonetheless, she realizes the limits of exploration for the young woman traveler when she tries to rent a boat to accomplish the first part of her vacation vision. “I wish to go alone and return when I like,” she requests, but the boatman asserts “it is not safe for Mademoiselle” (21). As a result, her trip is spoiled by another couple. She runs away, “crawl[ing] through a fence” (22), to locate her second dream spot, “the Béguinage meadow at evensong” (23). Here she unexpectedly encounters a girl she knew in New Zealand; the former acquaintance now has a 12

 The narrator, “Katherine,” seems to be Mansfield herself, though these narratives are later included as “stories” in Mansfield’s collected stories. 13  This sentiment echoes Woolf’s in “Evening over Sussex.” Woolf was often inspired by Mansfield, though the similarity in these writings may be a coincidence.

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husband with her and a baby back in England. Like the earlier couple on the boat, the young man and woman seem to represent a sense of domesticity that Katherine is trying to escape in Bruges. Katherine cannot seem to find a space to herself, and the couple, requesting her company while abroad, drives her to lie, “Unfortunately I have to go home quite soon” (24). Throughout her life, Mansfield never lost the sense that there was freedom in travel, but that full escape often remained elusive. In a 1915 entry in her journal called “Travelling Alone” she questions, “Was it simply her own imagination, or could there be any truth in this feeling that waiters—waiters especially and hotel servants—adopted an impertinent, arrogant and slightly amused attitude towards a woman who travelled alone?” (31). Being alone brought Mansfield great imaginative vision, but this was compromised by the fact that traveling put her on display as a young woman. Some of these complex, uncomfortable feelings originated from one of Mansfield’s first travel experiences: a grueling journey to Germany enforced by her mother because Mansfield had become pregnant. The trip set in motion a twenty-year-old keen to retaliate by exploring the wryness of her situation and the limitations imposed on women by their reproductive systems. As she did so, she articulated the female body in new ways. The story of Mansfield’s forced exile to Germany began in the summer of 1908 when she returned to London, hoping to establish herself as a writer or musician (LKM, 57). Looking for a place to belong, she passionately attached herself to the family of Thomas Trowell, a cello teacher she had known in New Zealand (Mantz and Murry, 236). Becoming secretly engaged to his son Garnet, a violinist, the “little colonial,” as Mansfield sometimes referred to herself, found a place to call home at last (Smith, Katherine Mansfield, 1). Nonetheless, even her visions of a new domestic bliss required geographic movement, as her many letters written to Garnet that autumn reveal; in one, she begins, “My darling, when we two are married, and go away together—” (LKM, 66). The continued importance of liberation through foreign journeying had as strong a hold on Mansfield’s imagination as did Garnet. As she traveled even locally during this period, she connected these excursions to her romantic feelings for Garnet. After riding with two women acquaintances to Ashdown Park, she writes in an October 16 letter, “I sat in the front of the car—the cold air blew upon my face—We seemed like a dragon, so fast we sped, eating up the road—tu comprends? And in my heart a fire raged and burned fiercely—I felt so close to you that I trembled with joy” (73). Though her young lover was not with her, the liberation of the car’s speed and movement seemed to resonate with her newfound world of passion and romantic freedom. Similarly, when she and a friend ventured to Paris for a brief holiday, the train ride inspired her to think of Garnet: “we had rushed our way into the country … . I thought of you. To open my eyes and find you beside me—if it was we two together going abroad” (74). In another letter she calls Paris “a city for — — — — you & I … . I picture us with perhaps two small rooms high in the Quartier Latin—setting out at night, arm in arm—and seeing it all and because we were together—a thousand times more (77–78). The romance of Paris can only

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be fully appreciated with the imaginative accompaniment of her lover, who helps transform the city into a paradise. Even once home in England, she idealizes their relationship as one of geographic freedom: “You and I are together, alone, upon a strange new planet, whose wonders we two explore” (79). The passionate relationship soon led to two events which shattered Mansfield’s idyllic dreams of travel and romance. First, the Trowells insisted Garnet end his relations with her, and he had little alternative because he was not yet of age (Tomalin, 62). Second, Mansfield discovered she was pregnant. The spurned young woman threw herself into a relationship with the singer George Bowden, married him in early March, and left him the same evening. Most Mansfield scholars assume “her erratic marriage” was “to provide legitimacy for a child she meant to keep” (Burgan, “Illness,” 72). In leaving Bowden, she fled back to Garnet, “staying with him in Glasgow and Liverpool” as he toured with an opera company (O’Sullivan and Scott, 89). When Mansfield’s family discovered her situation, her mother sailed for England, arriving in May. When Mansfield refused to return to her “legitimate” husband, her mother decided she must leave England. Ruth Mantz and J. Middleton Murry describe it thus: “Katherine must go abroad and hide … . The one thing needful in this case was that the breath of scandal should not be wafted overseas. So Katherine was dispatched to Germany … and then settled in the Bavarian village of Woerishofen” (322). Her early dreams of honeymoon travel with Garnet were replaced by something very different: an enforced exile. It was while she was in Germany that Mansfield had the experiences that inspired her first collection of short stories, In a German Pension, published in 1911. This volume became the one that defined her career; as Kate Fullbrook writes, “For her contemporaries, Katherine Mansfield was pre-eminently the author of her short story collection of 1911” which “lock[ed] her into a reputation for thematic and stylistic practices” (51, 52). What remains certain is that, had Mansfield never become pregnant and been sent to Germany, her first story collection would have been very different. Before her mother’s arrival, Mansfield had time for one last pleasure trip, spending a few days alone in Brussels at the end of April. By this time, she also had begun to feel the discomforts of pregnancy; she writes Garnet, “My body is so self-conscious—Je pense of all of the frightful things possible” (LKM, 91). She describes having an “intolerable headache” (91) and seems to anticipate further bodily ills to follow. As Mary Burgan notes, this passage seems an indication of Mansfield’s morning sickness, with the tiredness partly resulting from “ill-advised travel to the Continent at such a physically demanding time” (69).14 The “selfconscious” feeling Mansfield alludes to also comes from hiding in a body that would have begun to show signs of its condition. Writing “on the train to Anvers,” she ends the letter on a more positive note about her pregnancy: “I love Belgium for I love green & mauve. I wonder when I shall sit and read aloud to my little son” (LKM, 91). Looking forward to a child she planned to love and nurture, she 14  Burgan usefully notes that this may be Mansfield’s first “major somatic malaise” of her life, which would cause her to draw particular attention to it (“Illness,” 69).

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associated this new feeling with what she enjoyed about her foreign geography. Mansfield’s strong maternal feelings soon were contrasted by the weakness of her mother’s; once the pregnant daughter had been safely swept away to Germany, the mother returned to New Zealand and excised Katherine from her will.15 When Mrs. Beauchamp left her daughter at a German lodging, the Hotel Kreuzer, in June 1909, Mansfield already was working to regain a sense of control over her situation. As Tomalin notes, it is significant that the young woman, who had not yet established herself as a short story writer, signed herself in at the hotel as “Käthe Beauchamp-Bowden, Schriftstellerin (i.e., woman writer)” (69). To hide the taboo nature of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, she masqueraded under the name of her brief husband, but the professional tag was a twist of her own. Even in her exile Mansfield glimpsed the opportunity for self-transformation. In the middle of June, Mansfield moved to the Pension Müller, the locale that would be the setting for her first published stories. Although she miscarried soon after, her remarkable stories would survive. We know little of Mansfield’s time in Germany, but an early letter written to Garnet in June from the Pension Müller gives some insight into her misery. In the second trimester of a pregnancy and left among strangers, Mansfield was not in Germany for vacation but to “hide,” as Mantz and Murry put it, and to remain confined to her expectant body. Even leaving her room to take “a beautiful exultant walk” (92) turns out to be a mistake, and her resulting chills and dizziness only reinforce her feelings of displacement: To be alone all day, ill, in a house whose every sound seems foreign to you—and to feel a terrible confusion in your body which affects you mentally, suddenly pictures for you detestable incidents—revolting personalities—which you only shake off—to find recurring again as the pain seems to diminish & grow worse. (LKM, 92)

Here Mansfield shows her physical manifestations of illness bound up with her loneliness, then remarks on the way these together influence her imagination. Flu-like symptoms make her susceptible to strange, uncomfortable thoughts and unpleasant characters; her mind has awoken creatively, yet not to aesthetic beauty but to horror. In this letter she also looks ahead to her child with fondness, but he cannot be separated in her mind from her illness: “Some day when I am asked— ‘Mother, where was I born’. and I answer—‘In Bavaria, dear’, I shall feel again I think this coldness—physical, mental—heart coldness—hand coldness—soul coldness” (92). After Mansfield miscarried, she remained in Germany to convalesce and to write. When she returned to England, she briefly reunited with Bowden and showed him the stories she had written abroad. In Tomalin’s words, he then “offered her some of the best advice she ever had” by suggesting she seek publication in The 15

 See Tomalin, 68.

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New Age (80). Between March 1910 and May 1911, editor A. R. Orage published six of her stories, all which would later appear in her first collected volume. The stories largely focus on women’s everyday lives while revealing, with sardonic humor and unabashed realism, their bodily hardships. When organized into a collection, the stories’ themes of marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and infanticide stand out starkly, showing Mansfield’s own personal preoccupation with these subjects during her time abroad. While the thirteen stories of In a German Pension are a wry assortment of tales, the first four stories are humorous vignettes narrated by a young Englishwoman sounding much like Mansfield herself. From the first story, “Germans at Meat,” we are given a privileged view into a private place, taken inside the German pension right up to the dinner table. The narrator’s eye misses nothing: from Herr Hoffmann wiping soup from his coat to a widow picking her teeth. It is an intimate glimpse into life at a health spa for those seeking relief from various ailments. These first four stories, focused on dialogue between pension guests, could be witty scenes in a travel narrative; they certainly sound as if they are taken directly from life. Of course, what is missing is any description of Germany from beyond the pension. The stories conform to the pattern of women’s travel narratives in focusing more on inside matters than outside ones and centering more on smaller, domestic issues. Particularly, they highlight the most local place of all: the human body. Although these are stories of a young woman visiting a foreign locale, they are tales of stasis or, more fittingly, of “confinement,” to pun on the old-fashioned word for a woman’s time of labor and delivery. When asked what “complaint” she suffers from, the narrator’s response is to smile and shrug her shoulders (“Frau Fischer,” 52). She is in Germany to take “the cure” for this unspoken ailment and will not travel even locally while there. When the narrator is asked if she will go to München, she replies, “You see, it is important not to break into my ‘cure’” (“Germans at Meat,” 39). The narrator is not alone in her limited activity; for other guests, even sight-seeing trips are reduced to short walks. In “The Advanced Lady,” some cure guests walk about in the gardens while others take an eightkilometre walk—“the mildest German excursion” (100). The walking excursion proves so tiresome, though, that the group is relieved to return in a cart. While the narrator seeks through travel a kind of liberation from home matters, she finds herself confined in others’ imaginations to traditional domestic roles. Any pleasure of travel is sacrificed to the social demands on the female body. When asked about her husband in the story “Frau Fischer,” the narrator fibs romantically that he is “a sea-captain on a long and perilous voyage,” but soon the Frau forces her to think concretely about her vague fantasy (54). The Frau deduces that our young narrator has come to Germany to convalesce because she misses her husband: “Your sad heart flies for comfort to these foreign lands,” she conjectures (54–55). The Frau also presumes that the young Englishwoman is pregnant, for she says, “wait until he comes into harbour and sees you with the child at your breast” (55). When the annoyed narrator retorts that childbearing seems to her “the most ignominious of all professions” (55), the Frau can only

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pray that having children will both cure her of her sourness and her husband of his love for travel: “handfuls of babies, that is what you are really in need of,” she advises (55). The travel fantasy has gone awry, and the narrator supposes she will have to kill off her imaginary husband “somewhere off Cape Horn” (56).16 The narrator seems to hope that her private cure will not involve articulating her body’s condition. However, talk about the body rapidly intrudes upon her from other guests. In “Germans at Meat,” the first story of the collection, the narrator must defend herself from those set in their ways about certain ideals of marriage, meals, and childbirth (all of which seem to go together) as they proclaim Germany “the home of the Family” (39). When the narrator admits to not having eaten meat for three years, the Widow counters: “Who ever heard of having children upon vegetables? It is not possible … . Now I have had nine children, and they are all alive, thank God. Fine, healthy babies—though after the first one was born I had to—” “How wonderful!” I cried. “Wonderful,” said the Widow contemptuously … . “Not at all! A friend of mine had four at the same time. Her husband was so pleased he gave a supperparty and had them placed on the table.” (38–39)

Most clear here is the association between a woman’s ability to bear children and the corresponding male pride of production, at the woman’s expense. The narrator, obviously made uncomfortable by the intimacy of the Widow’s story, tries to interrupt it, but the German woman merely begins another forthright tale about the difficulties for women of having children. The narrator, rather abashed by such talk, provides an ironic distance between polite society and the widow’s candor. As we read on in the collection, however, we find that the narratives will boldly tackle women’s bodily issues anyway. Whether or not Mansfield means for her narrator to be pregnant, there is a palimpsest of the pregnant writer-traveler beneath the character’s surface. The narrator’s liminal position (between pregnant and not pregnant, married and not married) is consistent with Mansfield’s own position abroad, and her secrecy makes sense for a young woman who, by societal dictates, was not supposed to be expecting a baby. We, like the cure patients around her, have no sense of intimacy with this narrator, though we may feel we would like to know her better. When she closes the door on the impertinent guests at the end of “Germans at Meat,” she closes the door on us, too. After Mansfield miscarried, she moved from the Pension Müller into other German lodgings to recover her health, first living in the rooms of the woman who ran the lending-library, then in lodgings owned by the Brechenmacher family (Tomalin, 71). Perhaps fittingly, the central stories of In a German Pension switch 16  Mansfield sailed from New Zealand to England via Cape Horn; see the account of the journey in Tomalin, 18.

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from the inward view of a secretive, possibly pregnant narrator outward to the everyday lives of local German families. A more reserved world is left behind, and the reader comes face to face with the bodily hardships of women’s lives. Frau Fischer wished upon the narrator “handfuls of babies”; as if in answer, the fifth, seventh, ninth, and tenth stories of the collection overflow with unhappy scenes of pregnancy and childbirth. The fifth story, “Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding,” opens when the Frau, going to a wedding with her husband, “packed four of the five babies to bed,” leaving the fifth to look after the other four (56). The bride has a scandalous “free-born child” in attendance at the wedding (59), the result of a brief liaison with a traveling salesman, and the marrying couple receives for a gift a coffee pot holding “a baby’s bottle and two little cradles holding china dolls” (61). The story is one of several which satirize the view that children are women’s destiny, that the point of marriage is to have babies, and that women’s pain is part of the bargain; upon returning home, the Brechenmachers have an unpleasant discussion about their early marriage, when the Frau had to be “taught” how to be a proper wife in the bedroom, and the story ends with her lying on the bed “like a child who expected to be hurt” (62). It is revealing that in “Frau Brechenmacher” the only person who seems to have any forward movement is the absent traveling salesman who only “stayed … two nights,” leaving behind a pregnant teenager (60). In these stories when travel is mentioned or envisioned, like that of the invented sea captain husband in “Frau Fischer,” it exists as a contrast to these women’s conditions. Two stories in Mansfield’s collection concern women giving birth, and in these works maternity is not romanticized. Instead, Mansfield emphasizes the hardships of pregnancy on the body, the pain of labor, and the agony of waiting for birth. “At Lehmann’s” takes place in late October, likely the time when Mansfield would have given birth to her own child, had the pregnancy continued.17 Thoughts about her own pregnancy thus transfer to her stories, and it is a bitter portrait. The story concerns the owners and employees of Lehmann’s café. The pregnant Frau Lehmann has badly swollen legs and is kept upstairs because of her condition: “a big woman at the best of times, she had grown so enormous in the process that her husband told her she looked unappetising, and had better remain upstairs and sew” (73). Herr Lehmann categorizes the pregnancy as so abnormal and unappealing that his wife must hide her body away. The pregnant female body is not appreciated but pathologized, quite in contrast to the celebrated babies in “Germans at Meat” who are exhibited on the dining table. The tension of “At Lehmann’s” exists in a juxtaposition of opposites, between Sabina, the naïve young shop girl who understands little of sex or pregnancy, and the Frau Lehmann who is in labor with her child:

17  If Mansfield miscarried in June in the fifth month of pregnancy, her original due date would have been around the end of October.

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The process of labor euphemistically is called both Frau Lehmann’s “bad time” and her “journey to Rome.” The second is a particularly ironic description since a woman in labor would be confined in a room until the baby’s birth. The expression appears again in “The Child-Who-Was-Tired” where “Frau Manda went on her ‘journey to Rome’ last night, and brought back a daughter” (97). The pleasantsounding phrase is perfect for Sabina and other innocents who only need to know that the Frau is unavailable. Rome was of course a popular honeymoon destination, and offers a flavor of romance and the imagined delight of mobility. Yet here the image of the romantic honeymoon, like the one Mansfield wrote about in her letters to Garnet, turns instead into a nightmare of confinement and stasis. “At Lehmann’s” shows two poles of a woman’s possible journey: the innocent young girl and the burdened mother. Mansfield, so young herself, may be thinking of her sudden transition from girl to woman. Through Sabina and the Frau, Mansfield illustrates the gap between a naïve, euphemistic view of pregnancy and a realistic view of the hardships pregnancy often brought. Sabina, so innocent, wants a baby but not the bodily distress that comes with having one; “I wouldn’t be the Frau for one hundred marks … . To look like that,” she thinks (76). The text reflects the dangers of not properly educating young women about the realities of the body. Even as Sabina ponders the Frau’s condition, a young seducer tries to tempt her into posing nude for some sketches, and later corners her in the ladies’ cloak room. As he kisses her against her will, Sabina hears “a frightful, tearing shriek” from upstairs, signaling the baby’s arrival (78).18 Sabina scurries away; her sudden insight may have saved her, just in time, from a pregnancy of her own. With that “tearing shriek,” Mansfield vividly begins to articulate that “journey to Rome” so often avoided by other writers. In a second story about childbirth, “A Birthday,” she also reveals the bodily difficulties of labor and delivery, but does so through the eyes of a squeamish and unsympathetic husband. Andreas discovers that his wife has been in labor all night but did not want to disturb him. We can see why when the sound of one wail is enough to shock him. He whispers to himself in the bathroom, “I can’t understand it. It isn’t as though it were her first—it’s her third. Old Schäfer told me, yesterday, his wife simply ‘dropped’ her fourth” (84). The doctor disagrees, emphasizing his patient’s tenacity: “A woman who works as she does about the house and has three children in four years thrown in with the dusting, so to speak!” (88). Andreas only laments the way his wife has changed since their marriage, noting that she has “lost all her go” and “spirit” (90). 18  Burgan reads this scene as giving Sabina the shock that “childbirth is part of the virgin’s destiny” (Illness, 81).

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Moping about and wishing for a baby boy, he remains insensitive to his wife’s pain, though, in the end, he fears for her life. The doctor’s cheerful announcement of his newborn son then shocks Andreas into exclaiming, quite ironically, “Well, by God! Nobody can accuse me of not knowing what suffering is” (91). Mary Burgan rightfully reads the stories of In a German Pension as showing a new kind of maternal vision and a “corporeal familiarity” that “demystified” the body’s “secret life of flux and elimination, and satirized the romanticizing of its pains” (Illness, 74). Certainly, the maternal body in these stories is presented in bold, often harsh realism, and Mansfield unhesitatingly articulates women’s experiences of suffering as part of traditional motherhood. Fullbrook, too, notes how both “At Lehmann’s” and “A Birthday” involve “protests against the idea of biologically determined destinies for women” (57). Mansfield reveals that a life of pregnancy after pregnancy can lead to unhappiness and exhaustion. She also knew from her own experience that even a romanticized pregnancy might lead to disappointment. Rather than write about a more personal sorrow, she took out her frustrations on a societal and biological system limiting the prospects of women; this occurs most of all in her story “The Child-Who-Was-Tired.” Based on a story by Anton Chekhov, “The Child-Who-Was-Tired” shows a young unwanted girl who commits infanticide when asked to care for too many children.19 After encountering a series of stories about confinement, the reader can sympathize with the tired child’s desire for escape. The girl’s employer is herself a misused woman, tired of childbearing. Though she already has her hands full with one baby and three older children besides, another is on the way. “I was sick twice this morning,” she tells an elderly visitor. “My insides are all twisted up with having children too quickly” (97). The mother lashes out at the children for her own miseries, scolding and beating them. The baby and the child babysitter are conjoined in the story in several instances. When the tired child falls asleep in the cellar, the baby falls down and gets “a bump as big as an egg over his eye” (95), and as the tired child holds the teething baby on her knees, he “stiffened his body and cried” (96). Similarly, while the child caretaker cuts the vegetables, “a great lump ached in her throat and then the tears ran down her face on to the vegetables” (96). The lumps and tears in both children are caused by neglect and abuse. The child wants to be kind to the baby, but does not have the strength to do so, and can only share her dream of traveling somewhere else, “Once upon a time there was a little white road” (96). Her dreams of mobility in travel are squelched by a debilitating stasis. The tired child is a “free-born … daughter of a waitress at the railway station” whose mother tried to drown her at birth. Even this mother, who worked at a place of transit, sounds like a woman with unfulfilled dreams of leaving behind a tired existence. The child’s own impulse to kill the Frau’s baby follows a chain of learned behavior; right before she has the idea for a way to keep the child quiet 19  Fullbrook notes that the story is based on one by Chekhov (38); Tomalin sees it more extremely as just an unattributed English translation (and thus plagiarism) (72).

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she “saw her great big shadow on the wall like a grown-up person with a grown-up baby” (98). Not until she smothers the baby can she get away mentally and find her “little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all—nobody at all” (99). The arrested development in this story is brought on by having children without wanting them, and not knowing what to do with the children once they are born. As Fullbrook remarks, “Mansfield uses ordinary women’s experiences as the starting-points from which to survey the world in general” (62). In so doing, Mansfield looks ahead to key goals of feminist geography, articulating women’s spaces that ordinarily are not revealed. In a German Pension focuses closely on the often painful cycles of women’s experiences both of and through their bodies. It is not surprising that, after losing a child she was made ashamed of carrying, a young woman writer would want to articulate such hardships. Her first published collection reveals Mansfield as an unflinching writer of the experience of the female body, and her words and images sink deep because of her boldness. As she moved on in her career to even more modern experiments of short fiction, however, she reconceptualized pregnancy in a somewhat more positive light. Virginia Woolf once wrote that we must “think back through our mothers if we are women” (A Room of One’s Own, 76). When Mansfield wanted a child for many years but did not have one, rethinking maternity for her involved reconsidering her mother’s own pregnancies.20 After the death of her brother in the first world war, Mansfield wished to give his memory new life; instead of linking pregnancy to stasis and confinement, she associated it with a liberating journey taken in childhood. It was not until Mansfield wrote her story “Prelude” (begun earlier as “The Aloe”) that she gave the idea of imaginative awakening to a mother figure, and she accomplished this through that figure’s interaction with a new geographic space. While Susan Gubar would like to include Mansfield with other twentiethcentury women writers who give a “celebration of female artistry” (“Birth,” 26) and show “uniquely female images of creativity” (27), we cannot truly see this until “Prelude,” which shows a more positive depiction of pregnancy than In a German Pension.21 As Susan Gubar and Mary Burgan have shown, Mansfield’s younger brother’s death had a profound influence on Mansfield’s rewriting of “The Aloe,” as did Mansfield’s subsequent travels. In the late summer of 1915 Leslie Beauchamp came to visit Mansfield in England; one month later, he died during training exercises 20

 Mansfield’s 1914 journal reveals her longing for a child: “And I thought: if I had a child, I would play with it now and lose myself in it and kiss it and make it laugh. And I’d use a child as my guard against my deepest feeling” (Journal, 4). Mansfield worked on “Prelude” from 1915–1917. 21  Mary Burgan agrees that we might see Mansfield’s “positive ‘revision’ of women’s creativity” only in “Prelude” (Illness, n. 183). She adds, “Mansfield worked to that story through In a German Pension, where self-revulsion and rejections of feminine maternal solidarity are the presiding themes” (n. 184).

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for the war. O’Sullivan and Scott term this event “the most severe emotional crisis of her life” (197). Consistent with her earlier patterns of using travel for escape, Mansfield fled to the south of France to try to work through her grief, staying in a hotel and then a villa in Bandol, a seaside resort, with her partner, John Middleton Murry. She stayed for six months, trying to free herself mentally as well as geographically. When Murry returned to England in December, Mansfield wrote to him of her love for this new setting: “When I woke this morning & opened the shutters & saw the dimpling sea I knew I was beginning to love this place—this South of France— … . The palm trees after the rain were magnificent—so firm and so green and standing up like stiff bouquets before the Lord” (LKM, 220). In moving to the villa, she describes, “It stands alone in a small garden with terraces. It faces the ‘midi’ & gets the sun all day long” (239). These changes of place, surrounded by sea, sun, and gardens with abundant trees and plants, brought back memories of her New Zealand home and inspired the setting of “Prelude” and “At the Bay.” In January 1916, while staying at the villa, she wrote in her journal, “now I want to write recollections of my own country” and added that “in my thoughts I range with him [Leslie] over all the remembered places” (Journal, 42). She soon imagined a way to revise “The Aloe” in her brother’s honor. In February 1916 she wrote in her journal, “And now I know what the last chapter is. It is your birth—your coming in the autumn. You in Grandmother’s arms under the tree … . That chapter will end the book. The next book will be yours and mine. And you must mean the world to Linda” (48).22 Again, a change of place for Mansfield, this time in France, inspired a new kind of writing; it encouraged her to think back to another journey taken long ago. “Prelude” is largely based on Mansfield’s own family’s relocation to Karori, New Zealand, “outside the city, to give the children the experience of country life,” when she was four years old; “here the last Beauchamp child was conceived, a boy, Leslie,” born in 1894 (Tomalin, 11). The baby boy is not yet born in “Prelude,” which chronicles the family’s move, though he appears in the story’s sequel, “At the Bay,” where he inspires love in his mother in a way the other children have not. When she spends time with him and sees his dark-blue eyes open and his lovely “dimpled” smile, even in her attempt to show her scorn for babies, she is won over and feels “something so new” (192).23 “Prelude” might then be seen to represent the “conception” of the brother.24 The story is a subtle celebration of pregnancy, though the mother at first rejects the idea that she needs another child. 22

 Burgan comments that, “under the influence of mutual celebrations of old times in New Zealand with her brother, she intensified her program of recapturing the past by extending and recasting it, feeling that she ‘owed’ her brother the debt of reestablishing his right to be born and cared for in an emotionally distant family” (Illness, 101). 23  This description bears a resemblance to Mansfield’s sudden love for the “dimpling” sea in France, despite her sorrow. 24  Although Susan Gubar does not literally imagine the story as one of conception, she finds it a tale of female creativity and readying for pregnancy: “While the title ‘Prelude’

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In “Prelude” the journey from town to country is significant, showing, in contrast to the stories of In a German Pension, the pleasure of mobility; it seems to awaken a feeling in the mother, Linda Burnell, that has long been absent. The family drives away until “everything familiar was left behind” (100). The first image in “Prelude” is of Linda and her own mother about to leave with a cartload of “absolute necessities” and deciding, since there is no more room in the cart, to leave behind the two youngest girls, Lottie and Kezia (94). Linda’s decision, accompanied by a “strange little laugh,” is a symbolic one representing her true feelings about her children. Linda has already had three daughters, and she regrets feeling bound into a marriage where her primary role is reproduction.25 She “could not possibly have held a lump of a child on hers [her lap] for any distance” (94). This description of not wanting a child on her “lap” shows her resisting pregnancy just as she resists holding her girls. Linda likes her husband, but only “in the daytime” (138), when he is not pressuring her to have more children. Her husband thinks, looking at the children’s table, “That’s where my boy ought to sit” (122), but she imagines telling him, “I have had three great lumps of children already” (138). Again, the word “lump” implies she still sees her children as parts of her body, weighing her down. Her real dream is of travel and escape; “she saw herself driving away from them all in a little buggy, driving away from everybody and not even waving” (109). Her impulse may remind us, disconcertingly, of the childwho-was-tired who sought only a “little white road … that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all” (“The Child-Who-Was-Tired,” 91) to free herself from childcare. However, “Prelude” progresses somewhere quite different from Mansfield’s early tale of infanticide. Linda may not yet be pregnant, but throughout the story she is treated as if she is in a fragile condition; when Lottie and Kezia arrive, their grandmother tells them, “Poor little mother has got such a headache” and they see her lying with her feet up in front of the fire (102). The next morning, Linda’s sister comes in to tell her “you are not to get up yet” (110). Images of swollenness fill the story, and the idea of pregnancy links Linda to the aloe plant she and her mother examine in the garden, described as “fat” and “swelling” and which miraculously may flower this year, although it only flowers “once every hundred years” (118). With its image of rare and celebrated fertility, the aloe’s flowering presents reproduction in a new light for Linda. As Linda and her mother gaze up at what might be buds forming on the plant’s top, they see the grassy bank beneath the plant rise up “like a wave, and the aloe seemed to ride upon it like a ship with the oars lifted” (137). The aloe represents at once the power of femininity and the power of travel. Linda delights refers most explicitly to the characters’ prelude to life in a new house, then, it also alludes to the prelude before the birth of the little brother and to the process of composition that allows him to live again” (“Birth,” 38). 25  This is specifically reiterated in “At the Bay” when Linda mentally rejects the notion that it is “the common lot of women to bear children” and adds that “She was broken, made weak, her courage was gone, through child-bearing” (191).

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in the flower’s protective thorns, thinking, “Nobody would dare to come near the ship or to follow after” (138). In “At the Bay” we learn that Linda’s early dreams of adventure travel were cut short by her marriage to Stanley. She remembers as a child in Australia sitting on the veranda with her father, who promised fancifully, “‘As soon as you and I are old enough, Linny, we’ll cut off somewhere, we’ll escape. Two boys together. I have a fancy I’d like to sail up a river in China.’ Linda saw that river, very wide, covered with little rafts and boats.” Just then she notices a “young man with bright ginger hair” walking by, and her father teases her about Stanley being her “beau” (190). Before seeing Stanley, Linda is sunk deep in her imaginative exploration of, as her father pictures it, a boy’s seafaring adventure; now the “ship” of the aloe may remind her of the boats she held in her mind’s eye so long ago. This portrayal of Linda connects explicitly to Mansfield’s memory of her mother saying she wished she had been an explorer rather than a wife.26 While Linda’s marriage has largely kept her grounded, the renewing journey to the country awakens new inspiration in her. The first night in their new home includes a scene of the Burnells going to bed and sharing a moment of intimacy (107). Given Mansfield’s remarks in her journal about giving her brother “birth” through her writing, she may intend this scene to represent his conception if Linda is not pregnant already. In February 1916, Mansfield wrote of her brother “That in every word I write and every place I visit I carry you with me. Indeed, that might be the motto of my book. There are daisies on the table and a red flower, like a poppy, shines through” (Journal, 46). The idea of Mansfield “carrying” her brother parallels Linda’s pregnancy; Mansfield will shelter his body and bring him to life through her words. The morning after the intimate embrace, Linda dreams of a tiny bird that swells until it is a baby with a “gaping bird-mouth” (“Prelude,” 108). Because Mansfield’s little brother was given the middle name “Heron,” an accidental misspelling of Herron (Mantz and Murry, 109), the bird imagery may allude to him. Although Linda’s dream image of the bird baby is alarming, especially with its gaping mouth implying extreme neediness, it does not linger with her: in the morning “she had forgotten” (“Prelude,” 111). As Linda lies in the bed after her husband leaves, “She turned over to the wall and idly, with one finger, she traced a poppy on the wall-paper with a leaf and a stem and a fat bursting bud. In the quiet, and under her tracing finger, the poppy seemed to come alive” (111). The poppy, symbolic of the baby brother as indicated by Mansfield in her journal, is coming alive first through Linda’s imagination and then through her body.27

26

 In fact, in Mansfield’s journal, the memory is titled “The Rivers of China” (168) and Mansfield’s mother mentions she would have liked to explore these rivers. 27  Gubar, who quotes from Mansfield’s journal (but not the part about the poppy), also reads this passage from “Prelude” as a creative awakening. She argues that Linda here “comes to terms with her dread of mothering” (“Birth,” 34).

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As the scene continues, Linda’s creative and fanciful thoughts of inanimate objects connect her to her children in ways we have not seen before. Linda has been lying awake, listening to the girls play with their dolls outside. As their voices fade, Linda’s imagination soars; the tassel on her quilt becomes “a funny procession of dancers with priests attending … . For there were some tassels that did not dance at all but walked stately, bent forward as if praying or chanting” (111, Mansfield’s ellipses). By connecting to this creative energy and to the children she has discarded at the story’s outset, Linda seems to find a moment of beauty in her everyday life. In an earlier scene, Kezia (a version of Mansfield as a child) has shown her own artistry when she makes a tiny “picture” (118) for her grandmother in a matchbox: “First she would put a leaf inside with a big violet lying on it, then she would put a very small white picotee, perhaps” (117). Artistic creativity with flowers links mother and daughter in these scenes. Later, while going out to see the aloe with her own mother, Linda has a realization: “What am I guarding myself for so preciously? I shall go on having children and Stanley will go on making money and the children and the gardens will grow bigger and bigger, with whole fleets of aloes in them for me to choose from” (139). Though Linda gives herself over to more childbearing, she does so while visualizing a future with a means of escape, at least imaginatively: not just one ship beckoning to her but “whole fleets of aloes.” The aloe becomes a positive symbol of maternity as well as inner mobility and, just as Linda predicts, her baby boy is born before “At the Bay” begins. “Prelude” shows an embrace of pregnancy quite absent from the stories of In a German Pension. By its publication Mansfield had been wanting a child for a long time. In a 1919 journal entry she wonders what her doctor would think “if I’d told him that until a few days ago I had had a little child, aged five and three quarters, of indeterminate sex? Some days it was a boy. For two years now it had very often been a little girl … .” (134–135, Mansfield’s ellipses). In rewriting her mother’s pregnancy, Mansfield is able to share in the creative maternal process.28 She even puts something of herself into Linda in the scene in which she is lying in the bed looking at the wallpaper. The passage “She opened her eyes wide, and she heard the silence spinning its soft endless web” (“Prelude,” 112) echoes a 1918 passage in Mansfield’s journal called “Hotels”: “I seem to spend half of my life arriving at strange hotels … . I slip down in the sheets. Waiting for the shadows to come out of the corners and spin their slow, slow web over the Ugliest Wallpaper of All” (87). Mansfield has created the bedroom scene in “Prelude” by thinking of herself in a new place. For Mansfield, new spaces always brought the dream of new opportunities. This kind of renewal is exactly what the new house in the country represents for Linda. It is no longer the stasis Mansfield found in 28

  Though Mansfield lost her unborn child in Germany and her subsequent illnesses kept her from having another, she achieves a maternal creativity through her stories. Indeed, she sometimes thought of her stories as her children. We see this in a January 1908 letter to her father’s secretary: “I feel most horrid to have bothered you so persistently about my annoying children … . You have indeed been a Godmother to them” (LKM, 36).

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Germany but the ideal she had imagined in Bruges, an awakening of the female body accompanying an act of travel. When a World Tour is Not Enough, the Language of the Body Remains: The Creation of Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept In Mansfield’s writing, we see one of the first modernist women writers struggling to articulate pregnancy for her readers; while wary of the limitations it could impose on women’s lives, she also sought to resituate it as a potentially positive creative state for women. Three decades later, Canadian Elizabeth Smart, an avid reader of Mansfield and a fellow lover of travel, would present an even fuller articulation of the pregnant female body and its creative possibilities. After a trip around the world could not completely provide the impetus she needed to begin her writerly career, she found that writing the body gave her the most powerful material. Enamored with a married English poet named George Barker, Smart enabled his passage to California, spent a year moving from place to place seeking a location for their love, and became pregnant with Barker’s child. Smart would use the experience to develop her own authorial voice, and just before the birth of her daughter in 1941 she finished her manuscript of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, a work that Brigid Brophy terms a “masterpiece of poetic prose” (7) and that is regarded as one of the earliest works of Canadian modernism.29 The narrative replaces the unfinished story of Smart’s world tour with a less geographically ambitious but more dire tale of travel and a sensual story of the body, its desires, and its creative powers. Elizabeth Smart, born in Canada in 1913, arrived late to the scene of transatlantic modernism but accelerated herself there in full force by devouring the works of the modernists from an early age. While she and Mansfield were born twenty-five years apart, the authors’ early lives mirror one another; like Mansfield, Smart was the third daughter of five children born to a well-to-do couple, she wrote creatively as a child, and she came to England to study music before turning to writing.30 The young women also shared a geographic restlessness; for Smart, Canada was both a beloved home and a confining space. She looked elsewhere, especially to England

29

 Canada’s history of modernist fiction begins after the corresponding movements in Europe and the United States. Barbara Goddard challenges the tradition of not placing the beginnings of Canadian modernism before 1960, and By Grand Central Station, overlooked in volumes such as The Literary History of Canada, is the earliest example she cites. Smart’s work appeared in August 1945 (Sullivan, 227); though it received many favorable reviews, it faded from public interest until its reissue in 1977 (336). 30  After high school, Smart studied piano, theory, and harmony as well as literature and history in England (Sullivan, 58).

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and mainland Europe, for creative inspiration.31 Smart knew Mansfield’s work and showed a fascination for her writing style. During a trip to Sweden and Germany in 1933 with Mrs. Alfred Watt, traveling as a personal companion and secretary, nineteen-year-old Smart read Mansfield’s journal (Necessary Secrets, 21) and transcribed a 1915 passage: “Life with other people becomes a blur: it does with J., but it’s enormously valuable and marvelous when I’m alone, the detail of life, the life of life” (qtd. on 30). Smart then reflects: It was a blur all day. I tried to write—then in desperation I turned to K.M. She says the truth—I know the truth … . Why can’t I work? This blur, this apathy, haze—I don’t know. She gave me some new life suddenly, at last a gleam of life … . I will do it and I can. I will go for a walk and see things and note things. I will write those things on Sweden. I can. (Necessary Secrets, 30, Smart’s italics)

Mansfield’s meditations give Smart “new life” as she looks to her as a muse. In Mansfield’s original, she is traveling in Paris, enjoying an idle “amble” where she observes the river, people, “delightful places” (Journal, 28). She remarks that her powers of observation as a flâneuse are most powerful when she is by herself: “the amount of minute and delicate joy I get out of watching people and things when I am alone is simply enormous” (Journal, 29). This passage clearly resonated with Smart, and she resolved to use Sweden the way that Mansfield used Paris: as inspiration for minute observation. Smart had already decided to be a writer, and she hoped that travel would give her the impetus to find a voice. On her trip to Europe she began to explore freewriting, noting, “I wrote it down as far as I could and then I was happy—I was alive again at last” (Necessary Secrets, 31). She again finds a feeling of “life,” this time feeling “alive” through her own writing, and continues to describe people and places she sees. Reading Woolf’s The Waves and To the Lighthouse inspires her as well, although she is concerned that her writing may be overly influenced by others. She remarks that Woolf herself reflects Mansfield’s influence, and she in turn wants to be inspired by both of them (38).32 On the trip Smart also reads Joyce’s Ulysses and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She defends the “sensual 31

 Rosemary Sullivan writes, “Elizabeth could not find creative nourishment in Canada; she was already convinced that the real writers were in England” (78). Elizabeth Podnieks adds Smart, as a Canadian attracted to the metropolitan centers of Europe, to the list of “peripheral” modernist writers who, in the words of Judith Kegan Gardiner, experienced “The Exhilaration of Exile” in leaving home (qtd. on 245). 32  Smart also reads Woolf’s The Years in 1937, writing “I finished The Years. Not as good as The Waves but full of allusive meaning … . I love V.W.” (Necessary Secrets, 168). Though Smart would go farther than Woolf in articulating the passions of the body, Woolf recognized that writing the body was a necessary next step for women. In “Professions for Women” she writes of a girl “fishing” in thought who is removed from her imaginative world by the realization that there is “something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say” (288).

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joys” displayed in Lawrence’s banned novel (45); she would soon welcome such sensuality into her own writing as her style matured. Having readied herself to become a writer by exploring the high modernists, Elizabeth returned to Ottawa and began a diary. Using this medium, Smart started to train herself for a writerly future; as Elizabeth Podnieks remarks, “These are the journals of … an artist searching for her voice and style, honing her craft as she goes along” (230).33 On December 18, 1933, Smart announces, “This is going to be a disciplinary diary. Something must be written every day” (Necessary Secrets, 47). She continues, “I shall say what I feel and I shall talk about myself unto the very last page, and I shall make no apologies” (48). Her journal provides her with a working record of her thoughts, uncensored. For instance, on this day she writes from her bed with “water-on-the-knee”; delighted in her solitude, she expresses: “Bed is the most auspicious place … the great things come out clearly and nature is nearer, because you have more vitality to give to infinite details” (48). Like other women modernists, she champions the power of inscribing the details of the moment from intimate spaces. Most strikingly, in this entry she refers to the written work as her child: “Nothing matters here but producing the child—deformed, premature, blind or legless—but produced. I think it is death to keep it all in” (48). Here Smart begins to stress the importance of writing through the body, of giving “life” to written expression. Revising a space of women’s confinement (the bed), often equated with illness or labor in childbirth, Smart recreates it as a place of writing where a person can find “the joy to create” that “comes from deep within, with a pull and a heavy strain” (49). As Smart vows to write through the body, she celebrates it in her journals. She gains inspiration by sitting in the sun and reading out of the Bible from “The Song of Solomon” (68). A poem from November 18 reads, “I’m going to be a poet, I said / But even as I said it I felt the round softness of my breasts / And my mind wandered and wavered / Back to the earthly things” (66). The “But” signals a contradiction felt between being a poet and enjoying the physical body. In finding her voice, Smart discovered she could encompass both. Undergoing a sensual awakening while taking college classes in London, Smart decided one night to push the furniture to the walls and dance in her bathing suit, abandoning herself to jazz, Ravel, and Mozart. “Isn’t the body the most wonderful instrument—the most wonderful plaything!” (78), she muses, conceptualizing it as a device for artistic production. At age twenty-two Elizabeth was presented with a remarkable travel opportunity which provided inspiration for her writing and personal development. Mrs. Watt had organized a world tour to “speak to the Associated Country Women of the World,” and invited Elizabeth to come once again as her personal companion 33

 Podnieks groups Smart with Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, and Anaïs Nin, all novelists who “lived modernism as much as they wrote it,” traveling to and writing in cities where “modernism flourished,” and creating life-long diaries which “resemble the respective writer’s fiction” (8).

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(86). Beginning in August 1936, the two women visited Canada, the Western United States, Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Ceylon, Egypt, and Palestine. Of the trip, Smart later wrote somewhat belittlingly in a “Preface” to this part of her journal, “I call this a detour because it was only an excuse to put off for a little while the settling of my future” (86). The tour was both enlightening and dull for Smart: enlightening because there was a variety of fascinating new places to see, dull because she was there to iron, carry luggage, and entertain at meetings. The excitement of travel was also marred by her lack of independence. Rosemary Sullivan notes humorously, “Sending Elizabeth round the world with Mrs. Watt was like sending Van Gogh to Tahiti with a United Nations fact-finding team” (94). The trip was, nonetheless, beneficial to Smart as a writer; Podnieks, who has published in depth on Smart’s diary, agrees: “The trip did help her find some direction, and specifically, it came through and by the diary itself” (236). During these travels, the language in Elizabeth’s journals is often stimulated by the beauty around her. For example, in a passage on the Butchart Gardens in Victoria, she exercises her poetic powers of observation: This garden is so alive, so potential … . It is full of smell, and a damp, sharp, early autumn air, stimulating, but not too cold … . I feel hidden and secluded behind a grown hawthorn tree, loaded with dull red beady berries, like a gypsy with too much ornament on … . There are roses behind, magnificently ruined, like a wonderful evening dress the morning after the party. (Necessary Secrets, 98)

Smart illustrates her insights in grand similes and sometimes plays with parts of speech, anticipating her later style. Experience with the world has begun to awaken her writing. Travel frees her mind for reading and thinking and opens up new mental imaginings, and her stream-of-consciousness journal grows more expressive. As for other young women of her era with the ability to travel for leisure away from their families, travel allowed Smart ample opportunity to explore the self and to express her newly forming independent identity. In her journal she is alternately childlike, wading streams and climbing trees in New Zealand, and womanly, flirting wildly with young men on a boat near Samoa and Fiji. Sexuality and scenery seem to combine as she feels that “if I stood still for a while and listened and felt New Zealand, itself, the country, would come and permeate me, and I could love it” (113). At times, she seeks more aesthetic stimulation than the countryside can provide. She writes, “The trouble about N.Z. is that it has no imagination. Even the country, the wild country, doesn’t stir you to dream and create” (121). By the time she reaches Australia, she fears her diary is growing dull and decides, “I must be born again” (123). She finds this sense of renewal once they reach Palestine, and realizes how much her journey has benefited her: “It is extraordinary. I am a different person … . I can suddenly see the result of my six-month experiment and the things I have learnt on my travels. I am new-made” (147).

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When Smart returned to London in February 1937 she began working on a book about her world travels called Details of a Detour. On March 10, she writes “I awoke alive and worked all day. Lunch on a tray. Up to chapter twentyeight of ‘Details.’ O it was good!” She continues, “A good and moral day with beginning, imagination, birth, and end, all enough” (158). Again Smart uses “life” or “alive” to signal creative alertness. Between the day’s beginning and end come “imagination” and “birth” as she creates her book; as in her earlier journal passage written while in bed, Smart associates the creative process with maternity. While she never published the travel manuscript, her travel writings brought her new life as a writer. Smart was becoming increasingly aware of the powers of her own body, calling it a “powerful and easy weapon” in a journal entry (155). The body’s passions lent power to her aesthetic meditations, as in these musings on beauty: Beauty is not sight or sound. It is a feeling. It is a spirit. It permeates through you. It urges you out in a gesture of abandonment or surrender … . Beauty is holy. Beauty is earthly. It is God. It is sex. It is the momentary harmonious union of God with nature. (170–171)

Seeking a vibrant life and realizing that the body and its pleasures were part of this, Smart traveled to the South of France and spent time with friends in the home of artist Jean Varda. Ready to experiment with physical intimacy, Smart had a relationship with Varda and then with a woman named Alice Paalen, whom she met in Paris.34 During this period of sexual awakening Smart’s writing matures. Alice Van Wart, who edited Smart’s journals, rightly notes that the entries from this part of Smart’s life “begin to show a change in the style of her writing: there is a shift from an external focus to an internal one, the tone becomes meditative, and the language imagistic and metaphoric” (Necessary Secrets, 170).35 Searching for a proper expressive form, Smart comments in her journal, “A Poem, a note, a diary. These are the raw moments, the raw thoughts. I do not want, I am irritated with the devious method and hidden indirectness of the novel, for instance, or even the short story, or a play” (201–202). When she thinks of what she wishes to say, these forms will not do: “I need a new form even for a poem … . Each word must rip virgin ground. No past effort must ease the new birth. Rather than that, the haphazard note, the unborn child, the bottled embryo” (202). Metaphors of sex, conception, pregnancy, and miscarriage fill her journals at this time as she seeks a new form in writing. She adds on January 16, “I cannot write poems now. Other things are rumbling pregnantly in my brain but cannot emerge yet” (236). During this period of connecting bodily experience and sensuality with the written word, Smart fell in love with George Barker, a young poet and protégé  For a discussion of their relationship see Necessary Secrets, 230.  Podnieks agrees, writing, “Poetry and passion exploded simultaneously,” bringing about Smart’s “sexualized writing identity” (257). 34 35

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of T. S. Eliot.36 In August 1937 when browsing books on Charing Cross Road she became riveted by Barker’s stirring and sensuous language. Rosemary Sullivan describes it this way: “Had anyone been watching her at that moment, the spectacle would have been intriguing: an attractive young woman, blonde, blue-eyed, smartly dressed, standing there as if transported” (1). While it took Smart many months to meet Barker, she continued to read his work. She writes in her diary on March 1, 1939, “If George Barker should appear now I would eat him up with eagerness” (Necessary Secrets, 240). In reading his new volume of poetry she marvels, “he alone says exactly what I wanted to say,” revealing a jealousy of his poetic powers (245). While Smart was amorously basking in Barker’s language, the poet was in need of assistance. A second world war was beginning and Barker and his wife sought safe passage out of Japan, where George was currently teaching. When Smart discovered this, she wrote to over a hundred people to try to secure the funds for their journey (Sullivan, 144, 148). In a letter postmarked June 28, she invited Barker to join her in California, “40 miles South of Monterey & wild & rough. But beautiful” (Autobiographies, 25) where “There is room for you to stay … as long as you like, & for writing it’s ideal” (26). It was a dangerous temptation, however, for she was enamored with Barker’s poems, and the author was but one step removed. On July 19, 1940, Smart met Barker and his wife at the bus station in Monterey, not even knowing what the poet looked like.37 The year became both a heaven and a hell for Smart as she began a love affair with Barker, agonized over his onagain/off-again relationship with his wife, endured an arrest on the Arizona border, tiptoed around her family’s scorn for having a relationship with a married man, and became pregnant with Barker’s child. By the end of the first year together, she had experienced the “new life” she so avidly sought and had found the literary form she needed. Smart finished her poetic prose piece By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept two weeks before her child was born at the end of August 1941 (Necessary Secrets, 268), and she revised and published the manuscript in 1945. Articulating forbidden love, sex, and desire, Smart’s narrative later was selected by Margaret Drabble in 1968, during the heyday of second-wave feminism, to represent, anticipatory of later texts, a radically innovative work which showcased the female body and combined eros with lyricism.38 Partly because of its intent on articulating, from one woman’s perspective, secret yearnings and desires, 36

 Part of Smart’s attraction for Barker may have been his young age. Born, like Smart, in 1913, Barker already was accomplishing in his poetic expression what Smart wished to achieve. 37  Smart asks in her June 28 letter, “What do you look like? I never saw a portrait or anything, & know only what I deduct” (Autobiographies, 26). 38  Podnieks discusses Drabble’s “Women Novelists” lecture, given in 1968. Podnieks remarks, “Drabble uses Smart’s By Grand Central Station as an example of a work that has radically and powerfully combined the lyric with the erotic. Smart’s novel consequently stands as a work that was ahead of its time” (227).

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fulfillments and disappointments, the book is so inwardly focused that the narrative arc is difficult to understand without knowing Smart’s biography. At the same time, applying too much biography ignores the fictional remove, for what Smart chooses to show us is embellished truth, with unnamed characters.39 It is perhaps best perceived as a semi-autobiographical love story heavily inspired by Smart’s perception of real events. A record of travel as well as emotion, the intimate account of her passionate relationship takes us through California, Arizona, New York, Ottawa, and British Columbia as the narrator searches for a space to articulate the passions of the body and, later on, her pregnancy. The biblical title of Smart’s work, which provides a jarringly modern replacement of “the Waters of the Babylon” from Psalm 137 with “Grand Central Station,” the large train terminal in New York City, juxtaposes the poetic with the banal. Just so, the text concerns the narrator’s attempt to have a poetic awakening of love in a world confined by tradition, suspicion, and war. The narrator’s descriptions are infused with mythic and biblical references, while others’ comments about her relationship sound trite and clichéd, often constrained by slang. The biblical title also references the wanderings of the Jews in exile; by the end of the book, the narrator is in exile from her homeland because of her pregnancy, and the father of her unborn child does not show up to meet her at the train station. While the book is filled with images of travel, the narrator does not ever successfully find a place for herself. By Grand Central Station is the story of a changing relationship followed through diverse spaces. The opening scene, showing the narrator “standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in” (17), shows both great trepidation and great promise in the possibilities provided by impulsive travel.40 In the first section of the text, the narrator, the poet, and his wife reside in California. More than in any other part of the book, the narrator here remains attuned to her environment as she produces a narrative of travel and leisure; a new place awakens her senses and her language. “So, through the summer days, we sit on the Californian coast” (18), she writes, noting the “double-size flowers,” sea otters, and cliffs (19). The wild beauty is laced with potential hazards, however, as the narrator also notes the “poison oak,” rattlesnakes, and black widow spiders, and recounts the legends of women jumping from the cliffs into the sea (19). The narrator is drawn to the poet but is afraid to act on a forbidden love that will end in catastrophe. The California excursion is just a deferment of the love affair the narrator begins to characterize 39

 For this reason, Rosemary Sullivan chooses to see the text as “archetypal.” Sullivan writes, “One of the extraordinary things … is that the male character is never objectively described. When asked about this, Elizabeth replied: ‘Of course he is faceless; the he is a love object.’ The book is not autobiography, a personal account of a love affair; it is archetypal” (153). Nonetheless, when writing a synopsis of By Grand Central Station, the names Smart used for the first draft were Elizabeth and George (Autobiographies, 49). 40  Although no names are mentioned, when the narrator looks at the “disembarkers” coming off the bus (17), the sharp-eyed reader may notice the name “Barker.”

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as inevitable: “The long days seduce all thought away, and we lie like lizards in the sun, postponing our lives indefinitely” (19). The car, a place of movement where the narrator and the poet can be alone together, gives them an alternate space for their relationship to develop. On one occasion, the poet kisses her forehead “driving along the coast in the evening” (22) and she imagines “wherever I go, like the sword of Damocles, that greater never-to-be-given kiss hangs above my doomed head” (22). Her personal geography is changed by their attraction. “It is written. Nothing can escape” (22), she writes. “The mourning-doves mercilessly coo my sentence in the woods” (23). In love with a man who was “only a word” to her until recently (20), the narrator feels their fate inextricably bound up with language, writing, “sentences.” The two writers are drawn together with the help of a typewriter that serves as a pretense for being alone: “For excuse, for our being together, we sit at the typewriter, pretending a necessary collaboration. He has a book to be typed, but the words I try to force out die on the air and dissolve into kisses” (25). By Grand Central Station is much concerned with locating new spaces of possibility—new geographic places, new bodily realms, new freeing mental spaces. In a synopsis written in the 1980s, Smart writes of her characters, “They buy an open car and all three start out on a journey to discover new country in a new kind of relationship” (Autobiographies, 50). The “new country” they hope to find is both external and internal. Barker once referred to California as the “unimaginable continent where everything is possible,” and the narrator seems to have similar feelings (qtd. in Sullivan, 155). From the beginning, the paradise of the California wilderness, with its canyons, “gentle flowers” (Grand Central, 35), “eucalyptus” (31), and wild animals plays a key part in the narrator’s descriptions of their amorousness. She feels herself “over-run, jungled in my bed” and “infested with a menagerie of desires” as she imagines her body taking on the invading wilderness (23). Using the language of the earth and its lush vegetation, she writes, “I am indeed and mortally pierced with the seeds of love” (23). She describes her first romantic encounter with the poet by conceptualizing herself as the earth, the recipient: “Under the waterfall he surprised me bathing and gave me what I could no more refuse than the earth can refuse the rain” (24). The relationship then grows and bears fruit: “The frustrations of past postponement … hang ripe to burst with the birth of any moment” (25). Smart frequently in her journals has imagined new acts of creativity as a kind of birth. Here a new “birth” is imminent as her relationship with the poet matures. Throughout the California sections of By Grand Central Station, the narrator continues to define her relationship in metaphors of water and earth. Echoing a passage of Genesis where God’s spirit moves upon the “face” of the waters, the narrator figures the poet as God, while she remains the earth: When we lie near the swimming pool in the sun, he comes through the bamboo bushes like land emerging from chaos. But I am the land, and he is the face upon the waters. He is the moon upon the tides, the dew, the rain, all seeds and all the

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honey of love … . I am the earth the plants grow through. But when they sprout I also will be a god. (40)

Her lover begins as her anchoring land, but she soon becomes that earth herself. She is the vessel for his seed: “I am the earth the plants grow through,” she writes, thus anticipating her role as mother for his child. And yet, this will not make her passive, but powerful: “when they sprout I also will be a god.” Writing while pregnant, Smart looks ahead to her maternal role and empowers herself. Her strength will reside in language; after all, it is language that gives Barker, in her eyes, his god-like power, and she wishes this for herself. In Part Three, the narrative shifts geographically as the couple seeks a better location to explore their feelings; we sense that the poet’s wife has left, and the couple moves from the wild paradise to a place with a “swimming pool.”41 In the home of the Wurtle family, the narrator and the poet can express their love openly, but for the first time we sense the jarring juxtaposition of the narrator’s idealized sense of their relationship with others’ prosaic articulation: “When we tear ourselves out of the night … , Mrs Wurtle says, ‘Romance, eh?’” (41). When Mr Wurtle demands, “Then I have it from you there is such a thing as Love?” the narrator pities the pettiness of the way “he bandies the Word that Was in the Beginning” (41). The biblical allusion demonstrates the writer’s belief in the conceptual power of language as well as her own personal investment in the word “love” and all that it represents for her. Still playing with the conjunction of inner and outer geographies, the narrator sees the California landscape reflected in her lover: “he is also all things: the night, the resilient mornings, the tall poinsettias and hydrangeas, the lemon trees, the residential palms” (42). Feeling intimately acquainted with the world around her, the narrator imagines geography moving at her command: “I can compress the whole Mojave Desert into one word of inspiration, or call all America to obey my whim … . I am delirious with power and invulnerability” (43). She draws power from their union and, again, language gives her that power. She comments, “I am still empress of a new-found land, that neither Columbus nor Cortez could have equalled, even in their instigating dream” (44). As a woman explorer of the body in California, she discovers a “new-found land” to rival that of the male explorers and conquistadors of the Americas; reversing the usual trope of conquered land as female body, she at once claims the California terrain and the male body for her exploration. This California paradise is too soon left behind, however. The couple seems to desire the freedom to define their own relationship counter to custom and to go where they please, but the thrill of their newfound mobility gives way when they journey east. Part Four opens with the interruptive line: “But at the Arizona border they stopped us and said Turn Back” (47). The couple finds that pleasure 41  We know from Smart’s biography that this is Los Angeles, where Elizabeth stayed with friends the Witchners who become “the Wurtles” in her fictionalized account (Sullivan, 164).

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travel during wartime is regarded with suspicion, and their travels together end prematurely. This section is inspired by Smart and Barker’s arrest at the Arizona border in 1940. As Smart explained years later: “the USA was very jittery and obsessed with Fifth Columnists, spies, Communists, infiltrating their sacred shores. So to catch these enemies of America they decided to put officers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation at all the State borders.” The officials arrested Smart and Barker under the Mann Act, “crossing a state line with the intention of committing fornication in the next state” (Autobiographies, 47). Barker and Smart’s love became criminalized as their relationship was surveyed for signs of “fornication.” In the striking section Smart creates from this experience in By Grand Central Station, she juxtaposes the FBI men’s intrusive questions with the narrator’s answers, quotations from “The Song of Solomon”; this demonstrates more than any other place in the book the inability of the narrator’s love, and her grand idealism of that love, to fit within the borders of traditional custom and language. For instance, when the inquisitors ask, “Did intercourse take place?” she answers, aloud or in her mind, “(I sat down under his shadow with great delight and his fruit was sweet to my taste)” (Grand Central, 47). To punctuate the scene, an unclarified voice retorts, “Get wise to yourself, Solomon, lay off all that stuff” (49). Common slang does not allow for the beauty or elaborate metaphor that the narrator finds in her love. The power of language is taken out of her hands; “It’s not for you to talk,” a gaolwoman tells her (49). When writing is produced in this section, it belongs not to the narrator or her lover but to the FBI agents: “I sat in a little room with barred windows while they typed” (47). The typewriter is no longer a symbol of the couple’s intimacy, but of an inadequate translation of their relationship to a larger world. Of the FBI files, the narrator laments, “It is all written down. There are fourteen sheets and six copies of each” (49).42 She earlier remarked mystically of their conjoined fates, “It is written” (22). Now she feels she has lost control of her own love story. Separated from her lover, the narrator’s self-empowerment through travel and sexuality seems to draw to a close. She journeys alone on a train, “returning to Canada through the fall sunshine” (55), and fears the global vision of a seasoned traveler will mean nothing when matched against “the jealousy of those that stay at home” (57). In Ottawa, she must face her traditional-minded parents: “‘Love? Stuff and nonsense!’ my mother would say, ‘It’s loyalty and decency and common standards of behaviour that count’” (61). Once again, the narrator’s fanciful imaginings are replaced by others’ clichéd, down-to-earth advice: “You’re a clever girl. You’ve got brains. Get busy and make something of yourself” (63). Though the poet makes covert visits, Ottawa does not hold a safe place for their relationship.43 42

 Sullivan notes that there is still a three-page secret FBI file on Smart, not accessible to the public (165). 43  Barker rented a room in Hull and the couple met in cafés because Barker was unwelcome in the Smart home (Sullivan, 166).

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The narrator realizes she must leave: “Where are we going then? Anywhere to be together and alone” (63). She realizes that any new place will suffice if the poet is there, and none will if she cannot have him: “neither nunneries nor Pacific Islands nor jungles nor all the jazz of America nor the frenzy of warzones could hide any corner which housed an ounce of consolation if this failed” (65). Losing her faith in the transformative power of new geographies, she will find inspiration and mobility from within. As Smart developed the Ottawa section of By Grand Central Station, she reworked passages from her “letters” to George Barker from their shared notebook. This allows the narrative to tap into the immediate feelings of passion and frustration she was experiencing, keeping the raw emotion alive in the text. As Smart had once expressed in her journal, she preferred diaries to novels, finding them a more intimate medium transcribing “raw moments, the raw thoughts.” A passage from the notebook appears in By Grand Central Station as the narrator shows her hope for “a poverty-stricken word”—love, we assume—that “gives me everything” (65). The narrator adds: With it I can repopulate all the world. I can bring forth new worlds in underground shelters while the bombs are dropping above; I can do it in lifeboats as the ship goes down; I can do it in prisons without the guard’s permission; and O, when I do it quietly in the lobby while the conference is going on, a lot of statesmen will emerge twirling their moustaches, and see the birth-blood, and know that they have been foiled. Love is as strong as death. (65–66)

In this powerful passage, Smart’s narrator claims as her own combative strength the subversive and womanly power of reproduction.44 With other geographic spaces not fulfilling her needs, she reclaims the body as a space for rebellious and regenerative action. The word “love” escapes all attempts to stifle it; it is a triumph of passion and language. Most of all, it is a defiant feminine language, what Cixous called écriture feminine, that will bring a very vivid and bloody “birth” to confound the male politicians. It is an image of fluid feminine resistance countering the loss of language the narrator felt while in prison. As Smart writes Grand Central while pregnant, she lends many of her current feelings about her pregnancy to her descriptions of the narrator in Parts Seven

44

 In her notebook the passage reads: “I can repopulate the world though. I shall do it quietly in the lobby, while the conference is going on. A lot of stale men will emerge twirling their mustaches, & see the birth of blood, & know they have been foiled.” It is signed “love from Elizabeth” (Autobiographies, 37).

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through Ten.45 Smart worried about what her traditional family would think of her pregnancy. She decided not to reveal her condition to her parents, telling Barker in a February 1941 letter, “I am absolutely determined that they shall never know” and vowing to go somewhere “wild and inaccessible” (Autobiographies, 33). Like Mansfield, she took her pregnant body away from her home, facing the curious stares of strangers. However, Smart was not forced into this exile, and she was far from ashamed of her pregnancy. The child was intentional and she envisioned him as a physical embodiment of her relationship. She confided in a later interview, “I deliberately set out to have a child” (qtd. in Sullivan, 171). Smart had always wanted this child. As a girl, she collected pictures of babies in scrapbooks and founded the “baby club” with a friend (Sullivan, 31, 35).46 Sullivan writes in her biography, “It was a fierce dogmatism of Elizabeth’s, established here in adolescence, that women needed children to be truly women” (31). Similiar to what Kristeva noted about women of a later generation who found maternity central to “their discovery … of the complexity of the female experience” (“Women’s Time,” 30), as a young woman Smart felt that having a baby was part of growing up and reaching her full potential as an adult woman.47 As fiercely traditional as this sounds, Smart in her own life was also equating maternity with women’s artistic strength, enacted with or without a man.48 Sullivan asserts that Smart most wanted “art, love, children. If anything, she was the female imperatrix; she rebelled against everything that would deny her female vision” (3). She connected the birth process (and mothering) with the writing process.49 Of good writing, Smart advises, “Be paternal, maternal, full of humanity” (Necessary Secrets, 143). She saw childbirth and child rearing as something positive and creative, and ultimately even her troubled relationship with Barker could not take that away. The narrator’s pregnancy becomes clear in Part Seven of By Grand Central Station, which Smart’s notes place in Montreal and New York (Autobiographies, 48). The section reflects a harrowing period of Smart and Barker’s relationship; Barker was back with his wife in New York, but still seeing Smart; he was arrested for not traveling with his personal identification papers, and he became ill with 45  Smart later claimed the baby was conceived on a beautiful day when she visited Barker in New York, when she was still in Ottawa (Sullivan, 168). 46  Joining required writing two poems and making a paper bag. Writing thus seemed connected with maternity for Smart from an early age. 47  When Alice Paalen tells her she had a baby at seventeen, Smart thinks rather naïvely, “how much of life I have missed not to have had a baby too at seventeen” (Necessary Secrets, 230). Smart also reflects her desire for a child in her adult diaries; in Australia, she plays with three little boys and comments, “It’s coming over me again—this hungry passion for children” (125). 48  After all, Smart ended up raising four children as a single mother. 49  Podnieks remarks on this, too, commenting, “But if Smart was a product of reproduced mothering, she was also a subverter of it. She appropriated the notion that women are mothers to legitimize her writing, for she described her artistic process in maternal terms” (268).

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quinsy and was hospitalized. In Smart’s narrative we sense the once beautifully liberating relationship has stalled again: “My love, why did you leave me on Lexington Avenue in the Ford that had no brakes?” the narrator asks (75). The car that began their mobility, now with “no brakes,” presents a potentially dangerous end for our narrator. Soon she feels the pregnancy registering in her body: “I drank my coffee, but I had a slight feeling of nausea. It’s to be expected, I don’t mind at all, it’s nothing” (76). She takes the pregnancy in stride, then refigures it as a burden to bear as a sign of her love: “I can carry love like Saint Christopher. It is heavy, but I can carry it” (76).50 Her body has changed the word “love” into something tangible. Pregnancy brings for the narrator both frustrated feelings of confinement and a positive sense of inner strength during a tragic time. War intrudes on the couple’s lives in Part Eight as the poet learns his brother, mother, and grandmother have died in the bombing of the London Underground (79). The narrator asks only, “Why should even ten centuries of the world’s woe lessen the fact that I love? Cradle the seed, cradle the seed, even in the volcano’s mouth. I am the last pregnant woman in a desolated world” (80). She sees her role as protective and vital in this world of war and destruction, and yet she resists her entrapped position in their small hotel room. Knowing the poet is back with his wife, she feels abandoned. She realizes that losing hope might be fatal for “my unborn child” (88), so she makes herself busy with small city wanderings and repetitive domestic tasks. She writes, “I can do nothing, being paralyzed by doubt. I can only wait, like an egg for the twenty-first day, for him to arrive with all the west winds of irrefutable conviction” (88). In this curious simile, the narrator imagines herself as a chicken egg (with an incubation period of twenty-one days) waiting to hatch; though her figure of speech also implies she feels “paralyzed” without her lover, the fertilized egg might also be seen as a symbol of only temporarily arrested momentum. The actuality is that the “egg” will hatch with or without the father, and the seeming paralysis in its development is because all the crucial action and growth is happening on the inside. In fact, by the opening of Part Nine the narrator has channeled that sense of inner momentum and has moved to a new place: “the grass is already green in the country” (93), she writes. At this time in Smart’s life, early April, she had gone to Pender Harbour in British Columbia and told her parents she was leaving to write a book (Autobiographies, 48). While in real life Barker came to stay with Smart for a month, for dramatic convenience she leaves the poet absent from By Grand Central Station. The narrator despairs, “He is not here. He is all gone. There is only the bloated globe” (93). Now her body, often conceptualized as earth in her narrative, and here cast as the earth in its entirety, is “bloated.” Alone with her body in this section of the text, the narrator powerfully articulates her advanced pregnancy in ways that anticipate the later writings of feminist phenomenologists. 50  According to legend, St. Christopher carried the Christ child across a river, though he put his own life in great danger.

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Just as Iris Marion Young writes of pregnancy heightening the awareness of her body and its changing boundaries, giving a new sense of physical space and “mak[ing] me conscious of … the material weight that I am in movement” (“Pregnant Embodiment,” 165), Smart’s narrator remarks, “I grow too unwieldy to dance the minuet,” and notes how she is judged by the locals for her growing stomach and bare ring finger (Grand Central, 96). She shows fascination with the inner spaces and feelings now showing on the outside: “The small head juts out near my bladder. That’s our child. That’s the reward of love” (97). Wanting a sheltered world for her child, she remarks, “That’s why I drink milk and close my ears to the shock of disaster and the rage of gossips and the thunder of war. I listen to Mozart, I gather the spring flowers, wandering in the sun” (97).51 She records her evolving perceptions of the geography of her body, seeing her body change shape and feeling the child move within her: “I grow from one shape into another, and the oblivious child leaps without waiting for a father” (98). Her body shifts to accommodate the child in utero, adjusting a body schema that contemporary male theorists never considered: “Jumping down rocks and hills I have a different balance, and fall backward or trip too easily, overloaded in front” (98).52 As central to her life and body as the pregnancy becomes, however, she is weighed down by other feelings: “the loneliness grows greater than the child” (97). The fictional end of By Grand Central Station and the real portion of Smart’s life on which it is based impart two very different messages about her pregnancy. While in real life, Smart stayed in Pender Harbour in British Columbia until her child was born, in her fictionalized account the narrator despairs and chooses to seek her beloved despite her advanced pregnancy: “My feet down the wet street hurry to catch the train” (99). It is significant that Smart imagines herself itinerant at a time when she was least mobile, catching a train to New York to take control of her situation. But in this alternate glimpse of reality, there can be no happy ending. Part Ten begins, “By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept” (103). It is the cry of a woman in exile from her home, even in exile from her former body. In the tenth section, the narrator articulates, “I am going to have a child, so all my dreams are of water … . But tonight that child lay within like the fated and only island in all seas” (104). She conceptualizes the child as its own geographic place, the land the narrator once symbolically embodied. She continues, “When Lexington Avenue dissolved in my tears, and the houses and the neon lights and the nebulae fell jumbled into the flood, that child was the naked new-born babe striding the blast. He is the one focal pinning me to my own centre” (104). Only the child in utero seems to keep her connected to her former self. She is now 51  Many of these observations are taken from Smart’s personal experience of pregnancy; for instance, on May 10, 1940, she writes in her journal, “I can feel the small hard head jutting out near my bladder. That’s our child. That’s why I drink milk and close my eyes to the shock of disaster” (Necessary Secrets, 266). 52  Quite notably, By Grand Central Station appeared the same year as MerleauPonty’s original French edition of Phenomenology of Perception.

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mobile, but it is desperate, fruitless travel. She boards a bus (106), but moves with no direction or guide. “All my polestars have become falling stars,” she writes (107). She goes to her lover’s address and “shriek[s] beneath his window” (107). While the poet throughout has been a symbol of fecundity, she imagines him left without the ability to write: “The page is as white as my face after a night of weeping. It is as sterile as my devastated mind” (111). In the narrative’s end, the narrator seems more propelled by a death drive than by any impulse of bequeathing life. “Tomorrow at ten I shall take a train,” she decides. “All trains lead me to rivers that beckon and wink” (109). Though her mobility is renewed she is drawn to suicide by her despair. She imagines drowning and her lover kissing the circles on the surface of the water (110). She envisions a grave, which may be her own, and articulates the language of love as “the first cry of my never-to-be-born child” (112). It is significant that, while the poet’s powers of language are taken away, the child’s voice remains to express “love,” the word with the power to transform and create. While she, in her despair, envisions the child as “never-to-be-born” because of her own potential suicide, there is no indication that the narrator actually completes what she imagines. The next morning at the train station, we see only the rushing people and the ubiquitous slang: “Everything’s hotsy-totsy, dandy, everything’s OK. It’s in the bag. It can’t miss” (112). The language she so desperately needs to keep her conceptualization of this relationship alive is now gone. Yet, the last line of the narrative retains the narrator’s presence, asking for her voice to be heard: “My dear, my darling, do you hear me where you sleep?” (112). The line, though likely directed at her absent lover, could just as easily be meant for the child who embodies her sense of “love.” The baby, as the only one grounding her, may yet provide a vehicle into new spaces. Such an optimistic reading may only be possible in knowing the true ending to this chapter of Smart’s life. The end of By Grand Central Station was already written before she completed the rest of the manuscript, before Smart ever set foot in Pender Harbour. Smart wrote, years later, that the ending was likely “written on one of those previous occasions when I came down from Canada to see George and he didn’t meet me as planned, though we probably met the next day … . [O]ne needn’t be too accurate about this, as it’s not, as George so truly remarked, history, but fiction” (Autobiographies, 49). As if she had already decided Barker would betray her, she retained an ending keenly focused on her abandonment. Smart did not know what would happen with her relationship or with her baby, but being pregnant compelled and inspired her to write the manuscript of her experience, finishing it just two weeks before her child was born. Smart was afraid she might die in childbirth, and she wrote a note saying, of her imagined son, “Let him have all his father’s papers … . Let him know that there wasn’t a moment ever when I didn’t want him” (Autobiographies, 44). She safely delivered a baby girl, Georgina Elizabeth, on August 28 (31), the name revealing how the daughter gave her mother a tangible combination of both parents, a marker of the relationship that could not be taken away. The daughter

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was the “collaboration” that emerged from this union, not just a typewritten manuscript of the poet’s that was their first flimsy excuse for close interaction. The actual manuscript Smart produced was not a collaboration but her own strikingly original creation. She could celebrate the “birth” of the manuscript even when she could not share the news of the baby with her family, who did not know of the child’s existence.53 She wrote to her mother to announce that she had finished her book, saying, “I’m really pleased with it … I’ve done what I came to do” (qtd. in Sullivan, 182). The child and the manuscript were inextricably combined in her mind. Barker, who found the manuscript remarkable and labeled it “the first true native prose poem in English” (Autobiographies, 72), also connected By Grand Central Station with Smart’s maternal powers of creation, calling it “your progeny” (76). In his critique of the work for Smart, he wrote, affectionately, “Let us wait until we can lean with our heads together over this younger of your daughters and tell each other how beautiful she is and how long she will live, if you will tend her with a little love and much care” (76). The manuscript was actually the elder daughter, created from the passion and pain of the relationship and the inspiration of pregnancy before the actual child was delivered. As Sullivan notes, Smart shares the modernists’ attraction for exploring the moment. “Her gift, in life and art, was for the moment of intense feeling, what she would call the essence, the important core, the awareness to make the day alive” (92). Inspired to explore these moments of perception by her early travels, Smart could have finished and published the book she began about her world tour, but she saw it as only a “detour” in her life as an emerging writer. Continuing the kind of writing her travel journals encouraged, Smart’s more local journeying to freeing, artistic spaces inspired her sensual and writerly awakening. Further stimulated by the love she found for Barker and his language and for the child they produced (who, remarkably, would be only the first of four children they would have together), she achieved her own poetic empowerment. Her real interest was not just in seeing new places but in experiencing new things. Geography to her was merely an enabler: it gave her places to meet people, to indulge her passions, and to hide away when those passions brought illicit results. The real locus of her voice was the female body.

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 Smart’s decision not to tell her traditional, wealthy parents of her pregnancy may have been a wise one; after all, her mother later called By Grand Central Station “erotomania” and wanted all of the copies destroyed. She burned her own copy and rushed down to a local store to buy and burn all of theirs (Sullivan, 229).

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Evelyn Scott’s Escapade, the Pregnant Body, and the Modernist Travel Narrative In the fictionalized works resulting from Mansfield’s and Smart’s own travel experiences, the authors articulate the female body through new external and internal spaces. Though a male writer is key to Smart’s narrative, had George Barker written an account of his itinerant year with Smart, he might have told a very different story from Elizabeth’s inwardly focused tale of bodily awakening, passion, and pregnancy. Bringing my discussion back to the potential differences between the travel writings of men and women, I will examine a travel text written by a woman modernist alongside that of her male partner. The two travel works provide excellent examples of a gendered structural divergence, with each writer transcribing his or her own version of the same journey to Brazil. While Cyril Kay-Scott’s Life is Too Short (1943) recounts a mostly linear journey of exploration, employing traditional masculine norms of adventure and conquest, Evelyn Scott’s Escapade (1923) is, much more like Smart’s narrative, a roving poetic work focusing on her personal experiences of pregnancy and her resulting illness. While Cyril generally had high praise for Evelyn’s talents as a writer,54 he later commented depreciatively of Escapade, “After our return to America my wife published a book about this period of her life, but it was so subjective that it might as well have been written in Newark, New Jersey” (Life, 244). This striking comment reveals that Cyril Kay-Scott could not see Evelyn’s work as a travel narrative or even as influenced by Brazil, despite her vivid descriptions of the Brazilian landscape and native people. To him, travel involved investigating and discovering a foreign region; he neglected to consider that one such unarticulated region might be part of the writer herself. Evelyn Scott’s Brazilian journey is based on her real-life “escape” from a constrictive locale. In 1913, twenty-year-old Scott, then Elsie Dunn, the daughter of Southern U.S. aristocrats, chose to run away to Brazil with Frederick Creighton Wellman, a married Tulane biologist and dean fourteen years her senior. Dunn, a young feminist and an emerging poet, was seeking a space free from her parents’ bounded social world. Wellman in turn found himself bored by his current wife’s social circles. Accustomed to an adventurous lifestyle, Wellman was a gifted expert on tropical diseases and had spent many years living in Africa. Now seeking a new destination, Wellman found Dunn to be, besides an interesting intellectual companion, “the only woman I knew … who would consent to go to the tropics with me” (Life Is Too Short, 168). In “eloping,”55 the couple left behind their former names and adopted the new ones they would write under for the remainder 54

 Cyril writes of Evelyn, “She had an unusually brilliant mind with which, had she been able to develop the character and emotional stability to match, she could have made herself a very famous woman” (168). 55  They were not legal partners since Kay-Scott was still married and his current wife refused divorce.

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of their lives: Evelyn Scott and Cyril Kay Scott (later Kay-Scott).56 After a brief stay in London, the couple set sail for South America. By the time they arrived in Brazil, Evelyn was already pregnant. The time spent in South America was destined to be rough: they spent many years living in poverty as Cyril moved from job to job and city to city. Evelyn delivered a healthy child, but the difficult birth left her in chronic pain. While Cyril had the chance to explore the tropics, Evelyn remained largely housebound. Their different positions abroad led to two very different kinds of travel narrative. Cyril Kay-Scott’s Life is Too Short recounts the events in his life he deems most important, from his early scientific travels in Africa to his later artistic pursuits in writing and painting in the United States and Europe. The work’s preface, written by popular novelist Paul I. Wellman, Kay-Scott’s son, introduces him as a man with a life based on adventure: Wellman writes, “his adventures have taken place over four continents, and he has been equally at home among the most primitive savage tribes and in the world’s most sophisticated capitals” (9). Comparing his father to Victorian geographer, explorer, and linguist Sir Richard Francis Burton in his “adventurousness” and “search for the essential meaning of life” (9), Wellman sets up the text as a twentieth-century version of a nineteenth-century adventure story and conquest narrative.57 Although Wellman acknowledges that Kay-Scott “came along too late for the great explorations” he adds that “Out of sheer love for adventure he pushed the frontiers of exploration into an unknown part of Africa as large as modern Spain” (10–11).58 Paul Wellman implies that his father’s spirit for adventure was his one true love. He also calls the many women in KayScott’s life merely “episodes” and is careful to assure readers that “None of them overshadowed the central flame of his being, which was the resistless drive to find out—‘to see what is on the other side of the hill’” (13). In other words, though Cyril became involved with many women, he did not let them get in the way of his explorations. Such a statement assumes that women and travel do not go together, even that women are a hindrance to adventure-seeking journeys. It is true that, although Kay-Scott took Evelyn to Brazil with him, she did not become part of his adventures. Confined in her movements, first due to pregnancy and then due to post-partum complications, Evelyn’s outward experience of Brazil was much more limited than that of her husband.

 I use “Kay-Scott” for the remainder of my discussion since Life Is Too Short was published under that name. The man formerly known as Frederick Creighton Wellman writes that he adopted “the pseudonym Cyril Kay Scott (in after years so consistently hyphenated by my numerous European friends that I now spell it Kay-Scott)” (172). 57  Kay-Scott even emulates Henry Morton Stanley, the Victorian African travel writer, in a playful moment. He describes sneaking up on a lost companion and crying out Stanley’s famous line, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” (135). 58  Though no lands bear his name, many organisms do, as in the case of Wellmanius wellmani, an antelope parasite identified by Kay-Scott in Africa (10). 56

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Cyril Kay-Scott’s own preface provides a clue to his thoughts on narrative composition: he asserts, “Setting forth the story of a man or a nation in the form of a simple diarian chronicle of unrelated happenings, sprinkling details and comments belonging to one experiential thread through a narration of many other events and quandaries, results in no emergence or objective” (14). His text is thus essentially anti-modernist; following the Victorian male travel writing tradition, his focus is on clarity, linearity, adventure, and achievement. Rejecting that which he suggests is better suited for the “text-book on psychology,” he remarks that “What the reader wants to hear about a man are his successes and failures” (15). Kay-Scott further emphasizes the linearity of his methods later in his work, where he asserts that he is not a wanderer: “I have not wandered like a lost soul,” he writes. “I always had a definite purpose in view and knew what it was” (174). He is not a flâneur but a goal-oriented voyager, and his prose reflects this quality. Kay-Scott’s adventures in Africa, long before he met Evelyn, are perhaps the most traditionally exploratory part of his narrative. Arriving by boat with his first wife and son, Kay-Scott quickly adapts to the tropics, setting up mosquito nets to protect them from malaria and other diseases. Although he shows great devotion to his small family, he makes it clear from the beginning that they are encumbrances; traveling inland, his wife and child are each carried in a tepoia, a hammock, by eight natives while he himself walks (24). Although there is plentiful game around, he remarks pragmatically, “I had a wife and baby to get through this unhealthy valley, and could afford no time for shooting” (25). He speaks sparingly of his wife and later comments that because she grew too much like the puritanical missionaries he often left her behind while he made “long trips into the interior” (152). The reader quickly sees that women for Kay-Scott are only a passing fancy while Africa is his true love. He writes in an early passage, “I had already begun to love Africa, not dreaming that no mistress is so unpitying, that she breaks most men” (35). Like a traditional nineteenth-century male explorer, he sees Africa as a woman. Kay-Scott demonstrates a fascination with seeing and then mastering the unknown. In Central Africa, he establishes himself as an expert on tropical diseases and insects. He also leaves time for exploration. His fourth chapter, reminiscent of Stanley or other African explorers, is called “I Go Seeking into the Very Core of a Dark Continent” (74), though he notes quite modestly that this could not have been accomplished without “unsung natives of brain and courage” (76).59 One of the first things he does in the chapter, which focuses on “African exploration and big-game shooting,” is send his wife home to the U.S. to have a baby (74). This liberates him for more traditionally masculine pursuits. He undoubtedly believes in separate spaces for men and women, and later remarks quite proudly, “never in the future was any woman to decide my actions … . Men and women don’t share their lives: they share their love” (125). Rather than be “tied up for life,” he divorces 59

 Kay-Scott is, for his era, uncommonly gracious to his native hosts and workers. He is never more humble than when speaking of the vast knowledge of the Africans and, later, the Brazilian Indians (“These men were educated: I was illiterate” (76)).

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his wife (151). On being offered a position at Tulane, however, Kay-Scott quickly marries someone else he meets on the boat home. He is happy being sedentary for a while, but soon feels the call of the tropics and, showing his true adventurer nature, leaves his new life to elope with Elsie (Evelyn) to South America. Four middle chapters of Life Is Too Short detail Kay-Scott’s journey to Brazil. After realizing that collecting insect specimens for the British Museum cannot support his family, he takes a job as a bookkeeper and accountant. He soon becomes auditor of the company, and of this position he writes, “In this last capacity I had to travel a great deal, which suited me perfectly” (180). Journeying by train, mule, and canoe, he sees much of south and central Brazil while Evelyn stays home. He also appreciates his more quiet moments. Although Kay-Scott notes that “Life was good and belonged to me again. I wrote some poems and did a great deal of thinking” (183), his text never becomes excursive in the modernist vein. His thoughts and realizations always form a backdrop to his actions, and he never deviates from a subject or story without a clear purpose. He often includes a poem of his own inspired by his Brazilian experiences, but he never combines or confuses his poetic renderings with his realist narrative. Although Life Is Too Short touches on Evelyn’s pregnancy and her difficulty in labor (blaming her troubles on the Brazilian doctor) and elaborates on Cyril’s troubled relationship with Evelyn’s mother, the reader can see that the text’s main focus is not on family matters. Though Kay-Scott is devoted to his son, he refers to him as “a fine specimen,” using the scientific language of a man who has been collecting animals throughout his life. He also rather cruelly remarks on the ease with which the native maid, Petronilla, gives birth with “no particular trouble, and was up and about in a few days,” adding that “Civilized women are biologically incompetent” (193). Kay-Scott also does not acknowledge all of the hardships Evelyn and their child had to endure in Brazil; at one point he writes, “And lest the reader feel gratuitously sorry for my new wife60 I will say at once that neither she nor our child ever lacked a meal or a place to sleep while we were in Brazil” (179).61 Cyril Kay-Scott chooses to invest his South American narrative with doses of adventure, from a close encounter with robbers to his most “exciting” activity of all, undertaking a spy mission for the Allied cause which culminated in a nearfatal knife-wound (259). Most significantly, his tenth chapter, “I Go Seeking in the Cradle of Life,” recounts Kay-Scott’s journey to the valley of the Amazon where he made “excursions from various points on foot into the virgin forest” (208), looking for “the inexorable and the unknown” (202). Sustaining the previous 60

 Scott and Kay-Scott lived as husband and wife in Brazil although the two were not formally married; Kay-Scott clarifies this by describing their union as a “legal common-law marriage” (275). His references to Evelyn as his “wife” provide a certain credibility and stability to their relationship that is notably absent from Scott’s text. 61  Reading Evelyn Scott’s depictions of their meals and sleeping quarters might give the reader a different idea. These may have been provided, but the conditions seldom seem comfortable.

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references to himself as a new variety of Victorian explorer, Kay-Scott here describes himself as a masculine invader of feminine territory. He asserts that it was “in the Amazon forest that I had two of the most beautiful experiences of my life” (209). Kay-Scott sets up his quintessential masculine adventure as one he will make alone. Overjoyed to have a chance to see “the Amazons at last!” he writes, “For wasn’t that what I had come to Brazil for? I at once decided to settle my wife in Natal, then famous as the healthiest place in northern Brazil, completely free from malaria, and went home very happy” (190–191). While a portion of his happiness here relies on knowing Evelyn will remain free from malaria during his absence, kept in a protected feminine space in a city whose very name implies “birth,” this quote reveals that Kay-Scott’s own escapade to Brazil had little to do with Evelyn. This salient image of Evelyn remaining housebound, likely in bed, while Kay-Scott had the means to travel is an apt depiction of their very different experiences in Brazil. While he was out exploring the rich fauna and flora of the region he names “the cradle of life,” Evelyn found that cradle in her own body. While Kay-Scott jumped immediately to the genres of autobiography and adventure narrative for his travel accounts, believing the public desired to hear a linear narrative of a man’s “successes and failures,” Evelyn had a more difficult time choosing a genre for her own experiences. While living in Bermuda in 1922, she began to write the story of her time in Brazil, but avoided traditional means. She first attempted to fictionalize her experiences, but she changed her mind after several failed attempts. She later confided, “I had to write it, and write it just as it was” (qtd. in Callard, 23). She compromised by changing the names of her family members and leaving the narrator almost unnamed, a gesture which navigates the cusp between fiction and nonfiction.62 In a letter to her friend Lola Ridge, she wrote of her work-in-progress: It is an autobiography of myself in Brazil. Not like other autobiographies except in being written in the first person. It is broken into impressionistic bits, a page or so at a time and being purely objective in matters of environment—or rather nearly objective, becomes more and more subjective to almost free verse selfexplanation, and is to end with dreams, the final one being a slightly revised Shadow Play. (Qtd. in Callard, 24)

Scott loosely viewed her text as an “autobiography,” but, as her own description reveals, it also combines elements of poetry (particularly the imagist poetry

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 As several critics have noted, Scott does not give direct clues about the narrator’s name, but slips in “Evelina” once in a song and “Evelyn” in a dream-letter (239). While critics such as Tim Edwards, Janis P. Stout, and Paul Christian Jones refer to the narrator as “Evelyn,” I leave her unnamed since Scott likely wished to keep a slight level of removal between the narrator and herself.

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with which she experimented), travel narrative, and fiction.63 The sixth section of Escapade grows increasingly abstract and the seventh is the “Shadow Play” Scott refers to here.64 Refusing the straightforward form of the autobiography and incorporating elements of fantasy, Scott’s text baffled contemporary critics. Perhaps more than any other travel text written during this period, it reveals the fascinating relationship between travel and subjective experience. Evelyn calls the text not just “an autobiography” but “an autobiography of myself in Brazil,” suggesting that geography may influence a writer’s perception of her own identity. In Life is Too Short, Cyril Kay-Scott once refers to Evelyn as “so wrapped up in her momentary ills, sensations, and impulses, that her mind was rather like a string of beads without the string” (231). This description suggests an outsider’s view of the modernist imagination; while the traditionalist intent on narrative focuses on “the string,” the modernist examines the “stringless” beads of personal awakening. In contrast to Kay-Scott’s Brazilian autobiography, Evelyn Scott’s is much more internal, championing the exploration of inner space as well as outer. This quality of the text connects her work to the writings of other modernist women authors whose works I have examined. Indeed, Alyse Gregory grouped Scott with Rebecca West, May Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf when reviewing Escapade for The Dial in 1923, and although Gregory found her falling slightly short of her British peers, she nonetheless counted her among the esteemed women authors of the modernist movement (598). Today, in comparison to Woolf and West, Scott remains relatively unknown.65 Nonetheless, Escapade, filled with fragmented passages of poetic description and stream-of-consciousness narration, is as experimental as Woolf’s fiction and, like the work of Elizabeth Smart, is daring in its candid portrayal of the female body. Despite its experimental tendencies, in general structure Escapade is organized as a Brazilian travel narrative, following the couple’s outer movements from place to place. As Dorothy M. Scura notes in her afterword, six of the seven sections of  Janis P. Stout also examines Escapade as a travel narrative. Stout’s focus on the narrative is very different from my own, however, as her prime argument focuses on Scott’s outsider perspective of South America. Although I agree with Stout’s argument that Scott’s depictions of native peoples hold “[r]acial anxiety,” my focus is much more on Scott’s interior travel narrative. 64  As Escapade progresses, its links to fiction increase. The “slightly revised Shadow Play” is radically experimental. It contains all new characters, some of which are talking animals, and seems completely removed from the place and events of the rest of the text. While this fictional addendum further complicates the reading of Escapade as travel narrative, it may be helpful to remember Sackville-West’s remark that the mind of another person always presents “a strange country” (Passenger, 16). Taken in this way, the fantastical episode might represent an even more experimental kind of travel-inspired text. Indeed, it is the only part of Escapade written entirely in Brazil. 65  Dorothy M. Scura and Paul C. Jones term Evelyn Scott a “lost modernist,” and Scura notes that Scott “gradually disappeared from consideration” in the mid-twentieth century (Introduction, xvi). 63

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the narrative are “arranged geographically, tracing the physical journey or narrative of travel,” following the couple’s route from Rio de Janeiro north to Parahyba, to the mission station in Pernambuco, to the mountains in Bahia, to Villa Nova, and finally to their isolated ranch in Cercadinho. The couple makes each journey together by boat and train and, for the final trip, on horseback. Although Escapade charts these movements, the unnamed woman narrator has limited mobility within each region. Part I of the text opens with the line, “Through the only window I saw ragged clothes on a line between outbuildings of unbaked brick that leaned against each other as though about to fall” (1). A feeling of claustrophobia is established already as we sense the narrator trapped in an inside space in an unstable environment. Not even able to speak Portuguese, the narrator feels only a pervasive sense of weakness: “I felt my exclusion from the life about me, my helplessness” (1). Once her partner leaves, she has nothing to do: “When John had gone to his work I sat there in the room with nothing at all to occupy me—nothing but my thoughts.” She continues, “If I could only write!” (2). The lines are reminiscent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) where the narrator is confined to bed-rest for the treatment of post-partum depression, supervised by her mostly absent husband, John. Not allowed to write, she projects her desires and feelings of constraint onto the wallpaper until she escapes not only her confined space but her sanity as well.66 Scott may mean to subtly allude to Gilman’s story to establish a familiar connection between inside spaces and women’s entrapment, but her narrator ultimately avoids the fate of Gilman’s character by articulating her condition and holding onto reality. In retrieving pencil and paper, though feeling uninspired, she continues, “What possessed me completely was the faint disturbing nausea of my pregnancy” (2). The narrator cannot venture far, so she will articulate the spaces she can see, including her own body. We realize that we are reading a travel narrative that is very different from the traditional text: one told largely from hotel rooms, dining rooms, front porches, views through doors and windows of the sky and of people passing. Perhaps enhanced by the small radius of her attention, the narrator’s descriptions are extremely vivid: The heat of the tropics, as mid-day approaches, seems not so much to descend from the sky as to emanate from the earth in warm clouds of invisible but palatable steam. From the adobe huts, so close to my window that, leaning across to them, I can almost touch the people, comes a reek of hot palm oil. (3)

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 Scott’s narrator later comments, after her baby’s birth, “I lived in the long contemplation of a blank wall” (59). The connections between Escapade and “The Yellow Wallpaper” are so striking that I cannot help thinking that Gilman’s story may have had a strong influence on Scott. At one point, Scott’s narrator even longs for insanity “in order to escape” (65).

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These descriptions take us into the moment, letting us sense the very smells and heat she experiences. Time in the narrative seems elongated as she focuses on small details and uses vibrant similes to describe the worlds inside and outside the spaces she moves through: “The bay, vague as an expanse of silk, undulates before me. Into the small hollows of little waves, the light floats hesitantly” (15). Despite her poetic lens, Scott intended the early sections of her text to be “purely objective in matters of environment” (qtd. in Callard, 24). Nonetheless, like Sackville-West, Scott’s narrator does read into the people she describes, and she understands that her perspective may be colored by her own mind. When depicting individuals fleeing from the Northern drought, she writes, “They pass the house endlessly … . Old men can scarcely walk. Young girls have children on their backs. Their tongues are swollen … . Their eyes are terrible. I imagine that they see something I don’t see—the thing they have left behind” (69). She realizes that what she sees in these people is merely what she herself “imagine[s]” and acknowledges that they have a different sense of their predicament that she cannot understand.67 While Scott uses the Brazilian landscape to beautifully exercise her poetic powers, most notable to her text is the central position of (and articulation of) the female body.68 The narrator of Escapade soon discovers that the body itself is a place. She thinks, “We have a house at last. I close the door that opens to the street, and I am safe inside myself” (47). On some occasions, Scott intertwines descriptions of the narrator’s body with those of the Brazilian topography. Sometimes this occurs subtly as the narrator invests something of herself into the landscape: Through the window of my new room, I can see, while I am in bed, the sea spread out below me. It is thick green, like milk into which has been stirred a pallid radiance. I am impressed by its indescribable heaviness. The wind crisps the harsh surface, and pools of violet light rest in the hollows of the swell. (67)

This sensuous description of the sea very delicately invokes the image of a woman’s body, but these are not a masculinist travel narrative’s images of a virgin land taken by a male conqueror. “Heaviness,” “hollows,” and “swell” are all words that the narrator has used proudly to describe her changing body in the text; as 67  Please see Stout’s essay “South from the South” for an in-depth discussion of Scott’s portrayal of the Brazilian people. 68  Not surprisingly, other critics have examined Scott’s striking portrayal of the female body. Dorothy M. Scura writes in her afterword of the narrator’s “desperate struggle to write the female body” (310). Both Tim Edwards’s article “Magnificent Shamelessness” and Paul Christian Jones’s “Becoming (M)Other: The Anxiety of Maternity in Evelyn Scott’s Escapade” look at Scott’s depiction of the pregnant body. Edwards uses Bakhtin’s theory of carnival to discuss bodies transgressive in their public display; Jones focuses on Escapade’s “matrophobia” (38). Neither Edwards nor Jones focuses on pregnancy as an inward escapade, however, or connects pregnancy with the novel’s travel narrative aspects.

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well, the reference to milk reflects her new role as nursing mother at this point in the narrative. At a slightly later moment in the work, the narrator’s conception of the Brazilian landscape alters more directly when she reconstructs herself as a part of it. Lying still, she is able to become a part of the world that surrounds her, thinking, “I am in the branches. I am the movement and the stillness. My own dizziness is the oscillation of sunlight on the grass” (73). While Scott’s text contains many beautiful descriptions of Brazil, these passages reveal the way the narrator’s subjective experience creates a new awareness of her external and internal geographies. Pregnancy gives the narrator a new relationship with her body. Like the later observations of Young and Rich, Escapade explores how pregnancy redefines the body’s boundaries. She notes, “When I take off my clothes and stand sideways before the cracked mirror I see that my body is no longer hollow and unfilled” (5). Feeling her body somewhat Othered by the experience, she writes, “My inflated body is heavy about me. I cannot escape from its heaviness” (41). She resents the searching hands of doctors and dressmakers and the prying eyes of the Brazilian men. She confides, “The consciousness that I am pregnant makes me feel helpless most of the time. I cannot bear to expose myself to the naked gaze of the men I see” (38). Other people’s looks compromise the pleasure she finds in her private gaze. “I want to be proud of myself and I am ashamed,” she writes. “When I walk out with John I wear a heavy coat” (5). She adds, “Pregnancy has so altered my figure that nothing I own really serves to cover me” (18). At the text’s beginning, she feels she can hardly go outside of the Rio hotel. “When I venture by myself into the low part of the city where we live, something objectionable always occurs,” she writes (7). The narrator’s movements in the text are also limited by her domestic partner’s concern for her. John believes that her pregnancy should impose “restraint” on their activities (13) and advises her against getting a job because of the harsh working conditions faced by lower-class laborers. Scott’s text revolves around the narrator’s struggle to articulate her own body, to retain her own sense of self separate from the doctor’s hands and strangers’ eyes. She gains a new awareness of her body and her identity through the internal movements of her unborn child, showing a sense of what Young would later term “pregnant embodiment.” Before feeling the baby move, she writes, “I imagine the moment of its quickening as a sudden awakening of my own being which has never before had life” (5). After she can feel its motion, she adds, “All at once I had discovered a kind of hard unquestioning satisfaction in my own being. I was strong and important. A new ruthlessness seemed to be born in me, though for what end I could not conceive” (8). Here Scott uses words such as “born” and “conceive” to describe not the child but the development of her own inner strength, countering her feelings of weakness. She remarks, “With my pregnant body it is different. My mind is filled with a kind of stillness of understanding. There is calm in my realization of myself—force that has surpassed motion. I feel integrated like a rock, but warm and breathing” (8). The kind of “motion” she locates here does not revolve around outward travel but inner experience and

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the mobility of consciousness as she makes an “escapade” through the body. She writes that “the world … doesn’t permeate me any longer. I believe in myself, just as I believe in things outside me through the objectivity of touch” (9). The baby is becoming part of her “body map,” to anticipate (and extend) ideas of Paul Schilder and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Evelyn Scott, like Elizabeth Smart, examines connections of pregnancy and artistic creation. When forced to wait alone in the boarding house during the day, the narrator of Escapade feels only that “I want to feel, to feel anything” (13). Once she goes into labor, she writes, “When the pains began on Thursday I felt once more there was some meaning to my body. It really belonged to me again” (52). Uncomfortable with the physician and his control, she feels that the experience of birth needs to be something that is her own. She does not want to shy away from articulating her sensations privately, and later in writing, though she is “determined not to make a sound” before the doctor to retain as much personal power over her situation as possible (55). Even in her terror of what might happen in labor, the narrator finds pleasure in the fact that “It is impossible to control creation. I don’t mean this only in the sense of giving birth to new physical life. That which really is continues with the impetus which propelled its origin. I am, and I am going on and on to the end of myself where something else begins” (52–53, Scott’s italics). The process of labor, and of writing, feels defiant and unstoppable, and inspires her to travel “to the end of myself,” to find a personal geography where she can better understand and articulate herself. Later transcribing a voice she feels attuned to, she characterizes the writing process as giving life: “I am Life. They pay good blood for the poems that live in me,” she writes, speaking of her poems as if they grow inside her womb (71). She questions others’ limited artistic endeavors when she muses, “I wondered why the birth of a child appealed so little to the imagination of the artist. Why were all the great realistic novels of the world concerned with only one aspect of sex?” (58). Scott wishes to bring forth these details in a truly remarkable portrait of pregnancy and birth. At one moment in the narrative, the narrator directly connects the idea of thinking to trying to give birth, commenting, “My brain pulls, stretches, tears” (116). She presents a similar relationship between creative thought and pregnancy when she explains, “My thoughts are torn from me by little fingers that dig deep, deep into my mind, into the regions of me most obscure to myself” (184). This description may remind us of the “little fingers” of her child, which have become so instrumental to her writing process. While Scott’s work plots a remarkable journey into the uncharted realms of female experience, her writing made no “escapade” from the invasive editor’s pen. In a defiant act, Scott left behind asterisks in place of the words and sections she was forced to remove in order to bring her work into print, ostensibly passages seen as too sensuous or candid in a text already “scandalous” in its portrayal of an extramarital relationship. She writes, “I am longing for * * * some crudity of expression” to feel “that we have not been reduced to a slavery of self-control,” but her editor denies her that very expression (14). The asterisks remain behind like

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scars in the text; what precedes and follows these marks of omission sometimes do not align, leaving an uneven wound. We are reminded of the way that the narrator during the labor process, a painful delivery leaving behind “lacerated ligaments” (66), envisions the baby as “my own being that I am trying to force out of myself” (55). An operation at a local mission station can help only temporarily; neither the narrator nor her text is ever quite whole again. The narrator’s status in Escapade remains that of the “invalid wife,” the name given to her by John near the text’s end when he seeks employment from a group of American miners (256). She is “in-valid” because she and the already-married John cannot legally marry; she is an invalid because first her pregnancy and then her complications in delivery have left her bedridden for much of the narrative. At one point after giving birth, the narrator is even “carried on board the dirty little steamer” in a chair because she cannot walk (100). Nonetheless, even these short outer movements sometimes inspire inner awakenings for her: on a ship early in the text, the narrator remarks how the “agitation of the journey awakened my child to some dark consciousness” (25). Scott’s child draws attention to a new geographic space inside her, one crucially linked to realms of consciousness and introspection. Even after the child’s birth, she finds ways to “escape” through her illness; as she comments, “The only escape will be through the mind” (214). In Part VI, when the family arrives at the ranch, the narrator reflects on the time she must spend lying in bed: “I wanted to move softly in the depths of my being so as not to awaken the pain that would master me. Secretly … I was able to enjoy an unusual amount of freedom. My mind, for instance, ran up and down the four walls that surrounded me” (182). In this excerpt, similar to passages by Mansfield and Smart, Scott’s narrator finds a way of exploring her domestic world while remaining in bed. Even more significant is her remark: To be truly ill and helpless permits one an escape from the limitations of material existence. I could lie here safe in myself, in a universe on which nothing impinged. Time disappeared … . I felt as I lay there that life indeed was endless … . And the strange thing was that, without any stimulation from the contact of other being, I was conscious of a particular sentience. Somehow, out of emptiness—out of darkness—I had a tactile feeling of warmth, of the warmth of my own being which surrounded me, and I lay in myself, sleeping while I was awake. (182–183)

Scott’s narrator uses her body as a vehicle of mobility into a new realm of consciousness, making a prolonged internal excursion into a new “universe.” Moreover, this new space feels womblike as she lies “in myself,” surrounded by “the warmth of my own being.” Thus does Scott produce in Brazil a new variety of intimate autobiography in tune with her body. It is an untraditional experience of travel, much more similar to the works of other women modernists than to the work of her husband.

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Kay-Scott did not understand her view, noting only what she lost in focusing her attention inward: “My wife, enclosed in a crystal cage of introspection, could not see outside of it the beauty that had intoxicated me,” he notes in his autobiography (258). He similarly laments that, had Evelyn “treasured fewer personal caprices, [she] possibly might have become our greatest American writer” (168). What seem most remarkable about Escapade, however, are these very “personal caprices.” Escapade likely could not have been “written in Newark, New Jersey” as Cyril sardonically remarked. To say so deliberately ignores all of the beautiful descriptions of Brazilian landscapes, animals, places, and people that make Escapade a narrative of South American travel. Although Scott did not write her narrative in Brazil, it seems significant that living in Bermuda, another foreign locale, gave her the impetus to transcribe her earlier travel experiences. It is also probable that Scott wrote about her travels in some form while still in Brazil; critics have remarked that her writing “gives the sense of having been transcribed from journal notes” made during her journey (Callard, 19). Scott required this sense of the foreign for her inner awakening; it seems unlikely that even the most personal sections of the narrative could have been inspired in the same way by the comforts and community from which Elsie Dunn originated. Stimulated by the strangeness and newness around her, Scott was motivated to articulate what was strange and new in herself, including her experience of pregnancy. In stressing the connection between pregnancy and written creativity, Cixous once called the gestation drive just like the desire to write: a desire to live self from within, a desire for the swollen belly, for language, for blood. We are not going to refuse, if it should happen to strike our fancy, the unsurpassed pleasures of pregnancy which have actually been always exaggerated or conjured away—or cursed—in the classic texts. For if there’s one thing that’s been repressed, here’s just the place to find it: in the taboo of the pregnant woman. (“Laugh,” 261)

Anticipating Cixous’s call for the articulation of “the taboo of the pregnant woman,” Evelyn Scott, like Mansfield and Smart, moves away from “classic texts,” especially the repressed domestic realism of the nineteenth century, as she seeks “the desire to write” and to express the inner self. These women writers do so in narratives about the experience of travel, showing simultaneous outward and inward explorations. Here the physical boundaries between inside and outside are extensively challenged. The liminal spaces in these texts between near and far, foreign and familiar, self and Other, as between pregnant mother and child, echo the porous boundaries between autobiography and fiction. The line between fiction and autobiography, or a form of autobiography told in a foreign space, what Scott has called “an autobiography of myself in Brazil,” is not always clearly defined. Instead, experimental forms like Escapade, a text which has only begun to be analyzed and appreciated as a modernist masterpiece, arise out of these

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experiences of the awakening body in foreign spaces, encouraging us to look across traditional literary and geographic boundaries, trans-spatially.

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Chapter 5

“It carried her out of the house, out of the world”: Modernist Women Writers and the Piano

She shall have music wherever she goes. —English Nursery Rhyme

In previous chapters I have explored how women writers subversively reconceptualize aspects of the female body as vehicles of movement into new physical and imaginative spaces. In this final chapter, I move beyond the immediate topography of the physical form to include an object which has been so intimately linked to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century woman in the home that it has become an extension of her own body. Although other instruments such as the harp and the lute traditionally were seen as “feminine,” it is the piano which most clearly has been connected with women characters in Western literature. No other musical instrument was thought to display feminine gentility and proper social standing like the piano, and as such it became a central part of women’s domestic geographies. In “Heroines at the Piano: Women and Music in Nineteenth-Century Fiction,” Mary Burgan discusses how middle- and upper-class women were taught to play the piano to please visitors and woo suitors. She terms the piano an “emblem of social status” which “provided a gauge of a woman’s training in the required accomplishments in genteel society” (51). Often produced on demand from a young woman’s velvet bag of skills, playing the piano was a necessary domestic talent; as one writer stated in the 1880s, while young men might “abandon” the piano at an early age, “The young lady, on the contrary … is riveted to it until marriage.”1 The piano was intimately linked to the Victorian woman’s role in the home, and could even “be part of the young woman’s dowry or public identity” (Burgan, “Heroines,” 60). Music often has been considered the art form most closely linked to the emotions, both for the performer and for the listener. Since women have long been characterized as closer to their emotions than men, music was seen to fit naturally into the feminine domestic sphere, and was shared to charm, to captivate, and to please. 1  From Louis Pagnerre, On the Evil Influence of the Piano upon the Art of Music (1885). Quoted in Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos, 414.

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For centuries, keyboard instruments, along with the lute, harp, and guitar, have been viewed as acceptable instruments for women. Henry VIII’s daughters Elizabeth and Mary were accomplished at playing small “virginals,” a kind of spinet that could be placed on a tabletop (Blom, 59). The very name of this instrument implies how closely it was connected to and considered appropriate for the unmarried female body. Even in the early twentieth century, the piano still was deemed, as a 1909 text attests, the “chastest of all instruments” (Hofmann, 5). This was partly on account of its less “sensuous” sound (5), due, I assume, to its player’s inability to glissando between tones or to use vibrato. Provided a piano is tuned traditionally, only half-tones are available for performance, denying the piano a more human vocal quality. As well, the sound-producing mechanism of the strings usually is partly or completely hidden from view, making the parlor piano as modestly dressed as a Victorian woman. Indeed, the piano may be the only instrument in history in which the quality of tone production has been, on occasion, sacrificed “for the sake of mere appearance” (Loesser, 43). Itself not a far cry from the “Angel in the House,” the piano fascinatingly held a role in the home parallel to that of the Victorian lady, expected to relinquish comfort for style and voice for demureness and grace. Most importantly, a piano was deemed appropriate for a woman because of the way in which it is played. Although the piano technically is considered a percussion instrument because it produces sound through the pressing of external keys which allow padded hammers to strike the internal strings, piano playing was seen as modest because of the small amount of body movement required for performance. While with a woodwind or brass instrument, a woman would have to contort her lips and cheeks, with a violin she would have to tilt and press her neck, a young woman could play, as historian Arthur Loesser writes, “a harpsichord, a clavichord, or a pianoforte with her feet demurely together, her face arranged into a polite smile or a pleasantly earnest concentration” and sit with “her wellgroomed hands striking the light keys with no unseemly vehemence” (65). Many nineteenth-century novels depict young ladies performing in this demure way, as piano playing provides a gateway to refined society. Jane Austen was herself a pianist, and in her novels young women protagonists frequently play and sing at home, provided the family can afford a piano, or entertain at the homes of neighbors.2 Here, pianistic talent is closely tied to “manners” and proper upbringing: in Pride and Prejudice, for instance, Miss Bingley comments of Miss Darcy, “Such a countenance, such manners! and so extremely accomplished for her age! Her performance on the piano-forte is exquisite” (33). In Emma, Jane Fairfax’s mysterious gift of the “large-sized square pianoforté” becomes a key part of the triangular romance between Jane, Emma, and Frank Churchill (168). At the 2

 We can see from Austen’s early novels that most “gentrifying” families had pianofortes by the late 1790s (Loesser, 271). Loesser writes of Jane Austen herself, “Toward music she seemed to blow hot and cold: she scorned the polite pretense associated with it, yet she herself played the pianoforte apparently with some conviction” (275).

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Coles’s dinner party, Emma is invited to lead off on the piano, and, knowing “the limitations of her own powers too well to attempt more than she could perform with credit,” she is delighted to be joined in song by Frank. The more accomplished Jane soon takes her place at the instrument and, both singing with Frank and being admired by Mr. Knightley, rouses Emma’s jealousy. The importance of the piano to her social status becomes clearest the next day when Emma, regretting “the inferiority of her own playing and singing … . sat down and practised vigorously an hour and a half” (181). In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jane is mocked by Mr. Rochester for saying she plays the piano only “a little” (141), which he calls “the established answer,” thus commenting on the typical Englishwoman’s modesty about her musical abilities. When Jane does play for him, he agrees with her assessment, however, saying she performs “like any other English school-girl: perhaps rather better than some, but not well” (141). In contrast, Blanche Ingram can play and sing well enough to accompany Mr. Rochester, and this musical intimacy seems to Jane to reveal their closeness and compatibility.3 In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Rosamond Vincy similarly succeeds in alarming Dorothea with the intimacy she achieves with Will Ladislaw through her pianistic artistry; moreover, George Eliot, herself a pianist, satirizes traditional piano education for women through showing how Rosamund has no musicality of her own but merely imitates her teacher’s style; she “seized his manner of playing, and gave forth his large rendering of noble music with the precision of an echo” (161). Although these examples are not all-inclusive, they reveal a typical way the piano is used in Victorian fiction.4 In each of these instances, the piano is considered key to obtaining a man’s attentions. The women characters use the piano as an accoutrement; it is not the piano on display but the woman herself as she performs sweet songs and dance tunes. The piano functions, ideally, as a medium of self-expression, but if a woman is taught to repeat what others prescribe, as with Rosamund, her playing becomes representative of someone else’s ideas instead. Women were often taught to play, as in Jane’s case, “a little,” though fine masters might be recruited to teach wealthy young women, and sometimes the piano was given up altogether after marriage. Women rarely were taught music theory or counterpoint; they were discouraged from over-exerting themselves and especially from composing, which was thought to require too much mental stress. Lucy Green argues in Music, Gender, Education that women composing or improvising “threaten[ed] femininity” by exercising too much control over the music and by understanding its technical 3

 Jane realizes nonetheless that a woman should strive beyond the education of a parlor pianist. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf quotes Jane’s denouncement of men’s “narrow-minded” view that women “ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags” (qtd. on 69). 4  For a more complete look at the ways women’s music functions in mid to late Victorian literature, see Phyllis Weliver’s Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900 and Donna Parsons’s dissertation, Their Voices Sing True and Clear.

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makeup (82). This way of thinking persisted even in music conservatories, where Victorian women studied less theory than men and seldom were offered classes in composition; these prejudices endured in many schools into the twentieth century (Reich, 135–136). In general, women were not expected to play difficult pieces at home but performed salon music or simplified arrangements of larger works. As Mary Burgan explains, “Most of the young women who labored to learn the piano in the nineteenth century were not intent upon mastering the intricacies of Mozart, Haydn, or Beethoven” (“Heroines,” 56). From the nineteenth century well into the twentieth, music for parlor use often was advertised as “brilliant but not difficult” (Loesser, 291), emphasizing an easily achievable showy effect over the technical skill that comes through diligent practice. Though women pianists were more widely accepted as professionals before other kinds of women instrumentalists, a girl seeking status as a professional musician might be told that she was not ready for the concert hall but that her playing would be “delightful for the salon or parlor” (Cooke, 29). For the professional woman pianist, music became a tool through which to move into the male, public sphere; playing gave her mobility and respect and provided an outlet for her artistic abilities that was less stigmatized than acting or dance. Nonetheless, music as a profession was less acceptable and less easy for women than for men; although Lucy Green has argued that the apparatus of an instrument such as the piano “mediates” the gaze of the audience (53), women instrumentalists nonetheless were judged for their appearance as well as their abilities. Many early twentieth-century women who did not succeed as musicians or composers turned to writing instead. Ethel Mayne expresses her own frustration through her character Millicent North in One of Our Grandmothers (1916), where her Victorian heroine wishes to be a professional pianist but finds no outlet for her talent. The fact that she plays the piano so well is even “alarming” to some men (18), and Millicent contents herself with the hope that if she plays well enough “I might make people think I was pretty” (31), demonstrating her belief that the piano is intimately connected to her physical body. When Edwardian women authors include a prominent musician in their work, their main character is often male, as is the case in Phyllis Bottome’s Broken Music (1914) or Henry Handel (Ethel) Richardson’s Maurice Guest (1908). Ethel Sidgwick’s Promise (1910) concerns a woman violinist whose goal is for her son to excel at music in a way that she, as a woman, could not, and thus to live vicariously through him. She tells her little son, “Maman was a mistake, Bébé: just a silly girl. But you will be a man, and great music must be made by men. Oh, how I used to cry and cry because I could never be a man! But I shall be one after all, and you shall be one for me” (14). I wish to explore, in contrast to these depictions, how several modernist women writers use the piano as an instrument through which a woman might achieve connection, liberation, and self-definition.5 The piano no longer functions 5  Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) anticipates this transgressive use of the instrument, although it is found in another person’s musical performance. Mlle. Reisz’s

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as an adornment to showcase a woman’s body but as a tool for extending and accentuating the expressiveness of the self; the large space which the instrument inhabits makes the idea of this extension visually inescapable while its polyphonic nature best illustrates vocal strength and versatility. Music can open up a new world for the woman musician, providing a separate realm for contemplation and experimentation; this is especially accentuated in texts about travel where women’s explorations with the piano parallel their movement into new geographic spaces. In this chapter I explore three novels by modernist women writers, Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs, and Rebecca West’s Harriet Hume, that rework traditional associations between female body and instrument. In these texts the piano becomes an expressive medium, less an instrument of domesticity than an instrument of mobility, and a crucial part of each writer’s modernist project. I conclude by further exploring these themes in Philippa Duke Schuyler’s travel narrative of piano performance, Adventures in Black and White. The Piano and the Journey In a study of representations of travel, the piano may seem a strange inclusion. Pianos seem sedentary objects, as much furniture as instrument. Perhaps no other musical device has been so elaborately adapted into the domestic sphere, especially as an integral part of women’s space in the home. Various designs of the common household instrument underscore this connection: pianos, a development of the 1700s, were quickly “adapted to domestic utility,” made for the drawing-room in various shapes or designed to fit into a corner (Harding, 264). Small pianofortes already were doubling as sewing tables or tea tables by the end of the eighteenth century. A piano from the 1830s had a keyboard which could be “pushed in and out like a drawer” so that it could serve as a secondary item of furniture, such as a writing desk (Loesser, 402).6 Other desk and bureau pianos soon followed, including a “chiffonier”-style piano complete with a mirror, a piano by Friederici “in the form of a chest of drawers,” and a piano constructed as part of a bedroom and bathroom set (Harding, 265).7 These inventions link music making with other domestic duties and rituals. In fact, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, piano playing causes “new voices” to “aw[a]ke” in Edna Pontellier, who feels trapped in her domestic life. As the music “floated out upon the night, over the housetops, … losing itself in the silence of the upper air” (84), she longs for this freedom of movement. 6  Loesser emphasizes the correlation between a woman of the household and this type of instrument with his comment, “We can imagine a young lady penning a tender missive upon it with her right hand, while her left hand doodled ‘If I Were a Bird’” (402). 7  By 1866, a piano was made with “a hollow base” inside of which “is placed a couch, which is mounted upon rollers” and “a closet … which is designed to contain the bed clothes” (qtd. in Harding, 265).

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household pianos, now mass produced, were often purchased in the United States in the same stores as sewing machines (Loesser, 561). One hardly considers the inherently domestic piano a mobile item. After all, while being one of the most common instruments found in a middle-class Western home, the piano is also the largest. As Loesser writes of the clavier, a precursor to the piano, “Its inertia, if nothing else, made it the focus of the domestic musical life” (54). The piano, which received its modern makeover in the 1820s with the introduction of metal into its construction, was even more unwieldy. The instrument facilitated mobility in other ways, however; if the piano could not easily be moved, others must travel to it. In this way, the piano encouraged domestic journeying; instruments rooted in the drawing-room promoted movement from house to house as players traveled within their domestic circles to entertain at others’ homes. Having a well-kept piano could make a home an attractive destination; similarly, having great pianistic skill could gain one invitation to a home. For instance, one particular story appearing in 1851 in Godey’s Ladies Book calls musical accomplishments “passports to consideration” for young ladies lacking in other natural gifts.8 Thus performing in the parlor and wooing a husband there could allow a woman to “travel” by making an advantageous match, rising in status and literally moving to a nicer domestic space. We must also remember that for the piano to become a central part of the home it first had to be brought into it, a difficult task potentially hazardous to the delicate instrument. Several letters of Virginia Woolf reveal the ordeal she went through in borrowing a piano from Edward Sackville-West for her Bloomsbury home; although the piano provided the Woolfs with delightful concerts by friends in the summer of 1925, once February arrived Virginia wrote to Edward, “I think you ought to take your piano away as soon as possible—the damp is something awful” (L3, 240). Moving the drawing-room piano was no easy matter for families relocating locally, but this was trivial compared with the challenge facing those wishing to travel long distances with their instruments. In 1829, Alexandre Debain posed a solution by developing the “Piano-écran,” a small portable piano weighing less than 100 pounds which “could be packed up in a case to be taken away on a journey” (Harding, 243). Of course, such a small instrument would not prove suitable for a serious performer, and trying to transport a larger and finer instrument was a much more difficult undertaking. Families moving west in the United States sometimes chose to bring their pianos with them; in this way, the piano became a “symbol of Western Civilization,” as Jacques Barzun interestingly notes. Barzun goes on to remark humorously that “for the last century and a half the piano has been an institution more characteristic than the bathtub—there were pianos in the log cabins of the frontier, but no tubs” (vii). Mona Domosh and Joni Seager in Putting Women in Place include with their discussion of women on the American frontier a photograph of a family in 8  From Miss Meeta M., “Ellen Litchfield. An Autobiography.” Quoted in Koza, “Music Instruction in the Nineteenth Century,” 251.

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1880s Nebraska posing on the prairie with their parlor organ. Domosh and Seager comment, “Homesteading in Nebraska was certainly a strenuous life, but it did not preclude participation in the reigning ethos of Victorian domesticity” (149). Clearly a house was not truly a home without a piano. Julia Eklund Koza links the movement of the piano westward with the movement of women: “As arbiters of taste, women were placed in the role of conservators of civilization,” she writes. “When women moved to the wilderness of the West, they were believed to bring civilizing influences with them. The piano often served as a symbol of civilization in the midst of the wilderness” (247). A further example occurs in Jane Campion’s film The Piano (1993) in which a Victorian woman travels from Scotland to New Zealand with both her daughter and her piano; an early scene shows Ada and her daughter deposited on shore with the crated piano, which Ada, in full dress and bonnet, reaches through the crate to play. Early concert pianists perhaps faced the most difficult piano transportation issue of all: because many concert halls were not outfitted with suitable instruments, a grand piano would have to be moved by boat or train. Since a musician might not travel along with his or her instrument, this could cause incredible difficulties. For instance, when French pianist Henri Herz came to California to give a concert, he arrived before his piano. He began his recital only to find his instrument producing gurgling and splashing sounds; he later learned that the piano, proving too difficult to move by other means, had been floated part of the way there from San Francisco.9 Later in the nineteenth century, piano manufacturers began to sponsor the trips of great pianists, as when Paderewski and his entourage were provided with their own Pullman car of furnished rooms including the oxymoron of a mobile “sitting room with piano” (Macleod, 54). Professional women pianists including Teresa Carreño, Clara Schumann, Fanny Bloomfield-Zeisler, and Olga Samaroff also gave performance tours. For Carreño particularly, who was a child prodigy, her musical skills gave her whole family mobility, including the impetus to move from Venezuela to the United States. The woman virtuoso was quite different from the woman parlor pianist; as Macleod writes in Women Performing Music, women soloists were often “judged by their image as well as their musicianship” (4-5) and might have to work twice as hard as men to prove their talent. For instance, critics frequently praised Carreño for her “masculine” strength or “fascinating virility” on the keyboard (qtd. in Milinowski, 391) though they often emphasized her feminine appearance and expected some “feminine tenderness” in her playing.10 Touring brought on additional hardships for the dedicated musician; one 1913 text tells 9  See Beth Abelson Macleod, Women Performing Music. Macleod’s story comes from R. Allen Lott’s dissertation, The American Concert Tours of Leopold de Meyer, Henri Herz and Sigismund Thalberg. 10  In the late 1890s, one reviewer from the New York World complained that Carreño had lost her “feminine tenderness” and that she was playing too much like a “lioness” despite her “still potent charms of beauty and grace” (qtd. in Milinowski, 255).

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of a piano teacher warning a talented student’s father that a woman pianist must “sacrifice many of the comforts and pleasures which women covet” to become a professional. “The more successful she is, the more of a nomad she must become,” he cautions, hinting that the traditional woman and a “nomadic” existence are inherently incompatible (Cooke, 5). Nonetheless, both men and women musicians must have felt at home on tour simply by being able to perform on a familiar piano, especially if that instrument were their own. For nonprofessionals traveling in a foreign country, the piano might similarly function as a familiar acquaintance while abroad.11 Certainly, the topography of the keyboard would remain the same wherever one might travel, no matter the language of the country in which the instrument was made. As pianist Josef Hofmann remarks in his 1909 text Piano Playing with Piano Questions Answered, “Music is a language—the language of the musical, whatever and wherever be their country” (33). Indeed, any pianist whose journey threads through domestic spaces will likely “have music wherever she goes,” since her own body is the true music maker for the instrument. In an 1837 letter, Franz Liszt commented on his relationship with his instrument by writing, “[M]y piano is to me what a ship is to the sailor, what a steed is to the Arab, and perhaps more because even now my piano is myself, my speech, and my life” (45). Liszt usefully describes the piano as a kind of vehicle of transportation, a “ship,” a “steed,” that is nonetheless a deeply rooted part of him, something he could hold onto during his series of trans-European performance tours. For the traveling performer, there is the literal journey from place to place, but other kinds of artistic expeditions are also possible for the musician. For instance, the Polish composer and pianist Sigismund Stojowski commented in an early twentiethcentury interview that the performer, as the “interpreter” of the music, “must keep upon continuous voyages of exploration” to make musical meaning (Cooke, 287). He implies that music can serve as a vehicle for a more internal and inspirational journey. As the following sections will demonstrate, it is particularly this kind of excursion that Woolf, Richardson, and West take interest in and employ for their heroines. “Poured straight into music”: The Piano, the Body, and the Woolfian Voyage In Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), twenty-four-year-old Rachel Vinrace ventures beyond the sheltered home of her English aunts into a remote South American world. Leaving London with her aunt and uncle, Rachel spends weeks aboard the ship the Euphrosyne, then resides at a villa in the fictional 11

 Of course, not all musicians wished to perform while traveling. Although composer Ethel Smyth mentions other tourists’ piano playing at several points during her travel narrative A Three-Legged Tour in Greece (1927), she finds someone’s mistaken idea that she will give a concert in Andritsaena “exceedingly funny, … particularly if the lady performer-in-chief is clad in very old breeches” (99).

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town of Santa Marina. On both stages of this foreign journey, Rachel remarkably is able to keep near her the domestic musical object that best identifies her: the piano. Throughout the novel, Rachel highlights her skill for this instrument as her one distinguishing characteristic. Although the novel’s focus is not specifically on Rachel-as-pianist, what Woolf reveals with the instrument is key not only for understanding Rachel’s character in this künstlerroman but also for grasping Woolf’s opinions, developed throughout her life, about the super-linguistic powers of music. What Woolf achieves with the piano distinguishes her fiction from that of her Victorian predecessors; while Woolf’s early novel may owe much to Victorian tradition, Woolf’s use of the piano is distinctly modernist. Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell describes in Notes on Virginia’s Childhood that she and Virginia received only a little musical instruction as children: “Music naturally, since we were girls, had to be drummed into us, and the piano mistress succeeded in reducing us to complete boredom” (n. pag.). Here Vanessa negatively associates music studies with their gender, critiquing the Victorian convention of teaching young girls to play the piano as part of their social training. Despite these unpleasant childhood lessons, Virginia admired musicality in others early on. In her autobiographical work “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf writes critically of her father, “He had I think no feeling for pictures; no ear for music; no sense of the sound of words” (68), but of her mother she fondly remembers that “she could play the piano and was musical” (86).12 Though Virginia and Vanessa did not continue their musical training into adulthood, Woolf remained enraptured by the musical arts throughout her life. While Quentin Bell notes in his biography of Woolf that “She was not, in any strict sense, musical” (149), Woolf avidly enjoyed listening to music and attending concerts, and her prose gives the impression of a true “ear for music” and “the sound of words” that she failed to find in her father.13 Scholars interested in Woolf and music frequently draw on her fascinating 1940 comment, “I’m not regularly musical, but I always think of my books as music before I write them” (L6, 426).14 Surprisingly few critics specifically interested 12

 From a young age, Woolf may have seen music, especially piano music, as a particularly feminine art form. In “Within a Space of Tears” Emma Sutton suggests that the incorporation of music in Woolf’s works is a principally “female Modernism” (57). Jane Marcus also discusses music as “feminine” for Woolf in “Thinking Back Through Our Mothers.” 13  Woolf’s interest in the musical arts is well documented; my article tracing Woolf’s musical references in her diaries and novels (“Virginia Woolf and Music”) parallels studies by Patricia Laurence (“Virginia Woolf and Music”) and Emma Sutton (Virginia Woolf and Classical Music), while Jane Marcus (“Enchanted Organs”), Peter Jacobs (“The Second Violin”), and Elicia Clements (“Transforming Musical Sounds into Words”) have studied Woolf’s works’ proximity to musical forms. 14  Woolf’s interest in musical form largely derives from her 1930s friendship with composer Ethel Smyth; Jane Marcus and Elicia Clements, among others, have investigated the fruitfulness of this relationship. See Marcus, “Virginia Woolf and Her Violin” and Clements, “Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, and Music.”

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in Woolf and music have centered their attention on The Voyage Out, however, despite the main character’s musical hobby. Although some focus on Terence as the text’s Woolfian artist, many appropriately see Rachel as an equally important artist-figure; nonetheless, Woolf’s particular feelings about the piano and her specific choice of it as an instrument for Rachel as she ventures abroad have never been examined extensively. Rachel is not just a young woman who travels in search of new horizons but a young musician who does so. Like the homesteading ladies of the American frontier, Rachel brings along her piano as she ventures into foreign spaces. This action—the “simple” one of bringing a piano along on a trip from England to South America, which the novel does not dwell upon or question—perhaps reminds us of the late Victorian observation that a young lady is simply “riveted to [the piano] until marriage.” Woolf draws upon the widely held belief that the piano is part of a woman’s domestic accoutrements and accompanies her as naturally as her wardrobe. Woolf could have selected for Rachel a more portable instrument like the flute or violin, but the piano specifically embodies a weighty lingering Victorian domesticity. During Woolf’s own foreign travels in the years just before she began drafting The Voyage Out, she often observed travelers playing the piano. On April 5, 1905, when writing to Violet Dickinson from a boat “somewhere off the coast of Spain,” Woolf complains of her fellow passengers, “They play the piano all day long, and eat sandwiches and drink soup” (L1, 184). Here Woolf envisions her fellow travelers’ piano playing as a key part of the comfortable, mobile domestic sphere. Woolf was also well aware of the social conventions of raising a young lady to play the piano to entertain guests and entice eligible young men. On a 1906 trip to Greece, Woolf observed a girl pounding unpleasantly on a piano in a hotel drawingroom; of her, she comments acrimoniously in her journal, “the education I should sum up thus: there is no doubt that she can play Valzs [sic]: there is no doubt that she can do her hair; but there is no reason to suppose that she can read, write or talk” (A Passionate Apprentice, 339). Here, Woolf pairs piano playing with female adornment, criticizing an educational system which encouraged women to pursue certain superficial accomplishments but did not promote their higher intellectual abilities. Woolf similarly mentions the connections between women and the piano in her later feminist works A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), remarking in the latter of the nineteenth-century woman, “It was with a view to marriage that her mind was taught. It was with a view to marriage that she tinkled on the piano, but was not allowed to join an orchestra” (38). Woolf both draws on and departs from these conventions in The Voyage Out; while Rachel could have been a typical piano-playing heroine, her personal utilization of the piano is a striking revision of common domestic and romantic practices. When we begin The Voyage Out, Rachel’s piano playing at first seems befitting for Woolf’s critique of women’s traditional education: Rachel “had been educated as the majority of well-to-do girls in the last part of the nineteenth century were educated,” learning a little from “[k]indly doctors and gentle old professors” a few

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hours daily (33) with the effect that “there was no subject in the world which she knew accurately” (34).15 Like many of her real-life counterparts, Rachel also has learned the piano; near the novel’s opening we witness how her musical study is grouped with her other lessons by her father when he sends her off to do “Scales, French, a little German” (28). Following Rachel to her room on board the ship, however, we soon find that Rachel does not merely play “scales”: “By virtue of the piano, and a mess of books on the floor, Rachel considered it her room, and there she would sit for hours playing very difficult music, reading a little German, or a little English when the mood took her” (33). In contrast to her other studies, Rachel sits “for hours” practicing the piano. We discover that, being musically gifted, Rachel “was allowed to learn nothing but music” (34). Indeed, it is the piano that transforms her quarters into a room of her own where she can do what she likes independently. The fact that she enjoys playing for herself and at several points in the novel stops playing when she is interrupted by others suggests that we are to see Rachel, at least in her musical interest, as very different from the traditional, domestically cultivated, young woman pianist out of a nineteenth- or early twentieth-century novel.16 Indeed, her rigorous practice habits are somewhat alarming to her family, striking discord with the notion of the piano as a genteel matchmaking instrument: Helen tells Rachel how her Aunt Bessie “is afraid that you will spoil your arms if you insist upon so much practising” (20) and Rachel’s own father comments of his daughter, “She’s a nice quiet girl, devoted to her music—a little less of that would do no harm” (85–86). Her family’s anxieties reveal that she has gone beyond the traditional use of the piano as feminine accessory—so much so that it could make her unfeminine by developing her muscles or stealing the devotion she could lavish upon a suitor. Rachel’s performance of difficult, “masculine” composers such as Beethoven17 separates her from the conventional parlor pianist and instead connects her to professional women pianists like Clara Schumann, a woman whose skill was viewed as equal to a man’s and who made Beethoven’s sonatas familiar to mainstream audiences.18 The importance Woolf placed on establishing Rachel in the text as a fine pianist is expressed by a correction she made to The Voyage Out in 15

 For further thoughts on Rachel’s lack of education see John P. McCombe’s “‘The Voyage Out.’” 16  Despite the novel’s debt to Jane Austen in its satire of societal gatherings, Rachel is not an Austenian character. Woolf emphasizes this particularly by giving Rachel an aversion to Austen’s fiction, which she calls “like a tight plait” (58). Christine Froula interestingly comments of this line, “For Rachel, Austen’s novels, for all their sharpness, wit, and irony, signify the education that ‘plaits’ or plots young girls tightly into femininity, marriage, and motherhood” (71). For further discussion of Jane Austen and The Voyage Out, see Mark A. Wollaeger’s essay “The Woolfs in the Jungle.” 17  Katharine Ellis notes that the keyboard music of composers coming before Beethoven was often “gendered feminine” while Beethoven and the Viennese tradition represented “male-gendered genres” (362). 18  On Clara Schumann’s playing of Beethoven, see Lucy Green, 60.

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1920. In Chapter 2, Rachel’s playing allows her to “enter into communion … with the spirit of the whitish boards on deck, with the spirit of the sea, with the spirit of Beethoven Op.111” (37).19 Louise DeSalvo discovered that the Opus number in this passage was changed from “Beethoven Op. 112,” a cantata, printed in the first edition (“Textual Variant”). As James Hafley notes, Opus 111, the C minor piano sonata, is “the celebrated last of the piano sonatas” and “a demanding and famous piece” (4); most significantly, S. P. Rosenbaum cites a letter from Virginia Woolf to Saxon Sydney-Turner in which she asks that the Opus number be changed (4). This small revision reveals the care Woolf took to display Rachel’s talents, even speaking to those readers intimately familiar with Beethoven’s music. It is additionally unusual that in Woolf’s text Rachel’s performances are not intended to attract the male gaze. Indeed, on board the Euphrosyne, Rachel plays only in her room. If a young man had ever come to visit at her aunts’ home in Richmond, Rachel might have used her natural talent as a “passport” to a marriage; instead, she grew up cultivating her music as a solely private fulfillment. As the characters tease her out of her sheltered space, however, she becomes more bold. At the hotel dance, she decides to play for the party only after the hired musicians have gone home, wishing to continue the music that others have vacated. She takes a man’s place at the piano, boldly claiming her turn as “her gift for playing … was insisted upon” (165). While Rachel’s talents give her a “public identity,” a quality Burgan has identified with the traditional piano-playing heroine, her performance in this scene is not a plot device to fuel Terence’s love but an opportunity to showcase Rachel’s unique musical abilities. When Rachel approaches the piano, she finds upon it “dance music” which is “bound in coloured covers, with pictures on them of romantic scenes” (165). These traditional images do not harmonize with Rachel’s personal conception of the instrument’s social function. She notes how trite the music is, merely patchworks of “hymn tunes” with “bits out of Wagner and Beethoven” (165), thus fitting the popular style of the “brilliant but not difficult” salon piece described by Loesser. Instead, Rachel begins to play Mozart from memory; when told she is not playing “dance” music, “she mark[s] the rhythm boldly so as to simplify the way” and encourages the dancers to just “[i]nvent the steps” (166), creating a raucous scene.20 As Mark A. Wollaeger has observed, here Rachel is “breaking up and reassembling older social and aesthetic forms in a virtuoso performance of her  In E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, Mr. Beebe recalls young Lucy Honeychurch playing Beethoven’s Opus 111 at a recital (29). For more on Forster’s novel, please see footnote 28. 20  Although I focus here on Rachel’s playing, others have noted the freedom her music imparts to the dancers themselves. Frederick P. W. McDowell writes in his essay “Surely Order Did Prevail” that “for others sensitive to [Rachel’s] artistry, her music leads them to a transcendent plane of emotional intensity and spiritual insight” (83). Janis M. Paul in The Victorian Heritage of Virginia Woolf describes the scene as “one large moment of communication and connection through art” (70). 19

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independence” (“The Woolfs in the Jungle,” 42). He refers to her ability to mold traditional tunes to the needs of her listeners as “disruptive energies” and remarks how this scene reveals, above all others, “the potentially transformative power of her imagination” (39). As Rachel is improvising and recreating musically, she employs skills which women frequently were dissuaded from cultivating. Women were encouraged “to perform and not to create,” as Beth Abelson Macleod notes in Women Performing Music (22). Nonetheless, Woolf is definitely establishing Rachel as a “creator,” similar to a composer, and emphasizes this through her use of architectural metaphors. Here the description of the music creating “a building with spaces and columns … rising in the empty space” (167) echoes other rising “building” (57) and staircase metaphors (291) seen elsewhere in the text when Rachel plays, and champions Rachel as a builder and explorer of new musical worlds. In this way she resembles the composer and pianist Franz Liszt who visualized himself “as a creator, forming live shapes with his playing” (Andres, 45); this further identifies Rachel’s musical abilities as artistic and innovative, moving beyond the stereotype of composition as a “masculine” art. Rachel also reemphasizes her position as enjoyer of music versus entertainer when, “though robbed of her audience” she “go[es] on playing to herself” at the dance’s end (167). Rachel’s pianistic habits exist in contrast to those of the world she inhabits. Aboard the Euphrosyne, Richard Dalloway speaks rapturously about coming home from the harsh political world to find that his wife “has spent the day in calling, music, play with the children, domestic duties” (65). When Evelyn Murgatroyd, one of the hotel visitors, asks Rachel what she does and she responds, “I play,” Evelyn laughingly complains, with a perspective similar to Woolf’s view of the traditional woman in A Room of One’s Own, “We none of us do anything but play” (248). Evelyn takes Rachel’s word “play” to mean not only musical accomplishment but domestic frivolity, keeping wealthy women away from intellectual pursuits or social action. Yet Rachel’s playing is also meaningful, and not just in the way that Clarissa Dalloway’s playing is meaningful to Richard after a difficult day. A moment of tension between Rachel and Terence illustrates this point. After the young couple has returned home, now engaged, from a journey upriver, the two sit together with Terence writing and Rachel playing Beethoven. Notably, it is in this scene that Terence begins to watch Rachel play. He observes, “There she was, swaying enthusiastically over her music, quite forgetful of him,—but he liked that quality in her” (291). When he then asks Rachel her opinion about the difference between women and men while she is playing, Rachel fails to answer, focusing instead on her music: Up and up the steep spiral of a very late Beethoven sonata she climbed, like a person ascending a ruined staircase, energetically at first, then more laboriously advancing her feet with effort until she could go no higher and returned with a run to begin at the very bottom again. (291)

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Woolf gives us a beautiful description of the musician at work; crucially, Rachel is not performing in this passage but practicing while Terence is in the room, not casually demonstrating her skill but “advancing … with effort.” When she complains that she “can’t play a note” because of Terence’s constant interruptions, he responds tellingly: “I’ve no objection to nice, simple tunes—indeed, I find them very helpful to literary composition, but that kind of thing is merely like an unfortunate old dog going round on its hind legs in the rain” (292).21 Perhaps this is our first hint that Rachel and Terence cannot achieve the “all possible happiness” that their engagement letters wish them (292). In fact, Terence’s opinion reinforces the traditional belief that a woman need only play “a little” for a man’s pleasure. His ideal resonates exactly with the snide description Woolf later gives of English actress Ellen Terry who, before returning to the stage to be a great success, remains “content … to play her simple tunes on the piano to [her husband] while he paints” (“Ellen Terry,” 69). Terence seems to desire a domestic musician in Rachel, a young Ellen Terry who can play him “simple tunes” while he exercises his own artistry. Rachel will never be this kind of pianist, however; here we see her absorbed in her music, putting her whole body and mind into it instead of just her fingers, thus defying the traditional use of the piano as a modest, feminine social tool. Terence fails to take Rachel’s playing seriously, commenting that she should be answering their engagement letters instead of practicing (295). When she hesitantly obeys, Woolf demonstrates through Rachel’s bumbling attempt to respond to the letters (with “awkward and ugly” politenesses) that her playing is much more natural and integral to her (296). To Rachel, the piano provides a means of selfexpression for a life described as “the short season between two silences” (82). Not adept with language, she has a certain “hesitation in speaking, or rather a tendency to use the wrong words” (20). As I noted in Chapter 3, many critics have examined the significance of Rachel’s silence in the text and her difficulty with speaking.22 Crucially, Rachel turns to music for an alternate means of expression.23 For Rachel, music is a way of communicating without guise or repression: as the 21

 In her essay “Finding a Voice,” Suzanne Raitt suggests that Terence is “ridicul[ing]” Rachel’s muscular musician-body in this passage (35). I instead read Terence’s comment to be about the nature of Rachel’s playing, bent on mastering the difficulty of the music through repetitive practice (thus like a dog “going round … in the rain”) rather than rendering a pleasing performance. 22  See, for example, E. L. Bishop’s “Toward the Far Side of Language” and Patricia Laurence’s The Reading of Silence. 23  The critical studies most interested in music in The Voyage Out as communication and connection are Laurence’s The Reading of Silence, McDowell’s “Surely Order Did Prevail,” Paul’s The Victorian Heritage of Virginia Woolf, Marianne DeKoven’s Rich and Strange, and Terri Beth Miller’s “Teapots and Transcendence.” Miller interestingly mentions the way music is used as “communication” in the novel but asserts that there remains “an inherent social resistance to that which is intangible and beyond words” (187). The article most extensively discussing Rachel’s use of the piano as her voice is Raitt’s “Finding a Voice.”

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narrator states from Rachel’s perspective, “It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for” (37).24 She asks Terence, “Why do you write novels? You ought to write music. Music, you see … goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once” (212). Rachel envisions music as a language that does not have to be tailored to societal expectation but directly communicates emotion and articulates meaning. Other characters in Woolf’s novel view music as potentially dangerous for this very reason; after speaking dreamily of her love for Wagnerian opera, Clarissa Dalloway comments, “a little mysteriously, ‘I don’t think music’s altogether good for people’” (48), noting that it is “Too emotional … . One notices it at once when a boy or girl takes up music as a profession” (48). This is a curious comment following Clarissa’s description of crying on a stranger’s shoulder at the opera. She quickly transfers the focus (and blame) from her own passionate reaction as listener to the performer. Music’s potential not to be “good” for people links “goodness” with emotional repression. Through Clarissa’s comment, Woolf introduces the long-held opinion that self-expression through music might be hazardous, especially for women; as Phyllis Weliver emphasizes in Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, women’s capabilities were thought to be rooted in “biological and reproductive considerations” and other emotional or “energetic output” might ruin their nervous systems (51). Woolf is careful to show that Rachel becomes easily flustered through talk or argument, but that she is completely at ease with her musical instrument. She may converse with a stammer but she can speak out boldly through the piano. Rachel has grown up in a very sheltered environment; a shy girl, she has taken refuge in the piano: “All the energies … that might have made her friends, or shown her the world, poured straight into music” (34). The piano thus becomes both her “friend” and her “world.” At one point in the novel, Rachel takes leave of Helen and Clarissa because she feels “outside their world” (57) and retreats into her own: She slammed the door of her room, and pulled out her music. It was all old music—Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Purcell—the pages yellow, the engraving rough to the finger. In three minutes she was deep in a very difficult, very classical fugue in A, and over her face came a queer remote impersonal expression of complete absorption and anxious satisfaction. (57)

The yellowed music speaks to many hours spent in its company, while Rachel’s “complete absorption” reveals exactly how these hours have been spent. Rachel uses music to escape into another reality, a “remote impersonal” space not dependent on others; in two instances prior to this scene, she uses her music to 24

 Musicians sometimes comment that they cannot express something in words as well as they can demonstrate it on their instruments. James Francis Cooke notes that many of the professional pianists he interviewed felt “weakness in the art of verbal expression” (38).

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“forget” what is around her (29, 36). Indeed, she achieves an intimacy and comfort with the piano that she finds with no one else, even falling asleep on her piano in one scene. Meanwhile, Terence remains baffled by the little he knows about Rachel, even after their engagement (243). Only she and her piano seem to be especially close. The physical connection that is created between an individual and his or her instrument often is considered by instrumentalists who study the Alexander technique or Laban movement analysis to better understand the interaction, balance, and spatial relationship between the human body and the musical instrument. After all, as one self-help book for pianists experiencing pain explains, “the basic instrument of any musician is the body.”25 The emotional connections between player and instrument are considered much less frequently, however. Though the piano is not breathed into like a wind or brass instrument, cradled in the arms or otherwise held next to the body like a string instrument, a certain connection often is forged between the player and the piano. This bond with keyboard instruments has been noted for hundreds of years; for example, the clavichord was termed by one sixteenth-century writer “the thrilling confidant of solitude.”26 More contemporarily, Josef Hofmann wrote in 1909 of the “sweet intimacy … granted to the pianist when, world-oblivious and alone with his instrument he can commune with his innermost and best self” (8); this is precisely like Rachel who becomes “[a]bsorbed by her music” and is able to “enter into communion” with herself and the world around her when she plays. Perhaps expressing this relationship between player and instrument most interestingly of all, the pianist Alfred Reisenauer once commented, “I have played so much and so long that the piano has become a part of me” (qtd. in Cooke, 230). In the societal views of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the piano functioned as part of the social construction of a woman’s body, modestly displaying her graces and coding feelings with new musical meaning. In this way, the piano is like an item of dress, something pretty drawing attention to the wearer. Woolf’s novel, in contrast, highlights the instrument’s deeper abilities, especially its very personal expressive capabilities, allowing the piano to be seen as a closer part of the self, perhaps even as a soul-mate. The close relationship between a woman and her piano has been made familiar to modern audiences through Jane Campion’s film The Piano, a work which Woolf’s novel anticipates. In the film, a Victorian woman and her daughter journey to the wilds of New Zealand where Ada is to marry a landowner. Ada has not spoken since she was six years old and expresses herself instead through her brilliant piano playing; thus the piano accompanies them as an extension of Ada. Ada’s inner voice explains in the film’s opening, “I don’t think myself silent … because of my piano” (Campion, 9). While Campion’s film does more to connect the female body to the piano, in this case 25

 Alexandra and Robert Pierce, “Pain and Healing: For Pianists—Part 3.” Quoted in Friedberg, The Complete Pianist, 24. 26  Quoted in Loesser, 59.

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through expressions of both sexual desire and possessive violence as two men use and abuse the piano in attempts to control Ada, both the film and The Voyage Out bring out a latent relationship between the woman and the piano that transcends Victorian expectations of female piano performance. Both works recount voyages out to a foreign locale where verbally challenged women express themselves through the instrument.27 While Woolf could have chosen to tell a story of a young woman’s artistic awakening in the conservatories of Europe, instead she chose for Rachel’s development to come in South America. For most young women concert artists, such as Venezuelan pianist Teresa Carreño, the voyage out to artistic advancement occurred in the opposite direction. In contrast, South America functions as Rachel’s green space for new development. In Santa Marina Rachel grows vocal about her talents for the first time, telling St. John, “I also play the piano very well … better, I expect, than anyone in this room” (153), a statement Suzanne Raitt calls Rachel’s “most assertive moment in an otherwise hesitant existence” (“Finding a Voice,” 34). Even more bold is Rachel’s later, perhaps teasing remark to Terence that she is “the best musician in South America, not to speak of Europe and Asia” (292). Rachel speaks of herself as if she is already a great professional musician, one merely touring South America. She begins to realize her own artistic potential, a potential catalyzed by new spaces. Just as Sigismund Stojowski remarked that a pianist “must keep upon continuous voyages of exploration” to make musical meaning, in The Voyage Out Woolf creates similar exploratory experiences for Rachel. On an early excursion up Monte Rosa, Rachel’s ability to “obscur[e] the whole of Santa Marina and its suburbs with one hand” (129) shows her how small and limited her village existence really is but suggests the ability of her pianist hands to encompass wider worlds. Indeed, Rachel’s playing creates her own musical geography; as she voyages out, a corresponding “voyage in” occurs through the piano as Rachel creates fanciful buildings and ascends musical staircases. Terence is jealous of her imaginative ability “to be able to cut herself adrift from him, and to pass away to unknown places where she had no need of him” (302). Some of Santa Marina’s “unknown places” also inspire Rachel’s particularly modern imagination. When Rachel goes out for a walk the day after the dance, thinking of her music, she has her own internal adventure as she seeks unoccupied spaces: “along the valley there were trees and a grass path running by the riverbed” where “it was possible to lose sight of civilisation in a very short time” (173). Rachel’s walk away from town, crucially made unaccompanied, is shown to be particularly freeing, a woman’s excursion away from social restrictions: “The 27

 Campion commented of Ada in an interview, “I wanted to create a strong relationship with the piano … . So I felt if she couldn’t speak, the piano would mean so much more to her, it’d be her voice” (qtd. in Urban, 147). Campion does not mention The Voyage Out as an influence, but Woolf and Campion both draw on and depart from Victorian literary models.

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constraint of being among strangers in a long silk dress made it unusually exciting to stride thus alone” (173). Just when passing the beautiful flowering trees Helen “had said it was worth the voyage out merely to see” (173), Rachel ironically begins to move “without seeing” externally, and the memory of her music creates a new scene for her: Her ears hummed with the tunes she had played the night before; she sang, and the singing made her walk faster and faster. She did not see distinctly where she was going, the trees and the landscape appearing only as masses of green and blue, with an occasional space of differently coloured sky. Faces of people she had seen last night came before her; she heard their voices; she stopped singing, and began saying things over again or saying things differently, or inventing things that might have been said. (173)

Rachel’s walk is a far cry from the expedition St. John Hirst had in mind when he earlier remarked, in language suited for a typical tourist, “I like observing people. I like looking at things” (109). A highly unusual adventurer, Rachel here does neither. Not only do Rachel’s musings create an abstract landscape of indistinct colors and shapes, but the inventiveness she has used in her music the evening before is transmitted here to language through a curious kind of improvisation on a set structure, similar to jazz. As she “began saying things over again or saying things differently, or inventing things that might have been said,” we are reminded of Woolf’s modernist manifesto “Modern Fiction,” where she seeks a kind of writing that can transcribe the impressions the mind receives on an ordinary day, where perhaps “the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there” (106). Rachel’s talent is moving her in a distinctly modernist direction as she experiments abroad with her newly unbounded spaces. Woolf’s novel, while possibly drawing on other Edwardian texts’ use of the piano as an alternative means of communication for women,28 adds to this idea the element of the voyage and the theme of feminine mobility. What distinguishes Woolf’s pianist revolves around her destination apart from Western culture. Jane Campion, who uses New Zealand as a similarly remote space for her musician’s voyage, makes a useful observation about her film that might be applied to Woolf’s text: “There are symbolic signs of European civilization, especially the  Rachel may be partly inspired by Forster’s Lucy Honeychurch in A Room with a View (1908). Forster’s novel similarly concerns a young woman falling in love in a foreign space (Florence). Lucy also uses the piano to access a different “world” of feeling and emotion: “It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano” (28). Suzanne Raitt also has noticed this; in “Finding a Voice,” she writes in a footnote that Lucy “uses the piano to excite and play out her own passions” and that Woolf reviewed Forster’s novel while working on her own (47). However, in crucial contrast to Rachel, Lucy is “no dazzling exécutante; … she struck no more right notes than was suitable for one of her age and situation” (View, 28). 28

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piano which is a civilized instrument, that intrude on a world which is much more elementary and primitive” (Ostria and Jousse, 125). Woolf, too, envisioned the piano as a particularly “civilized” instrument when she wrote in her 1905 essay “Street Music,” “The whole of rhythm and harmony have been pressed, like dried flowers, into the neatly divided scales, the tones and semitones of the pianoforte” (30). In this unusual description, the piano represents man’s attempt to press the “flowers” of the wilderness into a set pattern, to domesticate music and mathematically divide it into semitones. How does this particularly “civilized” instrument then fit with Rachel’s voyage out to non-Western spaces? Certainly, the piano functions as part of the Westerners’ circle of familiar accoutrements. Nonetheless, as we can see in the scene of the hotel dance, the piano’s music (as guided by Rachel) is not a particularly civilizing influence, just as Rachel is not a traditional colonial explorer. To offer a point of comparison, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the archetypal modernist travel text with which Woolf certainly was familiar, the brief appearance of a piano clearly functions as a marker of civilization, colonialism, and Western domesticity.29 Here the piano does not escape the world of the home, making an appearance only when Marlow returns from the Congo following Kurtz’s death. As he confronts Kurtz’s “Intended” in the final scene, a grand piano provides a curious companion to the mourning fiancée in her drawing-room: The dusk was falling. I had to wait in a lofty drawing-room … . The bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture shone in indistinct curves … . A grand piano stood massively in a corner with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a sombre and polished sarcophagus. A high door opened—closed. I rose. She came forward all in black with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk. She was in mourning. It was more than a year since his death, more than a year since the news came; she seemed as though she would remember and mourn for ever. She took both my hands in hers and murmured, ‘I had heard you were coming.’ (73)

Here is the woman who stayed behind, who did not make the voyage out, alone in her drawing-room. Perhaps she played the piano, perhaps she did not, but that piano is a multi-layered symbol. Only wealthy families could afford a grand piano in the home, and there it sits as an item of furniture for display, preempting its status as musical instrument. The piano, taken with the other furniture, might suggest a happier time, perhaps when music helped establish the couple’s relationship. Marlow learns from Kurtz’s cousin that Kurtz was possibly a “musician” in his 29

 Although many critics have drawn parallels between these novels, no one yet has made a comparison between Conrad’s use of the piano and Woolf’s. Studies comparing the novels more generally include Rosemary Pitt’s essay, “The Exploration of Self in Heart of Darkness and The Voyage Out”; Marianne DeKoven’s chapter “The Vaginal Passage: Heart of Darkness and The Voyage Out” in Rich and Strange; and Wollaeger’s “The Woolfs in the Jungle.”

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former days (71), though we do not know what instrument he played. The piano remains as an emblem of domesticity, contrasting with the images of wilderness and savagery we have seen throughout Conrad’s novel. Now, however, the piano looms ominously in the room as a symbol of death, gleaming in the corner “like a sombre and polished sarcophagus.” The piano additionally echoes Kurtz himself, whom Marlow once described as “an animated image of death carved out of old ivory” (59). Though the civilized piano might be seen as the antithesis of the savage drums Marlow hears beating at Kurtz’s camp, the ghost of its uncivilized heritage lurks within its very corpus. This Victorian piano is an instrument created partly from the spoils of colonialism; its ivory keys recall Kurtz’s corruption in the African wilderness as he “raided the country” of ivory (55). It became “My ivory” as well as “My Intended”; “everything belonged to him” (48). The woman at home is part of his domestic treasure, and in this final scene her body parallels that of the piano as she appears “all in black with a pale head.” Crucially, she is not playing the piano; it remains mute in the corner while her hands reach out to Marlow instead. To keep women “in that beautiful world of their own” (48), a phrase echoed several times in Woolf’s novel, Marlow must lie—stating that Kurtz’s last words were not “The horror” he still saw (76) but his fiancée’s name, the ultimate deceit which replaces savagery with domesticity—and she, not knowing the world beyond her drawingroom, believes him. Perhaps the image of the piano lingered with Woolf long after she had finished reading Conrad’s novel, but Woolf uses women characters very differently and correspondingly uses the piano differently. In The Voyage Out, it is Rachel who travels into the wilderness, not remaining at home; moreover, she plays that piano and achieves a place and an identity in the world through music that is hers alone. In all other aspects she might represent the overly sheltered, undereducated woman reminiscent of her Victorian predecessors; in all other ways Woolf might mock her naïveté, but through music Rachel finds a doorway out of a repressive existence, and Woolf lauds this power in her. Woolf, while sometimes critical of others’ musical abilities, always showed a great respect for musicians’ fervor. “Street Music” praises the passion of street musicians, expressing appreciation for “violinists … using their instrument to express something in their own hearts” (28). Here Woolf favors the inner experience of music above the outer. She goes on to address society’s anxieties about the “danger” of music (30), reminding us of Clarissa’s comments in The Voyage Out. She calls the musician the most dangerous of the whole tribe of artists. He is the minister of the wildest of all the gods, who has not yet learnt to speak with human voice, or to convey to the mind the likeness of human things. It is because music incites within us something that is wild and inhuman like itself—a spirit that we would willingly stamp out and forget—that we are distrustful of musicians and loath to put ourselves under their power. (29)

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Woolf elevates the musician to the level of a godly messenger, giving him or her an ability and “power” greater than all other artists. Most interesting in this description is the musician’s ability to tap into what Europeans perceived as the primitive, and it is thus important that ten years later Woolf decided to write a novel about a musician, using the backdrop of South America. While the piano may often be equated with Western civilization, Rachel’s innovative imagination helps to decivilize the instrument. Rachel, who chooses to join an expedition into the wilderness to “go up the river and see the natives in their camps” (235), appears influenced by the South American music she encounters there. While still on the steamer, the forest itself seems a kind of music hall: “It echoed like a hall. There were sudden cries; and then long spaces of silence, such as there are in a cathedral when a boy’s voice has ceased” (268).30 When the exploring party encounters the natives, their gaze alone lies “far beyond the plunge of speech” (284). The native women seem to have no instruments with them, but their “voices rose in song, which slid up a little way and down a little way, and settled again upon the same low and melancholy note” (285). This is a description of non-Western music, employing a tonality not confined to the half steps of the piano. Although it is “melancholy,” there is a certain freedom in this singing. When Rachel returns home and practices Beethoven, we see her climbing “Up and up the steep spiral of a very late Beethoven sonata … until she could go no higher and returned with a run to begin at the very bottom again” (291). Although performing the music of a Western composer, Rachel’s performance practice seems to echo the rise and fall of the native singing she heard in the wilderness. Perhaps Woolf hints that Rachel’s music, at times already experimental, has been inspired by theirs. This further establishes Rachel in the text as a distinctly modernist artist and connects her artistic production to other “hybrid texts” of the period inspired by foreign cultures.31 Rachel thus emerges as a new kind of artist, one who, despite her shortcomings, nevertheless must have been admired by her creator. Though not a musician herself

30  In “Street Music” Woolf writes, “In forests and solitary places an attentive ear can detect something very like a vast pulsation, and if our ears were educated we might hear the music also which accompanies this” (31). 31  By the time The Voyage Out appeared, the use of “primitivism” in the arts had been en vogue for at least five years. The Encyclopedia of Literary Modernism (2003) asserts that the modern movement of “primitivism” began with Gauguin, who lived in Tahiti and the Marquesas from 1891 to 1903 and celebrated a “simpler, more sensuous way of life” (“Primitivism,” 321). The British public encountered Gauguin’s Polynesian-inspired works alongside other primitivist art for the first time in 1910 at the Grafton Galleries in London. Nicholas Daly has discussed the incorporation of primitive ideas in music and dance, noting especially Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s “Rite of Spring” (1913) (Modernism, Romance, 138). Cultures uninfluenced by Western ideas were thought closer to the passions of life which some writers and artists tied to the source of human creativity; T.S. Eliot wrote that “Poetry begins, I dare say, with a savage beating a drum in a jungle” (qtd. in Rawson, 105).

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and often reticent about commenting on music from a scholarly perspective,32 Woolf had always appreciated its expressive, super-linguistic capabilities. As a young woman, Woolf commented of her first night on a country excursion, “Our sensations were so exquisite, so crowded & so jubilant that music alone could keep pace with them or express a tenth part of their vividness” (Passionate Apprentice, 136). In an oft-quoted line from a 1901 letter to Emma Vaughan, Woolf asserted, “The only thing in this world is music … . I am going to found a colony where there shall be no marrying—unless you happen to fall in love with a symphony of Beethoven” (L1, 41). For young, inspired Rachel to whom, similarly, “The only thing in this world is music,” there, too, can be no marrying; she moves on to the “silence” of death before we have a chance to see her evolve further as an artist. In fact, the last image of Rachel we see is her hand, “cold,” laid by Terence upon the counterpane (354), the very hand which he before remarked to be “well shaped and competent” with “the fingers of a musician” (211). Many readers have asked why Rachel must die in Woolf’s text. Like a piano that, once displaced, cannot hold its tune again, Rachel succumbs to illness. Some critics read Rachel’s death as her only available release from a constrictive social order. Certainly, marriage as Terence construes it would not altogether be compatible with Rachel’s private musical artistry, and it does not bode well that the last of Rachel’s piano playing we see in the novel is interrupted by Terence. For Rachel to give up her relationship with the piano would be for her to lose herself as well. Perhaps Rachel’s death does not mark an end as much as a transcendence through music beyond the conventions of her time and place. She has gone too far in her “voyage out” and can never completely come back. Unlike Conrad’s Kurtz, however, Rachel briefly returns from her final journey through wilderness and feverish delusion to domestic civilization; Rachel’s last moment is peaceful and her last word truly is her fiancé’s name. Nonetheless, this moment of apparent domestic bliss cannot hold. Rachel is, too, not like Kurtz’s “Intended”; she has not been left behind but has gone ahead where Terence cannot go. Though Rachel’s last scene is ambivalent, told without her perspective, Terence here finds solace in a moment of communication transcending language. Just after Rachel’s death, we do not see the piano sitting alone in the corner, as in Conrad’s text, but feel for a moment the joy of the two briefly reunited young people spreading through the room like a chord: to Terence, “their complete union and happiness filled the room with rings eddying more and more widely” (353). The word “eddying” recalls a joyful scene, the dance at the hotel, where Woolf uses “eddies” three times in describing the music provided by the piano trio. For a moment only, Terence feels the “union,” the communication the two were denied in life, and it could not be more appropriately described than as a moment of music.

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 For example, when writing “Street Music,” Woolf wrote in her journal, “It is about music!—naturally depends more upon the imagination than upon facts” (Passionate Apprentice, 230).

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It is significant that Woolf chose for Rachel to be a pianist, thereby giving Rachel powers that she herself did not possess. Through her music, Rachel achieves the kind of modernist art Woolf aspired to find in writing, and the abstract ability of this art form so far removed from spoken language but so close to human feeling is perfect for Woolf’s demonstration of the expressive potential of art. We feel Woolf thus living vicariously through Rachel while looking ahead to her own modernist ambitions; as Woolf once wrote in a 1905 letter to Violet Dickinson, “beautiful writing is like music” (L1, 223). Woolf struggled to bring out this quality in her own work, and, like Rachel, she was most of all an innovator. Although Rachel dies, for Woolf the image of the pianist as exceptional artist lived on. In a 1925 diary entry, while continuing her struggle to give life to a new form of novel, Woolf describes her own difficult writing process as “like an improviser with his hands rambling over the piano” (D3, 37). Even ten years after The Voyage Out, it seems that Woolf is still thinking back to Rachel Vinrace. A Pilgrimage through Music: Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs While Woolf was writing The Voyage Out, Dorothy Richardson began to craft her own modernist novel about a young woman pianist visiting a foreign country. As in Woolf’s text, the piano becomes a form of expression and communication for Richardson’s young protagonist, Miriam Henderson. Richardson reveals that this expression can come from the female body when it is freed from the strain of performing to please an audience. When self-consciousness disappears, Miriam learns, consciousness can flow. Although Miriam’s piano playing and interest in music are shown throughout Richardson’s Pilgrimage, a thirteen-novel sequence, I will focus primarily on the first novel, Pointed Roofs (1915), which marks the beginning of Miriam’s musical journey. Richardson herself played the piano, and her choice to make Miriam a pianist reveals the importance of that ability to her. While scholars often conflate Richardson and her character,33 subtle differences in their pianistic abilities shed light on Richardson’s message about the transformative capabilities of music. At the age of forty, Richardson set out to begin a new kind of novel and realized that no form was available to transcribe the experience of reality in the way she wished. In the 1938 foreword she wrote to Pilgrimage, Richardson recalls her decision to create a “feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism” (9). She let her “preoccupations” slowly fall away until, liberated from traditional techniques, she felt on “a fresh pathway, an adventure” (10). She finished her novel in 1913 and called it Pointed Roofs; it appeared in 1915, the same year as The 33

 Due to the text’s autobiographical nature and Richardson’s hesitancy to tell about her life through other means, scholars often have conflated Richardson with Miriam; this is taken to an extreme by Horace Gregory, who persistently calls Richardson’s heroine “Dorothy-Miriam” in his 1967 study.

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Voyage Out, even published by the same press (Duckworth). Seen as an example of “feminine impressionism,”34 the novel became the first text of Richardson’s life-long work-in-progress. The novel sequence comprises a “pilgrimage” in more ways than one. Primarily, the volumes tell the story of young Miriam’s journey from place to place, seeking a location and a vocation that can satisfy her and through which she can find purpose and meaning. Secondarily, as an autobiographical series, these novels comprise Richardson’s own journey from memory to textual representation; Richardson’s own “adventure” occurs as she experiments with and further develops her form. Still speaking in terms of a “pathway” to modernism, Richardson in her foreword confesses that by the time Pilgrimage was published her “lonely track” had become “a populous highway,” with Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust all experimenting with the transcription of consciousness (10). Still, Richardson’s novel emerged as a distinctly “female” take on this new modernist medium.35 Richardson felt that too many novels seemed restricted to men in subject and form, and set about writing a woman’s version. She wrote in 1916 that she believed men too often have a “mental tendency to departmentalize, to analyze, to separate single things from their flowing environment” (qtd. in Hanscombe and Smyers, 53). In particular, the “flowing” form of Richardson’s narrative caught the public eye. As I mention in my introduction, Pointed Roofs inspired May Sinclair to coin the phrase “stream of consciousness” in her review of the novel: “Nothing happens,” Sinclair insists. “It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on” (6). Although Richardson did not particularly care for the phrase, it has endured as a hallmark of modernist writing, remaining when Pilgrimage itself had become somewhat forgotten.36 Pilgrimage frequently has been called a woman’s bildungsroman, but the text transcends a straightforward coming-of-age story with its focus on inner discovery and awakening. Pointed Roofs shows Miriam’s first destination on her pilgrimage and mirrors Richardson’s own journey to Germany as a teenager to teach at a finishing school. Leaving her home in Britain for the first time at age seventeen, Miriam travels to Hanover, Germany, to teach English at a small girl’s school in the Waldstrasse. The reader begins the novel in medias res, not knowing anything about Miriam’s family life or her childhood but finding her “Saratoga trunk” already packed to go abroad (15). In Germany Miriam will take her first steps 34

 These are Duckworth’s words, quoted in Fromm, 77.  In a 1923 article called “Dorothy Richardson,” Woolf praised Richardson for her “woman’s sentence … used to describe a woman’s mind by a writer who is neither proud nor afraid of anything she may discover in the psychology of her sex” (qtd. in Hanscombe and Smyers, 8). 36  While many scholars began to take interest in Pilgrimage in the 1960s and 1970s, even today Richardson continues to take a back seat to modernists such as Woolf and Joyce in college courses. As Jane Garrity writes, “Pilgrimage’s status within the academy remains precarious, at best” (87). 35

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toward adulthood and independence. The “pointed roofs” of the title refer literally to the “peaked houses” of “old-time Germany” which Miriam encounters on a day excursion to Hoddenheim (115).37 The title becomes a symbol of a foreign geography which serves as a space for Miriam’s solo journey out into the world. The teaching position abroad has been arranged secretly by Miriam, who felt plagued by “the sense of imminent catastrophe” at home as her father approached bankruptcy (30). In fact, Miriam’s description of her “lonely pilgrimage to the West End agency” to secure the job (27) is the first instance of the word “pilgrimage” in the novel, and suggests that Miriam’s long-term journey will comprise similar independent movements and decisions. Given the title of Richardson’s novel series, it is not surprising that many scholars have been quick to see Miriam on a quest for something elusive, such as “her own real identity” (Blake, Dorothy Richardson, 182), her “individual spiritual identity” (Staley, 65), or a “sacred space” for her writing (Watts, 73). The geography of Pilgrimage also has interested Elisabeth Bronfen and Jane Garrity, who examine both the material and the metaphorical places and spaces of Richardson’s text and connect the physical journey of the work with the imaginative and creative movement Miriam achieves.38 Literary critics have overlooked the importance of travel and place to Richardson in writing the novel, however. In a 1931 interview with Louise Morgan, Richardson reveals that she began the novel alone in a small cottage in Cornwall. There, “outside space and time,” Richardson found the means to conceive of something new and strikingly modernist. She recalls: When I first began writing Pilgrimage I intended to take on in the usual way. Then in Cornwall, in solitude, when the world fell completely away, and when I was focussing intensely, I suddenly realized that I couldn’t go on in the usual way, telling about Miriam, describing her. There she was as I first saw her, going upstairs. But who was there to describe her? (400, Morgan’s ellipses and italics)

Being alone in Cornwall allowed Richardson to develop a new kind of writing, one not relying on the description of a character’s actions in the “usual way.” It was not like the masculine psychological novel she so admired in Conrad and James, which now felt “irrelevant,” but a new feminine form (400). When Morgan presses Richardson to elaborate on the ideal space needed to produce this writing, she remarks that “everything should favour collaboration between the conscious and the unconscious” (396). Locating a new space of solitude allowed 37

 Carol Watts connects the pointed roofs to John Ruskin’s discussion of the pointed arch, a staple of gothic architecture and a “signal of cultural difference” (13). 38  For example, in Dorothy Richardson’s Art of Memory, Bronfen studies how Miriam’s journey through inhabited spaces “culminates in her discovery of the scene of writing” (1) while Garrity, in her chapter on Richardson in Step-Daughters of England, comments that what Pilgrimage “privileges is Miriam’s topographical journey through imaginative space” (86).

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this “collaboration” and gave Richardson the ability to inscribe what she calls the “woman-consciousness” which “has been but little expressed” (400). It gave her the means to go “there,” to locate Miriam’s introspective spaces, a world not found on any literary map. Near the end of Pilgrimage, Miriam herself remarks, “Contemplation is adventure into discovery; reality” (March Moonlight, 657). Richardson uses travel to find an internal “adventure” for her character that leads to a new kind of writing. In Pointed Roofs, the piano helps Miriam move into these transformative spaces: while Richardson’s adult art form is the written word, her young character’s art is music. Germany provides ideal conditions for the development of Miriam’s piano playing. Although Miriam is not alone in Germany, she finds herself an outsider there, even somewhat estranged from the other British girls at the school. She is inspired by the pianistic talents of the German girls, but it is only through playing in solitude that she can achieve a new art that conveys her emotions, facilitates consciousness, and transcends language. Throughout Pointed Roofs, music inspires memory; it creates tangible images in Miriam’s mind and functions as a connector between a current locale and a past place and time. Richardson thus uses music to enable her modernist project of transcribing consciousness, and her reliance on dashes and ellipses to show lapses or switches in thought may be musically inspired. These signifiers of space rather than language would be natural marks of communication for a musically trained author, since in music a rest or caesura indicates a timed pause between notes. When applied to writing, these gestures become a modernist innovation. On the opening page of Richardson’s novel, our first glimpse into Miriam’s past is triggered not by a madeleine soaked in tea but significantly by “the Thursday afternoon piano-organ, the one that was always in tune” (15). The song it plays, “The Wearin’ o’ the Green” (15), reminds Miriam how “It had begun that tune during the last term at school” (16). Her musings, first about school and then about the domestic life she is leaving behind at home, including playing duets with her sister Harriet, trail off in a diminuendo of thought signaled by ellipses as “ … . The piano-organ had reached its last tune. In the midst of the final flourish of notes the door flew open. Miriam got quickly to her feet” (17, Richardson’s ellipses). Although this introductory episode shows only a short period of Miriam’s musing, it links music and memory in a way that will recur throughout the novel. Significantly, the musical object triggering this memory, the “piano-organ,” a kind of barrel-organ running mechanically on a piano roll, is a mobile instrument that a street musician can play while walking. The instrument prefigures Miriam’s own journey which will revolve so much around music; the opening door which coincides with its last few notes seems to indicate a new world opening before her. In chapter two, Miriam begins her trip to Germany feeling “there was freedom somewhere at hand” (30). Though escorted on the train by her father, Miriam will leave him behind once in Germany; she joins our list of other traveling women from this era who found “freedom” in escaping to foreign spaces. As Miriam progresses on her journey, “watching the Dutch landscape go by” (28),

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her thoughts begin to wander. One of the most fragmented sequences of the novel follows as anxieties about her new position race through Miriam’s mind, loosely linked by ellipses. As occurs so often in narratives of travel, movement begets new thoughts which require a new medium for expression. Ideas of music and travel merge when Miriam in the train imagines that she hears “the noise of the wheels underneath going to the swinging tune of one of Heller’s ‘Sleepless Nights,’” a piano piece that Miriam and her sisters may have played at home (26). Although Miriam “wanted to be free for the strange grey river and the grey shores” of Germany, memory persists in getting in the way; thoughts of music are bound up with thoughts of home, and “the home scenes recurred relentlessly” (26). This section also reveals Miriam’s preexisting ideas on women, music, and domesticity. Miriam’s father is an amateur musician and has encouraged his daughters’ interests in music by taking them to Mozart and Wagner operas, to philharmonic concerts, and to “Madame Schumann’s Farewell,” where Miriam recalls her “sitting at the piano with her curtains of hair and her dreamy smile” (33).39 It is significant that Miriam especially recalls not Clara Schumann’s exceptional musicianship but her beautiful feminine attributes. Her perspective reflects traditional reviews of women performers, often admired as much for their dress and beauty as their playing. We can see from the beginning how much teenage Miriam has adopted the popular view of the woman pianist, seeing the performance itself bound up with the audience’s gaze on the female body. Miriam’s admiration of Clara Schumann, a German pianist, gives a clue to the position of Germany in the novel as a fantasy space for a young musician in the late nineteenth century. Though Miriam’s school is not a conservatory, its serious focus on music reflects the central role music education played in Germany, a country proud of its musical heritage. Many of the foremost nineteenth-century composers, including Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Wagner, were German. Germany’s musical scene helped make it a popular travel destination up until the first world war, and many young musicians from the United States and Europe came to German conservatories to study. Macleod writes in Women Performing Music that “The leading cities of Germany were the favored destinations of many American music students” (36), and notes that many teenage girls traveled there accompanied by their mothers and grandmothers. Amy Fay’s Music-Study in Germany, published in 1880, gave her contemporaries a remarkable window into her lessons with Liszt and other great artists, and encouraged many women “to study music … abroad” (Macleod, 39). While the original purpose of Miriam’s trip to Germany is not to study music, her awakening 39  This family life reflects Richardson’s own. Fromm’s biography recounts that Richardson’s father instilled a love of music in his daughters at an early age; he played the violin and often invited friends over for “musical evenings” of chamber music (13). Mr. Richardson also would take the girls to concerts in London. Dorothy wanted no part of the typical “female education” and went to school to study language and literature, the sciences, mathematics, and music (14). The subject “in which she excelled was pianoforte” (14).

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abroad occurs through this medium. Our very first glimpse of Miriam in Germany reveals her at the piano. It functions as a familiar object in a foreign setting, a piece of home away from home. Chapter three begins, “Miriam was practising on the piano in the larger of the two English bedrooms. Two other pianos were sounding in the house, one across the landing and the other in the saal where Herr Kapellmeister Bossenberger was giving a music-lesson” (34). Before we receive any other indication of Miriam’s place in the German school, we are given this view of communal activity through music. The set-up of these pianos with Miriam playing alone and yet participating in a house-wide sound provides a glimpse of the together-yet-separate theme which will characterize Miriam’s participation at the school. It is through music that she feels the closest connection to others and to the world around her, and music provides her with the experience of adventure and freedom of expression she seeks in Germany. The pianistic ability of the German girls opens new musical vistas for Miriam. She remembers how, the morning after her arrival, she witnessed young pupil Emma Bergman playing “on the bad old piano in the dark dressing-room in the basement” (35). What Miriam saw surprised her: She had opened the door on Emma sitting at the piano in her blue and buff check ribbon-knotted stuff dress. Miriam had expected her to turn her head and stop playing. But … the child’s profile remained unconcerned. She noticed the firmly-poised head, … the thick cable of string-coloured hair reaching just beyond the rim of the leather-covered music stool, the steel-beaded points of the little slippers gleaming as they worked the pedals, the serene eyes steadily following the music. She played on and Miriam recognized a quality she had only heard occasionally at concerts, and in the playing of one of the music teachers at school. (35)

As with her comments about Clara Schumann, Miriam’s observations here reveal her attention to the female pianist’s body. The description of Emma emphasizes her delicacy and femininity: the “ribbon-knotted stuff dress,” the long “stringcoloured hair,” the “little slippers,” the “serene eyes.” Emma is a picture of domestic perfection, though she performs on the basement piano, alone. Somewhat counter to this traditional feminine body at the piano is the skill of Emma’s playing. Miriam notes a “quality” in it that she has only heard in the playing of professionals, and “stood amazed” as Emma continued to play (35). Unlike Rachel in Woolf’s novel, Emma does not stop playing when interrupted. Although she may have begun practicing in private, Emma’s comfort with the piano as a social instrument suggests that public performance is the chief aim of her abilities. Richardson underscores the German pupils’ ease with performance during the remarkable Vorspielen scene in which the schoolgirls present a small concert on the grand piano in the saal, the school’s drawing-room. The concert is designed to be a very domestic event. Miriam, mimicking the other listeners who are “bending over fine embroideries” and lace-pillows, runs to get her “utmost experience of

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fancy work,” a decorative red and black wool stitch, from her work basket (42). At least from our limited perspective, it is Miriam who seems most moved by the performances, listening with her full attention while the other girls work. As Emma Bergman performs first, playing Chopin’s Fifteenth Nocturne, Miriam achieves a moment of transcendence as she “slid to a featureless freedom”: She felt that she was looking at nothing and yet was aware of the whole room like a picture in a dream. Fear left her. The human forms all round her lost their power. They grew suffused and dim … . The pensive swing of the music changed to urgency and emphasis … . It came nearer and nearer. It did not come from the candle-lit corner where the piano was … . It came from everywhere. It carried her out of the house, out of the world. It hastened with her, on and on towards great brightness … . Everything was growing brighter and brighter … . Gertrude Goldring, the Australian, was making noises with her hands like inflated paper bags being popped. Miriam clutched her wool-needle and threaded it. She drew the wool through her canvas, one, three, five, three, one and longed for the piano to begin again. (43, Richardson’s ellipses)

Miriam’s music-inspired reverie becomes one of the most important modernist moments of the novel. The scene is discussed often by critics; for instance, Thomas F. Staley calls Miriam’s daydream a “rhapsodic state” of “psychic well-being” (40) while Caesar R. Blake astutely comments that the light Miriam sees reveals “the power of abstractive music to stimulate an illumination” (101) and calls such textual moments an “‘opening’ vouchsafed to the contemplative consciousness” (185). Such an “opening” may remind us of Richardson’s feeling in writing the novel, when she felt in tune with her unconscious. Emma’s playing brings “freedom,” the very feeling Miriam was seeking when moving toward Germany in the train car. Suddenly the music creates a new geographic space for Miriam’s wandering mind as the room itself becomes “like a picture in a dream.” The piano music suffuses everything until it actually becomes a vehicle of transport: “It carried her out of the house, out of the world.” Music takes Miriam on a mental excursion to a new plane of existence, a space of “great brightness,” until there is an interruption of strange popping noises, which Miriam in her transformed state cannot recognize as applause.40 Miriam’s physical participation in the scene is also noteworthy. Historian Arthur Loesser has written that the “sentimental attachment that the piano could arouse was bound up with the things with which it lived: the parlor games, the embroidery, the sewing machine” (563). In this late Victorian drawing-room, 40

 This feeling of experiencing a moment of transcendence followed by interruption also appears frequently in Woolf’s writing, as in the later Mrs. Dalloway (1925) where Clarissa in the flower shop feels a wave of “this beauty, this scent” lift her “up and up” until she is interrupted by a sound like “a pistol shot” (13).

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Richardson reinforces the image of the piano as domestic object by encircling it with embroidering young ladies. Quite in opposition, Miriam can pay no attention to her own fancy work until Gertrude signals the end of Emma’s playing by clapping. When Miriam returns from her reverie she finally threads her needle, but the pattern she makes through her canvas is “one, three, five, three, one.” A reader familiar with basic piano playing would recognize this as the outline of an arpeggio, the first, third, and fifth notes of the scale played by the first (the thumb), third, and fifth fingers. Even as Miriam stitches, she wishes to actively participate in the music making she hears. When Clara Bergman performs next, Miriam experiences a second visionary moment, this time seeing a specific visual image: presently she saw, slowly circling, fading and clearing, first its edge, and then, for a moment the whole thing, dripping, dripping as it circled, a weed-grown mill-wheel … . She recognized it instantly. She had seen it somewhere as a child—in Devonshire—and never thought of it since—and there it was. She heard the soft swish and drip of the water and the low humming of the wheel. How beautiful … it was fading … . She held it—it returned—clearer this time and she could feel the cool breeze it made, and sniff the fresh earthy scent of it, the scent of the moss and the weeds shining and dripping on its huge rim. (44, Richardson’s ellipses)

As in the beginning of the novel, music ushers in memory. This time, however, it conjures an unrelated childhood scene, possibly triggered by the “throbbing undertow” of the musical movement (44). Here Richardson reveals how music can, without recourse to words, paint an image in the mind. Using musically inspired punctuation such as dashes and ellipses, Richardson illustrates the pulses of Miriam’s consciousness as she strains to retrieve that memory. The detail of this particular recollection is striking, bringing with it not only visual stimuli but also sound, touch, and even smell. The sensory details are so vivid that it is as if the mill-wheel has rematerialized before her. Moreover, Miriam associates the wheel with a place visited in childhood, Devonshire, and the music has transported her there in memory, again acting as a vehicle of movement through time and space. These imaginative excursions form a part of the “Pilgrimage” suggested by the novel series, moments which, like Hermione’s “AUM” in H.D.’s HERmione, open up new spaces for both character and author. Through listening to the German girls play, Miriam learns to separate the act of hearing the music from that of seeing the performer. The German girls at the school perform differently from their English classmates, and this allows Miriam to understand something fundamental about her own approach to the musical instrument. As two English sisters play for the Vorspielen, Miriam is brought back to the familiar world by their “self-consciousness” (44); only when the first Martin sister, with the “patch of dull crimson on the pallor of the cheek she presented to the room,” succeeds in “let[ting] herself go” does Miriam sense the freedom of

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the Beethoven sonata, and even then feels “a little ashamed of such expression coming from English hands” (45). This curious comment reveals that Miriam has been taught to play in a manner thought to befit a young Victorian woman musician: without too much emotion. When the second English sister plays, Miriam realizes that the German pedagogical approach is very different: “these girls were learning in Germany not to be ashamed of ‘playing with expression’” (45).41 The key difference is that the English girls “did not think only about the music, they thought about themselves too” (45). Richardson’s text is presenting a fascinating perspective on the interaction between the body and a musical instrument and the ways in which the body, while enabling the creation of musical sound, also can impede the production of that sound. We learn before the concert begins that Miriam herself has trouble playing in front of others because of her nervousness. The first time she had performed a duet with one of her sisters, the notes on the page seemed to blur, and her fingers acted strangely: Eve had said ‘louder’ and her fingers had suddenly stiffened and she had worked them from her elbows like sticks at the end of her trembling wrists and hands … . She had heard nothing then but her hard, loud minims till the end, and then as she stood dizzily up someone had said she had a nice firm touch, and she had pushed her angry way from the piano across the hearthrug. (41, my ellipses)

Richardson has given us a main character who suffers from performance anxiety, a debilitating affliction familiar to many musicians. It requires extreme composure and concentration to render notes in the performance space exactly as they are executed in the practice room. As Miriam observes, problems arise when a musician consciously or unconsciously thinks about her body in performance in a different way than she did in private: in the concert space, the body is revealed, becoming itself a part of the performance and the music. In this example, Miriam’s nerves have influenced her body, causing her fingers to “stiffen” and affecting their interaction with the piano keys. Her fingers even seem foreign to her body, mere “sticks” she cannot control, and her customary connection to the musical instrument is lost. Her anxiety additionally affects what Miriam sees and hears during the performance: the minims (half notes) become “swollen” on the page until she can no longer understand their symbolic function. Miriam becomes hyper-aware of her own act of performance rather than able to enjoy the music she is creating. This is in fact the opposite of what Miriam experiences when the German girls perform, when she feels, sees, and hears something beyond the musical notes alone. 41

 American pianist Amy Fay made a similar observation during her six years spent in Germany. She expresses amazement over “the artistic manner in which even very young German girls rendered the most difficult music” and remarked, “None of them had the least fear” (qtd. in Macleod, 39, 40).

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When reading Fromm’s biography of Richardson, we may be struck by how different Miriam’s playing seems from that of her author: Herr Froude took to featuring [Dorothy] in the annual school concerts. She could always be counted upon to perform proficiently and never betray nervousness, for she was used to playing for an audience at home, under her father’s direction. The music master’s praise led her to thoughts of a career on the concert stage, but she dreamed quite as often of the theater. (Fromm, 14–15)

Richardson had a great natural ability for the piano and was capable of performing both in the domestic sphere and at school concerts without nervousness. Although we cannot know whether or not Richardson felt but did not “betray” performance anxiety, it is important that she chooses to bequeath to her heroine a crippling stage fright that she herself did not show. In utter contrast, Miriam recalls playing at school performances “with trembling limbs and burning eyes” and on “musical evenings” trying in vain “to be able to reproduce the effects which came so easily when she was alone” (42). This difference reveals that Richardson wished to draw particular attention to the subtle connections between body and instrument in her text, allowing Miriam a more marked transition from nervous disengagement to powerful awareness in performance. To understand Richardson’s use of the piano as a vehicle for Miriam as she journeys abroad, it is important to consider the delicate relationship between player and instrument. Musicians who have trouble performing because of nervousness or pain sometimes turn to the teachings of F. M. Alexander (1869–1955), an actor who discovered that his speaking abilities were affected by the posture and tension of his whole body. Frank Pierce Jones, a life-long researcher and teacher of Alexander’s methods, lectured that it was crucial for musicians to understand “the use of themselves as well as they understand the use of their instruments” (182). Today, students studying the Alexander technique consider their body’s balance with the musical instrument and sometimes conceptualize instrument and body as one system. In nonmusical theory, the body and its boundaries have been studied by psychologists and phenomenologists, including Merleau-Ponty, who speaks of innate body knowledge as the “corporeal schema” of the body.42 Musicians have developed their own concept of “body mapping,” a term named by Alexander teacher and cellist William Conable, which involves witnessing and reconceptualizing the kinesthetic workings of the body.43 If we combine these theories, we can see how the instrument itself becomes part of the body “map,” part of the personal geography of the performer. This is similar to Paul Schilder’s idea of the plastic body schema, where a tool like a walking stick, used as an appendage, becomes integrated into the body’s movement and thus an individual’s  See Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. For a discussion of MerleauPonty’s ideas on corporal phenomenology, see Grosz’s fourth chapter in Volatile Bodies. 43  See Conable, What Every Musician Needs to Know about the Body. 42

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conception of him- or herself: “The body image can shrink or expand … . When we take a stick in our hands and touch an object with the end of it, we feel a sensation at the end of the stick. The stick has, in fact, become part of the body image” (Schilder, 202). Similarly, a musical instrument becomes an extension of the body through performance. This amended sense of personal cartography can be negatively affected by the gaze of others, disconnecting the union between body and instrument. In Pointed Roofs, Richardson implies that the key to inspired performance, especially for women as customary objects of the gaze, is not to let the workings of the body become separate from the musical action; this runs counter to the traditional Victorian view of the drawing-room pianist who uses the piano to display herself. The Vorspielen gives Miriam new insight into piano performance. She realizes that to play well a performer must concentrate only on the music and work to make it her own: Miriam believed she could do it as the Germans did. She wanted to get her own music and play it as she had always dimly known it ought to be played and hardly ever dared. Perhaps that was how it was with the English. They knew, but they did not dare. No. The two she had just heard playing were, she felt sure, imitating something—but hers would be no imitation. She would play as she wanted to one day in this German atmosphere … . She had in fact had a lesson. But she wanted to be alone and to play—or perhaps with someone in the next room listening. (45)

To “dare” seems to imply taking a step beyond what is expected or thought proper for the English drawing-room or school hall. Miriam believes that even the two English sisters at the Vorspielen played as if “imitating something,” perhaps reminding us of Rosamund’s playing in Middlemarch; in contrast, Miriam vows that “hers would be no imitation” (45). Miriam is setting out to create a form of art that comes from her own expressive abilities and is perfectly original. Nonetheless, her idea of performance is very different from the idea upheld by the school: Miriam wants to play “alone.” Music does not function as a communal activity for Miriam as it does for the other students. Music is her companion of solitude, her comfort, and her door into another realm: as Miriam goes to bed “wrapped in music,” she “fell asleep somewhere outside the world” (50). Unlike Woolf’s Rachel, Miriam is modest about her abilities. When Fräulein Pfaff asks her if she plays the piano, she responds demurely, “A little” (48), just as Jane Eyre does in Brontë’s novel. However, like Rachel and unlike Jane, Miriam finds uses for the piano that transcend the limitations of the Victorian parlor pianist. In chapter four Miriam plays for the first time since attending the Vorspielen, and we see how her playing has been affected by what she has witnessed. Feeling confident about what she has accomplished thus far in Germany, Miriam approaches the grand piano in the saal “under the light of the french window”:

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This passage reveals how much Miriam values making music for music’s sake and not just for the benefit of a listener. She feels “independent” enough to ignore the other girls and “let herself go, and listen,” integrating her identity as audience member with her identity as performer. The “light of the french window” illuminating the piano recalls “that wonderful light” that Miriam saw during the Vorspielen performances, the light that carried her “out of the world” and revealed the “weed-grown mill-wheel,” and suggests that Miriam soon may find such transcendence in her own playing. Moreover, it is important that she selects the music of Beethoven over that of Grieg for her debut performance “to herself.” In the liberating space of Germany, she chooses German music for her transformative experience. Miriam selects the first movement of the Sonata Pathétique, remembering how, in a lesson at home, when her teacher had cried, “Let it go! Let it go!” she “had almost forgotten her wretched self, almost heard the music … .” (56, Richardson’s ellipses). This time, Miriam only has to play the opening chord of the piece to feel a freedom of expression. As her hands fall “true and clean” on the chord, she wonders, “Should she play any more? … She had confessed herself … just that minor chord … any one hearing it would know more than she could ever tell them … her whole being beat out the rhythm” (57, Richardson’s ellipses). As she plays on: she found herself sitting back, slackening the muscles of her arms and of her whole body, and ready to swing forward into the rising storm of her page. She did not need to follow the notes on the music stand. Her fingers knew them. Grave and happy she sat with unseeing eyes, listening, for the first time. (57, Richardson’s ellipses)

This passage, in which Miriam lets her body relax into the music, is the opposite of the earlier one in which Miriam’s fingers feel like sticks protruding from her trembling hands. She discovers a way to speak through the piano, to “confess[ ] herself,” to let even one chord say “more than she could ever tell them.” Later in Pilgrimage, Miriam, sounding a lot like Woolf’s Rachel, will comment, “Why would people insist upon talking about things—when nothing can ever be communicated?” (Interim, 306). Knowing English much better than German, Miriam has some difficulty speaking with pupils and teachers outside of the English classroom and music gives her a way to transcend these language

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barriers. This passage further suggests that music has capabilities even beyond its function as a “universal language,” as Longfellow famously termed it (154). As Arianne Burford has argued, in Pilgrimage music “provides a space for female empowerment and expression” (269–270). It gives Miriam the ability to speak her emotions directly and provides an outlet for her passion and creativity. In writing a novel about a woman’s coming of age, Richardson demonstrates how a woman might take a symbol of female domesticity and transform it into one of imagination, freedom of expression, and mobility. As Miriam plays, her “whole being” merges with the music as her body forgoes its former problematic tension. As Kristin Bluemel has pointed out, this scene of emotional ecstasy is very physical.44 Bluemel beautifully articulates that it is the “conversation between Miriam and her piano” that allows her “to orchestrate her own escape into freedom” (64). As well, part of the “communication” here is between Miriam’s mind and body; no longer self-conscious, she is able to channel her emotions into not just her fingers but her “whole body.” She allows the piano to become a part of her as “her whole being beat out the rhythm” and her fingers find the notes in her mind rather than the notes on the page. Miriam’s body is speaking in this scene through the piano; it is not a body to be seen but a body to be heard, and the piano becomes a vessel for her voice. As she is able to express herself like this for the first time, her eyes fill with tears, revealing a physical outpouring of her emotion. In this small German school, however, one never can be truly alone or play only to oneself. At the end of this intimate scene, Miriam finds herself being watched through the door by Fräulein Pfaff and Gertrude. Although Miriam must feel pleased to be pronounced “a real musician” (57) by the genuinely impressed headmistress, the experience does not subsequently encourage her to perform in front of an audience. Indeed, the scene ends not in illumination but in shadow as Miriam hopes her tears are hidden by the “sun-blinds” which “cast a deep shadow over the room” (57). Miriam wants others to acknowledge her achievements without her having to perform for them; she wishes that her sisters could come, to see “the wonderful Germany that she had achieved,” wanting them “to hear the music that was everywhere all week, that went, like a garland, in and out of everything, to hear her play, by accident, and acknowledge the difference in her playing” (66). As she also expresses in an earlier scene, Miriam does not want to perform but to be heard “by accident”; she views her playing not as a solo recital but as a part of something larger, one melody of the “garland” of music at the school. It is curious, too, that Germany becomes in this construction something “achieved,” particularly by her playing; the idealized fantasy space now has been made real to her by her artistry. 44

 Bluemel reads Miriam’s ecstasy as one instance of an “unconventional” representation of “female sexuality” in a text lacking traditional representations of sexuality (64). Although I instead read this moment as artistic epiphany, I agree that it is Miriam’s “intuneness” and connection with her own body which allow her new movement.

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Bluemel comments that music is “a positive, nondivisive language in Pilgrimage” (62). Nonetheless, Miriam’s feelings about the personal nature of music making disagree with the praxis of performance set by the school, causing one of many rifts that eventually separate Miriam from it. While Miriam learns how to really “play” in Germany, she also discovers that she could not always ‘play’—even the things she knew perfectly—and she began to understand the fury that had seized her when her mother and a woman here and there had taken for granted one should ‘play when asked,’ and coldly treated her refusal as showing lack of courtesy. ‘Ah!’ she said aloud, as this realization came, ‘Women.’ (58)

Miriam dismisses women’s tendency to view piano playing as a simple showy parlor trick instead of recognizing it as an art form which requires inspiration of the moment.45 While Miriam admires the advanced piano skills the German girls acquire, she disagrees with one aspect of the German pedagogy: in a school that is not a conservatory, music is still conceptualized as part of the girls’ preparation for marriage. Although the students are brilliant performers, their music making will serve only to carry them further into the domestic sphere. Miriam seems to be alone in recognizing and celebrating a use for the instrument reaching beyond this social purpose. It is important here to note a final difference that separates Miriam from her author, or at least from how Richardson was perceived by her biographer. Fromm writes of Richardson’s piano playing that “not even Dorothy took her gifts seriously. All the Richardson girls understood that the future for them lay in marriage and the domestic life” (15). Indeed, though quite a performer, young Dorothy’s talents always seem to have been bound to a “domestic life” and future; after her mother’s death, she went to visit friends in Calne where she played a concert in the Town Hall and “was flattered and courted” (Fromm, 24). In her novel, however, Richardson reveals that the piano can serve a task beyond its domestic function; after all, it is the piano’s music which carried Miriam “out of the house.” Miriam has no interest in what men like in girls. She can, for instance, meet Pastor Lahmann’s gaze and courting poem (“A little land, well-tilled, / A little wife, well-willed” (128)) without blushing or blinking, filled only with “fury to be regarded as one of a world of little tame things” (129). Miriam is not in Germany to be occupied like a “well-tilled” piece of land but to explore for herself the world opening before her, particularly the world of possibility symbolized by the music of the piano. Miriam speaks for an author who, long removed from her teenage years, recognizes in the superlinguistic potential of music something she has been trying to express through her writing. 45

 Miriam’s self-placement within gender constructions is complex; for a fuller discussion of gender in the text see Garrity’s Step-Daughters of England and Joanne Winning’s The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson.

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In 1919, a reviewer in The Spectator remarked that reading the fourth book of Pilgrimage after Victorian romance was like “listening to a Jazz-band after a symphony by Mozart.”46 The musical analogy is fitting for a text which riffs on the ebb and flow of human consciousness and has such a loose narrative structure. Richardson once commented in a letter that “Language is a very partial medium of expression. Poetry indirectly more direct. Music still more so. Yet all art, as every artist … well knows, can never express fully, what he wants to express.”47 Thus Richardson considers music not only more direct but also more complete than language. Perhaps language, to express what the author intends, must aspire to the abilities of music. Richardson may have borrowed from the medium of music to express silence through symbolic representation, but music likely influenced her writing in additional ways.48 When Richardson lamented the shortcomings of traditional novel structures, she may have had music in mind: “The material that moved me to write would not fit the framework for any novel I had experienced,” she wrote. Both the romantic and the realist novel “left out certain essentials and dramatized life misleadingly. Horizontally.”49 As other critics also have noted, Richardson’s novel is developed, in contrast, “vertically,” without much forward motion. Considering the term “vertical” even more plainly, we might think of a musical chord. Late in Pilgrimage, Miriam refers to “the curse of speech” as “its inability to express several things simultaneously” (Dawn’s Left Hand, 164). Indeed, it is only through music that this can occur, and perhaps it is thus that Miriam is so fulfilled by “that minor chord,” as “any one hearing it would know more than she could ever tell them.” Richardson’s close interweaving of past and present, often achieved through music, suggests a chordal resonance. Perhaps we cannot begin to understand the surface “melody” of a character’s life without hearing the harmony and counterpoint which support her. Germany opens up new possibilities for Miriam; away from home for the first time, she is able to find her voice, largely through the medium of the piano. The piano provides a vessel for self-expression, converting emotion and body movement into meaningful sound. While both Rachel and Miriam achieve a personal intimacy with the piano, Richardson’s novel offers specific insight into the relationship between body and instrument, demonstrating that this connection must not be inhibited by the audience’s gaze and offering a glimpse into the realm of the musical which can exist apart from the limitations of social reality. The piano simultaneously presents new opportunities for Richardson as her pianist protagonist allows her to experiment with a form of art that transcends the abilities of language, allows for play with constrictions of time and space, and enables  Quoted in Caesar Blake, 3, from The Spectator, CXXII (1919), 330.  Quoted in Bronfen, 3, from an undated letter from Dorothy Richardson to Henry Savage held at the Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University. 48  Lynette Felber, for instance, has made a fascinating comparison between Pilgrimage and a Chopin nocturne, a work based on “variation and reiteration” (101). 49  Quoted in Felber, 101. 46 47

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artistic excursions into a more spiritual realm aligned with memory, dream, and emotion. Rebecca West, the Piano, and the Travel “Fantasy” Writer Rebecca West called Pilgrimage “a miracle of performance.”50 It is likely that West admired the work not only for its experimental style showing the flow of a woman’s consciousness but also for its use of the piano. West’s mother was a talented pianist; as Harold Orel has written of Isabella Fairfield, “If it had not been for the exigencies of raising a family on practically no money, she might well have secured for herself a career as a concert artist” (4). West retained for the instrument a feeling of awe and respect throughout her career; late in life she wrote of her mother, “How magical my mother then appeared to me as she sat down at the piano and evoked sounds that … were pure pleasure. She played Schumann and Beethoven and Mozart and Chopin, and a good deal of Mendelssohn” (“My Relations with Music,” 218). The piano becomes the instrument of choice of several strong women characters in West’s novels, women who are, incidentally, “magical.” Ann V. Norton has suggested that female magic subverts “male hegemony” in West’s novels (140); moreover, these women’s occult talents meaningfully parallel their power as artists. Harriet Hume is the most mysterious of these magical women; she is a professional concert pianist with an extraordinary musical ability, though her supernatural “gift” is the ability to read the mind of her lover, Arnold Condorex. While Arnold, not Harriet, is the foreign traveler in the novel, Harriet proves that exhilarating adventures can happen much closer to home. Harriet has the unique effect, perhaps linked to her other gifts, of transforming London into a foreign space, making the text a veritable travel narrative of the imagination. Harriet Hume (1929) is not the only novel in which West uses a woman pianist as a main character. In her autobiographical work The Fountain Overflows (1956), a pianist mother hopes for her daughters to succeed in music “where only ill luck had given her failure” (19). Although Mrs. Aubrey is very critical of her children’s playing, she is idolized by Mary and Rose, the daughters she hopes will grow to be concert pianists. Mary and Rose wish to play with the spirit and technical mastery of their mother, studying harmony and etudes and becoming “infatuated with arpeggios” (25). For them, the piano represents a vehicle that will carry them into the public sphere, enabling them to demonstrate their talents and make their own way. In contrast, their sister Cordelia, a showy violinist, is whisked away by Miss Beevor to give public concerts wearing expensive dresses. In performing, she emphasizes looks over artistry: “She would deform any sound or any group of sounds” just to show “how pretty she looked as she played her violin” (145). The novel scorns the ideal of the fashionable musician who performs only to showcase  Quoted in the front matter of the Popular Library edition of Pilgrimage.

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her body and her femininity, and supports separating the woman performer from her domestic image, allowing women to answer a higher artistic calling. At the novel’s end, as the two young pianists are on the verge of venturing into the world for the first time, Rose queries, “What is music about?” Mary replies, “Oh, it is about life, I suppose, and specially about the parts of life we do not understand … . Oh, I can’t say what I mean” (433). This explanation summarizes a quality of music Woolf, Richardson, and West all explore: that music can serve where speech cannot. In the above passage, Mary loses the ability to define her meaning through language even while trying to explain music’s purpose. The passage also suggests that music is related to the enigmatic and serves as a tool for tapping into the unknown. It is this aspect of music that Rebecca West explores in her earlier novel Harriet Hume, West’s most experimental work of fiction, featuring a mind-reading pianist.51 Perhaps inspired by the mystical experiences Miriam achieves with the piano, West takes instrument–performer connections to a new level. Harriet Hume is subtitled “a London fantasy.” In music, a fantasy or “fantasia” is an instrumental piece characterized by its “elusiveness resulting from its departure from current stylistic and structural norms,” giving “the impression of flowing spontaneously from a player’s imagination and delight in performance” (Harvard Dictionary of Music, 306). In writing, this kind of “fantasy” translates into modernism and stream-of-consciousness prose; in Harriet Hume, West experiments with language and form in a curiously playful narrative with little plot or character development. West’s personal favorite of all her novels,52 the light and fantastical work was likely inspired by Woolf’s Orlando, which West favorably reviewed in 1928.53 Contemporary readers such as Vita Sackville-West were quick to see connections between the two novels, and Joseph Warren Beach observed in 1932, “Miss West has reversed the formula of Orlando” (495). Instead of creating a character able to embody both masculine and feminine traits, one who can even metamorphose from one sex to the other, West creates two characters, Arnold and Harriet, who represent the extremes of masculine and feminine. Set up in the text as opposites, fairylike and domestic Harriet symbolizes delicacy, nature, and art for art’s sake while Arnold, intent on doing whatever is necessary to “rise in the world” (56), represents imperialism, corruption, and violence. 51  Ann V. Norton writes that Harriet Hume is West’s “most overtly modernist work of fiction in its focus on character and psychology rather than plot, its heavy use of myth, its stream-of-consciousness depiction of Arnold’s mind, and its lushly poetic language” (121). 52  This is noted in Glendinning, Rebecca West: A Life, 135. Glendinning also remarks that West’s hearing and sense of pitch altered after an illness, causing her to give up the piano (202). Ann V. Norton suggests that Harriet may be “the closest thing to a wishful self that she created” (123). 53  Woolf was pleased with West’s reading of the novel and was glad to see her “mind working along where mine tried to go (what a lot more of my meaning you have guessed than anybody else)” (qtd. in Bonnie Kime Scott, “Refiguring the Binary,” 181).

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The story is a fable in which these human tendencies interact in a relationship of both carefree love and bitter hate as Harriet and Arnold come together and split apart in each successive scene. Harriet and Arnold’s connection echoes the Chinese yin–yang, showing complementary but opposite forces of life with a dark “feminine” and light “masculine” side, each containing a part of the other. The couple’s connection is enforced through Harriet’s ability to read Arnold’s mind, but this skill repeatedly accentuates the couple’s differences by bringing to light Arnold’s unpleasant schemes. Although Harriet and Arnold ultimately enjoy “A Very Happy Eternity” (288), this cannot occur in the realm of the living.54 Particularly interesting about the novel is the way Harriet’s occult abilities seem connected to her talent as a pianist.55 When Arnold demands to know how she can decipher what he is thinking, she uses her piano to demonstrate. As she recites a poem, Arnold discovers that from the piano’s “unattended keyboard,” “whose mistress stood ten feet away, was coming music … . as if some inhabiting spirit of the instrument had resolved no longer to tolerate the age-old conditions … and was essaying to make its music by itself” (34). Harriet demonstrates her mystical ability through the natural phenomenon of sympathetic vibration. A quarter of a century later, West would bestow the same ability upon Rose Aubrey who, at a party, decides to perform a mind-reading trick rather than play the piano for an audience that might not understand her talents.56 Rose’s description of her trick makes Harriet’s even clearer: I was, of course, performing an action which presents hardly more mystery than the undoubted fact that a person standing some feet away from the keyboard of a piano and speaking clearly will cause certain notes to sound of their own accord, often quite loudly. The only difference in the thought-reading trick is that it is not a question of transmitting a wave to a detached object, but of receiving it. (Fountain Overflows, 199)

54  The end of the novel is quite unclear. One passage suggests that Arnold has already shot himself: Harriet tells him, “There is one who has had an accident with a pistol … and they have carried him up to your room” (270–271). The scene in which Arnold arrives to shoot Harriet appears to take place with characters who are no longer alive. Harriet already may have killed herself in order to be with him. 55  Harriet’s character likely is inspired not only by West’s mother but also by a pianist friend, Harriet Cohen, who, like her fictional counterpart, suffered from temporary blindness when she used her eyes too much. 56  In The Fountain Overflows, Mary and Rose, in contrast to Cordelia, are never praised for their musical talents. When Rose is asked to play at a party, she refuses, fearing that the audience will not understand her technical skill. Instead, she decides to perform a “thought-reading trick” where she places her hands on each side of a volunteer’s face and guesses the number she is imagining. The awed adults exclaim that she has “a gift” (227), a comment never made about Rose’s piano playing.

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Rose’s reversal of the relationship between speaker and instrument suggests that others’ minds are acting as her piano while she is using her musical ear to listen to them. In the former passage from Harriet Hume it is also possible to read Harriet’s piano that rejects “age-old conditions” as representative of the repressed woman who, no longer able to “tolerate” silence, is now learning to speak. Ann V. Norton remarks of this passage, “As [Harriet] speaks, the keys of the piano begin to vibrate hard enough to create a tone, as if to make unmistakable her feminine voice, powerful enough to express her own thoughts and not merely reiterate men’s ideas” (53). Although talented and successful, Harriet is continually belittled by Arnold as simple and childlike. Echoing ideas explored by Woolf and Richardson, West shows here how a woman can speak through the piano; the only difference is that Harriet’s body is so aligned with her instrument that she need not touch it in order to play upon it. West’s use of the piano as an occult instrument is unusual given the piano’s common domestic connections. Indeed, both Harriet and her piano seem intrinsically domestic, with the monstrous instrument monopolizing Harriet’s sitting-room. Harriet’s talent as a professional musician, however, allows her to slip into nondomestic spaces. While Harriet and Arnold represent gender opposites in the text, Harriet herself embodies the dualities of both delicate damsel and professional artist, domestic goddess and otherworldly “witch” (22), fashionable lady and primitive “Other.” Before Arnold learns of Harriet’s special mindreading talents, he reflects on Harriet’s “bland” little head while remaining aware that there lurks something in her character that he cannot see: “There must be much else besides. She had mastered the shining black leviathan that just behind her proclaimed Bechstein its parent … . She must be in league with formidable forces” (25). Harriet resembles her Bechstein piano, developed to show extreme beauty as well as masterful strength. She represents both the highly cultivated and the deeply mysterious sides of the musical arts.57 For her character, instead of drawing on the connections between music and domesticity, West uses the kind of primitive connections Woolf refers to in “Street Music” when she calls musicians “dangerous” and notes how “we are distrustful of musicians and loath to put ourselves under their power” (29). Certainly, Harriet’s profound ability repeatedly drives Arnold away even as he remains attracted to her femininity. West further draws upon conventional rhetoric that connects piano performance to otherworldly experience. West’s intense association of the mind with the piano is echoed in other books of her era; for example, Josef Hofmann writes in Piano Playing With Piano Questions Answered (1909) that the material side of piano playing is accompanied by a more subtle side which “depends upon imagination … and spiritual vision, and endeavours to convey to an audience what the composer 57

 I find it interesting that while Carl Bechstein worked to create a sturdy piano with a beautiful tone, Ludwig Bechstein was a collector of fairytales. Harriet thus has associations with both of these famous Bechsteins.

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has, consciously or unconsciously, hidden between the lines” (vii, Hofmann’s italics). He calls this the “almost entirely psychic side of piano-playing” which “eludes treatment in literary form” (xv). In The Visible and Invisible in Pianoforte Technique (1932), Tobias Matthay similarly comments that the performer must “try to make strict association between the spiritual and physical in playing” (3). In Great Pianists on Piano Playing (1913), James Francis Cooke adds that the “magnetism” or vitality of the performer can cast a “spell” over the audience (17), though this “is not done by … black art” but by “sheer intensity of feeling of the artist at the moment of performance” (87). West takes language commonly used to describe the enchanting abilities of music and literalizes it so that the pianist herself becomes a kind of “white witch” with unusual powers.58 While Harriet and Arnold are the novel’s continually separating but magnetically reuniting lovers, the individual with whom Harriet remains closest throughout the text is her piano. In an early passage, Arnold thought Harriet would run to him “to have confirmed all that had been between them by more kisses” when “instead she ran across the room to the grand piano” (11). When Arnold leaves her, Harriet “found peace” by going to her piano and practicing (98). These instances suggest that Harriet’s true companion is music, something that can transport her to a higher intellectual and emotional plane, as the passage in which she describes her practicing reveals: “I remembered that that morning when I was combing my hair the manner in which I played the Hammerklavier Sonata had seemed most shameful, and I resolved to practise it … . I sat down at my piano and played it over and over again, while the rising moon painted a black and silver pattern on my floor. After an hour or two I stopped, and there was nothing in my world save exaltation, for even as the black and silver pattern had stamped itself more brightly on the boards as the moon mounted the skies, so the pattern of the adagio had grown clearer and clearer in my mind as my comprehension had soared upward to its zenith, and now my finger-tips had no more to do than copy it. I have never felt more comfortable in my spirit.” (98)

Once again we find a young female protagonist playing Beethoven. Though this passage begins with Harriet enacting a domestic ritual, it ends with her accomplishing a feat of intellectual artistry, escaping through the piano in an empowering exultant moment. Harriet is performing the Hammerklavier sonata, Op. 106, generally considered to be Beethoven’s most difficult piano composition, and this scene is crucial to our understanding of her abilities. Since our view in the novel is limited to what Arnold sees, it is the only one in which we encounter Harriet practicing; incredibly, we never see her performing for an audience, although it is her livelihood. The “comfort” and elation she achieves with the 58  West’s epigraph for Harriet Hume by John Dryden reads “ … And like white witches, mischievously good … ” (West’s ellipses).

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piano is similar to that experienced by other modernist women characters. The scene additionally is tinged with the supernatural as her “spirit,” the moon, and the piano work in parallel, the “black and silver” pattern on the floor echoing the black and white keyboard beneath her fingers.59 We may be reminded of Rachel’s “communion” with “the spirit of the whitish boards on deck, with the spirit of the sea, with the spirit of Beethoven.” Both women are tapping into a separate plane of existence, moving in tandem with nature until the melody they play speaks to, echoes, and recreates the world around them. This passage, which links piano performance to mental discovery, aligns with an observation made by Rose in The Fountain Overflows. While Rose’s Cousin Jock is an immensely talented flautist, Rose contrasts his musical rendering with her mother’s in a telling moment: When Mama played well she was making clear something which the composer had found out and which nobody had known before him. It might even be that by the emphasis she placed on the different parts of his discovery she could add something to it of which nobody, not even the composer, had before been conscious … . But when Cousin Jock played he created about him a world in which all was known, and in which art was not a discovery but a decoration. (118–119)

Rose reveals that the true musician’s art comes not just in rendering another’s “discovery” but through interpreting that idea, making the piece his or her own. Cousin Jock’s playing creates a beautiful known “world” while their mother’s playing, the passage implies, creates one that is unknown, never before seen. Harriet’s playing is able to achieve a similar effect. Though we do not directly see any more of Harriet’s pianistic artistry in the text, we see how the world is changed because of her artistic presence. Harriet Hume offers a curious comparison with the other works explored in this chapter for, while Arnold travels the world, Harriet remains in London. A bit like the early established difference between George and Hermione in H.D.’s novel, the man and woman here appear to take on opposite gendered positions of public sphere/private sphere, with only the man traveling abroad. Arnold, who rejects Harriet to rise in society in the first section of the novel, becomes an “expert in Far Eastern affairs” (69) and then a member of Parliament. He gains much of his political power through inventing an imaginary Eastern city named Mondh (implying “le monde,” the world, rather than a specific location) and describing it in a speech “concerning his Emotions on his First Visit to Mondh,” which becomes “an acknowledged masterpiece of English prose” (135) and “a favourite 59

  Throughout the novel Harriet is strongly connected with nature, and music seems a part of this natural world. In the last scene, we find Harriet conducting her garden, which she calls her “orchestra,” out of the window (281).

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recitation on Empire Day” (136). Arnold’s oral travel narrative, brilliant in its play upon the Westerner’s ideas about the East, eventually makes him “Lord Mondh.” In this humorous but scathing depiction of imperial control, West reveals how much power the travel writer really holds. Arnold in turn inspires his own generation of tourists East; he receives a letter from Thomas Cook seeking help because their travelers who “requested them to arrange journeys to Mondh” could not seem to get there, “even under the direction of the most experienced guides” (135). Meanwhile, Harriet stays home in Kensington; her traveling is internal, achieved through her art. While Arnold uses his political schemes to make money and buy nice things, she comments, “I have always beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano” (150–151). For Harriet, the piano is a place as real and as inspiring as any foreign locale. Although Harriet’s profession as a pianist takes her into foreign cities such as Barcelona and Warsaw, the reader never sees her anywhere but London. Indeed, West claimed that she wrote the novel “to find out why she loved London,” and the work, like Mrs. Dalloway, follows its flâneur characters through various parts of the city.60 This London, however, is not the same city that any reader has experienced: Harriet tells tales of the Ladies Frances, Georgiana, and Arabella Dudley who have been turned into trees in her garden, of headless sheep herded through the streets, and of sphinxes lumbering “towards Piccadilly Circus” (157). Harriet, the artist of the narrative, therefore is capable of transforming London through her stories; Jane Marcus calls her a “Scheherazade who beguiles her lover with fairy tales” (“Wilderness,” 141). Each time Arnold encounters Harriet, his world is changed beyond recognition, becoming an imaginative geography. In the novel’s second section, directly after Arnold spots Harriet walking in Kensington Gardens and watches her from afar, he sees a topographical anomaly: a “vista” in the trees by the Serpentine shows a group of people “beneath a perspective of spires and towers that seemed inside the Park though they were in fact beyond its boundaries” and that “deceived topography and conjured up an illusion of a fantastic island to which the expected boat would ferry them” (81). Arnold responds to this optical illusion by asking whimsically, “Is this where we embark for Cythera?” referencing a Grecian isle. Something has affected Arnold’s perception of the world, creating a “deceiv[ing] topography” and a “fantastic island” out of an everyday scene at the park, and we sense that this something is the novel’s “conjurer,” Harriet. Similarly, in the novel’s third section, Arnold encounters Harriet on a hot, dry day in London during which he feels the presence of “the Sahara” (111) and sees a crane like a “Tibetan monk” (118), while a “narrow street of high stones that ran across Portland Place” suggests “a highway he had seen in Pompeii” (120). Once again, these geographies are anything but English. By the novel’s fifth section, Arnold, seeking Harriet so that he may kill his “opposite,” “ramble[s]” through London 60

 Both Arnold and Harriet enjoy wandering the city alone and on several occasions encounter one another while doing so. West may have written the novel to reclaim the city for herself after a difficult affair with Max Aitken (Beaverbrook); Glendinning notes how she “was finally reconciled to the city which had for so long ‘just hopelessly, finally, heartrendingly meant Max to me’” (Rebecca West, 127).

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(247), feeling lost in both space and time. Arnold, having shot himself, is dead or dying in this section of the novel, and may wander to Harriet’s home only in mind or spirit. Along the way, everyone and everything seems profoundly unusual; he comments, as he reaches Oxford Circus, “I feel the panic that comes on those who are lost in a vast desert!” (240). His wanderings through London have taken him far beyond the realms of his foreign conquests. Early in the novel, when Arnold has first discovered Harriet’s mind-reading gift, he shows his distaste for “women who laid claim to occult gifts. It was half way to saying that they believed in reincarnation and … remembered having been Egyptian princesses in their time” (9). Writing in the late 1920s when accounts like Carter’s and Seton’s fantastic depictions of Egypt were en vogue and just before Seabrook sensationally detailed dining with the cannibals in Africa, West offers a fresh and surprising twist. She teases out and satirizes the fantasy inherent in Western travelers’ accounts while making the heart of her novel a woman who creates rivaling fantasy worlds at home with her storytelling and her powers of music. The text can be read as a travel narrative of London in which the familiar becomes an exotic space, and Harriet’s powers as transformer of space and place seem connected to her pianistic talent. In the novel’s whimsical final scene, Harriet describes a blue flower in her garden as “a phrase in a sonata by Mozart, which I like to think he has given me for a keepsake because I have taken such pleasure in playing it” (281). Her performance skills and personal pleasure in playing magically call life into being: the piano becomes not a decoration to showcase her love for Arnold but a powerful tool of creation. She echoes the women pianists we have seen in other modernist novels who envision the instrument as personally meaningful and powerfully transformative. Coda: Black and White and Read All Over: Philippa Duke Schuyler’s Travels with the Piano In each of the works examined in this chapter, a woman pianist redefines the usual association between woman musician and piano by using the instrument as a tool of power, a magnifier of the internal voice, and a means of escape into a world away from a limiting domestic sphere. Lest my readers assume this use of the piano is only a fictional whim, I turn in this “coda” to a travel narrative of piano performance that supports this modernist use of the piano and solidifies these connections between piano and travel. There is no more apt conclusion for my discussion than American pianist Philippa Duke Schuyler’s Adventures in Black and White (1960), a travel narrative documenting Schuyler’s journeys to foreign lands to perform concerts between the years 1945 and 1959. Although the narrative appears after the modernist era, Schuyler’s reminiscences of travel echo many of the themes I have discussed in women’s modernist literature. Young Philippa, an American prodigy, did not just “tinkle on the piano” like a Victorian heroine, but was a passionate and talented twentieth-century musician. She was playing piano and composing by age four, performed her first public recital at age five, and became “a regular fixture at NBC” (Taylor, xiv). Schuyler’s story is

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even more unusual because she was biracial. Born in Harlem in 1931, she was the daughter of white Texas artist and journalist Josephine Cogdell and black Harlem Renaissance writer George Schuyler.61 The public recognized and celebrated Philippa’s early talents, and she became the first girl of African American heritage “to achieve national prominence at so young an age” (Talalay, ix). At fourteen, she performed at “Colored American Night at the Pops” in Boston and won national awards for her compositions. By then, Time magazine had written about Schuyler on four occasions and many Americans knew her from Joseph Mitchell’s “Evening with a Gifted Child,” appearing in both The New Yorker and Negro Digest. Carl Van Vechten, Schuyler’s godfather, seeing her perform in 1947 at Fisk University, commented, “She comes out on the stage or platform as would a very young girl. The moment she begins to play, she becomes a giant of power” (qtd. in Talalay, 108). Schuyler’s talents as both powerful performer and composer connect her to a tradition of more “masculine” arts. Yet, like professional women pianists before her, Schuyler was judged on her appearance as well, a fact complicated by her racial identity.62 Schuyler’s early popularity with both black and white audiences reveals the remarkable social mobility possible for the talented pianist. Articles about Philippa appeared in the white, mainstream magazine Calling All Girls and in Circuit’s Smart Woman.63 By her teen years she had become more of a poster girl for black America, appearing on the cover of Color in December 1952, Ebony in July 1958, and Sepia in June 1962. While her talent, appearance, and personality helped to open doors for her early in her career, other doors soon began to close. Racial roadblocks soon stalled the mobility once achieved by her artistry, and the now grown-up young artist increasingly drew more black admirers than white. Losing her white supporters alerted Schuyler to the American racism from which she had been carefully shielded as a child. Headlines like “Half Texan, Half Yankee; Half White, Half Negro, Piano Prodigy is Wholly Musician” made Schuyler seem a strange amalgamation, only saved from scorn by her talent (qtd. in Talalay, 111). Her body, ever “read” by the press and photographers as striking and lovely, an object of the gaze as a woman musician, was also seen as curiously in-between racially or, at least, “colored.” Schuyler later confided in an article that the “vicious barriers of prejudice” she encountered as an adult were too hard to endure: “It horrified, humiliated me. But, instead of breaking under the strain, I adjusted to it. I left” (“My Black and White World,” 13). Seeking an international audience was a natural next step for a 61

 Philippa was born at a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in parts of the American South; though her parents married in New York, her apprehensive white mother entered her race as “colored” on the marriage application (Talalay, 39). 62  For more discussion of Philippa’s multi-racial identity, please see my related article “Racial Identity, Travel, and Music.” 63  See “Scaling New Heights” in Calling All Girls (Oct. 1943) and Richard Saunders, “Xmas Shopping with Philippa Schuyler” in Circuit’s Smart Woman (Dec. 1947). I would like to thank the librarians at the Schuyler Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library for their assistance in locating these and other materials.

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young woman who had long corresponded with admirers abroad. During his interview at the Schuylers’ home, Joseph Mitchell had noted the nine-year-old’s many presents from Portugal, the Virgin Islands, and especially Africa, sent by individuals who had “heard her play on the radio” (Mitchell, 15). Given the attention of her international fans, it is not surprising that Schuyler would leave home to seek more inclusive spaces and reclaim geographically the mobility denied to her socially. Another benefit to venturing abroad was other countries’ more fluid perceptions of race; Schuyler’s exodus had much to do with American racial categories denoting anyone with black African heritage as “Negro,” while Schuyler saw herself as multi-racial and as much white as black.64 Using her piano as a vehicle into foreign spaces, Schuyler began her concert tours abroad in the 1940s and 1950s. Like many young women travelers, Schuyler journeyed to locate a new liberty of expression and sense of herself, but she additionally sought acceptance and a sense of “home” abroad. An Italian friend once called her “forever searching, never satisfied in one place.”65 As her biographer explains, “Constant travel was Philippa’s anodyne” (Talalay, 201). Most revealing is Schuyler’s own comment, “I have ten nationalities in my ancestry, and that may be what attracts me to all countries—I am trying to find myself” (Adventures, 222). Schuyler produced Adventures in Black and White at a crucial moment when she began to re-evaluate her career and experiment with her identity; as she was writing it, she was for the first time playing with the idea of “passing” and of calling herself a Portuguese-American. The title is a useful pun on both race and instrument: what becomes fascinating in Philippa’s work is how she uses her travels to escape American racial categories and utilizes the piano as a passport into other countries. Philippa’s travel narrative opens with a frontispiece of the author standing with her back against a piano keyboard, a formal portrait she often used to advertise her world tour (Figure 5.1). Impressively dressed in a sleeveless layered chiffon evening gown and a string of pearls, Schuyler gazes directly into the camera. The picture conveys beauty, elegance, and sophistication, and Philippa looks as if she has just stood to meet a new acquaintance. Yet, there is also something unsettling about the picture. The piano’s lid is fully open, and casts a dark shadow across the back wall. Philippa is backed up against the instrument; her expression is pleasant, but not quite welcoming, and she seems to cling to her piano for support. From the picture we glimpse an elegant young lady about to meet a potentially turbulent world, a world where the only familiar object may be a piano.

64

 As sociologist F. James Davis notes, “Not only does the one-drop rule apply to no other group than American blacks, but … it is found only in the United States … . In fact, definitions of who is black vary quite sharply from country to country” (13). 65  Madame Cosi, quoted in Talalay, 191. Throughout Adventures Schuyler reveals her interest in race relations in other countries, speaking highly of integrated orchestras and audiences. While her celebrity abroad was not free from racial scrutiny, during her travels Schuyler most often encountered attitudes of welcome and inclusion.

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Figure 5.1

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Frontispiece from Adventures in Black and White (1960). By kind permission of Ms. Kathleen Shedaker Speller, VP—Robert Speller & Sons, Publishers, Inc.

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Schuyler’s world travels echo a comment from Cooke’s Great Pianists on Piano Playing about the professional woman pianist: “The more successful she is, the more of a nomad she must become.” As she tours five continents, Schuyler makes exceptional forays into the unknown. Although Schuyler took some of her early trips abroad in the company of her parents, most of her later travels were made alone. In a remarkable understatement, her mother once commented of her daughter’s teen years, “She has been allowed to be independent” (qtd. in Taylor, xiv). Although Schuyler’s concerts are arranged ahead of time, she rarely realizes the dangers and difficulties that lie ahead. She demonstrates exceptional courage as she ventures into these foreign spaces by herself, often not even knowing how she will reach her next concert destination and sometimes relying completely on the goodwill of strangers. The diary she kept as she traveled through the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia helped her reconstruct her original responses to these varied locales. The author’s preface tells us, “This book is a series of snapshots of adventure, of exotic people, ideas, and scenes caught swiftly in passing” (Adventures, xii). Like the modernists who enjoy focusing on the moment of experience, Schuyler values spontaneity in her ideas; she writes in her preface, “I decided if it was to have any value, it would have to show me as I was at the time of the experience, not after I had thought it out” (xii). Schuyler also compares her literary work to a musical composition: “Since I had to learn about life on the run, the form would have to be looser than a sonata, yet hold together” (xii). Her worldview and narrative view are equally inspired by what she knows best: music. As she journeys abroad in the company of her music, Philippa continually searches for a place to call home. When in the United States, Schuyler writes, “I yearned for South America” (71). In Europe, Africa beckoned: “I am called by its deserts and forests … as by a hypnotic drug” (264). In feeling that different parts of her identity summoned her to different countries and showing a constant restlessness with place, Schuyler resembles Helga Crane from Larsen’s Quicksand. As Helga discovers, race is largely a matter of context and cultural perspective; traveling to a new place can allow a person to reposition the body and shift identity. Multilingual and experimental with her fashions, Schuyler best loved blending into a country until she truly felt a part of it. As she journeys abroad in Adventures, Philippa wears colorful, fancy clothes that draw attention to her as an attractive young soloist, some of which also highlight her as an exotic “Other.” Philippa was thrilled that people abroad often told her that she looked “southern European, Levantine, Indian, or Oriental” (Talalay, 222). Her ability to look as if she could come from any one of many culturally diverse places helped Schuyler to formulate a kind of international identity. Though Schuyler often manages to escape racial classification while traveling or to assume a kind of mysterious elusive ethnicity, she never does escape gender constructs, celebrated as a woman pianist. Following from nineteenth-century traditions, she must be beautiful and charming, looked upon and admired, while also technically brilliant. Schuyler often had to cope with reporters who commented on her looks or highlighted her femininity; in a striking example, one

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reporter noted Schuyler’s only worry about her upcoming Carnegie Hall concert was what she should wear.66 In her travel narrative, Schuyler comes across as a strong-willed young feminist, questioning why certain African women submit to circumcision (117), pestering a Sudanese man about his sisters’ limited education (162), and asking non-Westerners, “Do you believe in freedom of women?” (279), yet she also embraces her status as an object of the gaze as a lone and attractive young female performer. In Italy, she enjoys being chased and serenaded by men yelling “Oh chè bella!” (297). In Hong Kong, Schuyler’s monotonous repetition of a C-major scale during a rehearsal cannot deter an intoxicated onlooker who comes to admire her “cute figure” (278). A practice session in the Congo is interrupted by “a pair of eyes boring into my back”; when the man leaps on stage, Schuyler has to run out of the theatre (232). Schuyler is both the damsel in distress and the hero in her own narrative, saved just in time by others or by her own quick thinking. In a memorable scene, she has to play her way out of a tricky situation, enticing thieves to dance to her music rather than rob her (67). She represents herself as desirable and resilient rather than as helpless and vulnerable. Although Philippa attracts attention for her beauty, she often exploits this to her advantage. Unlike the Victorian parlor pianist, she is ultimately not playing to attract a man’s attentions but to showcase her technical mastery and gain access to new spaces. Throughout her life, journalists would question her on her love life, to which she frequently replied that she was “married to music.” During Schuyler’s travels, the piano functions as her primary medium of expression, a voice that speaks with strength and passion. Schuyler told Musical Courier, “It’s a great joy to go into a strange land, to make friends, and to give … the universal beauties of great music that bring all peoples into fellowship” (Courcy, 7). Her musical voice served to strengthen and liberate her personal voice; once introduced to her piano playing, many people wished to know the unique woman behind it. Reporter Dick Owen once astutely proclaimed Schuyler a “keyboard ambassador” for foreign lands.67 Performing abroad not only allowed her entry into a rich social scene but also gave her a more masculine position of strategic political access. Often, she was able to meet and converse with foreign dignitaries: in Adventures, she recounts playing for, among others, Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, President Tsiranana of the Malagasy Republic, King Mutesa of Buganda, and President Magloire of Haiti. Her adventures with the piano eventually led her to a secondary career in journalism. She hoped to bring these far-off regions to public attention, and her following books did just this, exploring the struggle for independence in the Congo, the unsung missionaries in Africa, and the war in Vietnam.68 Her forays into foreign countries were often still made possible by her piano performances there.

66

 See Bill Slocum, “Around the World with 88 Keys.”  See Owen, “Keyboard Ambassador.” 68  Who Killed the Congo? (1962), Jungle Saints (1963), Good Men Die (1969). 67

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In Adventures in Black and White, we see how Schuyler, similar to the fictional characters examined in this chapter, uses her piano abroad to escape the confines of a limited existence at home. Philippa would not have had the money to travel for pleasure, and it is the piano and her skill for that instrument that enable her travels. As Philippa voyages across five continents, moving from piano to piano, her music keeps her rooted while all else around her is new. Deems Taylor writes of Adventures that “You will find comparatively little about music in this book” because of Philippa’s interest in people and places (foreword, xv). Nonetheless, every chapter mentions her concert experiences, often telling of the audience, the music, the playing conditions, and the piano. Schuyler’s frequent descriptions of the pianos she finds in foreign lands are some of the most fascinating parts of her narrative, and the reliability or unreliability of these instruments is as important as that of the people she meets abroad, for her performance depends on their quality. The piano, an instrument native to Western and Southern Europe, is also a foreign traveler, faring poorly in very humid, dry, or hot climates. One typical remark comes in Jos, Nigeria, where a government official admonishes Schuyler, “Why did you come now? Our piano only works during the rainy season!” The pianist finds that “The sounding-board had an immense crack which filled up during the rainy season, opened in the dry. Now it was gigantic” (196). Similarly, at a party in her honor in French Togoland, Schuyler has the choice between two upright pianos, both “horrible, once worthy, but now ravaged by the tropical humidity, with great vacant spaces of missing or tuneless keys” (201). In Kingston, Jamaica, “Mr. Aubry had forgotten … to have [the piano] moved off the open stage while it rained, so the piano had been soaked too, several keys stuck, and its tone was dull and mushy” (42). Schuyler must struggle against the elements as she performs on a Western instrument in tropical climes. In Malaya, “The heavy rain, as though resenting the refined ornamentation of the classical music I was playing, lashed with primeval rage against the roof. This buffeting fury was made weird by the flute-like trills of the birds who nested in the ceiling” (285). Schuyler frames the performance as a battle of “refined” Western music versus the “primeval” Asian environment. In Treichville, Schuyler is mobbed by flying ants, brought in by the recent thunderstorms: “At least three dozen were always creeping round the bottom of my flame evening gown … . They flew in my eyes. I was immersed in black clouds. If one hand was momentarily idle, I would pluck off handfuls of ants with it, while playing with the other” (262). Schuyler’s attention to her art is incredible as she plays under such torturous conditions. A performance at Dr. Schweitzer’s home in the Congo when she is playing “Rhapsody in Blue” similarly illustrates Schuyler’s tenacity: The heat was so intense, that even in the red cheong-sam I had on for comfort, I was dripping with sweat. The keys, expanded by the humidity, were difficult to press down, and the ten hymn books underneath me were not too comfortable. The insects whirled around me and the four kerosene lamps, but I did not mind. (247)

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Schuyler makes every effort against distraction. Like Rachel Vinrace, she is fully engrossed in her music. Again we see an image of the piano as a more “civilized” presence amid primitive spaces, a marker of Western cultural authority. Nonetheless, Schuyler, like Woolf’s Rachel, does not function as a conventional colonial explorer, but ultimately seeks musical inspiration from these foreign places. Though Schuyler’s artistry depended upon performing canonical works by male American and European composers, when she returned to the United States, she embraced the music of the countries she had visited, from Japan to Argentina, by performing her own piano arrangements of their songs.69 In October 1960, her article “The Music of Modern Africa” appeared in Music Journal, revealing her growing interest in non-Western music. While her initial fame and mobility came out of white, Western art forms, she used her talents to educate herself and others and to enable cultural exchange. While Schuyler’s narrative has a strong focus on the excitement of exterior travel, her absorption in her piano playing also opens up imaginative internal excursions for her. In Haiti, upon seeing the crumbling Citadelle, Schuyler thinks of a ruined medieval fortress, and writes, “My mind recalled Chopin’s F Sharp Impromptu, that has always seemed to me to portray a young man, dreaming near the ruin of a mediaeval castle, of the thunderous hooves of invading horsemen of centuries before” (31). Since the principal geography in Schuyler’s mind is that of the piano, she compares a dreamy piano piece with the structures at hand. Although Schuyler has great musical focus, on occasion we see her so caught up in the music that her playing carries her away imaginatively. When visiting Dr. Schweitzer, she finds herself transported by her own piano playing: “I forgot the sweat … , my mosquito bites and weariness, in the excitement of the great chords of the Promenade, Gnomus, Bydlo, Baba Yaga and the Great Gate of Kiev” (244). She continues, “And I forgot I was in the humid tropical room, playing before a living saint and his devoted, selfless attendants. I was lost in the vastness of old Russia” (244). Perhaps reminding us of Miriam’s mental pilgrimages, Philippa’s removes her from central Africa and transports her to “old Russia.” This imaginative transport also occurs when she hears another pianist perform. In Hawaii, when a composer plays his arrangement of a Korean song, she describes how “the noble melody soared upwards, full of soul-questioning, aspiration, hope … . I was silent when he finished, plunged into another world” (268–269). This is a world not found on any map, quite beyond the bounds of Schuyler’s Asian tour. In Schuyler’s travel narrative, as in the works of fiction explored in this chapter, the traditionally domestic piano becomes a vehicle for a young woman musician into new social settings, foreign geographies, and imaginative realms. Abroad, the piano gives Schuyler a mobility that was not yet possible in a country in the midst 69

 An October 1959 program held in Syracuse’s Special Collections Research Center from John Hancock Hall in Boston shows Schuyler playing a set of pieces called “Adventures in Black and White,” arrangements of music heard in other lands.

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of a Civil Rights movement only beginning to challenge long-held prejudices. Schuyler concludes her preface: “This is how I have lived for over a decade, in sixty countries, in black and white moods, among black and white people, and with my only permanent companion, a black and white keyboard” (xii). The piano is, like Schuyler herself, both “black and white,” a representation of interchange between different peoples, of communication between different cultures. While she travels, she thinks of the piano as her one stable “companion,” echoing a theme found in all of these fictional texts about pianists. For Schuyler, as for Rachel, Miriam, and Harriet, the piano functions as an expression of the self, empowering her, giving her voice, and opening up new external and internal spaces.

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Conclusion:

Final Excursions: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Modern travel narratives and modernist fiction move together, taking parallel paths in their explorations of travel, each influencing and inspiring the other. The experience of travel gave women of the early twentieth century the opportunity to craft a new kind of experimental, introspective work. Travel similarly inspired women authors of modernist fiction to investigate interactions between geographic movement, identity (re)creation, and artistic exploration, articulating feminine subjectivity and creating imaginative “excursions” for their women characters. I have focused on the ways outward journeys inspire inward ones; the texts I have discussed subvert historically confining connections between woman and body by transforming the female body into a vehicle of exploration. From reimagining and recoding the external body and skin, to reconceptualizing illness and pregnancy, to refiguring women’s traditional connections to the piano, these writers create new pathways to modernism out of their visualizations of physical and imaginative mobility for women. The narratives and novels I examine in this study reveal the extraordinary connections between travel and imaginative thought for women writers in the modernist period, connections that have just begun to be explored. Today, the one travel text written by a woman that is consistently included in studies of twentiethcentury travel writing is Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941). Upon its publication, it received widespread recognition as a superbly written travel book and a mesmerizing historical account of the Balkan region. Making her mark more strongly than many other twentieth-century women travelers, West distinguished herself with a two-volume masterpiece of over a thousand pages. West’s text has never met with the same dismissal as many other women’s texts; for instance, she is one of the few women writers included in Paul Fussell’s Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars.1 Certainly, to refer back to D. H. Lawrence’s description of another woman author, in the public’s mind she was no “feeble fake,” but distinguished herself with her political journalism and social criticism. Perhaps by simply making her 1

 West remains just as popular in studies of travel today. For instance, she plays a key role in David Farley’s Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad (2010). Farley is especially interested in the way West’s work connects with late modernism, “where the representation of historical particularity and political thought is one of the chief features” (149).

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travels politically focused, West fashions a work that, in theory, feels more goaloriented and more “masculine,” and thus more fitting of the travel canon; David Farley even writes of West that she “brings a social awareness and praxis to her work that many of her male contemporaries lacked” (154). West’s traveling is done with the purpose of investigating the political climate in the Balkans that led to the first world war, and to further understand the conditions which were rapidly leading to the second; to, in her own words, “follow the dark waters of that event back to its source” (1089). West’s text also stylistically challenges many of the more established norms for the genre, and yet, while other modern women’s travel works have fallen by the wayside, West’s has endured, even making its experimentalism part of its potency. Any study of women and travel in the modernist period would be incomplete without the inclusion of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; nonetheless, in concluding by briefly addressing this masterwork, I wish to remind readers that West’s narrative in conception and design owes much to its less recognized precursors. In Chapter 5 we saw how in Harriet Hume, written in the late 1920s, West already was teasing out her ideas about the imaginative construction of foreign spaces. By the early 1940s West was struggling to transcribe a foreign space herself, narrating the journey she took with her husband through Yugoslavia in 1937. The work she produced was nontraditional; as Bernard Schweizer describes it, “West’s sprawling, episodic, liberationist, and anti-imperial epic contains explicit refutations of masculine conquest, both in form and ideology” (89). It is a record of travel but also a collage of forms: part history, part ethnography, part philosophical discourse, part autobiography. Although the narrative is not commonly categorized by critics as “modernist,” it is nonetheless experimental; as in texts such as those by Vita Sackville-West examined in Chapter 1, West becomes a flâneuse and produces a nonlinear narrative. Indeed, Carl Rollyson writes of her text that it is “both novel and history, both fact and imagination” (145). In his 2006 review of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Geoff Dyer writes of the book’s excursive traits, noting how its “inexhaustible capacity for self-fuelling discussion … is central to West’s structural and stylistic method.” He continues, “As West articulates and processes this experience, she takes us on a discursive journey into the furthest reaches of speculative thought before returning us to the exact spot or occasion from which we started” (4). Here, again, is modernism. Though Black Lamb and Grey Falcon might be seen as “masculine” in scope, a reader of West’s travel narrative never forgets West is a woman.2 In fact, perhaps this masterful combination of elements, the historical and the personal, is what gives the text its power. As we read, we get to know West as well as the places she travels through, and we could hardly ask for a more witty and intellectually stimulating traveling companion. Like other women travel writers before her, she draws great attention to minute details of scenery, of custom, of buildings 2  David Farley agrees, writing that West “navigates … between traditionally male travel experience and separate female spheres of experience” (155).

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she visits, of people she sees. She is especially attentive to women, their dress, and their social placement.3 The descriptions of individuals and landscape are so intricate that we feel as if we are there with her. Her text well suits Wollstonecraft’s remark that “a woman thinks more of the incidental occurrences, the strange things that may possibly occur on the road” (176). As if she is narrating in the moment, she transcribes for us whole breakfasts down to the cherry jam, entire intellectual conversations until interrupted by the arrival of some stranger, the “golden patina” of hair and “softly shrieking” laughter of a little girl who approaches her near a mosque (993). West’s tone must be a key part of her attraction for so many readers, as is her way of seeing the world; she can comment charmingly, “at this hour all cats are grey and all carpets are beautiful” (232), or remark wickedly of her chicken and rice, “the bird itself was a ghastly prodigy … like one of El Greco’s fasting saints” (873). The humor in her depiction of everyday travel is delightful, and her descriptions are vivid and fresh, bringing the scenes directly before our eyes. We may be armchair travelers, but West does her best to find active engagement with the spaces she encounters. After visiting a town and going into one of its houses, it becomes what West calls “three-dimensional” in the mind, no longer just “something painted on one’s retina” (401). For West, this is the purpose of travel, not for a cursory view, but for a deeper knowledge, and that involves the fourth dimension Seton so fantastically alluded to in her own travel narrative: time. While Seton enjoys her supernatural imaginative excursion into a place, West’s adventure is deeply grounded in history. She interweaves long historical commentaries with her personal scenes of travel. The approach is perhaps best described with a metaphor of her own. In Dubrovnik, West comments, “The landscape is in fact a palimpsest” (230). Time does not matter for West; when she approaches a historic spot, it holds for her all the layers of past events. As her imagination takes her on a journey to the past, her narrative gives long digressions acquainting the reader with the life of a man or woman who lived in the 300s, 1400s, or 1700s. It may take fifty pages for the reader to return to West in the present moment. In one of the most remarkable historical digressions, West describes the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s fatal visit in 1914, the precipitating incident for the first world war. Although West depicts the scene as if the people there realize his death is inevitable, her description suspensefully circles back in time through the lives of the assassins and the failed attempts on the Archduke’s life, while the occurrence of his death is momentarily withheld from us. West comes to Sarajevo to wrap her mind around the assassination event. Leaning on the balcony where the locals remember how “he stood just where you are standing, and he too put his arm on the balustrade” (333), she remarks, “‘I shall never be able to understand how it happened.’ It is not that there are too few facts available, but that there are too many” (350). West seems to embody history as she moves through the spaces others occupied. Earlier 3  Some critics note that West comments on gender divisions without challenging these conventions. See, for instance, Loretta Stec’s “Female Sacrifice.”

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in the text, West comments, “I had come to Yugoslavia because I knew that the past has made the present, and I wanted to see how the process works” (54). In delving into the past, she seeks answers for the present, and at several moments of the text realizes that the written historical record may contradict the stories eyewitnesses have to tell. Despite her long scholarly digressions, this lends history a modernist, subjective quality. As West describes the world around her, she realizes that, as an outsider, her powers of discernment are restricted and inadequate. Of a village she writes, “My power to convey it is limited; a man cannot describe the life of a fish, a fish cannot describe the life of a man” (227). Her comments remind us of Sackville-West, who consciously exposes the fiction of travel narrative, yet West works exquisitely hard to pin down Yugoslavia as best she can, moving through time and space. She can only describe the layers that she sees or that she can research, and she asserts that true knowledge comes in casting aside all that is known and comfortable. In learning, one must “have faith in what is entirely hidden and unknown, to cast away all the acquisitions and certainties which would ensure a comfortable existence lest they should impede us on a journey” (380). Just so, she tries to cast aside the impediments of the Western mind, though this is largely impossible, especially during a time of war.4 West’s prologue to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is of great significance in considering her ideas about journeying which resonate with those of the other women modernists I have explored. She begins with Yugoslavia as a space in the imagination only, focusing on the day in 1934 when she, yet unfamiliar with the country, first heard about the assassination of King Alexander. At the time, she was having an operation in the hospital. She recounts: One morning a nurse had come in and given me an injection … . Then I picked up my book and read that sonnet by Joachim du Bellay which begins “Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage.” I said to myself, “That is one of the most beautiful poems in the world,” and I rolled over in my bed, still thinking that it was one of the most beautiful poems in the world, and found that the electric light was burning and there was a new nurse standing at the end of my bed. Twelve hours had passed in that moment … . and now I was … still halfrooted in my pleasure in the poem. (1)

Caught up in the poem’s beauty, West travels seemingly in and out of time. Soon after, lying in her hospital bed, West hears the announcement of the king’s death and awakes from her blissful tranquility. When she leaves the hospital, she watches a news reel of the king’s assassination. West writes that, as he rides in his car, just before he is killed, he seems “to be thinking of Yugoslavia again, with 4

 Many readers, both past and present, have questioned the accuracy of West’s historical accounts and see West’s portrayal of Germans, Turks, and Jews as propagandistic. See Farley, 157.

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the nostalgia of an author who has been interrupted in writing his new book. He might be thinking, ‘Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage … .’” (16, West’s ellipses). This curious introduction with its modernist moments provides both an interesting set-up for West’s travelogue and a fitting end for my discussion. West immediately bequeaths upon a foreign monarch characteristics that are singularly her own. In writing the book, West takes up where the king, in her imagination, left off; she decides to make her own writerly journey into his land. Most significantly, West’s quote from Joachim du Bellay’s poem allows her preface to turn on this idea of the “voyage.” The “voyage” for West becomes both internal and external, both imaginative and real. In the hospital, for the twelve hours West is asleep, she experiences only a “moment” which is filled by the beauty of language and the image of a beautiful voyage, the aesthetic voyage of art. Still lying in bed, she learns the news from Yugoslavia, and is whisked off to a faraway land, though she has never been there herself. We might remember how the Ulysses of the poem traveled while Penelope stayed home. When the nurse cannot understand her patient’s concern with the assassination, West thinks about the “darkness” women inhabit in their “private lives.” In contrast are men who “are so obsessed by public affairs” that they, in her mind, see only “outlines of every object” but not “the details” (3). The “beau voyage” of West’s hospital bed cannot suffice. Instead, West sets out on her own “voyage,” knowing that it will not all be “beau,” but seeking to find the truth of Yugoslavia, both the public, political truth and the private detail. Her resulting text thus combines the separate worlds of Arnold and Harriet she had written about years before.5 Although West realizes that her view on Yugoslavia cannot be objective, her goal is to transcribe the Yugoslavia she experiences. West writes in her epilogue: So I resolved to put on paper what a typical Englishwoman felt and thought in the late nineteen-thirties when, already convinced of the inevitability of the second Anglo-German war, she had been able to follow the dark waters of that event back to its source … . I was obliged to write a long and complicated history, and to swell that with an account of myself and the people who went with me on my travels, since it was my aim to show the past side by side with the present it created. (1089)

West’s aim “to show the past side by side with the present” is strikingly like that of Jean Rhys, who wrote to Evelyn Scott that she wished to show in Voyage in the Dark “that the past exists—side by side with the present, not behind it” (JRL, 24).  Perhaps even in the title of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon there lurks something of Harriet in the end of Harriet Hume who, “bleat[ing] into her handkerchief,” laments being “innocent” but “impotent” in public affairs (266) and of the falconlike, politically wily Arnold Condorex who tries to sacrifice Harriet. 5

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As we have seen, West was not alone in seeking to write an account of her journey from her own personal perspective, nor was she the first woman to be captivated by the spirit of the foreign voyage. West’s excursion begins in her body with a strange new experience and extends as her body moves through space to new destinations; for other women writers and their characters, it is the experience through the body that becomes the most transformative and the most subversive of all. Near the end of her travelogue, West notes that her journey was especially meaningful because of the “coincidence between the natural forms and colours of the western and southern parts of Yugoslavia and the innate forms and colours of my imagination” (1088). Though her work seeks the “real” Yugoslavia, the one she encounters most is her own. Vesna Goldsworthy, who investigates the text as autobiography, agrees, writing, “With its very personal insights, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is quintessentially a modernist travel narrative. Introspection is the essence of West’s journey” (92). John Gunther once remarked of the book that it is “not so much a book about Yugoslavia as a book about Rebecca West” (qtd. in Goldsworthy, 91). His remarks may remind us of Evelyn Scott’s description of her own travel work as “an autobiography of myself in Brazil.” Body and place cannot help but overlap, and the result is a new articulation of both inward and outward spaces. Others rightly have seen Rebecca West’s portrait of the Balkans as “an attempt by West to redefine the boundaries of travel literature” (Goldsworthy, 90). West’s work is experimental, and delicately walks the line between objective and subjective observation, showing her both inside and outside the action, revealing a Yugoslavia both illumined by history and brought to life by her personal encounters. Nonetheless, we must remember that this pinnacle of modernism in the travel genre, highlighted by so many scholars, stands upon decades of lesserread narratives. Further exploration reveals a series of travel-related texts that are just as genre-bending and imaginative, works by other women writers who have made their own excursions into modernism.

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Index Notes: italics indicate images; ‘n’ indicates footnotes. Adams, Percy G., 3, 33 African American travel and narrative, 6, 88–101, 90n, 99n, 101n, 279–87; see also racial identity Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women, 137 Alec-Tweedie, Ethel, America as I Saw It, 41, 70 Alexander technique, 250, 266 Anderson, Monica, 7 archaeology, and “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” (Hall), 120–24, 120n, 122, 123n Athenaeum (magazine), 19n, 127 Athill, Diana, 103n Austen, Jane, and the piano, 236–7, 236n, 245n Baker, Michael, 114 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 112 Barker, George, 205, 209–10, 210n, 211n, 212, 213, 214, 214n, 215, 216–17, 219–21 ‘Baron Münchausen,’ 3, 3n Barr, Pat, 170n Bartkowski, Frances, 4 Barzun, Jacques, 240 Bashford, Alison, 135, 161, 174n Bassnett, Susan, 18–19, 19n Batten, Mabel, 114–15, 119 Baudelaire, Charles, 68, 68n

Beach, Joseph Warren, 273 Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex, 22n, 25, 25n–26n, 186 Belaney, Archie “Grey Owl,” 125, 125n Bell, Gertrude Lowthian, Syria: The Desert and the Sown, 16 Bell, Quentin, 243 Bell, Vanessa, Notes on Virginia’s Childhood, 243 bell hooks, 184n Benjamin, Walter, 68 Bennett, Gwendolyn, 6, 90 Bennett, Juda, 87, 130 Benstock, Shari, 6 Bernstein, Charles, 130 Berry, Mary, 12 Bhabha, Homi, 22 Bird, Isabella, 18n, 34n, 170n Bishop, E. L., 152 Blake, Caesar R., 259, 263 Blake, Susan L., 36, 36n Bluemel, Kristin, 269, 269n, 270 Blunt, Alison, 38n body, female, 1–5, 21–6 and early 20th C women’s travel writing, 40–41, 47–53 and illness, 133–4, 135–6, 148–9, 153–4, 156–7, 163–6 and the piano, 236, 239, 250–51, 262–3, 265–7 and pregnancy, 183–7, 193–200, 203, 205–20, 228–33

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and racial identity, 87, 91–2, 94–6, 97–8, 100, 107–8, 110–12, 124–5 Boisseau, Tracey Jean, 40n Booksaver, May, 129 Bordo, Susan, 183n Bottome, Phyllis, Broken Music, 238 Boyle, Kay, 6 Brantlinger, Patrick, 20, 54, 57 Breuer, Josef, 172, 177n Brinker-Gabler, Gisela, 22 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 139–40, 237, 237n, 267 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 259n Brooker, Peter, 8–9 Brophy, Brigid, 205 Burford, Arianne, 269 Burgan, Mary, 193, 193n, 198n, 199, 200, 200n, 201n, 235, 238, 246 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, The Secret Garden, 140 Caird, Mona, 10 Cameron, Charlotte A Woman’s Winter in Africa, 41–2 A Woman’s Winter in South America, 44, 45, 46, 50 Campion, Jane, The Piano, 241, 250, 251n, 252–3 Canadian modernist fiction, 205, 205n, 206n Carr, Helen, 7 Carreño, Teresa, 241, 241n, 251 Carter, Howard, 57–9 Caughie, Pamela, 87–8, 87n Chekhov, Anton, 199, 199n Childs, Peter, 8 Chisholm, Dianne, 172, 172n, 177n Chopin, Kate, The Awakening, 238n–239n Cixous, Hélène, 1, 23, 24, 85, 86–7, 101, 164, 184–5, 232

Clément, Catherine, 86 Clements, Elicia, 243n Cleopatra, 62, 62n Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, 19–20, 19n, 20n, 35, 36, 77, 77n, 106, 140, 145, 149–50, 253–4, 253n Cook, Thomas, 12, 27, 27n, 278 Cooke, James Francis, 249n, 276, 283 Crisis, The (magazine), 90 Cromer, John, 56n–57n Culler, Lucy Yeend, Europe Through a Woman’s Eye, 69–70 Cummins, June, 154 Currie, Jessie Monteath, The Hill of Goodbye, 17, 17n, 33 Daly, Nicholas, 6, 35, 255n dance, 26, 26n, 246n Danius, Sarah, 6, 13, 13n Davis, F. James, 281n Davis, Kathy, 184 Davis, Thadious M., 90, 93, 101 Dawson, A. J., “The Powder Play,” 55n Dellamora, Richard, 114, 114n, 117n, 120n DeSalvo, Louise, 80, 80n, 246 Dickens, Charles, 131 Dietz, Nettie Fowler, A White Woman in a Black Man’s Country, 42, 43–54, 47n, 52, 55, 60, 73, 77, 78, 90, 102–3 Dilworth, Leah, 127 Doan, Laura, 117, 117n Dolan, Brian, 12 Domosh, Mona, 240–41 Donaldson, Laura, 54n Douglas, Susan, 185 Doyle, Laura, 8 Drabble, Margaret, 210, 210n Duff Gordon, Lady Lucy, 56n–57n

Index Dunlop, Madeline, How We Spent the Autumn, 17 DuPlessis, Rachel, 136 Dyer, Geoff, 290 Earle, Pliny, 178 Edelman, Lee, 185 185n Ederle, Gertrude, 14n Edwards, Elizabeth, 43–4 Edwards, Tim, 228n Egerton, George, 10 Eliot, George, Middlemarch, 237 Eliot, T. S., 127, 128, 131–2, 210 Ellis, Havelock, 117n, 130n Ellis, Katharine, 245n Emery, Mary Lou, 8, 157–8 excursions into modernism, as term, 26–31 fantasy and the Other, 54–67, 58, 67 the piano, and ‘magical’ women, 272–9 readings on “Finding Miss Ogilvy” (Hall), 113–26, 122 see also imagination Farley, David, 7, 289n, 290, 290n Fauset, Jessie, 6, 90 Fay, Amy, 261, 265n Felber, Lynette, 271n Felski, Rita, 9 female body see body, female feminist geographies/phenomenology, 5, 14–16, 15, 23–6 and early 20th C women’s travel writing, 30, 37, 57n, 59–61, 66, 69n and pregnancy, 163, 184–7, 184n, 200, 218 fiction, 2–5, 6, 7–8, 18, 19n, 21, 23, 25

323

adventure fiction, 19–20, 35, 35n, 36, 37, 54 and early 20th C women’s travel writing, 39–42, 54, 55, 59–62, 79–83 and identity, 88, 93, 103n, 118, 126, 128 and illness, 136, 139–42 and the piano, 237, 242–3, 273, 279, 285, 286, 287 and pregnancy, and autobiography, 211, 218, 225–6, 226n, 232 Fielding, Henry, Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (pref.), 3 Fish, Cheryl J., 6n, 12–13, 39, 89, 89n–90n, 90 flâneur/flâneuse, 68–9, 74, 76, 80n, 110, 129, 206, 278, 290 Forster, E. M., A Passage to India, 2 A Room with a View, 246n, 252n Fortunati, Vita, 71n Foster, Shirley, 35n, 37, 137 Fox, Alice, 145n Frank, Arthur W., 134 Frawley, Maria H., 13 Frederick, Bonnie, 7, 7n, 12 French-Sheldon, Mary, 34n, 40n Freud, Sigmund, 24, 25, 172, 177n Friedman, Susan Stanford, 8, 166, 167, 167n, 177n, 180 Fromm, Gloria G., 261n, 266, 270 Froula, Christine, 152, 245n Fullbrook, Kate, 193, 199, 199n, 200 Fuller, Margaret, Summer on the Lakes, 39 Fussell, Paul, 17–18, 19, 289 Garrity, Jane, 258n, 259n Garvey, Marcus, 89, 89n, 92n Gaunt, Mary

324

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Alone in West Africa, 36, 70–71 A Broken Journey, 16 gender and displacement of sexual identity, 120–25, 129–32 and early 20th C women’s travel writing, 34–9, 50, 53, 69–70 and illness, 141–2, 151–2, 158–9, 161–4, 167, 172–6 and modernist writing, 5–11, 257–8 and pregnancy, 196 and racial identity, 85–6, 89–90 roles, and the piano, 235–9, 245–8, 252–3, 272–5, 277, 281, 282, 283–4 and traditional and modernist travel narratives, 221–33 and the woman’s travel book, 17–21 genre, 5, 7–8, 31, 33–9; see also fiction; modernist writing; travel writing geographies, 23–6 and the feminine space, 183 and illness, 136–42, 167–72 and pregnancy, 186–9, 212–13, 217–18, 228–30 and racial identity, 110–11, 114–26 transformative, and music, 252, 264, 278–9, 286 and the writing process, 259–60 Gibbs, Raymond, 25, 26n Gikandi, Simon, 22, 41 Gill, Miranda, 175n Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” 174n, 227, 227n Gilman, Sander L., 107, 107n, 162, 162n, 174 Ginsberg, Elaine K., 97 Glendinning, Victoria, 273n, 278n Goldsworthy, Vesna, 294

Grand, Sarah, 10 Green, Lucy, 237–8, 245n Green, Martin, 35n Greene, Graham, 2, 17 Gregg, Veronica Marie, 107 Gregory, Alyse, 226 Gregory, Horace, 257n Griffin, Farah J., 6n, 12–13, 89, 90 Grosz, Elizabeth, 24, 25–6, 164, 266n Gubar, Susan, 156, 163, 200, 201n–202n, 203n Guerard, Albert J., 19 Gunther, John, 294 H.D., 6, 167n, 168n Freudian Poetics, 172n HERmione, 136, 141–2, 166–81, 264, 277 “Notes on Thought and Vision,” 180–81 Hackett, Robin, 130, 130n Hafley, James, 246 Hall, Mary, A Woman’s Trek from the Cape to Cairo, 36n Hall, Radclyffe, 87, 88, 114–26, 128, 130 and belief in past lives, 118–20, 119n, 123, 123n-124n The Forgotten Island, 120, 120n “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself,” 28, 88, 113–26, 114n, 116n, 117n, 130n A Saturday Life, 119n, 123n–124n “The Career of Mark Anthony Brakes,” 124n The Well of Loneliness, 116, 116n see also Troubridge, Una Hamilton, Jill, 27 Hanscombe, Gillian, 5–6, 10 Harper, Howard, 142 Harrison, Nancy R., 163n

Index Hartley, Marsden, 127 Hellman, Lillian, The Children’s Hour, 175n Henson, Matthew A., A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, 90n Herz, Henri, 241 Herzog, Kristin, 22 Hight, Eleanor M., 44 Hofmann, Josef, 242, 250, 275–6 Holland, Patrick, 22 Hollenberg, Donna, 166, 172 homosexuality and identity, 114–26, 129–30 and illness, 140, 140n, 167, 171–6, 174n, 178, 179 Howe, Irving, 131, 131n Huggan, Graham, 22 Hull, E. M., The Sheik, 63 Hussey, Mark, 71n, 144n, 146n Hutchinson, George, 91, 91n, 92n, 95n Hyde, Virginia, 12 Ichikawa, Haruko, Japanese Lady in Europe, 20–21 identity see self; racial identity illness, 30, 133–6 and geographical space, 136–42 readings on The Voyage Out (Woolf), 142–55 readings on Voyage in the Dark (Rhys), 156–66 readings on HERmione (H. D.), 166–81 and the piano, 256 and pregnancy, 156, 183, 194 and social transgression, 141–2, 151–2, 158–9, 161–4, 167, 172–3, 175 imagination in early 20th C women’s travel writing, 39–42

325

and illness, 144–5, 147–51, 154–5, 159–61, 169–70, 173–5 and the piano, 246, 249–50, 251–2, 264, 267–9, 286 pregnancy, and creativity, 184–5, 189, 203–4, 213, 215–16, 230 see also fantasy; self imaginative geography, as term, 29, 42 Ingemanson, Birgitta Maria, 137 Irigaray, Luce, 4, 23, 24, 185 James, Henry, Daisy Miller, 140–41, 152 James, William, 11, 11n Jebb, Louisa, By Desert Ways to Baghdad, 54, 70 Johnson, Erica L., 147n, 149 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 24 Jones, Frank Pierce, 266 Jones, Paul Christian, 228n Joyce, James, Ulysses, 2, 24, 163, 206 Kaplan, Caren, 6–7 Kay-Scott, Cyril, Life is Too Short, 21, 189, 221–5, 221n, 222n, 223n, 224n, 226, 231–2 Kent’s Cavern, 121–4, 121n, 122 Kiernan, V. G., 56 Kingsley, Mary, 18n, 34n, 37n, 38n Kleinman, Arthur, 3n Koza, Julia Eklund, 241 Kramp, Michael, 117n, 119n Kristeva, Julia, 21, 23–4, 85, 154, 184, 184n, 185, 216 Kumar, Shiv K., 11 LaChapelle, Dolores, 127n Larsen, Nella, 6, 87, 88, 90–91, 91n, 92n, 100n, 113, 126, 131n Passing, 88, 96–101, 97n, 114

326

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Quicksand, 88–96, 101, 102, 114, 118, 128, 128n, 131, 283 Laurence, Patricia, 143n, 156n Lawrence, D. H., 2, 17, 127, 127n, 289–90 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 206–7 Lawrence, Karen R., 7, 7n,, 82n, 145, 147, 151 Leaska, Mitchell A., 72 Levitt, Dorothy, 13 Lewis, Reina, 35n, 41 Light, Alison, 10, 11 Lipner, Julius, 176 Liszt, Franz, 242, 247 Livingstone, Dr. David, 35, 222n Loesser, Arthur, 236, 236n, 239n, 240, 263 Loos, Anita, 14n Lott, Eric, 131 Lowell, Joan, The Cradle of the Deep, 17–18, 18n Lowther, Toupie, 117–18, 118n MacQueen, Peter, In Wildest Africa, 35–6 McConnell, Curt, 13 McDowell, Deborah, 91, 93n, 99 McDowell, Frederick, 142n, 246n McDowell, Linda, 25, 186, 187 McEwan, Cheryl, 34–5, 37n, 38, 40, 41 McKay, Claude, 128 McKittrick, Katherine, 25, 89 Macleod, Beth Abelson, 241, 241n, 247, 261 McLeod, Susan, 7, 7n Magoffin, Susan Shelby, 188, 188n Man, Paul de, 4, 23 Mann, Thomas, Death in Venice, 140, 140n, 141, 141n Mansfield, Katherine, 6, 189, 190–98, 190n, 193n, 197n, 200–201, 200n, 201n, 203–6, 203n, 204n

“A Birthday,” 198–9 “A Sea Voyage,” 190 “A Truthful Adventure,” 191–2 articles in The New Age, 190–92, 191n, 195 “At Lehmann’s,” 197–8, 199 “At the Bay,” 201, 202n, 203, 204 “Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding,” 197 “Frau Fischer,” 195–6, 197 “Germans at Meat,” 195–6, 197 In a German Pension, 189, 193, 195–200, 200n, 202, 204 journal, 190, 192, 200n, 201, 203, 203n, 204, 206 letters, 192, 193–4, 201, 204n “Prelude,” 189, 200, 200n, 201–5, 201n–202n, 203n “The Advanced Lady,” 195 “The Aloe,” 200, 201 “The Child-Who-Was-Tired,” 198, 199–200, 202 “The Journey to Bruges,” 190–91 “The Tiredness of Rosabel,” 11 Mantz, Ruth, 193, 194 Marcus, Jane, 243n, 278 Marson, Una, 6, 8 Matthay, Tobias, 276 Maturin, Edith, Adventures beyond the Zambesi, 16, 36, 43, 50 Maurel, Sylvie, 163 Mayne, Ethel, One of Our Grandmothers, 238 Mayo, Katherine, Mother India, 57n Mazzoni, Cristina, 183n Melman, Billie, 37, 183 Menninger, Karl, 133, 136 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 5, 25, 133, 186, 218n, 230, 266, 266n

Index Michaels, Meredith, 185 Miller, Dr. Janet, Jungles Preferred, 2, 47–8, 48n, 49, 53, 106, 139, 143 Miller, Terri Beth, 248n Millett, Kate, 23 Mills, Dorothy, The Road to Timbuktu, 52–3, 54, 68, 70–71, 101, 139 Mills, Sara, 7 Mitchell, Joseph, 280–81 modernism definitions of, 4, 8, 9–10 and new modernist studies, 8 modernist writing and the body, 207–10 Canadian modernist fiction, 205, 205n, 206n ‘excursions into modernism,’ as term, 26–31 and illness, 134–5, 136, 152–3, 163–6, 167, 179–81 and the piano and music, 242–57, 258–64, 267–8, 271–2, 273, 276–7, 279 and pregnancy, 220–33 and primitivism, 127–32 and racial identity, 91–2 and travel, 3–11 and the travel narrative, 34–9, 65, 68–79, 79–83 and women see gender and modernist writing Morgan, Susan, 36–7 Morison, Margaret Cotter, A Lonely Summer in Kashmir, 70n Morris, Adalaide, 172 Moulton, Louise Chandler, Lazy Tours . . . . . in Spain and Elsewhere. 2–3, 28, 41–2 Murray, John, Handbook for Travellers in Constantinople, 137

327

Murry, John Middleton, 193, 194, 201 Naremore, James, 147n, 156n Nebeker, Helen, 104 Nelson, Lise, 25n Netzley, Patricia D., 12 New Age, The (magazine), 190–91, 191n, 195 Nicolson, Sir Harold, 71, 73n Nicolson, Nigel, 77n, 78, 78n Nightingale, Florence, 64n, 68 North, Michael, 57–9, 130, 130n Norton, Ann V., 272, 273n, 275 O’Connor, Flannery, 135 O’Connor, Teresa F., 104n–105n, 163n Odoric of Pordenone, 3 Ogilvie, Arthur, 122–3, 123n, 124 Orel, Harold, 272 Orwell, George, 2 O’Sullivan, Vincent, 190, 201 Other, the, 21–3, 25 and early 20th C women’s travel writing, 33, 43–54, 45, 52, 55, 75–7 fantasy of, 54–67, 58, 67 and primitivism, 126–32 and racial identity, 85–8, 92–6, 100, 102, 111–13 and sexual identity, 120–21, 124 and women travelers, 33–4, 39–42 Owen, Dick, 284 Paddy, David Ian, 4 Parsons, Deborah, 68–9, 69n passing, 86–8, 97–101, 112–13 and primitivism, 126–32 Pavloska, Susanna, 130 Peat, Alexandra, 6

328

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Peck, Annie Smith, A Search for the Apex of America, 16, 34n–35n Pettinger, Alasdair, 88–9, 89n photography, 43–7, 45, 46, 49, 50–51, 52, 57, 58 piano, 235–9 traveling with, 239–42, 244 readings on The Voyage Out (Woolf), 242–57 readings on Pointed Roofs (Richardson), 257–72 fantasy, readings on Rebecca West, 272–9 readings on Philippa Duke Schuyler, 279–87 Picasso, Pablo, 130, 130n Podnieks, Elizabeth, 10, 206n, 207, 207n, 208, 209n, 210n, 216n Polo, Marco, 3 Porter, Dennis, 17 Pratt, Mary Louise, 34, 34n, 37, 38, 40, 64 pregnancy, 163, 183–6 personal geographies and mobility, 186–9 and readings on Katherine Mansfield, 190–205 and readings on By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (Smart), 205–20 and readings on Escapade (Scott), 221–33 and identity, 96, 111 and illness, 156, 183, 194 Primitivism, 23, 126–32, 126n, 130n, 255n see also Other, the Prince, Nancy, 12–13 A Black Woman’s Odyssey Through Russia and Jamaica, 89, 89n–90n

racial identity and primitivism, 92–3, 124–5, 126–32 and readings on Jean Rhys, 102–13 and readings on Philippa Duke Schuyler, 279–87 and social standing, 97–8, 108–9, 111–12 see also transdermal excursions Raiskin, Judith L., 113 Raitt, Suzanne, 80, 80n, 82, 248n, 251, 252n Rennie, Neil, 3 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, book cover, 27, 27n Reynolds, Dee, 26n Rhys, Jean, 6, 8, 87, 88, 102–4, 103n, 104n, 105, 114, 126, 293 “Black Exercise Book” (journal), 104–5, 104n–105n, 108–9, 108n, 111 “Let Them Call It Jazz,” 113 letters, 103, 104, 105, 293 “Negress in Bloomsbury,” 112–13, 112n, 131 “Prayer to the Sun,” 112, 112n Smile Please, 103n, 104, 105n, 160n “Tourists,” 102, 102n, 106 Voyage in the Dark, 2, 88, 102–13, 106n, 113n, 128, 131, 136, 141–2, 156–66, 181, 293 Wide Sargasso Sea, 105n, 112n Rich, Adrienne, 187 Richardson, Dorothy, 257–8, 257n, 261n “Excursion,” 28 Interim, 268 March Moonlight, 260

Index Pilgrimage (novel sequence), 2, 10–11, 257–8, 259, 259n, 260, 264, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272 forward to, 10–11, 257, 258 see also individual novel titles Pointed Roofs, 11, 239, 257–72 The Tunnel, 11–12, 11n Richardson, Henry Handel (Ethel), Maurice Guest, 238 Richter, Harvena, 142, 142n, 143n, 156n Rider Haggard, H., King Solomon’s Mines, 35 Ridge, Lola, 225 Rijnhart, Dr. Susie, With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple, 16–17, 17n, 37–8, 40, 86, 188–9 Robinson, Eugene, 99n Robinson, Jane, 7n, 38 Rogin, Michael, 131, 131n Rollyson, Carl, 290 Rossetti, Gina M., 128n, 129 Royal Geographic Society, 34, 34n Saad el Din, Mursi, 56n–57n Sackville-West, Vita, 2, 34, 54, 71–2, 71n, 72n, 73, 75, 75n, 79–83, 79n, 80n, 81n, 82n All Passion Spent, 80 The Land (poem), 71, 72, 72n letters, 34, 54, 71, 72, 73, 76, 80n, 82 Passenger to Teheran, 42, 68–79, 77n, 79–83 Seducers in Ecuador, 71 Twelve Days, 71, 79 Said, Edward, 21, 22, 35, 41–2, 56, 59, 61 Sampson, Gary D., 44 Savory, Elaine, 104n, 113 Savory, Isabel, In the Tail of the Peacock, 55, 55n, 56, 70–71 Schilder, Paul, 25, 186, 230, 266–7

329

Schumann, Clara, 241, 245, 261, 262 Schuyler, Philippa Duke, 279–87, 280n, 281n Adventures in Black and White, 239, 279, 281–7, 281n, 282 Schweizer, Bernard, 290 Scott, Bonnie Kime, 8, 190, 201 Scott, Evelyn, 105, 189, 221–5, 221n Escapade, 21, 183, 189, 221–33, 224n, 225n, 226n, 227n Scura, Dorothy M., 226–7, 226n, 228n Seabrook, William Jungle Ways, 3, 3n, 100n No Hiding Place, 3, 3n Seacole, Mary, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, 89, 89n–90n Seager, Joni, 25n, 240–41 self and displacement of identity, 114–26 in early 20th C women’s travel writing, 43–55, 46, 52 and illness, discovery, 143–4, 146–7, 153–5, 157, 166–7, 176–81 mobility and travel, 1–5, 11–17, 15 and the piano, self-expression through, 237, 239, 248–51, 267–9, 284–5, 287 and racial identity, 85–8, 92–3, 96–7, 126–7, 281–3, 287 see also imagination Seton, Grace Thompson A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt, 28, 42, 54–67, 58, 67, 68, 73, 75, 77, 78, 116, 116n, 127, 279, 291 “Yes, Lady Saheb,” 86, 138–9 sex and illness, 156, 158–9, 161–3, 167, 174, 174n, 175–6

330

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and language, 209–20 and racial identity, 99–100, 108–9, 110 see also homosexuality Shakespeare, William, 133, 155, 170, 176n Sidgwick, Ethel, Promise, 238 Siegel, Kristi, 18 Sinclair, May, 11, 258 Sinha, Mrinalini, 57n Sitwell, Edith, 72, 126n Skidmore, Thomas E., 99

Stein, Gertrude, 6, 9, 129 “Melanctha,” 88, 129–33, 129n, 131n “Portraits and Repetition,” 129n “Q. E. D.,” 129–30, 129n Stevenson, Catherine Barnes, 38–9, 38n Stojowski, Sigismund, 242, 251 Stout, Janis P., 226n Strachey, Lytton, 142 Sullivan, Rosemary, 206n, 208, 210, 211n, 214n, 216

Smart, Elizabeth, 189, 205–10, 205n, 206n, 213n, 215n, 216n, 218, 218n, 219–21 By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, 189, 205–20, 205n, 210n, 211n, 213n, 218n, 220n journals, 206–10, 212, 215, 216, 218n, 220 on Katherine Mansfield, 206 on Virginia Woolf, 206, 206n Smedman, Lorna J., 130n Smith, Amanda Berry, 12–13 Smith, Bonnie G., 13 Smith, Sidone, 26–7 Smyers, Virginia L., 5–6, 10 Smyth, Ethel, 243n A Three-Legged Tour in Greece, 242n Snaith, Anna, 8, 102, 104n, 110 Sontag, Susan, 157 Souhami, Diana, 126n Spectator, The (magazine), 271 Spillers, Hortense J., 185, 185n Sprigge, Elizabeth, 129 Spurr, David, 49 Squier, Emma-Lindsay, Gringa: An American Woman in Mexico, 40 Stanley, Henry M., In Darkest Africa, 106 Stanton, Domna, 185, 185n Staley, Thomas F., 259, 263

Sutton, Emma, 243n Sweeney, Carole, 127 Taylor, Deems, 285 Terrell, Mary Church, A Colored Woman in a White World, 16, 90, 98n Terry, Ellen, 248 Textbook of Travel Medicine and Health (Reid, Keystone, and Cossar), 137 Thacker, Andrew, 7, 7n, 8–9, 26n Thomas, Sue, 108n, 163n, 164 Time (magazine), 280 Times, The (newspaper), 121–2 Tinling, Marion, 7n, 37, 56n Tomalin, Claire, 190, 190n, 194–5, 199n transdermal excursions, 85–8 and passing, 86–8, 97–101, 112–13 readings on Quicksand and Passing (Larsen), 88–101 racial identity, readings on Jean Rhys, 102–13 the fantastic, readings on “Finding Miss Ogilvy” (Hall), 113–26, 122 and primitivism, 92–3, 124–5, 126–32 travel, 1–5 and early 20th C women, 11–17, 15 and homosexual identity, 114–26

Index and illness, contagion, 136–41, 142–3, 145–6, 150–52, 155, 156–7, 166, 177 and illness, stasis, 167–9, 180–81 and the piano, 239–42, 252–6, 281–3, 286 and pregnancy, impact on, 187–9 and racial identity, 85–91, 93–7, 98–9, 102–13, 124–5, 279–87 Travel (magazine), 16 travel writing early 20th C women’s, 33–4, 39–42 gender, genre, and travel, 34–9 readings on A White Woman in a Black Man’s Country (Dietz), 43–54, 52 readings on A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt (Seton), 54–67, 58, 67 readings on Passenger to Teheran (Sackville-West), 68–79 and fiction, 2–3, 79–83 and illness, 138–9 and the piano, 242n, 244, 279–87 and racial identity, 85-91, 101, 102-3, 279-287 traditional and modernist, 19–20, 34–9, 221–3, 225–6, 231–2 and the woman’s travel book, 17–21 see also modernist writing Trodd, Anthea, 10 Troubridge, Una, 115–21, 115n, 123, 125 diary, 115–16, 115n, 116n, 121n Trowell, Garnet, 192–4 Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 187–8 Van Vechten, Carl, 127–8, 280 Van Wart, Alice, 209 voice, 5, 23, 38, 102, 109, 112, 112n, 131

331 and illness, 134, 136, 142, 154, 156, 157–8, 163–6, 171–2, 175–81 and the piano, 236, 239n, 248n, 250–51, 251n, 252n, 269, 271, 279, 284, 287 see also body, female; self

Warren, Lady, Through Algeria and Tunisia on a Motor-Bicycle, 18, 18n, 55–6 Watts, Carol, 259 and 259n Waugh, Evelyn, 2, 17 Weliver, Phyllis, 249 Wellman, Frederick Creighton, see KayScott, Cyril West, Rebecca, 273, 273n Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 7, 289–94, 289n, 292n, 293n The Fountain Overflows, 272–3, 274–5, 274n, 277 Harriet Hume, 239, 272–9, 276n, 277n, 290, 293n Western Morning News (newspaper), 121–3, 122 Wharton, Edith, 2 “Roman Fever,” 141 White Star Line, 14–16, 14n, 15, 27, 89n Wilson, Harriet E., Our Nig, 89n Winkiel, Laura A., 8 Wolf, Naomi, 185, 187 Wolff, Janet, 24, 68, 68n Wollaeger, Mark A., 44, 246–7 Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 19, 291 Woman’s Journal, The (magazine), 14–16, 15 Woolf, Virginia “A Sketch of the Past,” 243 diary, 72, 72n, 79n, 80, 80n, 207n, 257

332

Excursions into Modernism on Dorothy Richardson, 10, 258n “Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor-car” (essay), 1–2, 5, 191n and family illness, 142–3 and Jean Rhys, 112n letters, 76, 79–80, 81, 81n, 142, 143n, 240 and the piano, 240, 243, 244, 246, 256, 257 To the Lighthouse, 80–81, 80n, 206 “Modern Fiction” (essay), 2, 11, 70n, 70–71, 153, 252 Mrs. Dalloway, 72n, 75n, 80n, 263n, 278 “On Being Ill,” 133, 134–6, 146, 149, 152, 153, 178, 180 Orlando, 65n, 72n, 82–3, 82n, 273, 273n “Professions for Women,” 206n A Room of One’s Own, 112n, 200, 237n, 244, 247

“Street Music,” 253, 254, 255n, 256n, 275 Three Guineas, 244 and Vita Sackville-West, 71–2, 71n, 72n, 73, 75–6, 75n, 79–83, 79n, 80n, 81n The Voyage Out, 2, 136, 142–55, 143n, 151n, 156, 165–6, 166n–167n, 177, 177n, 181 the piano and music in, 239, 242–57, 245n, 248n, 253n, 267, 286 The Waves, 206 The Years, 206n Wyndham, Francis, 103 Wynn, W. H., 69–70 Young, Iris Marion, 25–6, 85, 92, 183, 186–7, 218, 229 Zola, Emile, Nana, 161, 162–3, 162n