The invention of "Michael Field": A dandy -androgyne, modernism and the aesthetic world of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper.
Item
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Title
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The invention of "Michael Field": A dandy -androgyne, modernism and the aesthetic world of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper.
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Identifier
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AAI3159246
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identifier
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3159246
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Creator
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Primamore, Elizabeth.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Anne Humpherys
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English | Literature, Modern
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Abstract
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My study concerns "Michael Field" as a modernist project. This pseudonym belongs to late nineteenth century English aunt and niece literary collaborators Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper. By contextualizing "Michael Field" culturally, critically, and biographically, what emerges, I offer, is how female collaboration in the guise of a male identity creates a new genre through a merging of a lived reality with the production of that reality in writing. Focusing on the aesthetic movement, including theories of the dandy, this study analyzes the appropriation of a "gay male" discourse by two "lesbian" poets as a complementary discourse to contemporary theories of androgyny and queerness in the articulation of radical women's voices and queer desire. Utilizing Wildean notions of art and Butlerian notions of gender, I explore the ways in which Bradley and Cooper construct "Michael Field" as a dandy-aesthete-persona. My study begins with an analysis of "Michael Field's" artistic aim through a consideration of Bradley's The New Minnesinger, unpublished letters, and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. This section also concerns biographical material, which suggests political issues as opening up a space for "Michael Field's" aesthetic investigations. An historical overview, with a focus on gender politics, suggests a theory of collaboration that explores the complexities of the formation of a male poetic identity for two women poets within the context of emerging identities of the New Woman and homosexual aesthete. Poems from Wild Honey, Underneath the Bough, Sight and Song, and Dedicated as well as unpublished poems are read as life enacted in art. Long Ago is analyzed with particular attention to Hellenism, which is read as a discourse of female erotic desire. This work is situated in the context of "Sapphic Modernism." The study concludes with a look at the plays and religious poetry which are further analyzed as sites of female transgressions, a subject also produced through Bloomsburyian literary experimentation in the plays. By tracing the evolution, function, and multiple meanings of this identity, I hope to show that the public and personal desires of two women poets, filtered through "Michael Field," forged an innovative sphere of literature representative of modernist literary enterprises of the next generation of women.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
