Crosswriting the empire: Sylvia Townsend Warner and lesbian modernism.
Item
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Title
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Crosswriting the empire: Sylvia Townsend Warner and lesbian modernism.
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Identifier
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AAI9946227
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identifier
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9946227
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Creator
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Wachman, R. Gay.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Jane Marcus
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Date
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1999
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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, Modern | Literature, English | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation focusses on sexually radical narratives written by British women---Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf, and Radclyffe Hall along with the less-known Clemence Dane, Rose Allatini, and Evadne Price---during and after the first world war. I contextualize these writers' work within and against the imperialist evolutionist ideology-primitivism, degeneration theory, eugenics, sexology---that underpinned the British Empire, enforcing divisions and bigotries, whispers and silence. At my dissertation's center is Warner's achievement in surmounting and undermining the barriers of interdiction and inhibition that faced women writing about forbidden sexualities.;Drawing on the discourses of cultural studies, feminist historicism, queer theory, and literary analysis, I argue that Warner brought her oppositional feminist politics and her literary practice of crosswriting to an alternative modernist tradition of sexual radicalism that can be traced back to the aesthetics of excess of the 1890s. Its writers---Vernon Lee, Norman Douglas, Ronald Firbank, among others---represent the breaking of taboos, using fantasy as a means of reshaping and critiquing a world fragmented by the first world war.;After an introductory chapter about imperialist and lesbian history, biography, politics, and the law, Chapter 2 analyzes the reflection of imperial ideology in Clemence Dane's lesbophobic Regiment of Women and its subversion in Warner's exuberant satire, The True Heart. This chapter introduces crosswriting as a means of transposing the otherwise unrepresentable lives of invisible lesbians into narratives about gay men and of crossing the borders of gender, class, "race," and even species as a means of exploring sexuality. Chapter 3 focusses specifically on class and racial primitivism in Warner's first two novels, while Chapter 4 discusses explorations of the closet by Allatini, Woolf, and Warner: their narratives demonstrate the intersection of misogyny and homophobia with the classbound, racist jingoism that justified the first world war. My final chapter contrasts Radclyffe Hall's courageous but profoundly primitivist plea for sexual tolerance in The Well of Loneliness with two novels that rewrite it, Evadne Price's Not So Quiet... Stepdaughters of War and Warner's open celebration of revolutionary lesbianism, Summer Will Show.
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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.
