Sapphic primitivism in modern fiction: Virginia Woolf's "The Waves", Sylvia Townsend Warner's "Summer Will Show", and Willa Cather's "Sapphira and the Slave Girl".
Item
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Title
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Sapphic primitivism in modern fiction: Virginia Woolf's "The Waves", Sylvia Townsend Warner's "Summer Will Show", and Willa Cather's "Sapphira and the Slave Girl".
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Identifier
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AAI9959183
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identifier
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9959183
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Creator
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Hackett, Robin Michelle.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Jane Marcus
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Date
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2000
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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 | Literature, American
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Abstract
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This study examines figurations of blackness and degeneracy that are central to representations of lesbianism in Virginia Woolf's The Waves (193 1), Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show (1936), and Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). Toni Morrison argues that in white-authored American literature, figurations of blackness---of black people and dark expanses, of slaves and slavery---operate as shorthand expressions of what is both feared and benevolent, voluptuous and sinful. Following Morrison, I reveal the ways in which figurations of blackness function in lesbian literature in the aftermath of the trial involving Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness, and in the context of widespread modernist primitivism in art, music and literature. Also as context, I discuss late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sexology. Sexologists make diverse arguments, but each seeks to take the measure of European middle-class white homosexuality by writing comparative ethnography.;Woolf, Warner, and Cather reflect this standard trope of reference to homosexuality. Woolf excises nearly all obvious references to Rhoda's lesbianism from early drafts of The Waves. But a suggestion of lesbianism remains in Woolf's use of figurations of blackness: when other characters talk about sex or sensuality, Rhoda talks about India, warriors with assegais, tigers, swallows dipping their wings in dark pools, cobras, or Turks. Warner's Summer Will Show is more overtly homoerotic and anti-imperialist than The Waves is. But despite Warner's political convictions and her criticism of writers who romanticize the working class, racialized and working-class characters have the power to prompt the protagonist's erotic and political transformations specifically because of their class or race. In Sapphira, Cather also follows the model established by sexologists' use of figurations of blackness. In order to explore the possibility of female-centered erotics for white women, Cather creates an alliance between Sapphira, a white slave-owner, and Jezebel, an enslaved African characterized as a mythological savage.
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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.
