'MODERNIST' WOMEN WRITERS AND NARRATIVE ART Also by Kathleen Wheeler SOURCES, PROCESSES, AND METHODS IN COLERIDGE'S BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA THE CREATIVE MIND IN COLERIDGE'S POETRY ROMANTICISM, PRAGMATISM, AND DECONSTRUCTION 'Modernist' Women Writers and Narrative Art KATHLEEN WHEELER Fellow of Darwin College and University Lecturer University of Cambridge M MACMILLAN © Kathleen Wheeler 1994 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1994 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 0-333-59708-7 hardcover ISBN 0-333-61732-0 paperback A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in Great Britain by Ipswich Book Co Ltd Ipswich, Suffolk Contents Preface vi Acknowledgements viii 1 Introduction: The Dragon of St Cyril 1 2 Excavating Meaning in Willa Cather's Novels 19 3 Kate Chopin: Ironist of Realism 51 4 The Attack on Realism: Edith Wharton's In Morocco and 'Roman Fever' 77 5 Style as Characterisation in Jean Rhys' Novels 99 6 Dramatic Art in Katherine Mansfield's 'Bliss' 121 7 The Multiple Realities of Stevie Smith 141 8 Jane Bowles: That Modern Legend 162 Conclusion: The 'Voice of Silence' Speaks 182 Notes 189 Bibliography 207 Index 216 v Preface In a collection of essays, Eudora Welty remarked that fiction is often 'brought off (when it does not fail) on the sharp edge of experiment'. She added that 'mystery waits for people wherever they go, whatever extreme they run to', and that even in realistic fictions, the reality is mystery. In the following sentence she clari fied her insight when she explained that 'the mystery lies in the use of language to express human life'. The transformation of words into fiction is said to be a leap in the dark which brings writers and readers into 'the presence, the power, of the imagination'. Welty maintained that without its interpretation, without its artist, human life or experience - the 'so-called raw material' of fiction - is 'the worst kind of emptiness; it is obliteration, black or prismatic ... meaningless'. Before there can be meaning to human experience and life, there has to occur some 'personal act of vision' which is continuously 'projected as the novelist writes and the reader reads'. She then concluded: If this makes fiction sound full of mystery, I think it's fuller than I know how to say.... In writing, do we try to solve this mystery? No, I think ... we rediscover the mystery. We even, I might say, take advantage of it. As we know, a body of criticism stands ready to provide its solution, which is a kind of translation of fiction into another language ... the critical phrase 'in other words' is one to destroy rather than make for a real - that is, imaginative - understanding of the author. In this study of seven women fiction writers, an effort has been made to avoid translating their fiction into another, less imaginat ive language. The mystery of the transformation of human life into words remains, as we explore the territory of fiction and seek to experience it more deeply through increased, more intimate ac quaintance with the fiction, rather than through reductive gener alisations or discursive accounts. In a sense, most criticism seeks to avoid such reductiveness, but by paying close, scrupulous attention to that 'sharp edge of experiment' which the texts exemplify, and VI Preface vii attention to the 'personal acts of vision' they express, we hope to gain a better sense of the 'degrees and degrees and degrees of com munication ... possible between novelists and ... readers'. An effort is made to respect and understand these elements of mystery, of vision, and of art as experiments in original, individual personal acts of imagination, which seek to interpret human life and make it meaningful. The artistic products of that power of imagination (which is 'above all the power to reveal, with nothing barred') reveal themselves to readers who seek 'no explanation outside fic tion for what its writer is learning to do'. These statements, far from rejecting criticism per se, encourage a more imaginative response from readers, as Welty's prolific criticism shows. What is at stake is a respect for literary experiment and for the mystery of putting life into words, a respect which if cultivated, leads critics into creative articulation of experiences of reading which are their own 'raw material'. K.M.W. Acknowledgements My sincerest thanks go to Anne Rendell, whose initiative and deter mination got this book into legible form. I am also grateful to my editor Margaret Cannon whose interest in and enthusiasm for the project rescued it from oblivion. Many students, both graduate and undergraduate, contributed unawares to the book, both with specific ideas and approaches, and with their fascination for the modernist period as evinced in supervisions, seminars and lectures. To Gillian Rogers, the Librarian of the English Faculty, Cambridge, I owe much gratitude, not only for an unusually well-stocked library of women's texts, but also for helpful advice over the years about general matters to do with the book. To the Librarians of the University Library I am also grateful for help whenever needed. To the Master and Fellows of Darwin College thanks are due of a general kind for the congenial surroundings in which the writing of this book occurred. vm 1 Introduction: The Dragon of St Cyril In Mystery and Manners, a book of essays on the writing of fiction, Flannery O'Connor referred to the responsibility she felt as a writer to her readership, when she remarked: 'I hate to think of the day when the Southern writer will satisfy the tired reader.' She further explained that stories of any depth tell the tale, in an endless variety of disguises, of the mysterious passage past the dragon of St Cyril of Jerusalem, continuing: 'it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.'1 A few decades earlier, the American philosopher John Dewey had made a not unrelated observation, first paraphrasing a remark of John Keats: 'no "reasoning", as reasoning, that is, as excluding imagination and sense, can reach truth.... Reason must fall back on imagination - upon the embodiment of ideas in an emotionally charged sense.' Dewey then concluded: Ultimately there are but two philosophies. One of them accepts life and experience in all its uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge, and turns that experience upon itself to deepen and intensify its own qualities - to imagination and art.2 The intensifying and deepening of experience - even if the empirical qualities of that experience are 'uncertainty, mystery, doubt and half-knowledge' - occurs, Dewey said, by means of 'imagination and art'. They make possible intelligent reflection about the experience which leads to enrichment and to a kind of wisdom ('understanding' or 'knowledge' would not be quite the right word). Reason, then, is placed firmly under the control of imagination. O'Connor's more imaginative, metaphorical descrip tion (quoted above) communicates Dewey's idea forcefully, as she invoked images of 'mysterious passages' past dragons and spoke of the courage required by readers and listeners to face up to the 1