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Bonnie Kime Scott - Refiguring Modernism, Volume 1: Women of 1928

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Bonnie Kime Scott Refiguring Modernism, Volume 1: Women of 1928
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... an invaluable aid to the reconfiguration of literary modernism and of the history of the fiction of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Novel ... her readings of texts are quite smart and eminently readable. Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature... a challenging and discerning study of the modernist period. James Joyce Broadsheet (note: review of volume 1 only)... highly important and beautifully written, constructing a contextually rich cultural history of Anglo-American modernism. It wears its meticulous erudition lightly, synthesizing an enormous amount of research, much of it original archival work. SignsThrough her thoughtful exploration of the lives and work of these three female modernists, Scott shapes a new feminist literary history that successfully reconfigures modernism. Woolf Studies AnnualIn this revisionary study of modernism, Bonnie Kime Scott focuses on the literary and cultural contexts that shaped Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Djuna Barnes. Her reading is based upon fresh archival explorations, combining postmodern with feminist theory.

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Page 1

Part One:
Beginnings
Page 10

and preventing "infant's masturbation." Slowly other images emergeda "memory of penis seen through cot bars uncovered," and days later "father exciting nipples and face of father during orgasm," and "offering tip of penis to mouth'' and "masturbating beside child" (Sunflower notebook, Tulsa). She also recorded an "animal fantasy" sprung from a "suspicion of my father urinating in the grove in garden." It contained the logic "Animals free from taboos in sex. If my father and I were animals we would be free to enjoy each other" (Sunflower notebook). What actually occurred is impossible to say. Even West speculated that, under the influence of her analyst, she might have imagined it all. Certainly she suffered from paternal abandonment and decidedly mixed emotions about her father's sexuality.
Over the years, West made many things of Charles Fairfield and his desertion of the family when she was only eight. Being deliberate, his departure instilled guilt in West. The event may have been even more traumatic than Woolf's loss of her mother. A poem West wrote at the time ended with "the anguish of a soul / that finds its twin has faithless been" ("Juvenilia" ms., Yale). As an adolescent, West apparently grew to hate her Aunt Sophie (wife of Charles Fairfield's brother, Arthur) for telling stories of her father's youthful vices. 8
West's own account of her father in Family Memories begins romantically with the ebb and flow of Fairfield family fortunes in Ireland. The Fairfields had a small estate in County Kerry, a Dublin townhouse, and a London residence, all lost by her widowed grandmother. In establishing her own addresses in London and in the country, and in collecting fine furnishings and paintings, West approached the lost style of her ancestors. Though she never forgot her father's claim to gentility, she denounced his Protestant Irish snobbery. One peculiar proclamation of this exists in a letter written to another Anglo-Irish exile, George Bernard Shaw, in 1922: "He married my mother, who was a great pianist, and destroyed her musical genius and ruined her life with the most complete and well-mannered imperturbability, because she came of low people of peasant extraction" (Letter to Shaw, British Library). A family story credits Charles Fairfield with outdoing a much younger Shaw in an all-night debate at Conway Hall ( FM 194). West attributes to her father a Shavian style that she may well have imitated ( FM 164). West claimed that her father had received an extraordinary education from a French anarchist, Elie Reclus. She did not partake of Charles Fairfield's ideology, which was ardently antisocialist, though her own conservative notions of the state, expressed in the 1950s, may owe something to him.9
Page 100

6 Wyndham Lewis:
Above the Line of
Messy Femininity
Ezra Pound gave credit to Wyndham Lewis for vorticism, the idea that replaced imagism as the essence of the "new" in 1914. Unlike imagism, vorticism had no female co-founderno H. D. Pound found it preferable to share the leadership of a new movement with Lewis rather than remain in a year-old movement that had to be shared with Amy Lowell. A novelist and painter, a proponent of the virtues of space over those of time, and a blaster of the past, Lewis was founder of the Rebel Arts Center and of the vorticist journal BLAST , published in 191415. In his break with Roger Fry's Omega group in 1913, Lewis had embraced a masculine image for the group of painters who surrounded him, in contrast to Fry's group: "This family party of strayed and Dissenting Aesthetes were compelled to call in as much modern talent as they could find, to do the rough and masculine work without which they knew their efforts would not rise above the level of a pleasant tea-party, or command more attention" (Letters of Wyndham Lewis 49). 1 Lewis's paintings, and those of male cohorts such as Frederick Etchells and C. R. W. Nevinson, are integral to understanding the vortex. Works such as "Timon of Athens,'' published in the first number of BLAST , help clarify vorticism (see Plate 11). Lewis deploys in space linear or technologically produced objects such as girders, gears, and guns, so as to suggest dynamic lines of force and energy. An object resembling an upside-down child's top appeared on the title page of the BLAST "Manifesto," recurring several times within the number. Vorticism as a movement implied that there was a group of artists on the scene who were capable of superior creative energies, suggested in a spinning top or a whirlpool so energized as to have watertight qualities.
Rather than give a formal definition, the first number of BLAST gives a barrage of blasted and blessed items, starting with England and its climate, denounced in homophobic terms, "DISMAL SYMBOL, SET round our bodies, of effeminate lout within" (11). These fragments are arranged in differently sized but always bold type, ranging from a one-word item
Page 101

Plate 11 Wyndham Lewis Timon of Athens From BLAST 1 29 June 1914 - photo 1
Plate 11. Wyndham Lewis, "Timon of Athens."
From BLAST 1 (29 June 1914).
Page 102

on a list to a short, authoritative declaration. Lewis was for a time impressed by F. T. Marinetti's futurist doctrines of violence and the worship of machinery, but dissociated himself from futurist "automobilism" in BLAST ; the ultimate insult was to call the futurists "impressionists," a blast that also worked out Lewis's antipathy to Roger Fry. The journal advances a "predatory" attitude and a new "chemistry" of abstraction. The whirlpool, originally a figure in water, serves as a formal image for vorticism, but it is carefully managed so as to avoid laxness, representation of nature, or even the most typical behavior of liquids. The vortex achieves a maximum point of energy at a central still point; it makes swift movements, has "polished sides'' and "water tight compartments" ("Our Vortex," BLAST 1, 147). Vorticist artists, like Nietzsche's superman, are individualists and masters, not slaves of commotion. They are indifferent to the past and the future as "sentimental" constructions and despise and ignore an "impure Present." They are also superior to nature, which is given a subservient, sexual, female construction: "The Past and Future are the prostitutes Nature has provided. Art is periodic escapes from this Brothel" (148). Vortex "plunges to the heart of the Present" (147). With its calm, its controlled, self-contained, geometric shape, and its energetic force and repeated, plunging movement, Vortex promised triumph over the troubling impurities and voids, which elsewhere Lewis would associate with nature and the feminine. One of the "Blesses" of the second number of BLAST was to "The scaffolding around the Albert Memorial" (93). 2
The form of the feminine is blasted repeatedly, wherever it occurs in BLAST , especially where exhibited by men. Women are not necessarily blasted. Numerous individual women are blessed. Suffragettes are commended for their energy: " YOU AND ARTISTS ARE THE ONLY THINGS ( YOU DON'T MIND BEING CALLED THINGS ) LEFT IN ENGLAND WITH A LITTLE LIFE IN THEM " (151). But this comes rather late in Lewis's page-and-a-half-length "word of advice." Up to that point he makes uninformed and insulting overgeneralizations. The advice, titled "To Suffragettes," implicates a diverse group in a particular form of militancy that might lead to the destruction of artworks. It further assumes that suffragettes would not understand art and could not be artists. The characterization did not fit one suffragette in Lewis's own experience, Rebecca West.
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