Passing and performing

Essay outline:

At least three of the following text:

Woolf, Jacob’s Room (1922) and Orlando (1928)
H.D., Asphodel ([1922]/1992)
Bryher, Two Selves (1922)
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1935)
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood(1936)
Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)

Suggested topics:

Passing and performing
Nella Larsen’s Passing was a late addition to the reading-list, and I have been astonished to find how closely its themes are related to the other texts. One can ‘pass’ not only between races but between genders and gender-orientations, or even ‘pass off’ one’s own work as that of another. Gertrude Stein’s entire life might be regarded as a performance; one can look at Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and others in this light—not only biographically but in the way they create a text and represent ‘characters’ as performers. Jacob’s Room can be read as a woman’s ‘exposure’ of the performative element in a man’s life—of which the man would be unaware, or in denial. After deciding to become a witch, Lolly Willowes ‘performs’ being a human—and this text can be read as an allegory of all sorts of ‘passings’. HD and Bryher and all the others (not least, Leonora Carrington) can be understood in this frame, or on this stage.

National canons and cosmopolitan writers
Of all the writers studied on this course, only Woolf would be familiar on courses in English literature. Though Gertrude Stein is ‘famous’—a celebrity, the performer of a life—her works are seldom studied except on courses specialising in women’s writing. The presence of American women writers in Europe (Stein, HD, Barnes) or of English writers elsewhere (Bryher, Carrington, Loy) might have led to their exclusion or occlusion from the ‘national literary tradition’. This is however not at all the case with those men—Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway—who were labelled by Stein as the ‘Lost Generation’, and have ever since been central to the American canon.
This question may also be addressed in terms of class and wealth. Stein and Bryher were extremely wealthy, and money may be of some help if one aspires to shape the avant-garde, or wishes to perform a life, or ‘to live life on one’s own term’s’.

Linguistics and women writing (‘écriture féminine’)
This is the approach that had first motivated my selection of texts for this course, beginning with Dorothy M. Richardson. Even without Pilgrimage (or Pointed Roofs) we can find support for Helène Cixous’s term in other texts: Jacob’s Room, of course, and in the book I’d never heard of just a few weeks ago: Olive Moore’s Spleen. (Twenty copies of this are now isolated in the campus bookstore—but it is easily available online. As is Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.)

I have not mentioned all the relevant texts in outlining these themes. It is for you to shape an argument on the basis of some or all of the texts we have been reading. And of course you are free to choose your own theme, or to combine and splice one or more of these themes with another that you have devised for yourself.

 

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Passing and performing was first posted on March 24, 2020 at 9:18 am.
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