"Get on or Get Out": Failure and Negative Femininity in Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark
TL;DR: The authors argue that failure as a productive form of critique is linked to a feminist and anticolonialist project Focusing on Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark and After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, and argue that Rhys protagonists' failure to successfully enact prescribed gender roles is a feminist response, one articulated through a negative feminism rather than a conventional liberal feminism.
Abstract: This essay locates failure as a productive form of critique, linked to a feminist and anticolonialist project Focusing on Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark and After Leaving Mr Mackenzie , I argue that Rhys’s protagonists’ failure to successfully enact prescribed gender roles is a feminist response, one articulated through a negative feminism rather than a conventional liberal feminism Using Jack Halberstam’s notion of shadow feminism and Sianne Ngai’s noncathartic emotions, I show how Rhys exposes the need for an alternate model of white female respectability through her narratives of failure
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23 Apr 2009
TL;DR: A brief review of British and Irish Libel Law can be found in this article, along with a review of the Modernist Roman a clef and a select bibliography of the modernist Roman clef.
Abstract: Series Editors' Foreword Acknowledgments CHAPTER I Introduction: Fact, Fiction, Pleasure CHAPTER II True Fictions and False Histories: The Secret Rise of the Roman a clef CHAPTER III Open Secrets and Hidden Truths: Wilde and Freud CHAPTER IV Libel: Policing the Laws of Fiction APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IV A Brief Digest of British and Irish Libel Law CHAPTER V The Novel at the Bar: Joyce, Lewis, and Libel CHAPTER VI The Coterie as Commodity: Huxley, Lawrence, Rhys and the Business of Revenge APPENDIX A Select Bibliography of the Modernist Roman a Clef
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TL;DR: The modernist city is commonly thought of as a city of exteriors; we envision the "spaces of modernity" as sites of industry or leisure, and apply the very notion of the "urban" plan as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The modernist city is commonly thought of as a city of exteriors; we envision the ‘spaces of modernity’ as sites of industry or leisure, and apply the very notion of the ‘urban’—urban plann...
6 citations
TL;DR: In her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please (1979), Jean Rhys describes her young adulthood in pre-World War I London as discussed by the authors, set adrift from the support of family, Rhys recounts the lovers and friends.
Abstract: In her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please (1979), Jean Rhys describes her young adulthood in pre-World War I London. Set adrift from the support of family, Rhys recounts the lovers and friends ...
5 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors suggest that correspondences between key settings in Jean Rhys's "Temps Perdi" suggest the Benjaminian notion of history as a perpetual state of emergency, as suggested by analytics proffered by postmodern theories of space.
Abstract: Correspondences between key settings in Jean Rhys’s “Temps Perdi,” as suggested by analytics proffered by postmodern theories of space, suggest the Benjaminian notion of history as a perpetual state of emergency. Introduced in the three discrete sections of the story, these key settings are a house on the east coast of England during WWII, Vienna in the aftermath of WWI, and an unnamed Caribbean island (which the narrator visits between the wars). Further, the story’s key disabled characters, the narrator and a young Carib woman, point to Walter Benjamin’s notion of a revolutionary, “messianic” break with time, as suggested by analytics proffered by disability studies.
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TL;DR: Lollys Willowes as mentioned in this paper is a character who is possessed by the devil, but in a way that frees her from the demands of living according to the expectations of English Christian society.
Abstract: ion. And when she does this, she finds she remembers something important, and her thoughts themselves “slid together . . . like a pack of hounds” to join the hunt for the “clue to the secret country of her mind.” Lolly’s self-discovery occurs through abstraction; and, moreover, she discovers she is both hunter and prey—that she embod-ion; and, moreover, she discovers she is both hunter and prey—that she embodWinick / modernist feminist witchcraft 581 ies a witchy state of powerful passivity. This state of abstraction to which she aspires, furthermore, is marked as witchy just a few pages before the hunting sequence. Lolly, encountering some village women, notes they were “silent and abstracted as usual”; she approves this state and feels drawn toward it: “To-night their demeanour did not strike her as odd. She felt at one with them, an inhabitant like themselves, and she would gladly have gone with them up towards the wood” (118). Though Lolly is an accomplice in her own hunt, Satan reminds her that the ultimate power still rests with him. When Lolly observes that being a witch “all seems so perfectly natural,” he explains, “That is because you are in my power. No servant of mine can feel remorse, or doubt, or surprise. You may be quite easy, Laura: you will never escape me, for you can never wish to” (210). Unlike Murray’s witches, who commit to their religion with “free will,” Lolly can have no will of her own now that she belongs to Satan. Even before she pledged herself to him, she was already a witch-elect, drawn to Great Mop where she realized her long-developing witch identity. Lolly’s witchhood consists of two paradoxes: first, she is possessed by Satan, but in a way that frees her, and second, her primary desire is to be passive, idle, isolated—to be undesiring, a state she can only fully achieve through Satan’s help. She is the devil’s servant now but a content one, with no real duties and a host of freedoms she did not have before. She does not want to choose her own religion like Murray’s witches but only to be allowed to realize the natural inclinations toward the devil that have always been in her. In allying herself with Satan, Lolly emphatically frees herself from the demands of living according to the expectations of English Christian society. But at the same time, she corroborates some of the oldest assumptions of patriarchal Christianity: that women are especially susceptible to the devil, that they are naturally dependent on a stronger masculine figure, and even that they are chattel, the possession of such a figure.48 Lolly Willowes’s witchcraft not only parodies Christianity in its heretical relation to it; it also parodies Murray’s witch cult in order to reject a practice endorsed by both religions: heterosexual sex. The appearance of a figure recognizable as Murray’s witch god at the witches’ sabbath in Lolly Willowes illustrates the novel’s dissatisfaction with this aspect of The Witch-Cult. Like the witch god, this figure is markedly sexualized. His body is “lean, lithe” and “seemed to be scarcely withheld from breaking into a dance” (181). His touch is cold, a detail characteristic of Murray’s god, and he holds and licks Lolly in front of the gathered witches in what may be an attempt at the sexual rite. His sexual, serpentine manner seems to draw both from fertility cult and Christian contexts, as if he is trying too hard to appear to be Satan. Lolly rejects his advance, regarding it as an “affront,” an “odious and petty insult” (182). She stalks off, angry at the witches and at herself for “submitting her good sense to politeness. Hours ago her instinct had told her that she was not going to enjoy herself. . . . But she had stayed on, deferring to a public opinion that was not concerned with whether she stayed or went, stayed on just as she used to stay on at balls” (182). Later Lolly discovers that the masked man was not really Satan, but only a vain young author. Moreover, she learns that Satan and certain other witches may share her “sophisticated dislike for the Sabbath” (217). With this parody of Murray’s fertility cult, Warner emphasizes the very different place M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 582 of sociability and of heterosexual sex in her version of feminist witchcraft: as a passive witch, Lolly avoids the former and rejects the latter. Notably, the sabbath also features Lolly’s most explicit homosexual experience, with the “young slattern” Emily. When Lolly dances with Emily, “the contact made her tingle from head to foot” (175). But Emily is soon “snatched away” by a male dancer, and Lolly returns for the rest of the novel to solitude and apparent celibacy.49 Lolly responds to the attempted sexual rite in a manner consistent with her general refusal of heterosexuality, as manifested in her “temperamental indifference to the need of getting married” (26). Ultimately, she embraces solitude and celibacy in a clear departure from the sociability and fertility rites central to Murray’s witch religion. In Lolly Willowes, such activities are too reminiscent of the dull obligations of her prewitch existence, when she had to attend balls, entertain suitors, and mind her nieces and nephew. She prefers Satan’s “undesiring and unjudging gaze, his satisfied but profoundly indifferent ownership” (222). Unlike most men, including Murray’s incarnate witch god, Satan does not desire, nor does he impose a heterosexual relation on his witches. Though he “owns” them, he does not demand anything from them. They are free to do as they please, without concern for satisfying or disappointing him. As Gay Wachman notes, the novel ends with an “escape into Satanic celibacy” (Lesbian Empire, 83). By then Lolly has rejected or been denied all other forms of sexuality.50 Celibacy marks the culmination of her long preference for solitude, a preference shared to a large degree by her fellow witches and by Satan himself. But as we have seen, this “escape” is imperfect: while Lolly successfully avoids the demands of English Christian womanhood as a witch in Great Mop, the tradition of witchcraft that she embraces defines itself against Christianity and cannot escape its logic. Receptive and Reflective Reading Lolly Willowes models a practice of reading that moves from receptivity to critical reflection. Lolly herself figures this approach when she first makes her pact with Satan implicitly, without full consciousness, only to recognize and embrace it afterward. The Witch-Cult, by contrast, models a reading practice that begins in reflection and ends in receptivity. It demands, as the experience of the Dial reviewer attests, a critical, conscious choice to accept its account of the witches before immersing oneself in the fantastical possibilities their history suggests. The witches themselves figure this approach in their purposeful commitment to the witch religion in advance of their participation in its ecstasies. While The Witch-Cult enables a critically framed belief in the historical reality of the witch religion, then, Lolly Willowes offers the possibility of finding or creating new realities through the experience of giving in.51 The pattern evident in Lolly’s pact with Satan, a model of a certain mode of readerly engagement with the text and with the imagination in general, also stretches out in more detail over a sequence of related events in the novel. Before leaving Lady Place, Lolly has not yet embraced full receptivity. While visiting her mother’s grave, “she Winick / modernist feminist witchcraft 583 half yielded her mind to the fancy that the dead mother whose grave she tended was sitting a little apart in the shade, presently to rise and to come and meet her” (38). But this does not happen, and Lolly soon leaves the graveyard for the last time, moving, unhappily, to London. There, her imagination becomes more vivid and she becomes increasingly abstracted in daydreams and reading. By the time she has settled in Great Mop, her abstraction is so complete she often forgets herself. Thinking of the fables of the henwife as she helps her neighbor with his chickens, she “almost forgot where she was and who she was, so completely had she merged her personality into the henwife’s. She walked back along the rutted track and down the steep lane as obliviously as though she were flitting home on a broomstick” (134). This transformation is just a figurative one, but as we have seen, the figurative has a way of becoming literal in this novel. Indeed, shortly after the henwife episode, Lolly feels substantially altered: “She was changed, and knew it. She was humbler, more simple” (136). The change depends in part on maintaining forgetfulness: thinking of her relatives, she reflects that “all she could do was to go on forgetting them. But now she was able to forget them without flouting them by her forgetfulness” (136). To forget without flouting is Lolly’s new witchy mode, one that has “changed” her. Reflecting on this abstraction, she recognizes its effects without disrupting them. Such reflection simply confirms the new state in which she now exists—the new reality attained through forgetfulness. In the months succeeding this realization, “she lived in perfect idleness and contentment” (136). Thus Lolly moves from a state of “half yield[ing]” (38) to a full “yield[ing of] herself” (123). And while the effects of half yielding are limited to changes in daydreams, the effects of a fuller yielding lead to changes in Lolly’s reality. The final change comes when her nephew Titus visits. Driven to distraction by Titus, Lolly makes her silent pledge with Satan. Post-pledge, her “mind was almost a blank. She had forgotten Titus; she had forgotten the long afternoon of frenzy and bewilderment” (152). Her pledge results immediately in witchy forgetfulness. Soon after, with the arrival of her kitten familiar, a strong if almost unconscious certainty supplements her forgetfulness: “Not for a moment did she
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01 Jan 1997
TL;DR: The racial contract is a historical actuality and an exploitation contract as mentioned in this paper, and the racial contract has to be enforced through violence and ideological conditioning, and it has been recognized by non-whites as the real moral/political agreement to be challenged.
Abstract: Introduction1. Overview The Racial Contract is political, moral, and epistemological The Racial Contract is a historical actuality The Racial Contract is an exploitation contract2. Details The Racial Contract norms (and races) space The Racial Contract norms (and races) the individual The Racial Contract underwrites the modern social contract The Racial Contract has to be enforced through violence and ideological conditioning3. "Naturalized" Merits The Racial Contract historically tracks the actual moral/political consciousness of (most) white moral agents The Racial Contract has always been recognized by nonwhites as the real moral/political agreement to be challenged The "Racial Contract" as a theory is explanatorily superior to the raceless social contractNotes Index -- Cornell University Press
1,379 citations
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19 Sep 2011
TL;DR: In this article, low theory is used to describe the art of failure in animation: animating failure: ending, fleeing, escaping, surviving, and surviving. But it does not describe how to escape from failure.
Abstract: Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xii Introduction: Low Theory 1 1. Animating Revolt and Revolting Animation 27 2. Dude, Where's My Phallus? Forgetting, Losing, Looping 53 3. The Queer Art of Failure 87 4. Shadow Feminisms: Queer Negativity and Radical Passivity 123 5. "The Killer in Me Is the Killer in You": Homosexuality and Fascism 147 6. Animating Failure: Ending, Fleeing, Surviving 173 Notes 189 Bibliography 193 Index 201
1,090 citations
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01 Jan 2012
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the role of youth in modernist subjectivity and the world-system, and discuss alternative modernity and autonomous youth after 1945 in the modernist semi-periphery.
Abstract: Contents Series Editors' Foreword Chapter one: Introduction Scattered Souls: The Bildungsroman and Colonial Modernity After the Novel of Progress Kipling's Imperial Time Genre, History, and the Trope of Youth Modernist Subjectivity and the World-System Chapter two "National-Historical Time" from Goethe to George Eliot Infinite Development vs. National Form Nationhood and Adulthood in The Mill on the Floss After Eliot: Aging Forms and Globalized Provinces Chapter three Youth/Death: Schreiner and Conrad in the Contact Zone Outpost Without Progress: Schreiner's Story of An African Farm "A free and wandering tale": Conrad's Lord Jim Chapter four Souls of Men under Capitalism: Wilde, Wells, and the Anti-Novel "Unripe Time": Dorian Gray and Metropolitan Youth Commerce and Decay in Tono-Bungay Chapter five Tropics of Youth in Woolf and Joyce The "weight of the world": Woolf's Colonial Adolescence "Elfin Preludes": Joyce's Adolescent Colony Chapter six Virgins of Empire: The Antidevelopmental Plot in Rhys and Bowen Gender and Colonialism in the Modernist Semi-Periphery Endlessly Devolving: Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark Querying Innocence: Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September Chapter seven: Conclusion Alternative Modernity and Autonomous Youth After 1945 Works Cited Index
147 citations