Anxious Femininity: Rethinking Womanhood in Modernist Women’s Writing
Date
2020-07-08
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Abstract
Affect, as an impersonal force, opens subjects, objects, and spaces to the intensities that surround us. As a future-orientated theoretical approach, affect is often considered in relation to its propensity for engendering “potential liberations, escapes, and freedoms” (Cooppan, “Memory’s Future” 56). But to be open to the future is to be vulnerable in the present, not only to potential positive encounters but also to harmful or dangerous ones. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari note in A Thousand Plateaus, the lines of affective relations between bodies and spaces are susceptible to both creation and destruction: “There is a danger that these vibrations traversing us may be aggravated beyond our endurance” (197). But what if these unknown encounters, which produce vibrations that could traverse us beyond endurance, offered space for potentially powerful acts of resistance that could create modes of being that reject hegemonic social orders? What if the politics of bodies that are affected by aggravation, anxiousness, and unease as they move through the world, were to be mobilized into affective confrontations with normative prescriptions of life, happiness, and success? In this reading, sites of potential destruction can generate a movement towards a self-indifference to normative rhythms of life (dictated by gender, race, class, etc.) rather than an act of social (or physical) annihilation. In choosing to ignore, displace, or obliterate the aggravations that saturate the lived experience of existing in conflict with dominant social structures, employing self- indifference reframes the aim of living outside of the pursuit of normative ideals on happiness and success. In this way, the affective impulses of anxious and uneasy aggravations could also push individuals past their endurance under social regulations into resistance and revolt. The focus of this dissertation re-examines early-twentieth-century women’s writing, correlating as a study in the proliferating affect of anxiousness in the formulation of feminine subjecthood after the turn of the twentieth century. Analyzing Nella Larsen’s Passing (1928); Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939); and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), I examine the ways that anxiety as affect transmits between bodies and spaces, focusing on how feelings of unease can either constrain or release feminine potential. I argue that the writers dismantle the overwhelming sense of feminine anxiousness and unease that saturates their texts by creating ambiguous women who come to recognize their position as a misaligned with feminine ideals, exploring different orientations to the world and creating new worlds through their movements. This intervention into feminist scholarship shifts how we approach representations of the feminine, its production as performative femininity, and the potential of womanhood in modernist studies.
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Keywords
Anxiety, Women's writing, Affect theory, Modernism
Citation
Lypka, C. T. (2020). Anxious Femininity: Rethinking Womanhood in Modernist Women’s Writing (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.