The Single Woman, Bohemianism, and Domesticity

Sterry, Emma

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-40829-3_4

Emma Sterry²

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Abstract

This chapter explores the single woman’s negotiation of domestic scripts and bohemian sensibilities in modernity. It argues that the movement of bohemianism into the mainstream diluted its radical possibilities, while the modern domestic sphere was offering women increased agency. Consequently, we see the inability of bohemian and domestic motifs to mark sexually and/or criminally deviant women in Antonia White’s Frost in May (1933), Molly Keane’s Devoted Ladies (1924), Ngaio Marsh’s Artists in Crime (1935), Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets (1936), and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936). These novels also point to the difficulty in distinguishing between different versions of the single woman, and include more ambiguous categories of single women such as the schoolgirl, widow, and lesbian.

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Notes

1.
Janet Lyon, “Sociability in the Metropole: Modernism’s Bohemian Salons,” ELH 76.3 (2009): 703.
2.
Elizabeth Wilson, Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 1–3.
3.
D. J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation: 1918–1940 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007), 37.
4.
Freak parties were essentially themed fancy-dress parties, but they became infamous for their increasing outlandishness: see Alison Maloney, Bright Young Things: Life in the Roaring Twenties (London: Virgin, 2012) for the salacious details.
5.
Taylor, 28–9.
6.
Ibid., 12.
7.
Ibid., 28–9.
8.
Wilson, 41–4.
9.
Taylor, 168.
10.
Daniel H. Borus, “The Strange Career of American Bohemia,” American Literary History 14.2 (2002): 377–8.
11.
Lyon, 698; and Wilson, 3.
12.
Wilson, 92.
13.
Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians (London: Viking, 2002), 201.
14.
Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E.H. Young (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, eds, The Domestic Space Reader (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Wendy Gan, Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early-Twentieth Century British Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Judy Giles, “Authority, Dependence and Power in Accounts of Twentieth-Century Domestic Service,” in The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain Since 1800, ed. Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin and Abigail Wills (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Judy Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–1950 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995); and Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
15.
Giles, “Authority, Dependence and Power,” 204.
16.
Humble, 124–5.
17.
Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life, 68.
18.
Nicola Beauman, A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel, 1914–1939 (London: Virago, 1983), 109.
19.
Giles, “Authority, Dependence and Power,” 209–11.
20.
Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life, 81–2.
21.
Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 44 and 88.
22.
Taylor, 250.
23.
Wilson, 130.
24.
Humble, 241.
25.
Ibid., 108.
26.
Ibid., 215.
27.
Diana Wallace, “Revising the Marriage Plot in Women’s Fiction of the 1930s,” in Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History, ed. Maroula Joannou (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).
28.
Carla T. Kungl, Creating the Female Detective: The Sleuth Heroines of British Women Writers, 1890–1940 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2006), 2.
29.
Gill Plain, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 5.
30.
Briganti and Mezei, Domestic Modernism, 11.
31.
Ibid., 26.
32.
Elizabeth Bowen, introduction to Frost in May, by Antonia White (London: Virago, 1991), v.
33.
Diana Wallace, Sisters and Rivals in British Women’s Fiction, 1914–39 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 33.
34.
Lizzie Hutton, “The Example of Antonia White,” New England Review 26.1 (2005): 122–4.
35.
Beverly Lyon Clark, Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys (New York: Routledge, 2001), 7.
36.
Antonia White, Frost in May (London: Virago, 1991), 70–1.
37.
Ibid., 57.
38.
Ibid., 27.
39.
Sophie Blanch, “The Sacred Space of the ‘Mother-House’: Reading Maternal Metaphors in Antonia White’s Frost in May,” Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering 4 (2002): 121.
40.
White, 78.
41.
Ibid., 174.
42.
Ibid., 113.
43.
Pauline Palmer, “Antonia White’s Frost in May: A Lesbian Feminist Reading,” in Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Sellers, Linda Hutcheon and Paul Perron (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 90.
44.
White, 79.
45.
Ibid., 107–8.
46.
Ibid., 158.
47.
Ibid., 202.
48.
Ibid., 44 and 105–6.
49.
Ibid., 131.
50.
Ibid., 216.
51.
Blanch, 126.
52.
White, 217.
53.
The relatively few critical essays on Keane agree on this. See, for example: Clare Boylan, “Sex, Snobbery and the Strategies of Molly Keane,” in Contemporary British Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, ed. Robert E. Hosmer, Jr. (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993); and Rachael Jane Lynch, “The Crumbling Fortress: Molly Keane’s Comedies of Anglo-Irish Manners,” in The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers, ed. Theresa O’Connor (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1996).
54.
Molly Keane, Devoted Ladies (London: Virago, 1984), 6.
55.
Ibid., 16.
56.
Mary Breen, “Piggies and Spoilers of Girls: The Representation of Sexuality in the Novels of Molly Keane,” in Sex, Nation, and Dissent in Irish Writing, ed. Éibhear Walshe (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997).
57.
Keane, 42.
58.
Ibid., 19.
59.
Ibid., 42.
60.
One of the novels listed includes Young Entry, a novel written by Keane herself.
61.
Keane, 265.
62.
Ibid., 86.
63.
Breen, 209.
64.
Keane, 170.
65.
Ibid., 261.
66.
Ibid., 148 and 90.
67.
Ibid., 160.
68.
Elizabeth English, Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 153.
69.
Susan Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 161–7.
70.
Ngaio Marsh, Artists in Crime (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1987), 46.
71.
Ibid., 11.
72.
Ibid., 92.
73.
Ibid., 158.
74.
Rowland, 164.
75.
Marsh, 14.
76.
Ibid., 71.
77.
Ibid., 131.
78.
Ibid., 84.
79.
Ibid., 31.
80.
Rowland, 34.
81.
Marsh, 21.
82.
Ibid., 254.
83.
Andrea Lewis, “A Feminine Conspiracy: Contraception, the New Woman, and Empire in Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets,” in Challenging Modernism: New Readings in Literature and Culture, 1914–45, ed. Stella Deen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Wendy Pollard, Rosamond Lehmann and Her Critics: The Vagaries of Literary Reception (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Judy Simons, Rosamond Lehmann (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992); and Wallace, Sisters and Rivals.
84.
Gan, 155.
85.
Rosamond Lehmann, The Weather in the Streets (London: Virago, 1981), 64.
86.
Ibid., 44.
87.
Ibid., 106.
88.
Wallace, Sisters and Rivals, 116.
89.
Sophie Blanch, “‘Half-amused, Half-mocking’: Laughing at the Margins in Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer,” Working Papers on the Web: Investigating the Middlebrow 11 (2008): 2; and Wallace, “Revising the Marriage Plot,” 66.
90.
Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz (London: Virago, 1991), 275.
91.
Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 146.
92.
Lehmann, 44.
93.
Ibid., 42.
94.
Ibid., 162.
95.
Lewis, 84.
96.
Lehmann, 283.
97.
Ibid., 239.
98.
Ibid., 175.
99.
Ibid., 103.
100.
Ibid., 342.
101.
Some of the most notable examples include: Benstock, Women of the Left Bank; and Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism, 2 vols (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
102.
Daniela Caselli, Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’ Bewildering Corpus (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 2–4.
103.
Critical accounts of bohemian motifs in Barnes’ early work can be found in: Alex Goody, Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Parsons, 6–27.
104.
Diane Warren, Djuna Barnes’ Consuming Fictions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), xvi.
105.
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (London: Faber & Faber, 2007), 45.
106.
The concept of the carnivalesque was developed by the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in his study of the French renaissance writer, Francois Rabelais: see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
107.
One of the earliest studies to address this was Mary Lynn Broe, ed., Silence and Power: A Re-evaluation of Djuna Barnes (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1991). More recent studies of note include Caselli, Improper Modernism; and Warren, Djuna Barnes’ Consuming Fictions.
108.
Laura Winkiel, “Circuses and Spectacle: Public Culture in Nightwood,” Journal of Modern Literature 21.1 (1997): 18–20.
109.
Barnes, 10.
110.
Deborah Parsons, Djuna Barnes (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2003), 61.
111.
Barnes, 8.
112.
Ibid., 45.
113.
Ibid., 10.
114.
See Andrea Harris, “The Third Sex: Figures of Inversion in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood,” in Eroticism and Containment: Notes from the Flood Plain, ed. Carol Siegel and Ann Kibbey (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994), 233; and Jane Marcus, “‘Laughing at Leviticus’: Nightwood as Women’s Circus Epic,” in Silence and Power: A Re-evaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1991), 233.
115.
Harris, 237.
116.
Barnes, 70–1.
117.
Judith Lee, “Nightwood: ‘The Sweetest Lie’,” in Silence and Power: A Re-evaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1991), 208.
118.
Barnes, 23–4.
119.
Ibid., 123–4.
120.
Lee, 209; and Marcus, 239.
121.
Lee, 210; and Marcus, 236.
122.
Barnes, 37.
123.
Ibid., 109.
124.
Parsons, 180.
125.
Barnes, 31.
126.
Ibid., 30–1.
127.
Ibid., 50 and 55.
128.
Ibid., 43.
129.
Benstock, 261.
130.
Marcus, 243.
131.
Barnes, 128.
132.
Marcus, 232.
133.
Barnes, 136 and 115.
134.
Ibid., 129.
135.
Ibid., 116.
136.
Ibid., 137.

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Emma Sterry

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Sterry, E. (2017). The Single Woman, Bohemianism, and Domesticity. In: The Single Woman, Modernity, and Literary Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40829-3_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40829-3_4
Published: 07 June 2017
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-40828-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-40829-3
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