Representing consciousness in modernist women's fiction

Rebecca Nicholson-Weir, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation argues for a reevaluation of 20 th-century women's life writing in the context of modernist literary history. I draw on existential phenomenology to analyze the works of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gertrude Stein, four modernist women writers whose innovative fiction and life-writing projects question the ethical potential of intersubjectivity and explore the possibility of representing consciousness. Each of these writers transforms the familiar genres of memoir and biography into new literary tools to ask how well any of us can know and understand ourselves or other people. Modernism is often known for a thematic preoccupation with alienation and an aesthetic emphasis on impersonal form, but this common characterization overlooks the ongoing ethical and formal concern many modernists had with the most personal of genres, life writing. Each writer I study was dissatisfied with available genres and worked to reshape the conventional boundaries of biography and memoir into radical forms better able to express a growing awareness of the intersubjective nature of consciousness. Woolf's early writing evinces what turns out to be an ongoing concern with the ethical possibilities of biography and fiction, as exemplified by the book reviews, essays, and short stories that led up to the publication of her first "mature" novel, Jacob's Room. Richardson's lifelong autobiographical project Pilgrimage focalizes the narrative on the consciousness of her younger self, blurring the lines between memoir and fiction, realism and modernism. Hurston drew on her anthropological training to argue for the possibility of ethical intersubjectivity in both her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God and her memoir Dust Tracks on a Road. Stein's maddeningly circular narratives create, destroy, and recreate characters and the concept of autobiography to ask readers to consider the ethical implications of her storytelling in Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Three Lives, and Everybody’s Autobiography. Throughout the dissertation I assert that a closer look at the relationships between modernist life writing and fiction is vital for understanding modernist literary innovation.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Linett, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Modern literature|American literature|British and Irish literature

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