Abstract

Much as James Joyce’s Ulysses uses Bloom’s Jewishness to help define Stephen’s progress toward artistic autonomy and exile, Dorothy Richardson’s autobiographical novel Pilgrimage relies on the figure of a Jew to reflect and shape its protagonist’s emotional and political concerns. Critics have recently begun to uncover the role that the Jew plays in this thirteen-part novel, noting the ways Miriam Henderson constructs her Englishness by means of comparison with the Jew, the extent to which her views are influenced by the anti-Semitic and misogynist Weininger, and the threat to her individuality which Miriam senses in her Jewish suitor.1 Missing from this fledgling discussion, however, are an analysis of the metaphoric burdens that the narrative places onto Jewishness and a consideration of how and why the representation of the Jew changes as Pilgrimage—written from 1913 until 1954—proceeds. The shifting representation is important both because it shows Richardson’s awareness of and ethical engagement with European politics in the early 1930s and because its limitations demonstrate the tenacity of the metaphoric associations that had accrued to Jews in European cultures by the early twentieth century. More broadly, Richardson’s struggle to revise her Jewish figure highlights the power of images to direct subsequent meanings, especially in works written over many years, in spite of their author’s changing designs.

Comments

This is the author-accepted manuscript of Linett, M. (1999). "The Wrong Material": Gender and Jewishness in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. Journal of Modern Literature 23(2), 191-208. Copyright Indiana University Press, it is shared here with permission, and the version of record is available at DOI: 10.1353/jml.1999.0008.

Date of this Version

2000

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