| Original Full Text | This electronic thesis or dissertation has beendownloaded from Explore Bristol Research,http://research-information.bristol.ac.ukAuthor:Strausa, AnnieTitle:Sensory Aesthetics and Feminist ModernismsA Revisionary Study of Novels by Virginia Woolf, Gloria Naylor, and Naomi MitchisonGeneral rightsAccess to the thesis is subject to the Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International Public License. Acopy of this may be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode This license sets out your rights and therestrictions that apply to your access to the thesis so it is important you read this before proceeding.Take down policySome pages of this thesis may have been removed for copyright restrictions prior to having it been deposited in Explore Bristol Research.However, if you have discovered material within the thesis that you consider to be unlawful e.g. breaches of copyright (either yours or that ofa third party) or any other law, including but not limited to those relating to patent, trademark, confidentiality, data protection, obscenity,defamation, libel, then please contact collections-metadata@bristol.ac.uk and include the following information in your message:•Your contact details•Bibliographic details for the item, including a URL•An outline nature of the complaintYour claim will be investigated and, where appropriate, the item in question will be removed from public view as soon as possible.1 Sensory Aesthetics and Feminist Modernisms: A Revisionary Study of Novels by Virginia Woolf, Gloria Naylor, and Naomi Mitchison Annie Strausa A dissertation submitted to the University of Bristol in accordance with the requirements for award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts, School of Humanities, September 2023. 81,995 words. 2 3 Abstract Exploring novels by Virginia Woolf, Gloria Naylor, and Naomi Mitchison, this thesis argues that twentieth-century women writers engage with the sensory to critique, resist and revise hegemonic manifestations of modernity. Woolf’s Orlando (1928) explores the relationship between patriarchy and imperialism in 1920s Britain. Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982) and Bailey’s Cafe (1992) consider the complex histories of sexism and racism in America from a post-civil rights perspective. Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) and Solution Three (1973) examine post-war inequalities in relation to the Cold War. Though very different, the texts all employ sensory language to recover women’s bodies from modernity’s suppressive discourses and impacts – a process that is reflected in and supported by experimental episodic forms. By putting Woolf, Naylor and Mitchison in touch with one another, I construct a new community of authors, and emphasise that feminist revision might be understood in haptic terms, as a method of getting in touch. This thesis attends to the precarity of radical women writers; the gender and race politics of suppression; and relationships between readers, writers, and texts. It brings together feminist and Black feminist theories of the body, women’s writing, and revision. Framing this is the relationship I establish between sensory studies and feminist modernist studies. This study is the first to explicitly bring these fields together from an intersectional perspective that consistently considers race and gender. This project demonstrates that sensory studies and feminist modernist studies can support each other’s recuperative and expansive aims. Both fields bring new contexts and terms to the other. Feminist modernist studies expands sensory studies’ existing literary focus, highlighting its affinity with revision theory. Conversely, sensory studies’ emphasis on the socially constructed nature of the senses illuminates new socio-political meanings in sensory prose. 4 5 This thesis is dedicated to the loving memory of my mother, whose kindness and strength continues to inspire me every day.6 7 Acknowledgements My sincere gratitude goes to my supervisors, Dr. Andrew Blades and Dr. Cleo Hanaway-Oakley, for their consistent enthusiasm, encouragement and rigorous, reliable feedback. I am immensely grateful to them for reading my work with care and interest, and for challenging me to think in complex, dynamic ways. I am profoundly grateful to the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership for funding my project and making my postgraduate research possible. My thesis is also indebted to the generous guidance of Dr. Mary Foltz, Dr. Suzanne Edwards, Professor Maxine Lavon Montgomery, and the Gloria Naylor archive team at Lehigh University. I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Edwards and Dr. Foltz for the opportunities they have given me to discuss and present my work, and for their feedback on my Naylor research. I am deeply grateful to Professor Montgomery, Dr. Edwards and Dr. Foltz for securing funding that enabled me to visit the Gloria Naylor archive in person. I would like to express sincere thanks to Dr. Carrie Griffin, Professor Anna Snaith, Dr. Katie Baker, Dr. Naomi Walker, and Professor Anne Fernald for their encouragement and advice at various key points during my academic studies thus far. Grateful thanks to the University of Bristol’s English Department and library staff. I would particularly like to mention Dr. Pam Lock for her excellent writing advice and Dr. Erin Forbes for her constructive criticism as my annual reviewer. Thanks also to Dr. Alix Beeston and Dr. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein for supporting me during the doctoral application process and in the initial stages of my research. I am grateful to Northampton College for providing part-time employment during my final year, enabling me to continue my project beyond its funded period. I would also like to thank my teaching colleagues for their flexibility and understanding. Sincere thanks to my dear friends for their support and for bringing much laughter and lightness to my research experience. A special mention must go to Stephanie Knight, Shalin Victor, Elle Mortensson, Sonny Marr, Katherine Muskett, Gregory Martin, Kieran Hillman, and Charlie Smalley. Finally, I would like to express heartfelt gratitude to my family, particularly my father, Paul, my sister, Gina, and my brothers, Joseph and Jack, for their unwavering support and encouragement throughout this journey, and for always bringing me joy. 8 9 Author’s Declaration I declare that the work in this dissertation was carried out in accordance with the requirements of the University's Regulations and Code of Practice for Research Degree Programmes and that it has not been submitted for any other academic award. Except where indicated by specific reference in the text, the work is the candidate's own work. Work done in collaboration with, or with the assistance of, others, is indicated as such. Any views expressed in the dissertation are those of the author. SIGNED: Annie Strausa............................... DATE: 05/09/2023................... 10 11 Content Warning This thesis contains discussions of sensitive and potentially distressing topics, including physical violence, sexual assault, rape, and female genital mutilation, primarily within the context of analysing the works of Gloria Naylor. Reader discretion is advised, and support is encouraged for those who may be affected by these themes. 12 13 Table of Contents List of Abbreviations .............................................................................................................. 19 Introduction: Sensory Feminist Modernisms ..................................................................... 21 New Connections, New Frameworks ................................................................................... 21 Sensory Studies .................................................................................................................... 32 An oppressive modernity .................................................................................................. 32 Alternative sensory narratives .......................................................................................... 39 Revision, Modernism and Beyond ....................................................................................... 46 Haptic Feminist Aesthetics ................................................................................................... 55 Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Intersensorial Perception ...................................... 69 The Imperial Male Gaze ....................................................................................................... 74 Intersensorial Re-visions ...................................................................................................... 88 Subversive sensory language and sensitive seeing .......................................................... 88 The new biography ........................................................................................................... 98 Disorientation and affect ................................................................................................ 102 Photographic Texts and Images in Passenger to Teheran (1926), Twelve Days in Persia (1928) and Orlando (1928): The Intersensory Communications of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West .............................................................................................................. 109 Vita Sackville-West’s Travelogues .................................................................................... 114 The imperial male gaze .................................................................................................. 114 Formal innovation and new eyes .................................................................................... 121 Orlando, Vita, and the Photographic ................................................................................. 130 Photography and intersensory aesthetics ....................................................................... 130 Orlando as photo album ................................................................................................. 134 Memory and creativity ................................................................................................... 140 Sound, Gender, and Communication in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982) ..................................................................................................................................... 148 Historical Silences .............................................................................................................. 153 Brewster’s suppressions ................................................................................................. 153 Modernist connections.................................................................................................... 165 14 15 Communicating Radical Empathy ..................................................................................... 170 Brewster’s sonic resistance............................................................................................. 170 Naylor’s voice ................................................................................................................ 181 Jazz, Blues, and Black Women’s “Wayward” Lives in Bailey’s Cafe (1992) .................. 187 Race, Music, and Whoredom ............................................................................................. 192 “Wayward” women ........................................................................................................ 192 An emotive musical frame .............................................................................................. 199 Perceptions of jazz and blues ......................................................................................... 203 Female Vocalists and the Archive ...................................................................................... 209 Bailey’s Cafe .................................................................................................................. 209 Beyond the novel ............................................................................................................ 217 Telepathic Communication in Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) .. 226 Telepathy and Feminist Utopia .......................................................................................... 232 Progressive scientific communication ............................................................................ 232 The erotics of telepathy .................................................................................................. 236 Extrasensory Perception and The Cold War ...................................................................... 244 The fear of invasion ........................................................................................................ 244 Propagandic communication and colonialism ................................................................ 250 Propagandic communication and gender ........................................................................ 257 Extrasensory Navigations: Solution Three (1973), Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) and a Radical Biography ............................................................................................................ 266 The Hypnotic Modernity of Solution Three ....................................................................... 271 Sensory deprivation and emotional regulation ............................................................... 271 Extrasensory control and computers .............................................................................. 278 Social hypnosis and the power of the arts ...................................................................... 287 Looking Back and Moving On through Memoirs of a Spacewoman ................................. 291 Contradictory Mitchison ................................................................................................. 291 Revising Orlando and future planning ........................................................................... 298 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 307 16 17 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 318 Literary Texts ..................................................................................................................... 318 Literary Criticism ............................................................................................................... 319 Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West ....................................................................... 319 Gloria Naylor .................................................................................................................. 326 Naomi Mitchison ............................................................................................................ 333 Modernist studies............................................................................................................ 336 Women’s writing and Black women’s writing ............................................................... 343 Black writing and postcolonial literary studies .............................................................. 347 Other literary theory ....................................................................................................... 348 Contextual and Theoretical Works ..................................................................................... 350 Sensory studies ............................................................................................................... 350 Race and postcolonial theory.......................................................................................... 354 Feminist and Black feminist theory ................................................................................ 357 Further historical contexts .............................................................................................. 361 Further cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical contexts .................................................. 364 Archival Documents ........................................................................................................... 366 18 19 List of Abbreviations Brewster / Brewster Place – The Women of Brewster Place DNB – The Dictionary of National Biography ESP – Extrasensory perception FGM – Female Genital Mutilation MOAS – Memoirs of a Spacewoman O – Orlando Passenger / PT – Passenger to Teheran SPR – The Society for Psychical Research Twelve Days / TD – Twelve Days in Persia 20 21 Introduction: Sensory Feminist Modernisms They make us of the opinion that if people are highly successful in their professions, they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion — the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes. Money making becomes so important that they must work by night as well as by day. Health goes. And so competitive do they become that they will not share their work with others though they have more than they can do themselves. What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, and sound, and sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave. 1 New Connections, New Frameworks The above quotation from Virginia Woolf’s 1938 novel-essay, Three Guineas, paints a bleak picture of western modernity. The capitalist drive for economic growth, Woolf suggests, is dehumanising. It exerts physical, psychological, and emotional tolls, creating a workforce that is divorced from art, imagination, and social interaction in its obsessive focus on professional and financial success. Metaphorically speaking, modernity’s oppressive regime is equated with a loss of the senses in cognitive and corporeal terms. Woolf cites a loss of not only individual senses, but the ‘proportion’ of common sense.2 The sensory deprivation Three Guineas portrays, involves the loss of ‘speech’ and ‘conversation.’ Pointing to sensory possibilities beyond the familiar five-pronged sensorium, the passage seems to grant speech its own sensory 1 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas ed. by Anna Snaith, 2nd edn (Oxford: OUP, 2015) p.154. 2 A term Woolf similarly aligns with mental stability in Mrs Dalloway (1925) when used in laudatory terms by the psychiatrist, Doctor Bradshaw. 22 status. Certainly, the contact, whether physical, social, or emotional that communication constitutes and can afford, not only has its own figuratively tactile connotations, but is central to more familiar sensing processes; faculties of both mind and body must be in contact with the world to function effectively. Metaphors of touch, illuminated by other sensory terms in this context, enunciate the horror represented by Woolf’s cave most potently; it is a vision of a modern world without human connection, without community and without the art forms that celebrate and reinforce fundamentally human forms of physical and emotional touch. Woolf’s cave is a modern vision of female empowerment that revises Plato’s allegory of the cave.3 For Plato, the cave represents the basic level of human knowledge. Philosophical inquiry, he stresses, can lead to “higher” understanding – an emergence from the cave into sunlight.4 Like Plato, Woolf critiques life in the cave to champion more complex ways of knowing. Since women were barred from substantial professional success in the 1930s, though, Woolf’s depiction of the cave provocatively suggests that the cave-dwellers – those who ‘are highly successful in their professions’ – are male. It is they who are lost, weak and “in the dark” as twentieth-century modernity takes hold. In contrast, women remain outside the cave where they are more likely to remain in touch with others, with imagination, and with their own sense of humanity. Although Woolf refers to it as ‘fanciful’ (and its inclusion of an ableist term might trouble today’s readers), her vision of the cave is essential to Three Guineas’ feminist advocation of outsider knowledge.5 It reflects Woolf’s overarching claim that she, as a woman writer and thus outsider, can offer greater socio-political insight than men in power in relation to the text’s framing question: ‘how…are we to prevent war?’.6 Woolf’s language stresses the importance of the sensory, particularly touch, or to use a broader term, “the haptic,” in 3 Plato, The Republic (circa 380 BCE) ed. by Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 2007). 4 Gail Fine, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Plato, 2nd edn (Oxford: OUP, 2019) p.24. 5 Woolf ed. by Snaith, p.154. 6 Woolf ed. by Snaith, p.89. 23 articulating the radical nature of outsider knowledge and feminist revision itself. The value Woolf attributes to the sensory is central to her departure both from Plato and the androcentric epistemological foundations that he represents as an ancient Greek philosopher. While Woolf synonymises the sensory with life beyond the cave’s darkness, Plato’s distrust of sensory knowledge leads him to align the “sensible” – the world as understood through the senses – with the cave.7 This raises several questions. Do women writers engage with the senses in revisionary ways more broadly and, if so, how? What does the sensory reveal about twentieth-century modernity and how it is historicised in relation to women’s lives? What relationships exist between radical women’s writing, modernity and the haptic? Pursuing these and related questions, this thesis explores how the sensory is used to both expose and resist hegemony, as linked to modernity and often via revisionary methods, in texts by Woolf and two other lesser-known twentieth-century women writers: Gloria Naylor and Naomi Mitchison. The remainder of this section introduces these authors and starts drawing together the two main scholarly fields that frame my thesis: sensory studies and feminist modernist studies. I also discuss my interventions in each field. The subsequent sections of this introduction elaborate on my interventions and discuss my selected authors and texts in more detail. While ‘Sensory Studies’ outlines how research on hegemony and modernity in sensory studies has influenced my analysis, ‘Revision, Modernism and Beyond’ discusses the revisionary features that are shared by my selected texts. It also expands upon the role of modernism in my project. Tying these sections together with reference to feminist theories of the body, affect and women’s writing, the fourth and final part of this introduction, ‘Haptic Feminist Aesthetics,’ outlines my chapters and the sensory aesthetics I examine – the language of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. I 7 Plato argues we can only come to know ‘sensibles’ – multiple forms of material, embodied life – through philosophy, not the senses (Fine, p.24). 24 discuss how these aesthetics relate to each author’s engagement with episodic form as well as the process of feminist revision. By describing these aesthetics and processes as “haptic,” I suggest they are bound to, underpinned by, and evoke various notions of touch. While not synonymous with “touch,” as Mark Paterson explains, the haptic concerns the ‘sense of touch or tactile sensations,’ functioning as an umbrella term.8 In a scientific sense, the study of “haptics” – the tactile equivalent to optics – focuses on physical processes and experiences that enable or demonstrate touch both of and through the body. Rooted in discussions of kinaesthesia, the vestibular sense, and proprioception, its subjects include: the tactile function of the skin; phenomena such as pressure, pain, and pleasure; and gestures such as grasping and stroking.9 In this thesis, my analysis sometimes considers how specific haptic concepts are represented within my selected texts. Primarily, however, I employ the term “haptic,” as an adjective, to indicate the relevance of figurative and literal aspects of touch. I use it to describe the nature of sensory aesthetics (as textual features that consistently imply forms of contact) and the touch-related content these convey and reflect within my specific texts, particularly in relation to feminist revisionary processes. As Paterson explains, while slippage between concrete acts and metaphor risks a simplification of scientific haptics, such slippage has proven to be a productive tool in literary scholarship, establishing ‘thematic consistencies, or emotional contexts of characters’.10 It has also contributed to the theorization of “intersensoriality”– a sensory studies term for the various ways in which the senses interact with one another.11 Combining these research contexts, my consideration of the haptic speaks to the literary and intersensorial approach of this thesis. While my project is not 8 Mark Paterson, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007) p.4. 9 Paterson, ‘On haptic media and the possibilities of a more inclusive interactivity,’ New Media & Society, 19:10 (2017) p.1545. 10 Paterson, (2017) p.1545. 11 Paterson, (2017) p.1544. 25 predominantly attuned to the haptic, this introductory chapter demonstrates that the term offers a useful starting point for nuanced and intersensory interrogations of the sensory in women’s writing. It helps not only to explain intersensoriality and its relevance to bodily themes and aesthetics, but to illuminate coherence between sensory studies, feminist revision, and the specific texts and authors I explore. Written at different points during the twentieth century, the novels I have selected respond to contemporary manifestations of patriarchal structures from within different contexts. Woolf’s now-canonical modernist text, Orlando (1928), examines the kinship between imperialism and patriarchy at a time when the British Empire was in decline. Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982) and Bailey’s Cafe (1992) – examples of post-civil rights literature that are rarely connected to modernism – consider the complex intertwined histories of racism and sexism in urban America. Finally, Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (MOAS, 1962) and Solution Three (1973) – feminist science fiction narratives by an author whose earlier work is sometimes discussed in relation to modernism – address post-war inequalities and the impact of the Cold War. Despite these differences, each text uses similar aesthetic sensory strategies. When placed together, the texts reveal continuities both in terms of how hegemonic ideologies affect women in the twentieth century and how literature produced by women resists such hegemonies. Examining these authors together reveals a radical tradition of revisionary women’s writing that spans decades. Through consistent engagement with the sensory, I attempt to recover and refigure the often ignored or misrepresented experiences of women, whilst encouraging a sensory theorisation of feminist revisionary practice itself. Sensory studies – ‘a cultural approach to the study of the senses and a sensory approach to the study of culture’– and feminist modernist studies – the body of research within modernist 26 studies that focuses on sex and gender – inform my approach and arguments.12 Sharing interests in the body, modernity and revision, these fields demonstrate thematic, historical and methodological crossovers that not only cohere with ideas within my chosen literary texts but, in coming together, provide an apt and nuanced framework through which to explore them. I am the first, as far as I know, to demonstrate the value of explicitly bringing these two fields into conversation from within literary studies, particularly via an intersectional feminist approach that considers race and gender in its analysis and method.13 Both fields can bring helpful terms, debates, and ideas to the other. Sensory studies, particularly its concept of intersensoriality, can aid expansive and recuperative efforts in feminist modernist studies. Conversely, the vast body of work concerning gender, race and post-colonialism in modernist studies and feminist modernist studies has much to offer sensory studies in assisting its own expansive, revisionary aims.14 This mutuality enables me to build upon existing literary strands within sensory studies itself.15 12 David Howes, ‘The Expanding Field of Sensory Studies,’ <https://www.sensorystudies.org/sensational-investigations/the-expanding-field-of-sensory-studies/>, published August 2013, accessed June 2023. 13 See Kimberlé Crenshaw, On Intersectionality: Essential Writings, 3rd edn (NYC: New Press, 2023). Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989 to define and explore the complex ways in which different forms of oppression intersect with one another. 14 The turn towards the sensory in the humanities dates back to the 1980s, though there are important works that predate this such as Claude Levi-Strauss’ The Raw and the Cooked (1964) in anthropology and The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919) by Johan Huizinga in history. Drawing on such texts, sensory studies was founded in 1988 by sociologist Anthony Synott and anthropologist David Howes who, upon receiving funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a programme on “The Varieties of Sensory Experience,” formed the Concordia Sensoria Research Team. Also crucial to this initial research group was Howes’ doctoral student, Constance Classen, who is now an esteemed cultural historian of the senses. Beginning via these threads of anthropology, sociology and history, the field, as Howes and Classen explain in Ways of Sensing (2013), has since expanded to include additional disciplines including geography and the arts. This is clear in many of the field’s edited collections such as Empire of the Senses (2005) and the six-volume A Cultural History of the Senses (2014), which include and connect a variety of humanities subjects. 15 A Cultural History of the Senses includes one literary chapter and one art-based chapter in each of its six volumes. Both Classen and Howes have referenced literary studies such as William A. Cohen’s, Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (2008) and Sara Danius’ The Senses of Modernism (2002). Articles in The Senses and Society – the field’s primary journal, founded in 2006 by Michael Bull and Howes as well as historian Doug Kahn and literary scholar Paul Gilroy – also includes several articles on literary modernism. Daniela Babilon’s contribution to Probing the Skin (2015) similarly examines both modernist and postmodernist literature to explore relationships between skin, race and odour. 27 Andrew Kettler’s The Smell of Slavery (2020), emphasises the value of the literary in context of Black history.16 He cites Daniela Babilon’s monograph The Power of Smell in American Literature (2017) and, quoting Bruce R. Smith’s Shakespearean Sensations (2013), asserts that ‘when it comes to explanations of sensations and affects, fictions are truest to experience’.17 Kettler’s work draws upon other non-literary race research in historical sensory studies such as Mark M. Smith’s How Race is Made (2006) and Andrew Rotter’s Empires of the Senses (2019). It also gestures towards recent studies of race and the sensory such as Erica Fretwell’s Sensory Experiments (2020), and Sachi Sekimoto and Christopher Brown’s Race and the Senses (2020).18 My thesis is informed by these and other race-based sensory studies works. It is also influenced by Constance Classen’s sensory research on gender, which occasionally considers the literary too.19 However, within sensory studies, there is not yet a lengthy study that combines these literary strands on race and gender. My chapters bring these ideas into closer alignment. This allows me to perform sensory interventions in modernist and feminist modernist studies. Although sensory studies interacts with literature in several ways, literary studies has not yet widely considered the literary possibilities of sensory studies as a distinct field. This is despite the fact that literary critics have explored sensation in various ways, and occasionally cite sensory studies scholars. 20 Modernist studies, which has produced important works on embodiment and sensation such as Tim Armstrong’s Modernism, Technology and the Body (1998), Sara Danius’ The Senses of Modernism (2002) and Jon Day’s Novel Sensations (2020), 16 Andrew Kettler, The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 17 Kettler, p.35. 18 However, neither of these texts self-identify as belonging to sensory studies. 19 In The Colour of Angels, for example, one chapter explores novels by women writers including Jane Austen and Fanny Burney in its examination of gendered social-spatial spheres. 20 Some of these include: Abbie Garrington’s Haptic Modernism; Anthony Uhlmann’s edited collection, Literature and Sensation (2008); John Jervis’ Sensational Subjects (2015); and Sten Pultz Moslund’s Literature’s Sensuous Geographies (2015). 28 presents particularly prime material for such a scholarly fusion. We also find numerous studies of individual senses within modernist studies including Karen Jacobs’ The Eye’s Mind (2000), Sam Halliday’s Sonic Modernity (2013), and Abbie Garrington’s Haptic Modernism (2013).21 These texts have influenced my study in terms of their attention to literature’s sensory contexts and how these can reveal both criticism of and resistance to hegemonic socio-political structures. However, as well as bringing the insights of such works to bear specifically on women’s writing, I demonstrate that sensory studies’ work on post-Enlightenment sense hierarchies provides valuable new contexts through which to explore the socio-political implications of embodiment in and around women’s writing and modernism.22 My work demonstrates some kinship with Allyson C. DeMaagd’s Dissensuous Modernism (2022). Although technology is more prominent in DeMaagd’s work, like me, she explores radical sensory aesthetics pertaining to language and form in texts by twentieth-century women writers, including Woolf. Bringing a gender and woman-oriented perspective to Danius’ argument – that modernist aesthetics are intrinsically linked to a technologically-mediated ‘crisis of the senses’ between 1880 to 1930 – DeMaagd asserts that female modernists respond to this crisis whilst revising ‘traditional conceptualisations of the senses and the role technology plays’ within these.23 I similarly consider how women writers refigure the sensory to challenge oppressive forms of modernity. Like me, DeMaagd brings feminist modernist studies together with sensory studies in her use of theory, and even discusses intersensoriality.24 21 Others include Christina Walter’s Optical Impersonality (2014), Julie Beth Napolin’s The Fact of Resonance (2020) and Anna Snaith’s Sound and Literature (2020). Importantly, while these works focus on a particular sense, they do not ignore the wider sensorium. Jacobs discusses synaesthesia in her chapter on embodiment in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) while Halliday mentions Marx’s historicization of sense experience and the synaesthesic notion of “seeing sound.” Garrington, too, attends to all the senses in her consideration of touch (and the skin) as the basis for all sensing. 22 By “post-Enlightenment” I refer to the nineteenth century. Like sensory studies scholars I consider the Age of Enlightenment to have occurred between 1650 and1800. 23 Allyson C. DeMaagd, Dissensuous Modernism: Women Writers, The Senses and Technology (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2022) p.2. 24 DeMaagd’s work is the only text to bring together sensory studies and feminist modernist studies that I am aware of. 29 She does not, however, explicitly refer to sensory studies or its aims. It is partly because of this that she not only presents the relationship between her own work and Classen’s as unnecessarily oppositional but applies intersensoriality to her analysis in somewhat simplified terms.25 In contrast, my project not only acknowledges both feminist modernist studies and sensory studies but emphasises a greater synthesis between these fields that allows me to frame my analysis via more complex interactions with intersensoriality. Despite our shared focus on Woolf, my work differs from DeMaagd’s in its choice of authors and therefore in the contextualisation it requires. Although DeMaagd discusses race in her introduction and considers “late modernism” in her analysis of Elizabeth Bowen’s Eva Trout (1967), her work is concerned primarily with the early decades of the twentieth century (the classic modernist period) and explores novels solely by white women. My primary texts span 1928-1992 in terms of publication date, and through Naylor include an African American perspective in addition to the white, British perspectives of Woolf and Mitchison. This wider temporal scope and intersectionality builds upon the expansive work of feminist modernist studies itself. Indeed, the Feminist Modernist Studies journal, launched in 2018, focuses on texts that were published throughout the ‘long twentieth century’ from the 1870s to the early 1970s. Pre-dating the “new modernist studies,” this field has performed invaluable recovery work since the 1970s.26 This has brought more women writers into the canon and, according to 25 Referring to The Colour of Angels, DeMaagd argues that Classen perceives ‘the multisensory aesthetics of the late nineteenth century’ as ‘a compelling last glimpse at a shared vision of a world in which ‘sounds, fragrance, and colours correspond’ (Classen, quoted by DeMaagd, p.10). Dissensuous Modernism, in contrast, she states, suggests differently via its exploration of relationships between modernism and synaesthesia. Yet, in The Colour of Angels, Classen similarly acknowledges that ‘the ideal of sensory interplay’ is ‘not entirely forgotten’ in the modern age (p.112). Further, in her later work (which DeMaagd does not cite) while Classen discusses how Futurism sought to compartmentalise the senses in ways that reinforced post-Enlightenment sense hierarchies, she also mentions that other artists were ‘willing to decompartmentalize their senses and imagine alternative ways of perceiving the world through art’ (A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) p.210). 26 See The New Modernist Studies ed. by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). The “new modernist studies” began in the mid-1990s and aimed both to re-examine canonical works and expand the canon. Important feminist recovery projects that predated the new modernist studies and focused on specific authors include: Jane Marcus’ work on Woolf and Rebecca West, Marianne 30 Julie Taylor, has challenged the narrow idea of a masculine, cerebral aesthetic that once dominated scholarly understanding of modernism and its creators.27 My thesis emphasises the ongoing importance of feminist recovery projects and performs its own revisions of the canon.28 It draws attention to neglected texts by Naylor and Mitchison whilst bringing new theoretical frameworks to Woolf. Aesthetically, it centralises the traditionally feminised realms of sensation and emotion. Embracing modernism’s expansion both in terms of when it happened and who it involved, I understand modernism, in Michael Whitworth’s terms, as a set of varying responses to modernity, with modernity being anything that reflects or contributes to modernisation as a pattern of ‘socio-economic development’.29 This thesis is not concerned with locating a more specific definition of modernism beyond this assertion. Nor is it seeking to proclaim or prove that Naylor’s work, or Mitchison’s later works, are modernist. Rather, I demonstrate that modernist contexts are helpful not only in understanding a wider tradition of radical twentieth-century women’s writing and the fruitfulness of a sensory approach to this, but in illustrating the value of moving beyond conventional modernist frameworks when it comes to women writers. Thus, I share Michaela Bronstein’s contention that ‘modernist studies...must be a broader field than the particular works it labels as its objects of study’.30 I build upon studies of experimental women’s writing that call for movement beyond modernism such as Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs’ DeKoven on Gertrude Stein, Virginia Kouidis on Mina Loy, Lillian Schlissel on Mae West and Helen Nebeker on Jean Rhys. The wider tomes that followed include: Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of their Own (1977), Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Writing Beyond the Ending (1985), Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank (1986), and Gloria T. Hull’s Color, Sex and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1987). 27 Julie Taylor, Modernism and Affect (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015) p.2. As Celia Marshik and Alison Pease explain in Modernism, Sex and Gender (2018) feminist modernist studies have not only refigured and widened our understanding of modernist aesthetics, particularly through exploration of feminised and thus culturally devalued categories but have therefore enabled modernist studies to become more diverse (p.33). Critics who have focused on feminising modernism include: Rita Felski, Suzanne Clark, Barbara Green, Liz Conor, and Bonnie Kime Scott. 28 My thesis continues, as Erica Gene Delsandro puts it, to make ‘the case for feminism’s necessity in modernist studies’ (Delsandro, Women Making Modernism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020) p.1). 29 Michael Whitworth, Modernism (London: Wiley, 2007) p.233. 30 Michaela Bronstein, quoted by Mao and Walkowitz, p.9. 31 Breaking the Sequence (1989) and more recently, Kate Aughterson and Deborah Philips’ Women Writers and Experimental Narratives (2021).31 As Aughterson and Philips argue, studies of experimental women’s writing ‘must go beyond formal literary modernisms to address texts and authors which exist outside the conventional canons,’ to unearth ‘new connections and possibilities between women writers’ even those ‘we think we know well’.32 My thesis takes up this proposal whilst intervening in existing research via engagement with sensory studies. Concurrently, following scholarship including Lisa Williams’ The Artist as Outsider in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf (2000), I demonstrate the value of examining Black and white women writers together. Like Williams, who recognises ‘the vast differences’ between Woolf and Morrison but emphasises their shared effort ‘to give form to the muted and silenced voices that have been left out of history,’ I posit that Woolf, Naylor and Mitchison, although writing from different subject positions, offer similar aesthetic responses to modern hegemony.33 Identifying and exploring these similarities facilitates a more complex understanding not only of the often-problematic race issues at work in Woolf’s and Mitchison’s writing, but of the gender issues that Naylor addresses in conversation with racism. In making this argument as a white woman myself, I follow Jane Marcus’ sensitive approach in Hearts of Darkness (2004) which, while exploring how female modernists allude to and/or address race, acknowledges the importance of examining white female complicity in imperial ideology.34 31 Another influence has been Ellen E. Berry’s Women’s Experimental Writing (2016) which like my thesis brings together women writers who ‘differ in many ways’ but ‘share a commitment to combining extreme content with formally radical techniques in order to enact varieties of gender, sex, race, class, and nation-based experience that…may only be “represented” accurately through the experimental unmaking of dominant structures of rationality’ (Berry, Women’s Experimental Writing: Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique (London: Bloomsbury, 2016) p.1). 32 Kate Aughterson and Deborah Philips, Women Writers, and Experimental Narratives: Early Modern to Contemporary (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) p.14. 33 Lisa Williams, The Artist as Outsider in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf (US: Greenwood Press, 2000) p.7. 34 Jane Marcus, Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 32 Like Marcus, I stress that for white feminists, such analysis is an important task, enabling us to confront our own biases whilst ensuring that the intellectual and political labour of challenging racism under patriarchy does not fall to women of colour alone. The next section begins this task by arguing that sensory studies can help us to understand, and better resist, oppressive aspects of modernity in rich, historically-informed ways that attend to race and gender alike. Sensory Studies An oppressive modernity Woolf’s depiction of modernity in Three Guineas as a loss of senses and connection, is anticipated by Georg Simmel’s ‘Sociology of the Senses’ (1907). Simmel argues that the modern person, bombarded by the noise and busyness of the modern world, deflects ‘innumerable things’ that ‘appear intolerable to the senses,’ as a strategy of self-preservation.35 Such deflection, he explains, can lead to desensitization and social detachment. Several influential thinkers have since explored the idea of modern sensory declination and its social consequences in more politicised ways, particularly in connection with the Age of Enlightenment (1650-1800). In ‘The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead’ (1943), Martin Heidegger argues that, during this period, humans began to turn away from the sensory world, the realm of natural phenomena, towards an “I-ness of the ego cogito” that exploits the world’s resources for profit.36 For Heidegger, this is linked to a “forgetting of Being” – a renunciation of embodied life that stems from a self-aggrandizing pursuit of reason.37 Linking this idea to 35 Georg Simmel, ‘Sociology of the Senses’ (1907) in Simmel on Culture ed. by D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997) pp.118-119. 36 Martin Heidegger, ‘Nietzsches Wort 'Gott ist tot' (1943) translated as ‘The Word of Nietzsche: God Is Dead,’ in Holzwege, edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 37 Heidegger, Being and Time ed. by Edward Robinson (London: HarperCollins, 2008). 33 the growing influence of Cartesian mind/body dualisms – Descartes’ elevation of mind over body – Jacques Rancière develops Heidegger’s theory by arguing that modernity causes humans to forget ‘their debt to the Other’.38 Characterised by a suppression of the feeling, sensing body, modernity disconnects us not only from our own bodies and surroundings, he argues, but from the lived experiences of others too. Thus, Walter D. Mignolo posits that a depletion of sensation and affect is inseparable from colonialism – what he calls ‘the darker side of western modernity’.39 For Rancière and Mignolo, sensory and emotional disconnect indicates the mind/body dualism’s construction of social difference in the post-Enlightenment era; while the powerful are frequently synonymised with the mind, the marginalised are aligned with the subordinated corporeal realm. Woolf’s cave brings a gendered perspective to this. By presenting modernity’s “darkness” as masculine and male, Three Guineas alludes to the masculinisation of the mind and the feminisation of the body – a dichotomy regularly explored by feminists both in studies of bodily subjugation and theories of epistemology.40 Sensory studies often draws on such oppressive portrayals of modernity.41 My own analysis is shaped by these ideas. My readings are also informed by the context sensory studies 38 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). 39 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (USA: Duke University Press, 2011). 40 Whitworth states that ‘modernity has become identified with large-scale processes of rationalization, alienation and differentiation that are seen as distinctively masculine…the project of modernity is, it seems, the project of masculinity’ (p.234). Femininity, in contrast, he explains, has become ‘equated with either a primitive condition of underdevelopment or an edenic state of nonalienated plenitude, depending on the writer’s particular standpoint’ (p.234). Rita Felski’s The Gender of Modernity (1995) disrupts this gendered idea, asking ‘how would our understanding of modernity change if instead of taking male experience as paradigmatic, we were to look instead at texts written primarily by or about women? And what if feminine phenomena, often seen as having a secondary or marginal status, were given a central importance in the analysis of the culture of modernity?’ (p.10). Discussion of the hierarchical dichotomy between masculine rationality and feminine sensuality has been a staple of feminist epistemology theory which began to appear in the 1980s. Explaining how the mind/body binary has been mapped onto notions of male and female, Susan J. Hekman’s Gender and Knowledge (1990) argues that ‘since the Enlightenment, knowledge has been defined in terms of man’ (p.2). Genevieve Lloyd’s The Man of Reason (1984) and Jane Duran’s Toward a Feminist Epistemology (1991) each trace this back to Descartes’ contention that the body, unlike the mind, is an unreliable source of knowledge. 41 The end of Tim Edensor’s chapter in A Cultural History of the Senses, for example, uses Rancière’s idea to argue that the socio-political regulation of social space often places the less powerful in more sterile 34 provides regarding how and why this negative narrative developed. Sensory studies’ central claim – that the senses are socially and culturally constructed – heightens understanding of the Cartesian mind/body dualism in relation to modernity. Since Aristotle, sensory studies scholars show, the sensorium has been hierarchised. As David Howes and Classen explain, Aristotle presented sight and sound as “higher” senses in terms of their ability to acquire knowledge. Sight was considered the most supreme of the two. In contrast, smell, taste, and touch were considered “lower” senses, placed respectively in third, fourth and fifth in terms of usefulness.42 During the Enlightenment and beyond, this hierarchy was reinforced by Descartes’ mind/body binary. The “higher” senses became increasingly aligned with knowledge through affiliation with the mind while the “lower” senses became increasingly distanced from knowledge through a contrasting, and supposedly inferior, alignment with the body. Thus, Classen explains, it was ‘during the era of Enlightenment’ that the ‘visual adjectives “bright” and “brilliant” to mean intelligent…came into vogue’.43 As Classen and Steven Connor each assert, sight consequently seemed to undergo a process of disembodiment, with Descartes himself stating that it is ‘the mind that sees, not the eye’.44 It is partly due to and reflecting this Cartesian influence, sensory studies scholars illustrate, that sense hierarchies become more pronounced during the post-Enlightenment era. This suggests that the growth of environments than those with power. Similarly, in his 2013 discussion of what questions sensory studies may be able to answer, Howes asks, with reference to Rancière: ‘what is the role of institutions in maintaining and/or changing the current “distribution of the sensible”?’. Both Edensor and Kate Flint use Simmel to discuss the shocks of modern life. Much like Mignolo, Sekimoto and Brown argue that a reduced perception of sensation and affect concerning the Other leads to objectification and thus, the dehumanisation of people of colour. Although they are synonymised with the body in some ways, they argue, Black bodies also have a ‘numbness’ projected onto their senses that attempts to justify, and render more possible, abuse and exploitation of them (p.14). 42 Howes and Classen, Ways of Sensing (London and New York: 2013) p.5. 43 Classen, The Book of Touch (Croydon: Berg, 2005) p.5. 44 Descartes, ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’ (1641), quoted by Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion Books, 2004) p.21 and Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures (London: Routledge, 1993) p.4. 35 visual culture in the modern age is intertwined with the pursuit of rationality and intensified elevation of the eye.45 Sensory studies’ post-Enlightenment theory further explains the relationship between bodily suppression and subjugation of the Other.46 Sensory studies emphasises that sense hierarchies both reflect and can perpetuate hegemony. Again, since Aristotle, the field demonstrates, notions of race, gender and other forms of social difference have been mapped onto sensory hierarchies in various philosophical, scientific, and socio-political discourses. The “higher” senses have been routinely associated with masculinity, maleness and the west while the “lower” senses have acquired feminine, female and racially “primitive” associations.47 This has generated unsavoury sensory stereotypes concerning, for example, the supposed odour of Black skin, explored by Kettler and Smith, and women’s domestic associations, explored by Classen.48 Classen has produced a comprehensive body of work on the gendered aspects of this 45 See, for instance, “ocularcentrism” in Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (California: University of California Press, 1993). 46 When referring to marginalised subjects, the word, ‘Other,’ will be capitalised throughout this thesis – a practice often attributed to French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, and adopted in feminist theory by numerous scholars including Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949). 47 For example, Classen, Howes and Fretwell, have each explored the racial implications of sensory hierarchy with reference to Lorenz Oken’s Elements of Physiophilosophy (1847), which proposes a racial sense hierarchy that places the “civilized” European “eye-man,”’ at the top and ‘the African “skin-man”’ at the bottom. In terms of gender, Classen’s The Colour of Angels outlines ‘the forbidden taste, the mysterious smell’ and ‘the dangerous touch’ that is associated with women in pre-modern culture, including how this manifested in the figure of the witch in the eighteenth century (p.1). She traces these tropes of danger, gluttony and poison back to the Biblical Fall, arguing that the fall of Adam and Eve is a fall of the senses. Robert Jütte also makes some important sensory arguments concerning women and gender. He argues that in the eighteenth century, common belief maintained that ‘women’s bodies were so sensitive and their minds so dull—their lower senses so overripe and their higher senses so unrefined—that they were subject to a sort of sensory “tyranny” from which they needed sheltering’(Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 2005) pp.138-9). 48 Kettler’s The Smell of Slavery (2020) explores the olfactory stereotypes that were ascribed to Black people, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Within the wider context of a growing desire ‘to remove nearly all smells as a marker of disease to the singular body and the wider body politic,’ he explains, for instance, the “odorized” Black body became aligned with disease and infection (p.5). It was imagined as ‘a mark of biological inferiority’ intrinsic to Black skin (p.xi). Subject to pseudoscientific scrutiny of phrenology and physiognomy as well as the influence of Darwinism, he adds, the African nose, too, was seen as an intrinsic feature of this inferiority. Such beliefs, he illustrates, became ‘essential for slaveholders and scientific racists to continue justifying their beliefs regarding the inherent inferiority of African minds and bodies’ (p.xviii). Similarly, in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire, Classen notes that one mid-nineteenth century treatise on racial difference proclaims that ‘the skin of the purely white race’ exhales ‘a pure and 36 while she, Smith, Kettler and others including Howes and Fretwell have each considered sensory hierarchy and stereotypes in relation to race.49 It is during the post-Enlightenment era, alongside the increasing prevalence of sense hierarchies that such hegemonic ideas also become most prominent. This highlights increased efforts to control the bodily and the Other. As DeMaagd argues, the increasing influence and use of sense hierarchies signifies an attempt to ‘keep people in their so-called proper places’ because ‘those who stray’ from ‘sensory identifications, or who misuse their sensory faculties, threaten the larger social order’.50 This thinking, I argue, can be understood as that which creates the oppressive conditions of modernity described by Heidegger, Rancière, and Mignolo. By connecting sense hierarchies to raced and gendered hegemonies in this post-Enlightenment context, sensory studies illuminates a historical trajectory and explanation for modern sensory suppression and its othering associations. Citing Marx’s view that ‘the senses were alienated and suppressed under capitalism,’ Howes aligns sensory hierarchy with a nineteenth-century shift towards the dehumanising economic machine collectively described by Heidegger, Rancière and Mignolo.51 Regarding gender, and presenting a history that anticipates Woolf’s cave, Classen argues that after the eighteenth century, ‘the expectation was agreeable odour’ while ‘that of the [African] … is very strong and offensive’ because ‘it is, of course, distilled through a coarse system and unrefined, coarse-grained flesh’ (p.2). Offering a nuanced perspective on how women and women’s bodies have been regulated through containment, Classen illustrates that the division of “lower” and “higher” senses has been used to reinforce gendered labour divisions between the domestic and public spheres. So-called “women’s work”, she writes, centres on the “lower” senses: ‘cooking, cleaning, sewing and family care’ (pp.2-3). In contrast, men are conceptualised as ‘masters of sight and hearing’ who go ‘out to oversee the world and take part in public discourse’ (p.3). 49 This includes exploration of the fact that hierarchical constructions, and their associated stereotypes, are relevant not just to the sensorium at large, but to each individual sense within it too. Classen illustrates that women were typified ‘as soft and weak compared to strong and hard men’ in terms of touch, for instance, while those symbolically without vision were still often affiliated with darkness and colour as opposed to notions of light and form surrounding the powerful. Hence, the main arguments against female suffrage were that women were ‘too physically weak to defend their country’s laws’ and ‘belonged at home’ (A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire, p.3). Both Mignolo and Woolf turn these visual stereotypes on their head by aligning the powerful with darkness. 50 DeMaagd, p.7. 51 Sekimoto and Brown also reference this Marx quotation, from ‘Private Property and Communism’ (1844), in their work on race and inequality. 37 that “irrational” feminine sensibilities could be contained and controlled’.52 Similarly, anticipating the sensory suppression of racial Others described by Mignolo, the work of Kettler, Smith, Sekimoto and Brown examines how racial difference was increasingly scrutinised and regulated through nineteenth-century pseudosciences, inspired by Darwinism, such as phrenology and physiognomy, in ways that sought to justify slavery and segregation.53 Yet, Smith illustrates, vision became less reliable in this respect during the age of “passing” (1880-1925).54 Fuelling fear that Blackness could become whiteness, awareness of racial passing created a “need” to ‘sense race beyond vision’.55 I suggest that such fear, too, can be understood as a precursor to modernity’s lost sense of bodily connection, and the hegemony this reflects and perpetuates. Despite being used widely to acquire and create stereotypical ideas, sensory epistemologies, even while fetishizing or subordinating a certain subject, also made the “threat” of that subject seem more real and pervasive.56 It is perhaps unsurprising that the sensory became an increasingly disparaged concept when, as Smith states, it often seemed to hold the white mind, and reason itself, hostage in the post-Enlightenment era. 57 Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892) – explored by Fretwell and Classen as well as within modernist studies – serves as compelling evidence for this fear and renunciation of both the sensory and the Other. In this now notorious criticism of “social immorality,” sensory experiments in contemporary art and experiences of synaesthesia are aligned with moral turpitude along with queerness, prostitution, and non-European peoples. Reinforcing sense 52 Once the sensory threat of the witch had been ousted by scientific and masculine reason (Classen, The Colour of Angels, p.6). 53 Darwin himself suggested that the sense of smell was “more highly developed” among “savages” while Freud referred to tactile, gustatory, and olfactory processes as being oriented more towards both infancy and the “lower races” (Classen, A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire, p.18). 54 Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) p.xiv. 55 Smith, How Race Is Made, p.x. 56 The fact that the visual is not only disembodied in its affiliation with the mind, but goes on to dominate western culture, perhaps even suggests an attempt to regain control over and further empower vision following the discovery of its limitations regarding the Other. 57 Smith, How Race Is Made, p.ix. 38 hierarchies while quoting the physician, Édouard Séguin, Nordau claims that all “degenerates” ‘without having recourse to sight,’ have an ‘obtuse’ sense of touch and a strong sense of smell that is ‘not disagreeably affected by the smell and taste of human ordure’.58 Nordau’s similar displeasure with synaesthesia stems from his knowledge of ‘pharmacologist Raphäel Dubois, whose study of bioluminescence revealed that the paddock (the ancestral mollusk) hears, feels, tastes, and smells all at once’.59 In humans, Nordau claims, synaesthesia is a ‘retrogression…a descent from the height of human perfection to the low level of the mollusk’.60 Such discourses propelled the suppression of the body and the sensory particularly in connection with suppression of the Other. Thus, sensory studies brings further understanding to negative conceptualisations of modernity because it suggests that western ideas of reason stem from the circulation and internalisation of older sensory ideas; it enables us to draw connections between the sensory world of the twentieth century and its preceding decades. Like Smith, I stress the value of attempting to understand ‘the role of the senses in structuring historical meaning’.61 Drawing on these hegemonic sensory histories, I apply this understanding to consider how Woolf, Naylor and Mitchison use sensory aesthetics in ways that interrogate oppressive manifestations of modernity whilst corroborating sensory studies’ historicization of sense hierarchies. 58 Max Nordau, Degeneration (1892), (Germany: Outlook Vertag, 2018) p.481 59 Erica Fretwell, Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke University Press, 2020) p.34. 60 Ibid. 61 Smith, p.viii. Investigating the ‘sensory history of race’ in particular, he argues, ‘allows us to understand how and why the clumped notions of “black” and “white,” of binary notions of racial identity, gained such social currency’ (Smith, p. xxiv). This follows on from the work of Paul Gilroy, especially Against Race (2000) – ‘a powerful meditation on the need to renounce race-thinking and venture beyond the colour line’ (Smith, p.xix). In this, Gilroy argues that ‘the human sensorium has had to be educated to the appreciation of racial differences;’ to come to terms with the historical construction of race, he argues, we must therefore think of it in all its forms and all its senses (Smith, p.xix). 39 Alternative sensory narratives As well as drawing on the ideas and contexts outlined in the previous section, my analysis is shaped by the forms of resistance that sensory studies scholars stage in relation to hierarchical and hegemonic sensory discourses. I consider how the sensory aesthetics of my selected authors not only expose and critique raced and gendered hegemonies, but how they resist them too. In addition to following the recuperative efforts of feminist literary scholars, I contribute to a parallel recovery project within sensory studies – a ‘recovery of the Other’ as Kettler explicitly writes.62 In their explorations of marginalisation, sensory studies scholars draw attention to the oft-neglected experiences of the Other. They emphasise that ‘social groups can contest their sensory typing and challenge the boundaries of their social containment’.63 Informing my chapters on Naylor, Smith not only considers ‘sensory stereotypes concerning Black people’ and how these were used to ‘justify and explain exploitation,’ but ‘how Black people in turn challenged’ them from the 1700s to around 1950.64 He argues that ‘black slaves used the senses – materially and ideologically – to thwart slaveholders,’ challenging ‘segregationist sensory stereotypes’ in their language and songs.65 For both Kettler and Smith, scholarly resistance to such stereotypes manifests not just in the creation of these alternative narratives, but in a reclamation of the “lower” senses since these have been synonymised with the Other, and as Classen posits, are largely neglected by scholars when compared with the 62 Kettler, p.22. 63 Howes and Classen, Ways of Sensing, p.7. 64 Smith, How Race is Made, p.11 & p.10. 65 Smith, How Race is Made, p.13. Smith also exposes the hypocrisy of segregationists who ‘publicly reviled Black scent, mocked the sound (more often, noise) of blackness, and proclaimed the terrible dangers of coming into contact with black skin’ while revelling in ‘the beauty of Black singing’ and clandestinely, experiencing ‘the intimacy of Black women’ in often assault-based circumstances (p.6). In this way, Smith shows, ‘whites not only invented and styled the sensory dimensions of Blackness, but applied and suspended the “rules” around these as and when they wanted’ (p.6). 40 visual and sonic.66 Sensory studies attempts to remedy this – to recover and revise the “lost” and disparaged senses – as part of their recovery of Other embodied lives. My own project performs a similar intervention. By considering touch and emphasising its value despite its status as a neglected “lower” sense, I build on sensory studies work such as Classen’s The Book of Touch (2005) and The Deepest Sense (2012), as well as Paterson’s The Senses of Touch (2007) and Laura U. Marks’ Touch (2002). It is also in this respect that Garrington’s Haptic Modernism not only influences my project but finds kinship with sensory studies since it similarly moves away from a modernist studies focus on visuality and sound.67 These scholars stress the complexity of touch and haptics in their reclamations. Although touch is ‘most closely associated with physical contact’ and can therefore be aligned with ‘sensations of heat, pain, pleasure, and movement, among others,’ Classen explains, it also carries a wealth of metaphorical meaning.68 It aligns with notions of communication – of “being in touch” – and of “feeling” in an emotional sense. As Paterson observes, touch is ‘a sense of communication. It is receptive, expressive, can communicate empathy. It can bring distant objects and people into proximity’.69 As partially demonstrated already by my analysis of Woolf’s cave, this fluency between physical and emotional touch as well as the metaphorical haptics of contact and communication, is fundamental to my understanding of touch and the sensory aesthetics I describe as haptic. So is the more specific reclamation of touch as that which has, as Classen shows, been affiliated in subordinating ways with both women and Blackness as the “lowest” sense. Like Classen, I build upon feminist discussions of the 66 Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012) p.xv. 67 Garrington also discusses sense hierarchies and Aristotle’s legacy on the western sensorium. 68 Classen, The Deepest Sense, p.xiv. 69 Paterson, (2008), p.1. 41 archetypal binary between male sight and female touch by referring to the cultural history of touch while considering the racial dimensions of this too.70 Ideas of touch and the haptic, in all their various senses, have shaped my project, but my approach is decidedly intersensorial. Since intersensoriality, developed by Michel Serres, refers to the ways in which the senses communicate within and between bodies, it is itself a haptic concept, invested in sensory contact.71An intersensorial approach to culture and history emphasises that ‘any effort to separate the senses out, displaying them adjacent to each other…will be gently and repeatedly precluded by the requirement to knot them together’.72 It acknowledges that the senses are fundamentally inter-linked. As Howes and Classen summarise, the senses are ‘part of an interactive web of experience,’ constituted by sensations that variedly ‘reinforce each other, play off each other and, at times, contradict each other’.73 For sensory studies scholars, acknowledging this reflects efforts to move beyond the narrowness of Aristotelian and Cartesian sensory models. The concept of an intermingled sensorium challenges the notion of hierarchy and therefore the associated constructions of social-sensory hegemony I have outlined.74 Thus, in The Colour of Angels (1998), Classen states that she is aiming to ‘recover’ histories that emphasise the ‘cultural interplay of the senses’ as well as ‘the social lives of the often neglected lower senses’.75 I perform the same gesture by consistently thinking about how sensory aesthetics are multi-sensory and indicative of a connected sensorium. My first two chapters even argue, in part, that the intersensory aesthetics of Orlando help to construct and advocate a more intersensorial form of perception 70 Classen, The Colour of Angels, p.63. Luce Irigaray is a key feminist thinker on the gendered oppositions concerning touch and sight. See ‘This Sex Which is Not One’ in This Sex Which is Not One (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985) pp.23-33. 71 Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, translated by Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). While Serres does not use the term “intersensoriality” himself, his work has been used to develop the concept it represents. The term “intersensoriality” was coined by Howes. 72 Howes, Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2005) p.323. 73 Howes and Classen, Ways of Sensing, p.5. 74 The idea of intersensoriality coheres with intersectionality in this sense. 75 Classen, The Colour of Angels, p.2. 42 as part of its own revisions. In later chapters, the intersensory is not referred to in explicit terms, but continues to be part of my approach since touch itself is a particularly intersensory concept. As Classen comments, touch is ‘closely related to the other senses (as well as to the emotions)’ because ‘all the senses can be, and have been, thought of as having tactile dimensions’.76 As my second chapter demonstrates, the particular ‘contiguity between grasping and looking,’ explored in relation to photography both in and out of sensory studies, is another intersensory idea.77 My intersensory approach is defined by a seemingly paradoxical acknowledgement of sensory segmentation and coherence. In DeMaagd’s study, the focus is primarily on the latter. Paying particular attention to the synaesthesic, DeMaagd argues that female modernist writing is radical because it is willing to embrace the intersensorial body at a time when the body and its senses are undergoing a process of “segmentation” due to increased corporeal marketization and regulation. Futurism, in contrast, presents a perpetuation of such segmentation, she explains, in its refusal to consider the body in more unified terms. I agree that modernist women are writing against increasingly hegemonic bodily controls and that subversive depictions of sensory unification are perhaps more prevalent in female modernisms. However, DeMaagd’s approach overlooks the fact that images of sensory fragmentation also appear in her chosen texts in often equally radical ways. Furthermore, DeMaagd reduces the intersensory to the synaesthesic. According to Howes, synaesthesia is one of many intersensory forms. An intersensory approach to research, Howes suggests, might therefore focus on sensory 76 Classen, The Deepest Sense, p.xiv. She states: ‘even sight involves eye movement’ (p.xiv). Thus, skin, as the organ of touch, has also been connected to the intersensory by Howes, Serres and Connor as well as Dirk Vanderbeke and Caroline Rosenthal. Skin constitutes what Rosenthal and Vanderbeke call a ‘contact zone’ for sensations and emotions that connects the sensory organs. 77 Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion Books, 2004) p.59. Similarly, Laura U. Marks emphasises a notion of ‘haptic visuality’ to highlight vision’s tactile abilities whilst seeking ‘the material presence of the other’ (Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) p.xviii). 43 relationships between, for example, co-operation and opposition; hierarchy and equality; and fusion and separation.78 While taking an intersensorial approach consciously offers an overtly symbolic gesture towards hierarchical destabilisation in the context of sensory studies, the intersensorial, as discernible within literary texts, is not inherently synonymous with either unity or resistance. The intersensory can be present in both the depiction and advocation of hierarchy and fragmentation.79 Conversely, intersensory depictions of sensory fragmentation and sensory unity may both be radical. This is the case in my selected texts; both the radicality and intersensoriality of their sensory aesthetics hinge upon a contrasting co-existence of sensory fragmentation and unity. While DeMaagd’s work attends to the dualisms that Howes aligns with intersensory research by presenting sensory integration and sensory segmentation as separate aesthetics between texts, my thesis demonstrates how integration and segmentation might also work within texts to create radical intersensory aesthetics in more complex terms. This contributes to the ways in which sensory studies scholars have used intersensoriality to reframe the sensorium, moving beyond its conventional boundaries. Indeed, in their rejection of this reductive model, sensory studies scholars look for senses beyond the usual five. Stressing, for example, the existence not only of additional physiological senses, but of senses relative to different cultures and concepts of a sixth sense.80 Cohering with assertions made by 78 Howes, ‘The Expanding Field of Sensory Studies,’ accessed June 2023. 79 Furthermore, as Garrington illustrates, the Futurists conceived intersensory concepts. In Filippo Tomaso Marinetti’s 1921 manifesto on tactility, ‘he proposes the creation of “tactile theaters” in which seated spectators will “place their hands on long, tactile conveyor belts which will produce tactile sensations that have different rhythms. One will also be able to mount these panels on turntables and operate them to the accompaniment of music and lights”’ (Garrington, p.36). 80 In physiological terms, Howes states, ‘there are at least ten senses and possibly as many as thirty-three’ including, for instance, ‘pressure, temperature, pain, as well as kinaesthesia, proprioception’ and balance (Howes, ‘The Expanding Field of Sensory Studies,’ accessed June 2023). However, immaterial ideas of common sense, speech and even extrasensory concepts such as ESP, psychic abilities and telepathy have also been examined in texts such as Howes’ The Sixth Sense Reader (2009) and Blackman’s Immaterial Bodies (2012). In other sensory studies research, this same expansive aim is achieved through consideration of how the senses are understood in different nations and time periods. Rolf Elberfeld’s work on classical Indian 44 Howes and Classen, my project embraces sensory expansion by considering communication, particularly through its metaphorical connection to touch, in sensory terms.81 Exploring depictions of telepathy and hypnosis, my chapters on Mitchison even consider extrasensory communication – an important sensory subject, Howes explains, because it opens ‘up the boundaries of conventional perceptual paradigms to new possibilities of perception’.82 Finally, my project is informed by sensory studies’ efforts to resist hegemony because it follows the field’s attempts to create alternative and more positive narratives of modernity via the sensory. Sensory studies scholars emphasise that there are always other social-sensory regimes at work beneath the dominating ones of hegemony. Examples of this include Smith’s research on Black resistance, Fretwell’s work on psychophysics and Jessica Riskin’s research on the eighteenth century. Fretwell, whose work I discuss in my Woolf chapters, not only explores the neglected nineteenth-century pseudoscience of psychophysics, but argues that this theory of sense experience was an important precursor to feminism, phenomenology and experimental psychology.83 Similarly, Riskin’s Science in the Age of Sensibility (2002), emphasises that contrary to received wisdom, some scholars did construct sensory knowledge in laudatory terms during the Age of Reason.84 In finding alternative narratives, sensory studies philosophy, for instance, lists eight senses: “(1) prana (breathing organ, i.e., nose; also ‘breath of life’); (2) the speech organ; (3) tongue (taste); (4) eye (color); (5) ear (sounds); (6) mana (thought, mind, inner organ); (7) hands (work); and (8) skin (sense of touch)” (Howes, The Explaining Field of Sensory Studies). Similarly, in Worlds of Sense Classen acknowledges that in Buddhist cultures, the mind is seen as a sixth sense while in pre-modern Europe, ‘speech was sometimes considered to be a quasi-sixth sense’ (p.1). As Classen and Howes explain in Ways of Sensing with reference to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), ‘sights and sounds carry different meanings to different cultures and times’ (p.2). Sensory acts, too, ‘have different meanings between cultures’; while a limp handshake suggests a ‘respect for bodily boundaries’ in Japan, for example, in the west, limpness has, at times, been seen as a sign of weakness (p.4). 81 In ‘The Expanding Field of Sensory Studies,’ Howes emphasises that communication and/or speech have frequently been considered senses in their own right in alternative cultures as well as in pre-modern western history. 82 Howes, The Sixth Sense Reader, p.36. 83 Fretwell, p.5. 84 For instance, she stresses that ‘the eighteenth-century French tradition of science (both physical and moral), which was grounded in the conviction that “sensation and emotion were inseparable” and together formed the basis of natural knowledge, moral sentiment and civic engagement’ (quoted by Howes in ‘Charting the Sensorial Revolution,’ Senses & Society, 1:1 (2006) p.117). Classen emphasises that while ‘negative typologies of women 45 challenges dominant ideas about modernity. Concurrently, it emphasises the fragility of hegemonic constructs whilst highlighting and often enacting the possibility of reshaping them. The fact that sensory ideas change so readily, not only undermines sense hierarchies, but exposes the absurdity of the fixed social hierarchy “logic” they represent. The intersensory continuance between sight and touch, as Classen intimates, particularly illustrates this since both “seeing” and “grasping” are allied metaphorically with knowing.85 Even in the post-Enlightenment era, Howes argues, touch was ‘considered more “authentic” than sight in giving the mind access to external objects’ by some figures such as French physician, Philippe Pinel, who described touch as ‘the sense of the intellect’.86 Likewise, my engagement with the senses seeks and creates complex historical and cultural narratives that undermine Aristotelian and Cartesian hierarchies. I acknowledge that sense hierarchies are destabilised even by Aristotle and Descartes’ own comments. As both Paterson and Howes explain, while Aristotle presents touch as bestial in some contexts, elsewhere he celebrates ‘the aesthetic pleasures that touch affords, decoupling valid sensory pleasure from more bestial or carnal appetites’.87 Howes even suggests that Aristotle proposes some intersensory thought since he puts ‘forward some initial observations of synaesthesia,’ describing taste and sight as forms of touch in De Anima.88 Similarly, Paterson mentions were woven into the fabric of Western culture,’ there were nonetheless, ‘particularly from the Renaissance on, attempts to arrive at more positive valuations of female nature’ (Classen, The Deepest Sense, p.73). In the sixteenth century, for example, she explains that ‘Lucrezia Marinella took the sensory symbols that were used to characterize women as weak and irrational and gave them new meanings – women’s softness is not a sign of mental weakness, but of ability to assimilate impressions and information’ (Classen, The Book of Touch, p.203). 85 Classen, The Book of Touch, p.5. Cohering with Garrington’s comments on Futurist exploration of tactility and complicating the idea of the gendered sensorium, Classen’s The Colour of Angels explains that even Futurist leader, F.T. Marinetti believed the ‘electrification of the world would lead to visual aesthetics and eye-minded rationalism being superseded by a kinesthetic fusion of force, thought, and feeling’ (pp.156-7). 86 Howes, ‘Charting the Sensorial Revolution,’ p.119. Garrington’s discussion of sense hierarchy and her emphasis on the importance of incorporating haptic experience and ideas into our understanding of modernism, performs this same revisionary work regarding touch in literary studies (Garrington, p.18). 87 Paterson, (2008), p.37. 88 Howes, Empire of the Senses, p.61. 46 Descartes’ notion of ‘seeing with the hands’ in his Dioptrique (1637).89 I also follow what Smith refers to as sensory studies’ challenge to “Great Divide” theory. This, he explains, tends to align the pre-modern world with more “primitive” senses and the modern with sight and sound.90 Via sensory aesthetics, my selected authors similarly present more complex ideas and histories, unveiling seemingly paradoxical portrayals of both oppressive and progressive modernity. Interacting and contending with different social-sensory regimens of modernity, my authors use the sensory to explore hegemonic aspects of their own contemporary circumstances whilst seeking and creating improved alternatives. Revision, Modernism and Beyond The sensory aesthetics in my primary texts revise sensory hierarchies in ways that challenge social hegemonies of modernity and alter narratives about modernity itself. Before elaborating on these aesthetics in the next part of this introduction, this section outlines the wider revisionary properties that my texts share, further explaining both why I have brought these authors together and modernism’s relevance to my thesis. All five novels point to revisionary content through their engagement with the historical. Orlando follows the life of its eponymous protagonist across several centuries of English history from the first Elizabethan era to Woolf’s present day in 1928. The Women of Brewster Place, though set in the early 1970s, flashes back in time to the 1930s and 1960s civil rights movements. Bailey’s Cafe, set in 1948, revisits earlier moments in the 1900s, including the Second World War. Naylor’s texts also refer to nineteenth-century slavery and its legacy. Contrastingly, in MOAS and Solution Three, Mitchison historicises her own present day by setting each text in a distant future that looks back on the 89 Paterson, (2008), p.8. 90 Both Smith and Classen argue that the work of Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan often falls into this category. 47 twentieth century. The revisionary potential suggested by the historical interests in each text is intensified by the use of episodic forms – narrative structures that present cohesive story arcs within each chapter as well as across the whole text. Including the short story cycle and composite novel, according to Paul March-Russell, such forms maintain the traditional overarching plot of the novel but are simultaneously composed of segments or “episodes” that enable shifts in time, place, or character. 91 These shifts, in turn, serve to expand and diversify both the scope and subject-matter of more conventional, linear narratives. Though my selected texts are not identical in their use of form, they can all be understood as episodic. Each of Orlando’s chapters, written in third person as if from the perspective of a biographer, take place in a different historical period; the adventure Orlando has within each period constitutes an episode in the life of the character. Together, the chapters create a plot that follows Orlando’s development, but each one presents its own historically-determined story too. The travelogues of Vita Sackville-West, which I bring into conversation with Orlando in Chapter Two, similarly present an overarching narrative about Sackville-West’s journeys while each chapter contains a story about a particular stage of those journeys. In The Women of Brewster Place – often referred to as a short story cycle or sequence – the episodic elements are constituted by character shifts; each chapter tells the story of a different woman who lives in the novel’s eponymous location. Yet, Naylor also creates connections between the stories and figures to build an overarching and climactic plotline. Bailey’s Cafe follows the same formula, but from a first-person perspective where Brewster Place is in third person. Like Orlando, MOAS traces the character development of one subject whilst also presenting episodic self-contained adventures with each chapter. Unlike Woolf’s text, however, these are recounted in first-person. Alternatively, in Solution Three, Mitchison’s use of the episodic is more closely aligned with Naylor’s short story cycle; written in third person, it shifts 91 Paul March-Russell, The Short Story: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) p.103. 48 its character focus with each chapter whilst tracing wider socio-political changes that lead to a cohesive finale. The multiplicity enabled by these shifts not only revises established literary conventions regarding time, place, and action but accentuates how episodic forms can profoundly reflect and create generic subversion too. Both Orlando and MOAS subvert life-writing and, arguably, historical fiction. Although MOAS can be identified as feminist science fiction, neither Woolf’s nor Mitchison’s texts conform to one genre.92 Generic unconventionality is intensified in both texts’ amalgamation of reality and fantasy. Orlando engages with real historical events but presents a character who lives for centuries and changes sex after falling into a trance. MOAS refers to real events in history but presents an imaginary future of space travel and telepathic communication systems. Solution Three offers a more clear-cut example of feminist science fiction. However, it remains generically radical in its subversion of masculine sci-fi conventions. It similarly blends fantasy and realism, dealing both with real-life issues including war, food shortages and population control, and fantastical depictions of hypnotic telepathy. Naylor’s novels, which are not clearly affiliated with any one genre, also have mythic qualities. This is more explicit in Bailey’s Cafe since the eponymous location is an eatery that exists outside of space and time. However, even Brewster Place, as Maxine Lavon Montgomery explains, with its inclusion of dream narratives, is not completely realist.93 These formal and generic experiments, as efforts to break and re-make the literary text, enact a refiguration of historical and literary narratives, and the socio-political ideas and structures informing them. Allusions to canonical literature in each of the texts assist in this 92 Mitchison’s text therefore intervenes, from a feminist perspective, in mainstream sci-fi. 93 Maxine Lavon Montgomery, ‘The Fathomless Dream: Gloria Naylor’s Use of the Descent Motif in The Women of Brewster Place’ in The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor ed. by Sharon Felton and Michelle C. Loris (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997) pp.42-48. 49 process too, highlighting efforts to challenge and revise the traditionally male literary canon – an act that for Naylor is also consciously about challenging white supremacy. Notably, for this revisionary reason, Shakespeare appears in all my selected texts. In Orlando, the bard features briefly as a character, whom the protagonist feels intimidated by and flees from, and as I mention in Chapter One, the novel’s opening scenes suggest the influence of Hamlet. Later, Othello is overtly referenced when Orlando compares his own jealousy to that of the Moor. As a woman in the latter half of the text, when Orlando becomes a writer herself, she appears to emerge from Shakespeare’s shadow to craft her own literary identity, no longer shaped by Shakespeare’s characters. In Brewster Place, some of Naylor’s characters watch an all-Black reimagining of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – a play that is refigured again by Naylor when it is used to shape a collective act of female defiance in the novel’s closing scenes. In Bailey’s Cafe, the defacement of Shakespeare’s complete works by members of the Ku Klux Klan during a racist attack represents not only the irrelevance of literature to the attackers, but for African Americans, the impossibility of finding sanctuary in a society and literature that is crafted by white men alone. Finally, in both MOAS and Solution Three, Mitchison accentuates already subversive aspects of Shakespeare’s works to construct her own radical portrayals of sexuality and gender. In MOAS, the narrator’s haploid daughter, fathered by a Martian with the capacity to change gender, is named after the cross-dressing Viola in Twelfth Night. During a series of grafting experiments, Mary names one graft Ariel – perhaps a reference to The Tempest. Likewise, in Solution Three, Shakespeare is cited as an important historical figure who had been wronged by previous societal norms. One character, Ric, for example, contemplates the ‘tragedy’ of Shakespeare’s heterosexual existence.94 94 Naomi Mitchison, Solution Three (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1995) p.16. 50 Shakespeare, mentioned at several points in this thesis, affords opportunities for women writers to discuss and reimagine sensory experience in female-oriented terms. As widely acknowledged by critics, Shakespeare’s work had a particularly profound influence on modernism, often serving as a touchstone for authors seeking to challenge modernity’s oppressive presence.95 This is clear, for example, in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian social commentary, Brave New World (1932), which famously takes its name from The Tempest. Similarly, in ‘The Cinema’ (1926), Woolf seeks out and celebrates what Garrington calls the ‘synaesthesic appeal of Shakespeare’s sonnets,’ in her own critical response to modernity.96 The bard, it seems, is called upon to address the social-sensory crisis of the early twentieth century. For Woolf and other female modernists, though, such allusions go beyond critique; they are attempts to ensure that women and women writers have a say in shaping the new social-sensory order. Shakespeare is cited to challenge the androcentricity of both the traditional and contemporary canon – a strategy that continues beyond modernism in works such as Naylor’s and Mitchison’s. Certainly, Mitchison’s allusion to The Tempest in her first science fiction novel seems to revise the modernist work of her friend, Huxley, in addition to Shakespeare himself. As a figure prevalent in modernist texts but not confined to the modernist era, Shakespeare embodies the idea that modernist contexts are relevant to, but not synonymous with, all my texts. However, a more thorough exploration of the revisionary features I have outlined so far – historical engagement, episodic forms, generic subversion, and allusion (whether Shakespearean in nature or not) – can provide a more comprehensive understanding of this dynamic. In one sense, these features emphasise modernist links. Historically, by 95 For example, see Cary DiPetro, Shakespeare and Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 96In ‘The Cinema,’ Garrington notes, Woolf writes that Shakespeare’s sonnets ‘present us with impressions of moisture and warmth and the glow of crimson and the softness of petals inextricably mixed and strung upon the lift of a rhythm’ (Garrington, p.146). Garrington links Woolf’s ‘The Cinema’ to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream too (Garrington, p.146). 51 referring to the early twentieth century, Naylor and Mitchison engage with what is classically understood as the modernist period despite, unlike Orlando, being published long afterwards. More specifically, and particularly since MOAS is partly a revision of Woolf’s mock-biography (as I argue in Chapter Six) Naylor and Mitchison look back on the female modernisms to which Mitchison contributed during the 1930s.97 Aesthetically, too, features that indicate and enable revision in my chosen texts by Naylor and Mitchison connect not just to Woolf as a female modernist, but to wider notions of modernist aesthetics. While acknowledging the difficulty of establishing a concrete definition, Whitworth lists twelve features of modernism that include temporal and generic experiment and allusion.98 According to March-Russell, the episodic, as a form of temporal experiment, has strong modernist links. Influenced ‘by the stop-start procedure of trench warfare’ during World War One, he argues, modernists find a solution to ‘the homogenising tendency of the realist novel’ and its commitment to linearity through the ‘use of interlinked short stories, described variously as a ‘cycle,’ ‘sequence,’ or ‘composite novel’.99 These ‘episodic structures,’ he explains, can be found in modernist texts such as D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1921) and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927).100 Jennifer J. Smith similarly discusses the episodic “vignettes” common in modernist works by Hemingway, Joyce and Faulkner.101 Revision itself even evokes modernism: the much-quoted “make it new!” mantra of Ezra Pound, often synonymised with modernism, emphasises its relationship to renewal of the past. Yet, revision and the aforementioned revisionary features also have rich histories, predating and extending beyond modernism, particularly in women’s writing and Black writing. Feminists have explored revision in women’s writing from various periods. In ‘When 97 See, for example, The Corn King and The Spring Queen (1931). 98 Whitworth, pp.11-15. 99 March-Russell, p.103. 100 March-Russell, p.105. 101 Jennifer J. Smith, The American Short Story Cycle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017) p.1. 52 We Dead Awaken’ (1972), Adrienne Rich posits that feminist revision – the reinterpreting and reimagining of literary texts – is crucial to subversive interrogation of patriarchal narratives, creating new ways of thinking about power, identity and processes of reading and writing.102 In ‘The Thieves of Language’ (1982), Ostriker argues that women can challenge traditional myths by re-moulding language to better reflect women’s experiences.103 Scholars of feminist modernist studies such as Erica Gene Delsandro often draw on these revisionary theories because they cohere with the field’s own recuperative, revisionary aims. Examining texts by writers such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Rich herself, in addition to modernists such as H.D., Ostriker demonstrates its wider relevance. Likewise, Rich applies revision to female poets as various as Sappho, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Rich’s own poem, ‘Diving into the Wreck’ (1973) articulates the necessity of this re-visioning process. Emphasising the ‘necessity to dive again,’ the poem highlights the importance of a continual revisionary process in women’s writing that extends beyond classically modernist texts.104 This process is equally important in Black writing which, as Henry Louis Gates’ Jr. argues, often presents its own revisionary form of allusion through “signifyin” – a narrative technique indebted to Black oral traditions.105 For this reason, Charles E. Wilson Jr. observes, Black writing was ‘modern before modernism’.106 As Cornell West argues, African Americans can be considered ‘the most modern of all people’ because they ‘consistently “revamp, revision, and 102 Adrienne Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,’ Women, Writing and Teaching, 34:1 (1972) 18-30. 103 This is, she stresses, an important act of political resistance (Alicia Ostriker, ‘The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking,’ Signs, 8:1 (1982)). 104 Claire Hurley, “‘Writing as Re-Vision’: Female Creative Agency in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich” in Feminist Moments: Reading Feminist Texts, ed. by Katherine Smits and Susan Bruce (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) p.159. 105 Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The Signifying Monkey (USA: Oxford University Press, 1988). 106 Charles E. Wilson Jr., Gloria Naylor: A Critical Companion (London: Greenwood Press, 2001) p.16. 53 recast themselves” in response to the obstacles that attempt to impede their economic, social and even spiritual journey’.107 Revisionary textual experiment, including the episodic, similarly predates and exceeds the classic modernist period in the radical writing traditions of women and people of colour.108 As Roxanne Harde explains, while Joyce’s Dubliners ‘is often credited as the first story sequence’ and Sherwood Anderson claimed he had invented the genre with Winesburg, Ohio (1919), sequences by women such as ‘Elizabeth Gaskell and Sarah Orne Jewett, predate them both,’ as do episodic works by Black authors such as Harriet E. Wilson, Hannah Crafts, and John Rollin Ridge.109 Promoting community whilst rejecting the linearity of modernity’s oppressive rationale, episodic form is an experimental strategy that has long appealed to Black writers and women writers in their efforts to resist hegemony.110 Whilst linking my selected 107 Cornell West quoted by Charles E. Wilson Jr. in Gloria Naylor: A Critical Companion (London: Greenwood Press, 2001) p.18. This idea is corroborated by what has been called the historical turn in post-civil rights literature by scholars such as Aida Levy-Hussen and Brian Norman. 108 Jennifer J. Smith also acknowledges the short story cycle gets ‘claimed as new in each period’ but existed long before even in influential works such as Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1400) and Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel, Clarissa (1748) (p.2). 109 Roxanne Harde, Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences ed. by Roxanne Harde (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) p.1. See Crafts’ The Bondwoman’s Narrative (circa 1853-1961), Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), and Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures Of Joaquin Murieta (1854). 110 Since ‘the mid-nineteenth century,’ Harde argues, episodic form has ‘appealed to women writers from around the world who often use it to negotiate the tensions between individual identity and community’ (p.1). Likewise, Bettina Jansen asserts that, by lending ‘itself to the exploration of community,’ the short story cycle has often been used by Black authors to locate and express ‘communal belonging’ (Bettina Jansen, Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story (London: Palgrave Macmillan) p.16.). For Sandra Zagarell, this privileging of ‘community over self’ indicates ‘concern with process rather than a linear narrative’s conflict or progress,’ an idea that, in her analysis of Brewster Place, Laura Nicosia has applied to Black women’s writing. This, as Jennifer J. Smith acknowledges, highlights the episodic as a form that appeals to women and people of colour because it poses a radical challenge to ‘the logic of progress and rationality, so central to modernity’ (Smith, p.7). I add that the episodic therefore gives voice to notions of “Black time” and “women’s time,” concepts that recognise the alternative temporal experiences of the marginalised. Elaine Showalter, for example, argues that women experience time in more cyclical ways due to biological and cultural differences. Temporal experiment, Showalter asserts, is a crucial strategy for women writers to lay claim to the literary sphere, embedding their own subjectivities within it whilst challenging androcentricity. In parallel, Daylanne K. English posits that Black people have historically experienced time differently because they have been forced to adopt western temporal routines through subjection to colonialism and slavery. Black writing has, she shows, similarly used temporal experiment to resist white supremacy. See: Sandra Zagarell, ‘Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre,’ Signs, Vol. 13, No.2 (1998) 498-527; Laura Nicosia, ‘Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place: Evolution of A Genre’ in Narratives Of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences, ed. Roxanne Harde (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) pp.173-195; Elaine Showalter, ‘Women’s Time, Women’s Space: Writing the History of Feminist Criticism,’ Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol 3. No. 1-2, (1984) 29-43; and Daylanne K. English, Each Hour Redeem: Time and Justice in African American Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 54 texts, the revisionary features I have outlined, along with the idea of revision itself, emphasise the importance of looking beyond traditional notions of modernism in studies of radical women’s writing and writing by people of colour. Acknowledging the simultaneously modernist and non-modernist assignations of these features reveals the initial narrowness of modernist investigation, and how modernist contexts can now help to examine and challenge this narrowness. It elucidates that texts by women and people of colour were largely not considered in initial theorisations of modernism’s aesthetics and history. Feminist modernist studies has since engaged in rigorous work to recover female authors both within and outside these boundaries. Studies of Black writing have done the same with Black writers, establishing complex relationships between race and modernism. Like West, numerous scholars have illustrated that while Black culture infuses and pre-empts modernism, it was initially presented as either separate from it or as the offshoot (often confined to the Harlem Renaissance) of a predominantly white movement.111 As Sieglinde Lemke explains, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Black life and culture were largely disparaged as “primitive”.112 Yet, Kate Marsh and Fionnghuala Sweeney argue, artists such as Picasso, Mondrian, and the Futurists were influenced by Africa.113 Przemysław Strozek and John Lowney each similarly emphasise the significant Black influence of jazz on modernist life and art.114 As Marsh and Sweeney point out, we can now acknowledge that Black cultural outputs not only influenced mainstream modernism but emerged within it in appropriated and 111 For more on modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, see: J. Smethurst, The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (US: University of North Carolina Press); Miriam Thaggert, Images of Black Modernism Book: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (US: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010); and Darryl Dickson-Carr, ‘African Americans and the Making of Modernity,’ American Literary History, vol. 25, no. 3, 2013, pp. 672–682. 112 Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (Oxford: OUP, 1998). 113 Kate Marsh and Fionnghuala Sweeney, Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2013) p.6. 114 Przemysław Strozek, ‘Futurist Responses to African American Culture’ in Marsh and Sweeney, pp.43-61, & John Lowney, Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music (Illinois: University of Illinois Press) 2017. 55 sometimes fetishized ways.115 For these reasons, Lemke suggests, modernism itself was “passing”.116 So are notions of modernist legacies and late modernisms. As Lowney explains, the longevity of modernism beyond the classical modernist period is particularly highlighted by the ongoing influence of jazz as a Black musical genre. This topic and its implications are explored in my chapters on Naylor. However, the relationship between race and modernism, in addition to that between gender and modernism, is also investigated more broadly by this thesis. I argue that in looking back to the early twentieth century and modernism, Naylor’s and Mitchison’s novels pay tribute to and develop the feminism of this period, but also critique the racial inequity and violence that existed alongside it, often in confluence with sexism; their texts express desire to record and move on from modernism, including that specifically presented by Woolf. Within and between my selected texts, reductive and oppressive narratives of both modernity and modernism are presented and challenged – an idea that defines the revisionary tradition I examine, and underpins my analysis of sensory aesthetics, even when revision itself is not overtly being discussed. Haptic Feminist Aesthetics Since all sensory modalities are engaged with notions of touch, all sensory prose can be described as haptic. In my selected texts, this is true even when other senses are in the foreground, or when touch is not explicitly mentioned. Similarly, while my analytical focus is primarily on language, the episodic form of each text can be referred to as a haptic aesthetic feature because it seems to embody and reflect the numerous and opposing examples of haptic 115 Marsh and Sweeney, p.10 & p.45. 116 Lemke, p.3. English’s Each Hour Redeem (2013) offers another example of this Black erasure, arguing that “modernist” temporal experiments are practised by Black authors both before and during the modernist period. These authors, including Angelina Weld Grimké and Georgia Douglas Johnson, inform and must be understood, English argues, in relation to modernism too (p.17). 56 experience within the narratives.117 Sewing together the characters, places and times depicted in each chapter, the boundaries surrounding each “episode” become seams of contact that emphasise both the friction and harmony presented between characters and communities. Since these linguistic and formal sensory aesthetics are revisionary in my chosen texts, they suggest that feminist revision itself can also be referred to as haptic. Certainly, we can conceive feminist revision as a radical getting-in-touch process that enables us to forge new, important connections and narratives. Using “haptic” as a descriptor for feminist revision as well as sensory aesthetics is particularly valuable in relation to my texts not only due to their exploration of literal and metaphorical touch, but because these explorations are part of a larger effort to expose and resist forms of suppression and oppression. Appearing frequently throughout this thesis, the terms “suppression” and “oppression” are crucial to understanding radical women’s writing and feminist revision in the specific contexts of modernity and modernism. They are also inherently haptic. The notion of pressing down suggested both by the inhibitive forces that define “suppression” and the cruel, controlling forces that define “oppression,” gestures towards the haptic subject of pressure. The haptic, then, is embedded in the language evoked by and required to discuss feminist concerns, the more specific sensory aesthetics of my authors, and indeed theories of modernity by thinkers such as Mignolo. Acknowledging this may help us to understand and approach feminist revision and analysis in new ways, as a mode of pressing back, whether literal or metaphorical. In my chosen novels, this pressing back, specifically through the sensory aesthetics I have outlined and described as “haptic,” involves an effort to get in touch with and recover the female body – a sensing, feeling and therefore haptic entity – from subjugating 117 In this sense, my understanding of form coheres with Theodor W. Adorno’s claim that form and content mutually shape and determine each other. See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970), (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). This approach parallels that of Ostriker, who contends that language revision and textual experimentation are interconnected since ‘new meanings must generate new forms’ (Ostriker, p.87). 57 discourses. The corporeal is at the centre of these novelists’ revisionary approaches to modernity, history, and literary conventions. They are, as Hélène Cixous famously encourages in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975), writing ‘with the body’ as well as about it; they are putting their own embodied experiences, as women, into the literary realm.118 For Cixous, women can locate creative power by tapping into what she calls the “dark continent” of female instincts, desires, and emotions. 119 This is an alternative darkness to that of Woolf’s cave. It is the female experience that powerfully exists in the dark, hidden from sight, but bearing a wealth of radical potential that can be brought to light by women writers. Building on this, Audre Lorde argues in ‘Uses of the Erotic’ (1978) that the feminised realm of sensation and affect is often suppressed because of the erotic power it holds for women.120 The erotic – linked but not limited to sexuality – she explains, allows women to embrace their bodies rather than perceive them as inferior or shameful. This is radical; it is a self-acceptance infused with political power to transform society and its ideals. My authors’ uses of sensory aesthetics demonstrate attempts to access this erotic power. By acknowledging the haptic in this, it becomes possible to unearth and theorise more specific radical aesthetic uses without having to dispense with an intersensory approach. Illuminating much of the feminist content between and within the narratives, this approach helps to frame and bring together the tensions I have outlined concerning modernity and aesthetic literary ideas. Each text’s revisionary interrogation of both oppressive and progressive modernity narratives can be mapped onto and better understood as depictions of literal and metaphorical haptic themes. They present a dichotomy between violent, deprived, and numbing touch – aligned with the downward-pressing haptics of suppressive and oppressive modernities – versus more resistant tactility in 118 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, vol.1, no.4 (1976) 875-893. 119 Cixous, p.885. 120 Audre Lorde, ‘The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ (1978) in Sister Outsider (London: Penguin, 2019) pp.43-50. 58 the forms of comfort, healing, communal solidarity, self-revelation (a getting in touch with the self) and empathetic communications. As Connor explains, touch can be violent or caring; it can be a ‘caress,’ ‘a retreating touch,’ light, heavy, or invasive.121 For Ruth Finnegan, touch is the ‘most direct invasion in interaction’ and has different communicative meanings expressed through, for example, kissing, handshakes, or physical violence.122 In my selected texts, the tension presented between these kinds of touch, between unwanted and desired or valuable contact, particularly as experienced by female characters and conveyed via sensory language, is fundamental to their critique of and resistance to patriarchal social-sensory regimes. In relation to the resistance side of this paradigm, the thesis itself is structured so that it presents a gradually expanding focus on notions of communication and community – concepts that are haptic, I posit, because they depend on contact, whether literal or figurative. Woolf’s Orlando is primarily concerned with establishing new connections and understanding within the self; the protagonist’s revelations towards the end of the text depend on communication between her many subjectivities. In Naylor’s novels, healing touch becomes more attached to communal links, particularly between Black women, and the resistance that establishing such links can grant. Finally, Mitchison’s texts, in their consideration of global and intergalactic scales, explore the potentially more progressive modernity to be found in communication between different communities. The episodic reflects and reinforces these resistant modes of contact. As well as depicting and symbolising revisionary and feminist recoveries of the body, however, the haptic sensory aesthetics of these texts strive to perform this recovery. As I explore at various points within this thesis, my writers’ engagements with the sensory often point beyond the novel itself, to other texts, readers and therefore the material world. 121 Connor, pp.262-3. 122 Ruth Finnegan, ‘Tactile Communication’ in The Book of Touch, p.18. 59 This idea gestures towards theories of affect, a concept – as Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg admit in their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader (2009) – that is difficult to define. Broadly speaking, ‘affect is about movement and process, the body, and its relatedness’.123 Teresa Brennan’s The Transmission of Affect (2004) considers how affects are not simply contained within individuals but passed between them through non-verbal communicative processes. This, in turn, is connected to emotion. Brennan explains that the theorisation of affect stems largely from ‘Charles Darwin’s physiological account of emotions’.124 Literature, as Alex Houen observes, has affective properties; it can evoke bodily and emotional responses.125 In this thesis, it is not my aim to define or measure affect, but rather to acknowledge that this affective potential, and bodily reader-response more generally, exists as a link between texts, writers, and readers. The sensory aesthetics of my selected novels appeal to this affective potential, and thus become more radical. These texts have the potential to inspire the transformative change they depict and promote. Acquiring a further affinity with haptic experience, the episodic as an experimental form enhances this affective touch, contributing to recovery of the sensuous body from Woolf’s cave. As DeMaagd argues of her own selected authors, ‘the formal innovation of each writer reflects and heightens their sensuous innovation’; their textual experimentation offers ‘meaningful sensory experiences, not only for their characters but also for their readers’.126 Adding to this, I argue that experimental forms such as the episodic can not only reawaken the body but both present and 123 Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) pp.1-26. 124 Brennan’s work discussed by Alex Houen, p.9. Affect theories began in the mid-nineties with figures such as Brian Massumi, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Other important affect theorists include Silvan Tomkins, Deleuze, Spinoza, Sara Ahmed, Jonathan Flatley, Sianne Ngai, Raymond Williams, Spinoza and Ruth Leys. While some scholars such as Sara Ahmed use ‘feeling’ and ‘affect’ interchangeably, Brennan distinguishes them. Affects are ‘discerned by feelings,’ she explains, but their production is involuntary and unconscious’ and may involve ‘a shift of mood’; ‘feelings are thoughtful, and affects are thoughtless’ (p.183). 125 Alex Houen, Affect and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 126 DeMaagd, p.22. 60 encourage a challenge to social hegemony by disrupting “normal” sensory experience and expectations. Informing this idea is Lauren Berlant’s feminist materialist theory of affect, which considers genre to be ‘an aesthetic structure of affective expectation’.127 Texts, she argues, are products of the affective socio-political climate in which they are created and can therefore communicate this experiential environment to readers. If a text subverts generic and formal norms, I suggest, then, it also subverts the affective dimensions and expectations embedded within the text itself. Such subversion has the capacity to stimulate new affective encounters, potentially departing from those that dominate structures of white supremacist patriarchy. In the episodic texts I analyse, this potential for sensory disruption combines with temporal and generic experiment, to create a radical form that reflects and advocates the resistance depicted within the novels themselves. Such materialist aspects of my approach further align my thesis with sensory studies. The connection between affect, the haptic, art and culture has been explored by sensory studies scholars such as Paterson who draws on modernist contemporaries including Walter Benjamin and phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to argue that all good art has ‘haptic aesthetics’ because ‘art should be a touching experience – if not physical then definitely emotional’.128 By combining materialist thought with the language-based approach of feminist revision, my primary methodology of close reading deviates from most sensory studies strategies. Howes and Classen detach sensory studies from fields such as psychology and phenomenology because they perceive them as too ‘preoccupied with language’ in ways that neglect ‘different cultures’.129 My method of analysis aligns more 127 Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008) p.4. 128 Paterson, (2008), p.79. 129 Howes and Classen, Ways of Sensing, p.9. Yet, there does not appear to be a consensus on this point among all sensory studies scholars. Jütte argues, for example, that the ‘ongoing discourse on the senses owes much to the phenomenological approach of Edmund 61 closely with that of Donna Haraway, who adopts a material-discursive approach in her own reading of Mitchison’s work.130 Like her theory, my readings suggest that the material and discursive ‘interact in the constitution of bodies’.131 In my first chapter, I argue that the sensory aesthetics of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando trace and perform a process of hierarchical disruption regarding the supremacy of the visual and its associated hegemonies. Bringing together Laura Mulvey’s work on the male gaze, Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the informational gaze, and post-Enlightenment sense hierarchies, it theorises Woolf’s depiction of hegemony in Orlando as a portrayal of what I call the “imperial male gaze” – a visual form of unwanted contact that attempts to regulate the lives of women and the colonised alike. Building on the sensory history outlined in this introduction, I locate the origins of this gaze in nineteenth-century sexist and racist pseudosciences. Following this, the chapter considers how Orlando’s sensory aesthetics undermine and challenge such hegemonic vision/contact whilst providing an alternative, progressive narrative of modernity and its history. Crucial to this is Woolf’s construction and recovery of the queer female subject. This process is attached to the construction of new, intersensorial ways of seeing. Orlando’s emergence as a queer female artist at the novel’s end is presented as an acquisition of such vision. Signalling a more holistic understanding of the self, it is a vision and a “re-visioning” process that indicates Orlando’s increased sense of connection with her own multitudinous identity, and the Other she becomes upon changing sex. This process is intrinsic to Woolf’s simultaneous revision of the biographical. My focus, however, is on how sensory aesthetics craft this process. Establishing the theme of multiplicity and paradox that defines the sensory Husserl (1859 - 1938) claiming that the senses are part of the phenomenal world’ (Robert Jütte, ‘The Senses in Philosophy and Science’ in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire, p.118). Paterson also relies on phenomenological work. 130 Donna Haraway, ‘Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms’ in Material Feminisms ed. by Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman (US: Indiana University Press, 2008) pp.157-187. 131 Alaimo and Hekman describing Haraway’s analytical approach, p.7. 62 aesthetics I explore in all my selected texts, I argue that Orlando’s social-sensory revisions, rely upon often contradictory portrayals of sensory chaos and sensory harmony. Drawing on Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006), I posit that this combination represents a particularly queer intersensory aesthetic that disorients/reorients the reader’s gaze to both reveal and conceal the queer female body. This allows Woolf to not only criticise and resist the enduring influence of suppressive nineteenth-century hegemonies, but to do so whilst evading censorship. The second chapter considers the more personal aspects of Orlando’s recovery project and the queer intersensory aesthetics that facilitate it. I argue that Orlando’s recovery of the queer female body is linked not only to Woolf’s relationship with Vita Sackville-West, but to Sackville-West’s travels in the mid-late 1920s, and her records of them in Passenger to Teheran (1926) and Twelve Days in Persia (1928). Conveying mutual attempts to recover the embodied presence of the absent lover, separated through travel, the sensory elements of each text, create and convey communications between the women that operate as extensions of their correspondence during this period. Intrinsic to all three texts, the photographic and its own sensory and intersensory properties, I suggest, are particularly significant. First, I explore how sensory content in Sackville-West’s travelogues provides additional insights into Orlando’s sensory and especially visual motifs of contact. These both perpetuate and subvert the violent touch of the imperial male gaze. Returning to Orlando, the chapter argues that the photographs in Orlando symbolise and contribute to the recuperative, intersensory aesthetics outlined in Chapter One in ways that directly relate to Sackville-West and her travels. Referring to affective theories of photography and existing Woolf scholarship, I suggest that Orlando itself can be theorised as a modernist photograph album with its own intersensory and communicative properties. The final scenes of the novel can be read as a culmination of this photographic work and the text’s wider personal and political recovery project. 63 Building on the themes of communication in Chapter Two, Chapter Three on Naylor’s Brewster Place, begins to think about sensory aesthetics in relation to community. Drawing on sound studies concerning race and gender, and sensory studies work on orality, the chapter examines the thematic relationship that Naylor presents between the silencing of Black women’s voices and cultures of racist and sexist abuse that surround and touch the Black female body. This is contextualised through consideration of how sensory hegemonies and stereotypes influenced post-war segregation in urban America. Exposing painful continuities in terms of how Black women’s experiential realities are suppressed in the post-war and post-civil rights periods, enables Naylor to illuminate the shortcomings of the civil rights movement from a Black feminist perspective. This generates discussion of complex links between modernist and post-civil rights literature and how Naylor interacts with both via the sensory. The chapter explores how Naylor’s depictions of Black female vocality and aurality resist suppressive discourses. I argue that the text advocates an empathetic form of communication that is healing and empowering within the community of Black women Naylor portrays. Such communication, her novel suggests, provides a foundation for radical socio-political action that can transcend divisions both within and beyond African American communities. With reference to Doveanna S. Fulton’s narrative theory of “Black feminist orality,” the chapter concludes by arguing that the radical possibilities of empathetic communication are embodied by the text itself and by Naylor’s own communicative practices. Chapter Four turns to Naylor’s fourth novel, Bailey’s Cafe, and her archive to explore how the oral-aural and haptic forms examined in Chapter Three, develop in her later work. The theme of bodily and vocal suppression as well as Naylor’s resistance to it, persists via sensory aesthetics in Bailey’s Cafe. However, in this novel, the focus shifts towards exposing and challenging the demonisation and policing of Black women’s sexuality. Music is as important in this endeavour as voice and orality. This chapter is the first piece of scholarly work to explore 64 Naylor’s engagement with sexuality and music through her archive. The archive sheds light on how Naylor interrogates the construction of women as “whores” in relation to the novel’s post-war setting and its interaction with Judeo-Christian discourses. It also indicates Naylor’s awareness of how perceptions of jazz and blues shaped raced and gendered perceptions of the “whore” figure. Prompting further consideration of relationships between modernist and post-civil rights literature, the archive confirms that this text, like Brewster Place, engages with history to address enduring contemporary issues. The second half of the chapter argues that Naylor reclaims and revises “whoredom” in Bailey’s Cafe whilst recovering and participating in a women’s jazz and blues tradition. Naylor gives voice to the suppressed experiences of Black women and presents alternative, empowered narratives about their embodied lives. Archived references to contemporary female vocalists such as Joan Armatrading and Jevetta Steele illuminate and aid this process. Throughout the chapter I consider how this revisionary project builds upon Brewster Place. As I briefly outline towards the chapter’s end, it also anticipates Naylor’s later work for stage and screen. I conclude the chapter by positing that threads of orality in Naylor’s texts not only illuminate their inter-relationships, but symbolise the empathetic communication presented within and by Brewster Place on a larger scale between and beyond texts. Like the communication between Woolf’s and Sackville-West’s publications, the haptic orality of Naylor’s work allows us to theorise her neglected oeuvre, more comprehensively, as a set of interactions that radically reach out to one another and their audiences. My fifth chapter examines Mitchison’s first feminist science fiction novel and the haptic language within this that concerns and shapes depictions of extrasensory communication. Written in the same mid-century period in which Brewster Place is set, MOAS addresses racial and gender-based inequality in the context of the Cold War. Using research on the extrasensory by Blackman, Howes, and Pamela Thurschwell, alongside race and gender-based histories of 65 the Cold War, this chapter argues that Mitchison’s depictions of telepathy speak to contemporary fears and fantasies surrounding embodied life in the west, as connected not only to the national Other but to the perceived otherness of women and people of colour within powerful western nations. This is linked to modernism and the modernist period both thematically and contextually. The resurgent (pseudo)scientific interest in extrasensory phenomena during the Cold War, first explored in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elucidates continuity between the embodied dreams, concerns and issues that are exhibited within each of these specific periods of modernity. In one sense, Mitchison’s depictions of telepathy offer up idealistic visions of sensory and emotional connection. Gesturing towards feminist notions of utopia, these celebrate elements of contemporary race and gender-based activism. Intervening in masculine sci-fi conventions, they present a mode of getting in touch with the Other that finds kinship with the empathetic communications presented by Naylor. However, as I explore in the latter half of the chapter, these utopian dreams are undermined by covert dystopian gestures. These are also embedded in telepathic touch and point to subterranean levels of control, surveillance and invasion that epitomise the often-discreet nature of Cold War tactics and propaganda. By combining utopia and dystopia through the communicative extremes embedded in the extrasensory, I argue, Mitchison not only intensifies her challenge to generic sci-fi norms, but encourages her readers to see beyond idealistic, binary thinking. Her sensory work advocates attempts to locate truly radical and empathetic forms of communication that might counter the enduringly disembodied, masculine and rationalist logic of modernity. The final chapter explores how Mitchison expands upon these ideas in her second sci-fi novel, Solution Three. This text, I argue, presents modernity during the mid-1970s Cold War era as a hypnotic, mechanical and numbing force. This portrayal harks back to Simmel’s perspective on the early twentieth century. Despite its moral and peaceful attestations, the 66 future Earth society that Mitchison depicts, continues to breed hegemony. Since hypnosis has strong modernist links, the significant inclusion of this extrasensory phenomenon connects the novel’s themes to the early twentieth century whilst reiterating the ongoing need to disrupt the supremacy of the visual. In her critique of the computer, Mitchison updates this understanding of an emotionally-detached modernity in ways that remain relevant to today’s world of burgeoning artificial intelligence. This is a Cold War version of the technologically-mediated sensory crisis that Danius perceives in modernism. Mitchison’s novel raises complex questions about the future of technology and societal biases without providing definitive answers, ending on an optimistic note that encourages readers to contemplate a more progressive shaping of Earth’s future. In the second part of the chapter, I argue that extrasensory phenomena in Mitchison’s sci-fi serve as a bridge between her early twentieth-century writing and her later work on Africa. They become metaphors for the transformative shift that occurs at this stage of her writing career, especially concerning her increased desire to transgress western boundaries, and therefore the western sensorium. Particularly crucial to this is MOAS’ revision of Orlando through which Mitchison both pays homage to her modernist roots and notes her need to move on from the norms of this period, especially concerning perceptions of race. While Mitchison’s engagement with race is more progressive than Woolf’s, it remains problematic in other ways. However, the open-ended nature of her sci-fi, does suggest recognition of the need for more diverse voices and perspectives, such as those subsequently expressed by Naylor, to adequately address and connect with what cannot be fully comprehended from a white perspective alone. Woolf, Naylor and Mitchison are all searching for their own communities in ways that are reflected by their simultaneously haptic and feminist sensory aesthetics. They are all socio-political outsiders in terms of gender, and indeed, their left-wing views. For Woolf, this has an additionally queer dimension. For Naylor, race and American identity contribute to her sense 67 of national ostracization. Similarly, for Mitchison, her Scottishness, though part of an elite Scottish-Irish background, led her to feel culturally out of place among the middle and upper class groups she encountered in the south of England. In their writing, all three women were seeking new connections, and a sense of self-healing that speaks to each of their mental health struggles and the nurse training that Naylor and Mitchison both undertook in their early adult lives. In bringing these three women writers together, I, too, am creating and communicating my own new literary community – one that transcends usual temporal and spatial boundaries to put women in touch with one another who would not normally co-exist on the academic page.132 As Delsandro states, such unconventional groupings are crucial to reading and revising women’s writing in nuanced, valuable ways.133 The structure of my chapters reflects this unconventionality and the haptic nature of feminist revisionary work. Each author section becomes its own episode connected by the overarching work of the thesis. Furthermore, the two chapters that comprise each author section operate as a pair, intrinsically in contact with one another. In each pairing, the first chapter is more theoretical while the second does more biographical work.134 This structure is a symbolic homage to the temporal and generic experiment in women’s radical writing traditions, as is my decision to centralise the Naylor chapters. Emphasising the thesis’ focus on race and gender intersections, these chapters become a bridge between the differing attitudes towards race presented by Woolf and Mitchison, as well as how consideration of Naylor enables more sensitive navigation of these portrayals. Resultantly, the chapters do not follow the texts chronologically in terms of publication, but 132 It is important to note that Mitchison and Woolf did occasionally interact. While I have not found any evidence to suggest they ever met in person, archival records reveal some correspondence. The Keep archives in Sussex contain two letters sent from Mitchison to Woolf in 1938, both in praise of Three Guineas, and the National library of Scotland lists one letter sent from Woolf to Mitchison in 1920 among its archived documents. Furthermore, Jenni Calder’s biography of Mitchison, The Burning Glass (2019), notes that Mitchison once met Woolf’s brother, Adrian, and later described him as ‘a shy creature’ (p.186). 133 Delsandro, p.12. 134 This is not to say that theory and biography should be applied separately in literary analyses. Rather, I emphasise their inherent connection. However, in this project, it seemed prudent to discuss sensory theory before turning the sensory lens towards a focus on biographical factors. 68 create a new sensory timeline, ordering the texts by setting. By refiguring the standard thesis structure in this way, I aim to produce radical and original work that echoes and celebrates the unconventional, boundary-breaking narratives of Woolf, Naylor and Mitchison themselves. 69 Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Intersensorial Perception In the final chapter of Virginia Woolf’s mock-biography, Orlando (1928), the eponymous protagonist – famously based on Woolf’s friend and lover Vita Sackville-West – experiences a violent sensory shock upon arrival in the early twentieth century. Synaesthesically presenting sound as a tactile force, Woolf writes: the clock ticked louder and louder until there was a terrific explosion…Orlando leapt as if she had been violently struck on the head. Ten times she was struck. In fact, it was ten o'clock in the morning. It was the eleventh of October…1928. It was the present moment.135 When Orlando subsequently jumps into her motor-car, the sensory assault continues in visual and aural forms. She finds herself bombarded not only by the ‘violently and hideously cacophonous’ ‘uproar of the street,’ but by fleeting images of the cityscape as she speeds through it (160). The ‘red cowls of chimneys,’ ‘omnibuses,’ ‘white-faced drivers’ and even, ‘sponges, bird-cages’ and ‘boxes of green American cloth,’ merge together to form a ‘raging torrent’– something Orlando only avoids being consumed by because she ‘does not allow these sights to sink into her mind’ (173). Presenting modernity as a destructive vortex from which Orlando must shield herself, these scenes initially seem to cohere with the early twentieth-century observations of sociologist Georg Simmel. Simmel argued that the modern person strives to deflect ‘innumerable things’ that ‘appear intolerable to the senses’ by way of self-preservation.136 While Simmel warned that such sensory numbing may lead to social 135 Virginia Woolf, Orlando (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) p.173. 136 Georg Simmel, ‘Sociology of the Senses’ (1907) in Simmel on Culture eds. D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997) pp.118-119. 70 detachment, Woolf’s novel offers an optimistic alternative. Orlando’s refusal to be engulfed by the ‘torrent’ instead prompts an empowered self-revelation. Having lived for over three hundred years and changed sex from male to female, Orlando suddenly finds herself peering into the ‘tunnel’ of her past (184). Seconds later, her surroundings gain a new and startling ‘vividness,’ ‘as if she had a microscope stuck to her eye’ (185). Watching the ‘vast view,’ Orlando’s mind engages with the material world in a new way. The ‘innumerable sights’ of her life finally become ‘something tolerable, comprehensible’: ‘a forest with glades branching here and there…in an incessant chequer of light and shade’ (187-9). Enabling Orlando to view poetry and her own poetic endeavour as a ‘secret transaction,’ a ‘voice answering a voice’ that has value beyond ‘money,’ this moment – punctuated by feelings of ‘ecstasy!’ – affirms the text’s construction of a queer and artistic female subject (187, 168). Constituting part of a wider effort to resist the erasure and reductive misrepresentation of women during Britain’s imperial peak, it cements what many critics have identified as Woolf’s dual rejection of androcentric and heteronormative biographical conventions and contemporary censorship laws. Dismantling boundaries between culture and nature, as well as mind and body via the interplay of light and darkness, the revelation emphasises the importance of the sensory, particularly the visual, within this resistance project. The realisation of a new female subjectivity is presented, via multi-sensory language, as a new way of seeing. This indicates a new epistemology – one that illuminates the often unseen and unrecognised ontologies of queer women in Woolf’s present day. In this chapter, I examine multi-sensory aesthetics – the language of colour, smell, taste, sound, and touch – throughout the text and how these come to generate such a visually-inflected moment of radicality. As the transition from Simmelian sensory attack to sensory pleasure illustrates, these aesthetics are multifaceted, and sometimes paradoxical, in terms of what they convey about the modern 71 world.137 Haptically, they embody the tension between unwanted and desirable contact that I outline in my thesis’ introductory chapter. This doubleness not only enables Woolf to radically “re-vision” the biographical form whilst exposing and resisting what Brian Harrison calls the correlation between anti-feminism and imperialism, but to evade censorship whilst doing so.138 Woolf’s engagement with the sensory in Orlando works to both conceal and reveal the queer female body in ways that criticise the enduring influence of suppressive nineteenth-century gender norms, while highlighting the possibility of overcoming them within the twentieth century. Bringing together Laura Mulvey’s work on the male gaze, Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the informational gaze, and post-Enlightenment hierarchical notions of the senses, the first half of the chapter theorises Woolf’s depiction of hegemony in Orlando as a portrayal of what I call the “imperial male gaze.” This way of seeing suppresses the experiential realities of British women and the colonized alike. Such a gaze is not only evident in early twentieth-century propaganda, but signifies the enduring impact both of nineteenth-century observation-based pseudo-sciences concerning the body and the west’s male-dominated literary tradition. More broadly, it indicates modernity’s obsession with the visual and how this contributes not only to Simmel’s impression of numbing sensory bombardment, but to what philosophers such as Walter D. Mignolo, have considered to be a loss of sensation and affect – a lost sense of connection to the self and others.139 Orlando brings a gendered dimension to this notion of lost connection. However, Woolf omits, obscures, and perpetuates the racial injustice that Mignolo’s work helps to expose and resist. The second half of the chapter considers how 137 There is no evidence to show that Woolf definitely read Simmel’s work. Critics such as Anna Jones Abraham, however, have noted the influential nature of his ideas during this period while analysing similar observations in Woolf’s writing. See Anna Jones Abramson, ‘Beyond Modernist Shock: Virginia Woolf’s Absorbing Atmosphere,’ Journal of Modern Literature, Vol.38, No.4 (2015) 39-56. 138 Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978) p.75 & p.231. 139 As explored in my introductory chapter alongside a brief discussion of Heidegger’s and Rancière’s similar thoughts. 72 Orlando’s sensory aesthetics undermine and challenge the hegemonic vision outlined in part one. Constituted by experimental form as well as language, these aesthetics are radical and intersensory – a sensory studies term that refers to the interconnected nature of the senses. Drawing upon DeMaagd’s Dissensuous Modernism (2022), I argue that intersensoriality helps to envision a new social-sensory order within which gendered hierarchies are dissolved. In considering race and sexuality as well as gender, I expand the scope of DeMaagd’s focus.140 Woolf creates a new narrative of female subjectivity, depicting a multifaceted, sensorially complex and sensitive vision that transcends the “logic” of patriarchal imperialism and resists social and artistic manifestations of modernity’s suppressive, heteronormative impulse. Whilst also drawing upon visual culture studies that consider the dynamic between absence and presence, I argue that Woolf’s intersensory text points to the limitations of relying on visual faculties alone; it unveils the radical possibilities of the unseen in social and literary contexts. This can be understood as a re-vision of modernity, biography, and related historical narratives. Using other writings by Woolf, feminist theories of affect and Fretwell’s work on psychophysics, I suggest that this history traces a recovery of the sensation and affect that hegemonic strands of modernity have attempted to quash. I iterate the particularly queer nature of this recovery, as manifested within Woolf’s depiction of the intersensory, through reference to Sara Ahmed’s work on disorientation and queer phenomenology. Woolf’s intersensory aesthetics not only make room for the usually suppressed phenomenologies of queer women but can direct the readerly gaze towards other marginalised subjects. In making this argument, this chapter, like my thesis more widely, participates in the current sensory turn within modernist studies, highlighting important convergences between sensory studies and feminist modernist studies. By bringing together feminist and postcolonial theories of visual culture, I 140 DeMaagd does mention queerness and racial inequality in her introduction, but gender is the main focus within her Woolf chapter on Between the Acts. She briefly discusses racial purity in relation to Fascism and the Nazis too (p.115). 73 develop the raced and gendered elements of sensory hegemony discussed by sensory studies scholars. My focus on Woolf introduces a queer context to such sensory research. This, and its engagement with affect theory – a concept notably neglected by most sensory studies scholarship – emphasises the value and relevance of feminist modernist studies to the concerns of sensory studies. Conversely, sensory studies enables re-evaluation of the critical emphasis upon visuality within feminist theory.141 In Sensing the Past (2008), also cited by DeMaagd, Mark M. Smith critiques the perpetuation of sensory hegemony in studies of the senses. Intersensorial approaches, he stresses, evade this perpetuation.142 By bringing an explicitly intersensorial approach to this chapter, I not only join DeMaagd in introducing this term to feminist modernist studies but use it as a strategy to emphasise the importance of existing visual culture work without risking such perpetuation myself. The chapter brings together a combination of theoretical and historical contexts that form a nuanced approach both to Woolf studies and Orlando. In visual terms, critics have already focused on the text’s use of photographs and illustrations.143 This chapter aligns more closely with the work of Erica L. Johnson, Victoria Smith, and Sherron E. Knopp who have made use of visual referents in their analyses of Orlando without discussing photography or portraiture. Like Johnson, I bring the visual into conversation with modernist studies and Woolf studies concerning ideas of nation. I respond to Melanie Micir’s recent call for a renewed focus upon genre in Orlando analyses.144 In their work on the photographic, both Floriane Reviron-Piégay and Emily Setina, have drawn 141 By this I mean that a greater emphasis on the multisensory and intersensory is now needed in feminist scholarship to build upon important and rigorous visual work by scholars such as Mulvey. 142 Smith, Sensing the Past Seeing: Hearing, Smelling, Tasting and Touching in History (California: University of California Press, 2008) p.126. 143 See Talia Schaffer, 1994; Helen Wussow, 1997; George Piggford, 1997; Natasha Aleksiuk, 2000; Erika Flesher, 2006; Emily Setina, 2007; Christine Fouirnaies, 2016; and Floriane Reviron-Piégay, 2017. 144 Melanie Micir, ‘The Sense of Unending: Revisiting Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography’ in The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives, ed. by Melanie Micir (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 74 parallels between Woolf’s visual experimentation and her subversion of life-writing. I make similar arguments but also consider how this relationship operates beyond the text’s literal images. This defines my own contribution to the recent sensation-based development in Orlando scholarship, especially evident in Sentencing Orlando (2018).145 The Imperial Male Gaze In Orlando’s opening scene, set within the first Elizabethan era, gendered and raced power divisions are mapped onto physical bodies. Figured as a masculine, imperial oppressor in the novel’s first line – ‘he – for there could be no doubt of his sex…was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters’ – the adolescent Orlando represents white male power in his agency and agility (11). While he can ‘lunge and plunge and slice the air with his blade’ in the ‘vast’ attic room of his aristocratic family home, the Moor, whose head was ‘struck…from the shoulders of a vast pagan…in the barbarian fields of Africa’ by ‘Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather,’ has been deprived of an autonomous, embodied life not only in death, but within the colonised territory he once inhabited (11).146 In their control of physical space, Orlando and his ancestral forefathers demonstrate a sensory freedom, ableness and violent touch that has destroyed the Moor’s sensory capabilities. The compressed features of the head – the ‘sunken cheeks’ and ‘shrunk black lips’ – point to the sensory manipulation and bodily destruction of imperial conquest as well as its effort to diminish native-controlled land (11). The visual is especially aligned with such destruction in this moment. Through Orlando’s 145 Elsa Hogburg and Amy Bromley, ed., Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). See chapters by Elsa Hogburg, Jane Goldman, Jane de Gay, and Anna Frøsig. 146 It is important to note that Britain’s imperial power during the Elizabethan period was not as extensive as Woolf’s novel suggests. In fact, the Ottoman Empire was arguably far superior in its strength. Perhaps this is historical inaccuracy on Woolf’s part, or the scene is simply intended to represent contemporary imperial power and ideology in the early twentieth century. For more on the Ottoman Empire in the Elizabethan Age, see Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 75 ‘violet’ eyes, the contrastingly eyeless Moor is himself perceived as territory to be conquered and possessed; he is reduced to an insentient, passive space whose existence is defined by the intrusive contact of the imperialist alone (12).147 Described as ‘the colour of an old football’ with ‘coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut,’ the shrivelled head of Orlando’s ‘enemy’ is perceived as an object of acquisition, a remnant of what has been reduced to an exoticized game (11). Michelle Cliff contextualises this scene whilst discussing the imperial, western obsession with the African head in visual terms. The ‘imperial European gaze,’ she writes, scrutinized African heads in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were endlessly sketched, pictured, and collected in shrunken forms, in ways that attempted to prove African inferiority.148 Propelled by the advent of evolutionary theory, nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences such as phrenology and physiognomy, sought to hierarchize race through their respective analyses of skulls and facial features.149 Influenced by physiognomy, the colonial administrator, Herbert Hope Risley, used nose measurements to divide Indian people into different social castes.150 The American physician, Samuel George Morton – a keen skull collector – used phrenology to argue that Caucasians possessed superior intelligence.151 The victims of such a gaze, Cliff writes, became ‘twice-captive, ending up in glass jars on a shelf’ in western museums, as scientific specimens.152 In using ‘head’ and ‘skull’ to denote the Moor’s 147 A colour choice that looks overwhelmingly close to “violent” on the page. 148 So were the heads of colonised peoples and people of colour more generally. Michelle Cliff, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Imperial Gaze: A Glance Askance’ in Virginia Woolf: Emerging Perspectives: Selected Papers from the Third Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf ed. by Mark Hussey and Vara Neverow (US: Pace University Press, 1994) pp.97-98. 149 As my introduction notes, this is discussed by sensory historians such as Andrew Kettler and Mark M. Smith. 150 Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (US: University of California Press, 1997) p.202. 151 Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). 152 Cliff, p.98. It is partly due to this history that a decolonisation drive in 2020, led to the permanent removal of a large collection of shrunken heads at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Belonging to, but also created by the Achuar and Shuar people of Ecuador and Peru, these heads, displayed for over eighty years, were commercially obtained, and later presented in ways, researchers found, that reinforced racial stereotypes of primitiveness and 76 remains, Woolf’s language connects physiognomy and phrenology, a fascination with both the flesh and bones of the Other, to imperial seeing (11). Further, Woolf’s transition from ‘head’ to ‘skull’ suggests that the dehumanisation inherent in such perspectives can be understood as a process in which the layers of the self are gradually stripped away.153 While the flesh of the Moor’s head remains physically intact, the linguistic shift to ‘skull’ erases his skin and the identity it represents. Anticipating the subsequent moment in which Orlando flees from Shakespeare's gaze, as mentioned in my introductory chapter, this language simultaneously establishes a disparity between Orlando’s vision and a more insightful literary gaze. Alluding both to the Moor in Othello – a play that Orlando later watches – and the famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy addressing Yorick’s skull in Hamlet, Woolf stresses that Orlando, unlike Shakespeare, does not look upon the Moor or the skull in ways that acknowledge their humanity.154 By gesturing towards pseudoscientific contexts in vision-oriented terms whilst distinguishing Orlando from Shakespeare, the beginning of Woolf’s novel, despite its Elizabethan setting, speaks to hierarchical post-Enlightenment conceptions of the senses. For René Descartes and other influential philosophers of this period, vision was at the apex of the sense hierarchy because it was perceived as the most valuable in terms of acquiring knowledge.155 Of the other four main senses in the west, hearing typically came second while the proximity senses of smell, taste and touch were third, fourth and fifth respectively.156 This model (and its Aristotelian origin) was often used to reinforce gendered and racialised savagery (Human remains in the Pitt Rivers Museum,’ <https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/human-remains-pitt-rivers-museum>, accessed 28/10/2022). 153 Woolf first refers to the Moor as a “head” but uses “skull” in the two subsequent references. 154 By gesturing towards Shakespeare’s complex, multi-faceted portrayal of Othello and Hamlet’s existential interaction with Yorick’s skull, Woolf acknowledges Shakespeare’s profound insight into both individual and universal human experience. She is simultaneously challenging androcentric literary cultures by embedding these allusions within her own radical narrative about recovery of the queer female body. 155 Howes, Empire of the Senses, pp.10-11. 156 Ibid. 77 dualisms, and the Cartesian mind/body binary.157 While the “higher” senses were conflated with the mind, masculinity and “white cultural sophistication,” the “lower” faculties were associated with the body, femininity and “savage primitiveness”.158 In the early 1800s, the philosopher and naturalist Lorenz Oken even devised a racialised sensory hierarchy that placed the European “eye-man” at the top, and the African “skin-man” at the bottom.159 Orlando’s opening paragraphs not only highlight this association between vision and white male power, but present a way of seeing that perpetuates hierarchical thinking and the social segregation it represents. Recalling the disembodied nature of the eye according to the Cartesian mind-body dualism, Orlando’s objectifying gaze upon the shrunken, bodiless face of one who cannot gaze back, is distanced from the Moor’s embodied reality. As Mignolo writes of modernity’s oppressive rationale, Orlando’s gaze represents thinking and action detached from the sensory-emotional life of the colonial Other. Referred to as “the darker side of western modernity,” such detachment is a form of suppression, of pressing down, that reflects and fuels the ‘dispensability (or expendability) of human life’ at the heart of colonialism.160 Orlando’s gaze, propped up by the vast wealth he has inherited from imperial ancestors, participates in this elitist modern project. Symbolically blind to the suffering and exploitation of the Moor and his compatriots, it is a gaze that overlooks and fails to see, even when appearing to scrutinise. Orlando’s gaze is inseparable from what Mary Louise Pratt theorises as the ‘informational gaze’ of the imperialistic traveller.161 This gaze, she explains, disembodies 157 Ibid. 158 Ibid. 159 Ibid. 160 Mignolo, p.6. While also pointing to Simmel’s fears regarding sensory numbing in the modern world, it evidences a racially-inflected version of what Jacques Rancière has termed a forgetting of one’s ‘debt to the Other’ – a concept of emotional detachment, fuelled by the avarice of twentieth-century modernity, that is, in turn, indebted to Martin Heidegger’s ‘forgetting-of-being’ theory. These ideas are explained more fully in my introduction. See Heidegger, Being and Time (1927) ed. by Edward Robinson (London: HarperCollins, 2008); and Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). 161 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (USA: Routledge, 1992) This is a study of European exploration discourses, written almost exclusively by men. 78 space; it ‘minimizes human presence’ in the landscape whilst seeking only practical information about its use-value and otherness.162 Pratt’s theory becomes even more relevant to Orlando in moments where the novel’s protagonist (as male) gazes at the landscape. When he surveys the English countryside from a hill on his family’s land, his quantifying view and privileged sense of ownership are clear. The ‘heath was theirs,’ he observes, ‘and the forest’ (14). So were ‘the pheasant and the deer, the fox, the badger and the butterfly’ (14). Orlando’s desire to possess and control is already satiated in this home environment; it is only later in the Jacobean period, when Orlando travels to Turkey as an English ambassador, that the dehumanising quality of his informational gaze emerges more conspicuously. Looking over Constantinople, Orlando contemplates that ‘the inhospitable Asian mountains’ surrounding him are ‘the very breath’ of the country’s ‘strident multicoloured and barbaric population’ (73).163 He cannot see the ‘eyes or noses’ of the ‘turbaned pilgrims’ below (72). This language subordinates and erases the embodied reality of the foreign Other; like the Moor, the people of Constantinople are dismissively merged with the landscape and its perceived opposition to English civilisation. No ‘view,’ Orlando reflects, could ‘be less like the counties of Surrey and Kent or the towns of London and Tunbridge Wells’ (72). He is startled, then, when he subsequently recognises ‘a passion of affection’ for this ‘wild panorama’ (73). Finding himself able to ‘gaze and gaze’ at the view with pleasure, he is ‘entranced’ and resultantly wonders whether ‘one of his ancestors had taken up with a Circassian peasant woman’ during the Crusades (73). This indicates a particular feature of the informational gaze, identified by Sten Pultz Moslund as the tendency amongst westerners to ‘put racism forward as love’ when viewing and describing non-western landscapes.164 The splendour of Turkey under Orlando’s 162 Pratt, pp.123-126. 163 This harks back to Classen’s claim that the racial Other is stereotypically aligned with colour whereas the powerful are associated with light and form (A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire, p.3). 164 Sten Pultz Moslund, Literature’s Sensuous Geographies: Postcolonial Matters of Place (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) p.139. 79 gaze can only be understood in exoticized, objectifying terms that relate to his own inheritance; it is a superficial admiration attached to imperialistic viewership. For Woolf, such viewership and the sensory division underpinning it are also patriarchal. The absence of the Moor’s body in the opening scene is simultaneously indicative of female absence. Orlando must ‘steal away from his mother’ to use his sword (11). Given that Orlando is ‘disturbed’ by the sight of his mother, who never physically appears in the text, his action of sometimes cutting ‘the cord so that the skull bumped on the floor’ perhaps suggests a self-imposed umbilical severance (11). Orlando’s violent actions point to the restrictions imposed on the environments and sensory experiences not only of the colonised, then, but on women within powerful imperial nations. Anticipating Woolf’s 1938 novel-essay Three Guineas, in which she asserts that as a woman, she has ‘no country,’ the colonial image emphasises women’s enduring lack of influence in the British public sphere.165 Certainly, after the First World War, women were excluded from the newly formed League of Nations, and most new and existing higher education and professional settings.166 Before the year of Orlando’s publication, women were without an all-encompassing form of suffrage.167 Until 1948, a woman’s nationality was even legally changed to that of her husband upon marriage if it differed from her own.168 As Jane Garrity argues, these facts indicate that women were not regarded as fully-fledged British citizens.169 Nor were they considered appropriate subject matter for life-writing. Victorian and Edwardian literature of this genre was notoriously androcentric. This included the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), compiled by Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen.170 Reflecting this, the gaze presented at the beginning of Woolf’s novel 165 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. by Anna Snaith (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2015) p.286. 166 Jane Garrity, Step-daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003) p.49. 167 Garrity, p.45. 168 Garrity, p.46. 169 Ibid. 170 Micir, p.119. 80 is attached not only to Orlando himself, but to a narrating biographer who, in the first half of the text, consistently relegates female characters to the margins. While praising his subject, he reduces the worth and purpose of Orlando’s mother to her son’s existence when he exclaims: ‘happy the mother who bears…the life of such a one!’ (12). Similarly, he glosses over Orlando’s early female lovers, including a fiancée who is mentioned only once. Revelling in Orlando’s imperial, masculine swordplay, his viewpoint, as Jean Kennard notes, is explicitly hegemonic.171 Orlando highlights how women as well as racial Others were conceptually positioned against the knowledge and power associated with vision. As DeMaagd summarises, ‘men were considered the more logical’ and therefore ‘better equipped to see’.172 In contrast, ‘popular thinking maintained that women were governed by their bodies, which interfered with their ability to see clearly’.173 Unsurprisingly, the aforementioned pseudo-sciences were as marred by sexism as racism in their corporeal observations. In a partly phrenological work, the French polymath, Gustave Le Bon, argued that most women were less intelligent than white men because they had smaller, gorilla-like brains. 174 Similar sexist and racist discourse was rife in early sexology as it strove to explain “sexual deviances” in women through visible bodily features. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, scientists William H. Flower and James Murie asserted that the buttocks and labia of Black women signified their deviance from “normal” white female sexuality.175 Subsequently, Havelock Ellis posited that an enlarged labia or elongated clitoris made women, especially Black women, more susceptible to lesbianism, 171 Jean Kennard, ‘Power and Sexual Ambiguity: The Drednought Hoax, “The Voyage Out”, “Mrs Dalloway” and “Orlando”, Journal of Modern Literature, 20 (1996) p.161. 172 DeMaagd, p.5. 173 Ibid. 174 Gina Rippon, The Gendered Brain : The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain (London: Penguin, 2020) p.6. 175 Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (USA: Cornell University, 1985) p.88. 81 prostitution and hysteria.176 Indicative of these epistemologies and their nineteenth-century origins, the hegemonic gaze that Woolf presents in Orlando is one in which imperialist and patriarchal ideologies converge to erase, misrepresent and control the embodied realities of women and the colonised alike. It is a gaze that coheres not only with Pratt’s informational gaze, but with what Laura Mulvey has theorised as “the male gaze”.177 Constituted by scopophilia – a form of pleasure derived from looking at the female body while reducing women to passive roles – this mode of seeing and its heteronormative assumptions reflect and perpetuate the erasure and objectification of women’s embodied lives.178 Gender-based objectification is evident when Orlando perceives women as ‘roses’ (19) he must obtain before withering. Similarly, when he initially sees Sasha – a Russian princess who becomes his first meaningful love interest – he compares her to ‘a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds’ (24). Here, racial politics infuse a traditionally gendered division between masculine culture and feminine nature.179 An aspect of the Enlightenment’s dualistic understanding of mind and body, this division permeated the work of prominent twentieth-century thinkers.180 These moments recall how landscape has long been personified in female and feminine terms. As Gillian Rose argues, ‘landscapes are often seen in terms of the female body and the beauty of nature’.181 Paralleling how, according to Pratt, foreign peoples disappear into the landscape under the dehumanising 176 Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race (USA: Duke University Press, 2012) p.11. 177 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen, Vol. 16 (1975) 6-18. 178 These heteronormative assumptions are implied but not directly addressed by Mulvey. 179 Intending to capture what Orlando perceives as Sasha’s uniqueness, these exoticized images of natural phenomena are bound up with internalised racial stereotypes. The references to ‘melon,’ ‘pineapple’ and ‘olive tree’ particularly elucidate western colonial desire to taste the foreign, both literally and figuratively, as part of a possessive and controlling form of contact. Moreover, the juxtaposition between ‘fox in the snow’ and the Mediterranean ‘olive tree’ indicate Orlando’s ignorance both of Sasha herself and of racial identity more widely; he connects her with cold and warm climates simultaneously. 180 For instance, Ellis asserted that women were ‘the embodiments of the restful responsiveness of Nature’ (Garrity, p.72) 181 Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity, 1993) p.87. 82 imperial gaze, the male gaze (discussed by feminists such as Mulvey and Rose) merges the female body with land. Women’s bodies, like the Moor’s, are viewed as territory to be controlled and conquered. Orlando’s early obsession with landscape and his desire to ‘feel the earth’s spine beneath him’ can be understood as an example of the Mulveyan scopophilic perspective, as can his imperial attraction to the Orient as a feminised landscape (15).182 Further highlighting the imperialistic nature of this land and body merger, is Orlando’s decision, as poet, to assign the names Clorinda, Favilla and Euphrosyne to three of his female lovers (21). Reiterating the role of literature in perpetuating imperialistic patriarchal ideologies, he defines these women in the same way that, as Moslund has shown, the imperialist renames conquered territory to affirm possessive power.183 In renaming them, Orlando attempts to define his lovers solely in relation to himself.184 When Orlando returns to England as a woman, this naming power disappears. Instead, Captain Bartolus directs her eyes for her as she arrives in London by ship, reeling off the names of notable landmarks including ‘Westminster Abbey’ and ‘The Houses of Parliament' (98). Frustrated by ‘plaguey’ skirts and one sailor’s profound shock at the sight of her ankles, Orlando realises during this voyage that being a woman in England means ‘conventionality…slavery…denying her love, fettering her limbs, pursing her lips, and restraining her tongue’ (97). As Jaime Hovey observes, colonialist images are repeatedly used to connect imperial violence to the subordination of British women and the bodily restraint imposed on them within their own country.185 Unsurprisingly, this subordination is most keenly 182 The subterranean violence of this attraction, of racism ‘put forward as love,’ is even anticipated by the fact that Orlando’s initial desire for Sasha is compared to grasping ‘a sword in his hand’ and charging ‘a more daring foe than Pole or Moor’ (25). 183 Moslund, p.89. 184 When they begin to display behaviours that do not conform to Orlando’s vision of them, therefore, he ends his relationships with them. He abandons Clorinda, for example, when he becomes ‘sickened’ by her Christian efforts to ‘reform…his sins’ (21). 185 Jaime Hovey, “Kissing a Negress in the Dark”: Englishness as a masquerade in Woolf’s Orlando,’ PMLA, 112 (1997) p.400. 83 felt by Orlando in the Victorian era. In this oppressive atmosphere, figured as a spreading ‘damp’ and ‘antipathetic to her in the extreme,’ Orlando feels that her own gaze is being ‘forced by a superior power down upon her knees;’ the pressure to conform is felt as a haptic, downward-pressing experience (133, 141, 135). This sensation, occurring when she passes Buckingham Palace, indicates Britain’s overwhelming imperial power, and reiterates its attachment to a gendered sensory hierarchy in which visuality is masculinised. This section of the text not only reinforces the connection between such hierarchy and Mignolo’s description of modernity but brings a gendered perspective to it. Becoming an extended and haptic metaphor for the destructive effects of Britain’s expanding empire and economy, ‘the damp’ of the nineteenth century not only affects ‘outward things’ – leaving every house ‘smothered in greenery’ and turning every garden into ‘a shrubbery, a wilderness’ or ‘a maze’ – but destroys all ‘feelings…of warmth’ (133) too. The drive for progress, as Mignolo suggests, is correlated with a loss of human connection.186 For Woolf, this striking of ‘hearts and minds,’ particularly leads to the sexes drawing ‘further and further apart’ (133). Women’s lives, she elaborates, are reduced to ‘a succession of childbirths’ that bring the ‘British Empire…into existence’ (133). As Garrity argues, this was an era in which women became objects of service to the Empire; women’s purpose was to birth and support the nation’s men from within the private sphere.187 As a way of seeing, this ideology becomes manifest in contemporary propaganda, which consistently idealized conformity to such a female persona from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. In the imagery of war enlistment posters, for example, Jo Fox shows that women were presented as something for which to fight and defend; they were trophies for the bravest of soldiers.188 In the image of Britannia, women even became a triumphant symbol 186 Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: On (De)Coloniality, Border Thinking and Epistemic Disobedience,’ Postcolonial Studies, 14: 3 (2011) p.275. 187 Garrity, p.68. 188 Jo Fox, ‘Women in World War One propaganda,’ The British Library, <www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/women-in-world-war-one-propaganda>, published 2014, accessed 27/11/22. 84 of Empire itself.189 The statue of Queen Victoria that Orlando looks upon as a ‘garish erection’ that ‘no wind, rain, sun, or thunder, could ever demolish’ is a similar iconised and masculine image (135). Through both Victoria and Britannia, the female body was seen and shown to represent the ‘nation’s moral rectitude, its virtue and innocence…and its determination to overcome the enemy’.190 Distanced from the realities of female embodied life – as emphasised not only when Orlando acknowledges that gestating bodies are concealed with ‘crinolines’ but when the biographer directs our attention away from Orlando’s own birth experience and towards Kew Gardens instead – such portrayals emphasise that men decided who and what were worth seeing in the context of Britain’s imperial age (136). Woolf’s depiction of the ‘damp’ Victorian period correlates general notions of bodily suppression in the nineteenth century and more specific oppressions experienced by women (133). It emphasises how a sensory approach to history can help us to better understand the nature and origins of these oppressions. The prevalence of the visual in Woolf’s text is partly reflective of the primacy of visual culture in modern society, as cited by Mulvey, for instance, in relation to the rise of twentieth-century cinema.191 However, Orlando’s historicised portrayal of the imperial male gaze – as that which reflects the Cartesian sensory hierarchy and its disembodiment of sight – traces this modern visual prevalence back to a widespread post-Enlightenment culture of suppression: a dominating epistemological viewpoint that fears Other sensations, feelings, and ontologies. Orlando corroborates the historical trajectory of oppressive modernity that, as I outline in my introductory chapter, sensory studies helps to unveil. The sensory and emotional 189 Garrity, p.8. 190 Fox, Jo, accessed 27/11/22. 191 Woolf similarly acknowledges and critiques such ‘ocularcentrism’ (to use Martin Jay’s term) in her 1926 essay, ‘The Cinema’ in Collected Essays II (The Hogarth Press: London, 1966) pp.268-272. In this essay, Woolf criticises the cinema’s promotion of passive, unthinking spectatorship. She argues it is a medium that lacks artistic depth and focuses more on financial success than intelligent commentary. The term ‘ocularcentrism’ comes from Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes (1993). 85 suppression of the ‘damp’ anticipates the Simmelian sensory bombardment experienced by Orlando in the twentieth century. The development of this oppressive sensory contact, Orlando illustrates, is inseparable from the increasing hierarchized power of the visual within the imperial age. Even though both phrenology and physiognomy lose credence in the twentieth century, the hegemony they represent lived on. The equally pseudoscientific and vision-oriented field of eugenics, which originated at the same time, continued to acquire influence, inspiring Fascism on both sides of the English Channel.192 Also illustrating this continuity is the persistence of the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, under which many 1920s texts were censored for sexually explicit, particularly homosexual, content. Under this law D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was famously banned in 1928.193 In the same year, also that of Orlando’s publication, Radclyffe Hall’s bildungsroman, The Well of Loneliness, was banned for its portrayal of lesbian relationships.194 Max Nordau’s criticism of queerness in Degeneration (1892) – another text I discuss in relation to sensory suppression in my introduction – helped to solidify this approach to “obscenity.” Promoting regulation of the sensory and sensual in the cultural sphere, Nordau connected moral “degeneration” not only with sexual “deviance” and foreignness, but with the supposed sensory decadence of aestheticism – an artistic movement associated with queer figures such as Oscar Wilde. This oppressive influence over literature is also captured by Woolf’s depiction of the damp and its destruction of a ‘sensitive writer’ named Eusebius Chubb – an aesthete, perhaps, who is no longer able to produce the work he desires (133).195 Since ‘there is no stopping the damp,’ Woolf writes, ‘it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork – sentences swelled, 192 Founded by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, and inspired by evolutionary theory’s emphasis on survival-of-the-fittest, this field used photographic “evidence” to similarly hierarchize different groups of people. See Shawn Michelle Smith, At the Edge of Sight (USA: Duke University Press, 2013) pp.35-36. 193 Adam Parkes, ‘Lesbianism, History, and Censorship: The Well of Loneliness and the Suppressed Randiness of Virginia Woolf's Orlando,’ Twentieth Century Literature, 40:4 (1994) pp. 434-60. 194 Ibid. 195 Critics have interpreted Chubb in a number of other ways. Mark Goldman, for instance, identifies him with the Romantic era, and also as an effort on Woolf’s part to poke fun at Victorian sentimentality. See Mark Goldman, The Reader’s Art: Virginia Woolf as a Literary Critic (Walter de Gruyter: Berlin, 2015) pp.23-24. 86 adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes’(133). Provoking the same chaotic expansion in culture as in nature, the damp seeps its way into literature, making it as stodgy, mouldy, and overgrown as the ideologies fuelling it. For Chubb, whose name suggests expansion, this ends in suicide, Woolf explains, because as the damp spreads and his pregnant wife enters her ‘fifteenth confinement indoors,’ he finds, to his distress, that his work is becoming ‘all about nothing’ (134, 133). Churned out in multitudes for economic gain but incapable of delivering any insight, this is a literature that serves to generate the social-sensory hegemonies that define the imperial male gaze. Whether scrutinising or ignoring the Other, whether wanting or not wanting to look their way, it is symbolically blind to, and out of touch with, alternative experiential realities. The challenge that Orlando poses to the gendered and heteronormative aspects of this hegemony is explored in the next section of this chapter. What remains to be expressed in this section, however, is that although Woolf’s stance is anti-imperial, the racialised hegemony I have outlined does not receive the same authorial consideration. Ironically, although Woolf criticises the symbolism of idealized female roles, she often makes a symbol out of the colonized figure, reinforcing the subordination of the foreign and racial Other. As the skull scene indicates, the presence of the colonial figure and related language often stands in for the marginalised female body. Hovey and Karen Kaviola have each observed that colonialism is used as a cover for the text’s queerness both as a ‘love-letter’ from Woolf to Sackville-West and within which the protagonist enjoys ‘the love of both sexes equally’ (128).196 In one sense, Orlando poses a problem like that outlined by Karen Beckman in relation to the vanishing woman trope of nineteenth-century magic shows and later, twentieth-century 196 Hovey, p.402, and Karen Kaviola, ‘Revisiting Woolf's Representations of Androgyny: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Nation,’ Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 18 (1999) p.248. 87 cinema. Stemming from ‘a fatal literary tradition of disappearing women, this trope, Beckman argues, highlights a ‘misogynist fantasy of eradicating women’.197 Dependent on the woman’s eventual return, however, the structure of the magic trick also diverts the spectator’s attention away from bodies that ‘are permanently invisible’ and ‘made to stand in via the white female body’.198 While the vanished woman might be considered a site of feminist resistance as a body that ‘keeps returning even when vanished,’ Beckman explains, the ‘smiling and willing’ nature of the magician’s assistant, and the fact that she often becomes, in her costume, a passive substitute for an ‘oriental body,’ complicates this.199 Orlando presents the same problematic tension between absence and presence. Like the magic trick, it brings back the vanished woman via Orlando’s sex change and other means that I explore shortly but seems to reinforce the invisible status of the foreign or racial Other. Highlighting the limits of Woolf’s own gaze, the racialised coding of gender issues and queerness in the novel, as Garrity says of other similar modernist references, can be read as primitivist appropriation.200 Such references are apparent elsewhere in Woolf’s work.201 As Benjamin Hagan notes, her repeated use of the term ‘savage,’ ‘signals her entanglement in the translation and figuration of other peoples as uncivilised barbarians’.202 Critics including Jane Marcus, Urmila Seshagiri, and Laura Doyle have discussed this entanglement and Woolf’s wider, problematic relationship with race.203 Donald 197 Karen Beckman, Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) p.5. She cites texts that include ‘Spenser’s Faerie Queen, Eve in Paradise Lost, Keats’ Belle Dame Sans Merci’ (p.5). 198 Beckman, p.7. 199 Ibid. 200 Garrity, p.15. 201 In ‘Women and Fiction,’ for instance, she aligns femininity as a ‘dark country’ with racial otherness (Garrity, p.15). 202 Benjamin Hagan, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and the Reading of Remains in Orlando’ in Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018) p.184. In ‘The Cinema,’ Woolf even opens by referring to those who attend ‘the movies’ as ‘savages’ (p.268). 203 The Dreadnought Hoax of 1910, through which Woolf, her brother, Adrian and four of his college friends, gained access to the HMS Dreadnought while posing as Abyssinian dignitaries, is commonly used to frame the complexities of this topic. As Seshagiri writes, while intending to deride imperial violence and ‘the navy’s ignorance of the nations it dominated,’ the success of the hoax, which depended on ‘participants’ willingness to appear in blackface’ and ‘cobble together an “Abyssinian” dialect’ demonstrates complicity in that which is being criticised. See Urmila Seshagiri, Race and the Modernist Imagination (NY: Cornell University Press, 88 Childs similarly explores Woolf’s complex attitude towards eugenics. This, too, reveals complicity in the ideologies of the imperial male gaze.204 Yet, as other critics who have examined race, nation and foreignness in Orlando argue, it is by considering such complicity – and its exposure of the complicated kinship between imperialism and patriarchy – that we, as modern feminist critics can not only address the oversights of Woolf and her era, but open up more intersectional avenues of thought.205 Like Beckman, we can identify and discuss embodied lives that remain problematically absent by first attending to what has been emphasised as present. Intersensorial Re-visions Subversive sensory language and sensitive seeing In Dissensuous Modernism (2022), DeMaagd argues that Futurism – the predominantly white and masculine art movement that emerged in the early twentieth century – embraces a sensory aesthetic that perpetuates the social divisiveness enshrined in post-Enlightenment sense hierarchies. With its strikingly discordant visuals and celebration of chaotic sensations – what its founder, Filippo Tommasso Marinetti called ‘the new contradictory sensibilities’ of modern 2010) p.147. See also: Jane Marcus, Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004); and Laura Winkiel and Laura Doyle, eds., Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005). 204 Donald J. Childs, Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) p.14 & p.33. Many of those in Woolf’s close circle were interested in this topic in the early twentieth century, and its influence within her language is clear. Disturbingly, whilst gesturing towards negative eugenics (the desire to eliminate the non-ideal), for instance, an early diary entry from 1915 concludes, in relation to people with mental deficiencies, that ‘they should certainly be killed’ (quoted by Childs, p.23). Illustrating changed views, and a move away from the more overtly unacceptable nature of her diary comment, however, Woolf’s later eugenic language concerns positive eugenics – the creating of an ideal. Thus, in Three Guineas, she the state should pay ‘those whose profession is marriage and motherhood’ (quoted by Childs, p.23). The biological war, she suggests, will be won by those who can produce a ‘“desirable” kind of future citizen who will help to create “peace and freedom for the whole world”’ (Three Guineas, p.186). 205 See Lawrence, 1992; Kennard, 1996; Johnson, 2004. 89 warfare – Futurism represents a new hegemonic sensory order.206 Continuing to suppress Other bodies, it is a movement that presents sensory imbalance as an aesthetic of strength, through which machine power, particularly that of military standing, is depicted as an extension of male power and vision. Futurism can be understood as capturing and promoting the sensory destruction that Simmel, Mignolo and others attribute to modernity.207 As DeMaagd argues, however, such divisive sensory regimes (and their post-Enlightenment origins) are challenged by the ways in which female modernists engage with the senses. In particular, she asserts, they embrace a radical, yet harmonious, integrated aesthetic of intersensoriality.208 As I explain in my introductory chapter, radical depictions of intersensoriality can certainly be detected in Orlando (as in all my primary texts) but not solely in the integrated, synaesthesic way that DeMaagd suggests. The novel's engagement with various intersensory forms undermines the imperial male gaze and the hegemony it represents in both social and literary terms, enabling Woolf to imagine an alternative modern social-sensory order – one that not only breaks with the hegemonic discourses I explored in the previous part of the chapter, but unveils an alternative resistant history below its surface. As DeMaagd observes in relation to other modernist texts by women, synaesthesia – a form of the intersensory that explicitly symbolises hierarchical collapse and which Nordau accordingly aligned with “deviants” in Degeneration – plays an important role in this process.209 When Orlando first sees Sasha skating across the Thames during the Great Frost, his desire for her is presented as a moment of synaesthesic confusion: ‘he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together’ (24). Here, the power and heteronormativity of the imperial male gaze is destabilised by the synaesthesic. Unable to 206 Classen, ‘Art and the Senses: From the Romantics to the Futurists’ in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire, p. 206. 207 This is explored in my thesis’ introduction. 208 DeMaagd, p.8. 209 DeMaagd, p.9. 90 discern whether Sasha is male or female due to her ‘loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion,’ Orlando’s vision not only fails him in this moment, but appears to confound his other faculties (24). Orlando’s entire body seems immobilised by his stare. Reversing the traditional notions of active male and passive female as well as the dynamic presented between Orlando and the Moor in the novel’s opening scenes, Sasha skates with ‘speed and vigour’ while Orlando becomes static. In this public setting, it is she who demonstrates control over physical and embodied space (24). Gazing at Sasha with ‘curiosity,’ Orlando, in contrast, blends into the ‘wintry landscape’ as his lips become ‘froze[n] in wonder’ (24-5). Woolf uses the synaesthesic to challenge the power structures that are inherent in the imperial male gaze. This is reinforced when Sasha – who has ‘something hidden; in all she did’ – abandons Orlando before their planned elopement (29). As he waits in the dark for the Princess’ arrival, Orlando finds: all his senses were bent upon gazing along the cobbled pathway […] Sometimes, in the darkness, he seemed to see her wrapped about with rain strokes. But the phantom vanished (37). In this moment, while Sasha sets sail for Russia, Orlando, ignorant of her departure, again remains still. As he attempts and fails to summon Sasha’s presence with his gaze, synaesthesic prose reiterates the diminished strength of Orlando’s vision. It also connects such diminishment to the neglect of his other senses. Although Orlando clearly needs to seek out assistance from his other senses, he does so whilst demonstrating a persistent belief in the supremacy of sight; rather than embrace alternative sensory processes, he folds all his sensory experience into the act of gazing. When Sasha does not subsequently appear, then, Orlando falls prey to ‘anguish,’ ‘horror and alarm,’ experiencing a sense of powerlessness that stems, Woolf shows, from a misguided and hierarchical faith in sight (37). Certainly, led away from the scene by ‘blind 91 instinct,’ Orlando eventually learns the truth through sonic and tactile means (38). As the clocks strike midnight, they seem to not only make the ‘whole world…ring with the news of her deceit and his derision’ but leave Orlando feeling as though he has been ‘struck in the face by a blow, soft, yet heavy, on the side of his cheek’ (38, 37). Anticipating the sensory onslaught of modernity that Orlando experiences in the twentieth century, this is a moment of violent contact, accompanied by wild cries,’ ‘terrible inhuman groanings’ and likened to the ‘boom’ of ‘great guns’ (38). Sound and touch become bound together in the double meaning of ‘struck’ and, as Amy Bromley notes, the ‘soft, yet heavy’ blow reflects both the sweetness and betrayal of Sasha’s caressing kisses.210 Violence, in this synaesthesic instance, indicates the often self-destructive nature of imperial patriarchy and its gaze; Orlando becomes a victim of his own colonizing attitude – a moment that is foreshadowed by his identification with ‘the frenzy of the Moor’ while watching Shakespeare’s Othello with Sasha (35).211 Even when synaesthesic language is absent, the intersensory and its challenge to the imperial male gaze is consistently present throughout the novel’s discourse. Although sight appears dominant in the opening scenes, for instance, Woolf is not, of course, advocating such dominance or the imperialistic, patriarchal ways of seeing with which it is aligned. Attending not only to Orlando’s eyes, but to his ‘hand,’ ‘lips,’ ‘arrowy nose,’ ‘eyes,’ and ‘ears’ in ways that synecdochally point to the human sensorium at large, her language focuses on embodied experience in more holistic ways (11-12). This is crucial to her rejection of both modernity’s more general suppression of sensation and affect, and specific attempts to suppress the queer, female body. Like the confusion that Orlando experiences synaesthesically upon first seeing 210 Amy Bromley, ‘In Amorous Dedication: The Phrase, the Figure and the Lover’s Discourse’ in Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence ed. by Elsa Hogburg and Amy Bromley (Edinburgh Scholarship Online, 2018) p.158. 211 This moment of identification with Othello continues to show Orlando’s lack of understanding concerning the Moor’s own unique identity; Orlando imposes his own situation on Shakespeare’s protagonist without thinking about the differences between himself and the character. 92 Sasha, the multi-sensory language in the novel’s opening scene reflects a disruption of the imperial male gaze regarding gender and sexuality norms. When we read more closely, as several critics observe, the masculine impression of Orlando that the biographer attempts to construct is revealed as illusory. Nobody sees Orlando’s violent performance in the attic; it is not genuinely part of the public sphere. The fact that his ‘enemy’ is long since deceased and compared to a ‘football’ reduces the apparent show of power to an adolescent game (11).212 Such details reveal the ambiguity of Orlando’s gender and sexuality from the beginning. Kaviola argues that the attic space itself suggests confusion and homosexual desire.213 Furthermore, both she and Hovey point out that Orlando’s masculinity is undermined by his feminine eyes ‘like drenched violets’ (12).214 Creating the very doubt it denies, even the novel’s first line – ‘there could be no doubt of his sex’ – appears to protest too much (11).215 In this way, Woolf immediately subverts the traditional centrality of the white male both in the public sphere and in life-writing. This same dualistic portrayal and renunciation of the imperial male gaze via the intersensory is prevalent in later scenes when Orlando, as female, appears most oppressed during the Victorian era. In this period, the pressure to ‘yield completely and submissively to the spirit of the age’ by taking a husband and having a child, is experienced, haptically, as an ‘extraordinary tingling and vibration all over her, as if she were made of a thousand wires’ (141, 138). Orlando’s body, brimming with electrical sensations, is likened to a modern machine. As the ‘agitation’ gradually becomes isolated to ‘her hands’ and then ‘one hand’ and then ‘one finger of that hand,’ she realises there is “abnormally” no wedding ring on her finger (141). Yet, the fact her entire body is attuned to these sensations and their meaning, counters 212 Hovey, p.398. 213 Kaviola, p.252. 214 Kaviola, p.252 & Hovey, p.399. 215 Nancy Cervetti, ‘In the Breeches, Petticoats and Pleasures of Orlando,’ Journal of Modern Literature, 20 (1996) p.165. 93 the erasure of women’s embodied experiences under the imperial male gaze. Despite how it may first appear, this is not a depiction of the suppressive, biopolitical modernity described by Mignolo. Rather than subordinating or exploiting the body, the mechanical power that becomes synonymised with Orlando’s corporeality enunciates a celebration of sensation and affect. It is a way of affiliating the sensing, feeling realm with power in the modern world. The nervous system – thought to be the bodily site of emotion in 1920s culture – is particularly infused with this power; Orlando’s nerves are the ‘wires’ and the ‘future telegraph wires’ that attune her to her circumstances and inform her subsequent trajectory (138, 139).216 Negating the conflation between emotional sensitivity and weakness that had been applied to discussions of the nervous system in theories of neurasthenia since the late 1820s, Woolf’s intersensory portrayal of nerve-based sensitivity in Orlando demonstrates insight and mental strength in spite of adversity.217 Similar ideas regarding ‘sensitivity’ are apparent in Woolf’s essays, especially in how she links this concept to literary talent. When she praises Katherine Mansfield’s ‘terribly sensitive mind,’ she aligns sensitivity with both humaneness and knowledge.218 Moreover, in ‘The Leaning Tower’ (1940), she declares that all credible ‘writers are infinitely sensitive’.219 In this piece, building upon her call for a “society of outsiders” in Three Guineas, sensitivity is conceived as an ability to see beyond one’s own experience: to perceive, understand and capture hitherto unrecognised or misrepresented realms of life. Using the metaphor of ‘the leaning tower,’ Woolf claims that adopting such sensitivity, even as a writer from an elite background, has been made more possible by the modern world. Advancements in visual technology and weaponry, she explains, have rendered war and human suffering more palpable 216 Kirsty Martin, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Conditions of Our Love’ Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy: Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) p.101. 217 Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present (London: Hachette, 2011) p.106. 218 Woolf, ‘A Terribly Sensitive Mind’ in Collected Essays I (The Hogarth Press: London, 1966). 219 Woolf, ‘The Leaning Tower’ in Collected Essays II (The Hogarth Press: London, 1966) p.163. 94 than they once were; they can be seen, heard, and felt directly by even the most privileged of authors. For this reason, she claims, the perspective from the once upright tower has changed. It now leans to the left, bringing previously ignored or hidden perspectives into view. Indicating a capacity to be emotionally in touch with the self and others, Woolf’s notion of sensitivity becomes a way of seeing in which mind and body are reunited. In its attention to the entire corpus, it promotes an intersensory viewpoint that rejects both the subordination of the bodily and the disembodiment of sight. Anticipating this, and informed by her own mental health struggles, Woolf even critiques the affiliation between feminised emotional sensitivity and weakness in A Room of Own’s Own. Referring to a fictional example of an unfulfilled, potential female writer, Woolf remarks that while it was thought she could not write books because she was ‘sensitive and melancholy,’ her letters show ‘what a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence’ (47).220 Here, Woolf simultaneously mocks the idea that melancholic mental illness is either a sign of intellectual deficiency or synonymous with an inability to write well as a woman. The death of the ‘sensitive writer,’ Eusebius Chubb, in Orlando perhaps represents a symbolic death of weak sensitivity and sensation (133). The fact that Woolf makes the sensitive writer male even rejects the gendering of these concepts. In its depiction of Orlando’s nerve-based sensations, the subsequent marriage scene, in contrast, seems to indicate the arrival of Woolf’s alternative meaning. Pointing to a more positive, sensorially-engaged vision of modernity, the nervous system itself links all parts of the body, including the eye. Taking place in the Victorian period, however, it implicitly traces this new modernity back to nineteenth-century work on the senses that counteracts the dominant, fragmented concept of the sensorium and the pseudo-sciences that this became manifest in. Specifically, the scene is reminiscent of Gustav Fechner’s theory of perceptual sensitivity: the process ‘of discerning fine / gradations 220 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) p.47. 95 of sensation, such as varying levels of brightness’.221 Like that presented by Woolf, this was a form of sensitivity that depended on all sensory processes, defined by alertness and sound judgement. It was born out of psychophysics – an experimental science developed and practiced by Fechner, E. H. Weber and Hermann von Helmholtz between 1840 and 1880 – that ‘tested people’s subjective responses to auditory, gustatory, olfactory, tactile, and visual stimulation’.222 Although now ‘largely hidden from view’ or dismissed as a science only ‘in the service of liberal biopower,’ Fretwell argues, this field was an important precursor to feminism, experimental psychology and phenomenology.223 It made possible a new theory of sense experience that ‘orients body-subjects to each other in ways that may reflect but might also refract dominant social formations’.224 By illuminating this neglected aspect of post-Enlightenment sensory history, Orlando’s use of the intersensory in the marriage pressure scene becomes emblematic of a revisionary approach not only to modernity and its future, but to how we understand this through historical narratives. For Woolf, this is inseparable from her revision of traditional heteronormative marriage plots, and her effort to shed light on the embodied experiences and histories of queer women. Despite describing the pressure to conform as a series of restricting sensations, the eroticism of Woolf’s intersensory language simultaneously emphasises the presence of the queer female body. In addition to making her ‘senses much quickened,’ her toes and marrow tingle and her hairs ‘erect themselves,’ the experience produces ‘the queerest sensations about the thigh bones’ (139). Since queerness was certainly associated with homosexuality when Woolf was writing Orlando, this phrase, as both Elizabeth Freeman and Derek Ryan have argued, gestures towards the novel’s queer content. Exploring sexual connotations pertaining 221 Fretwell, pp.12-13. 222 Fretwell, p.2. 223 Ibid. 224 Ibid. 96 to hands, in particular, Freeman describes the scene as a display of ‘lesbian fingerplay’.225 Similarly, Ryan argues that by gradually bringing our attention to ‘a ring of quivering sensibility about the second finger of [Orlando’s] left hand,’ Woolf radically reconceptualises marriage as a queer event (139). 226 She replaces the conventional wedding ring with a ring of queerness. Setting up Orlando’s engagement and marriage to Shelmardine – a character whose gender and sexuality are as fluid as her own – this is a queering of marriage that requires a queer ring.227 As emphasised by the reference to Orlando’s nerves as ‘telegraph wires,’ this scene’s celebration of sensation and affect is an attempt to both communicate and empower the queer, female body. In revisionary terms, Woolf inserts this body into an era commonly (though erroneously) reported to have been ruled by a Queen who did not believe lesbianism existed. She is exercising the kind of literary sensitivity – the radical intersensory seeing – that the scene evokes and which she later theorises. Conveying and challenging bodily suppressions, it illustrates Woolf’s attempt to get in touch with what Audre Lorde calls the erotic – a sensory and emotive force of power, I explain in this thesis’ introduction, for women. 228 So does the birth scene. Although the biographer appears to direct our attention away from the birth of Orlando’s son and therefore the female body, the sensory description of Kew Gardens that replaces it is abundant with symbols of fertility, gestation, and sexuality. In this space, ‘a plum tree, a grape hyacinth, and a crocus, and a bud, too, on the almond tree’ all exist ‘so that to walk there is to be thinking of bulbs, hairy and red, thrust into the earth in October; flowering now…’ 225 Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography’ in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (London: Duke University Press, 2010) p.110. 226 Derek Ryan, ‘Queering Orlando and Non/Human Desire’ in The Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013) p.114. 227 Ibid. 228 Audre Lorde, ‘The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ in Sister Outsider (London: Penguin, 2019) pp.43-50. For this reason, the description of Orlando’s own writing is erotically charged too: ‘she plunged her pen neck deep in the ink…She drew the nib out. It was wet, but not dripping. She wrote. The words were a little long in coming but come they did’(pp.153-4). 97 (170). Again, the female body is aligned with landscape, but here the sights, tastes, textures, and implied smells of the garden, provoke revelation rather than erasure. Embracing the female body, as Lorde’s promotion of the erotic demands, this sensory language rejects attempts to present marriage and sexuality as mutually exclusive in women’s lives. So does the barrel-organ that the biographer uses to initially turn us away from Orlando. Not only is this instrument a metaphor for Orlando’s womb, but it is presented both as a sexually active body and a body going through childbirth as it ‘gasps’ and ‘groans’ (170). This becomes allied with Woolf’s effort to communicate queerness when immediately before revealing the birth, the text instructs the reader to: ‘Hail! natural desire! and pleasure of all sorts’ (171). Embedding such telling words in seemingly heteronormative contexts, Woolf’s intersensory language elucidates the ongoing need to recover the queer, female body together with the powerful expression of Lorde’s erotic. It does so while enabling Woolf to avoid censorship. Concurrently revealing and concealing language mitigates the risk of obscenity accusations, presenting non-heteronormative content in veiled, euphemistic ways.229 Thwarting the scrutinising vision and unwanted contact of censors and the imperial male gaze more broadly in what it depicts, symbolises and performs, Woolf’s intersensory language – as linked both to her own literary sensitivity and that which Orlando acquires – emphasises possibilities of resistance even while imperialistic and patriarchal structures remain. As I now examine in relation to genre, the text, as well as the character, become “deviant” bodies that cannot be suppressed. 229 Sherron E. Knopp says the same of the novel’s generic blurring of fantasy and reality. See Knopp, ‘"If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?": Sapphism and the Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf's Orlando,’ PMLA, 103 (1988) 24-34. 98 The new biography Throughout Orlando, Woolf’s intersensory language gradually undermines and transforms the imperial male gaze of its protagonist, eventually helping Woolf to stage a coup against the biographer as a representative of this gaze. Woolf appears to perform a reclamation and transformation of sight via the intersensory as the text unfolds. Seeing becomes more closely aligned with, thus demonstrating Woolf’s own use of, the literary sensitivity that she describes in visual terms in ‘The Leaning Tower.’ After the novel’s opening scene – in which traditionally masculine sight is paired with feminine images of water and flowers – this sensory and especially, visual transfer of power from the biographer to Woolf is most obvious in the birth scene. In this, Woolf’s voice appears to intervene while the biographer desperately searches for words ‘to mitigate, to veil, to cover, to conceal’ Orlando’s pregnancy (170). When she asserts, ‘hail not those dreams which bloat the sharp image as spotted mirrors do the face in a country-inn parlour,’ the biographer’s distracting descriptions of London are allied with dreams (171). Clouding the ‘sharp image’ of the female body, previously presented to us in an ordinary, clear mirror when Orlando transitions in Turkey, these dreams belong to England’s sleepy, ‘blind land’ (171). Woolf draws us out of blind sleep when she reveals the birth. Calling upon the natural world, she writes, it is the Kingfisher who, striking ‘right in the ball of the innermost eye,’ bursts ‘the seal of sleep’ and returns ‘our eyes’ to ‘the red, thick stream of life’(171). Soon after, she clarifies: ‘in other words, Orlando was safely delivered of a son on Thursday, March the 20th, at three o'clock in the morning’ (171). Her use of the phrase, ‘in other words,’ reiterates that language has been used to obscure and delay. This perhaps includes (self-mockingly) her own Kingfisher metaphor. The two optical references within it emphasise that Woolf is representing and advocating ways of seeing and knowing, particularly related to the female body, that depart from those represented by the biographer. 99 This is also apparent in the biographer’s response to Orlando. In addition to his efforts to avert the reader’s gaze from Orlando’s pregnancy, he becomes frustrated by her writerly ambitions, and her rejection of heteronormativity. After asserting that love is the only topic of interest concerning female subjects, he asks: ‘what is more irritating than to see one's subject, on whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one's grasp altogether?’ (156). Unable to comprehend Orlando’s pursuit of intellectual and creative interests, the biographer cannot, in tactile terms, ‘grasp’ his subject or see her in any way that deviates from his expectations. This not only reiterates the reductive nature of his discriminatory logic and perceptions but affirms Woolf’s coup; the female artist as presented by her, and by Orlando herself, usurps the biographer. This process is in motion even before Orlando’s sex change. Contrary to the confident picture that the biographer paints in the initial pages, and his vow to ‘plod in the indelible footprints of truth,’ he momentarily loses sight of his subject altogether during the Jacobean era (41). Resolving that it might be ‘necessary to speculate, surmise, and even to use the imagination,’ he admits he does not have enough evidence to describe some parts of Orlando’s life, and that therefore his gaze is limited (72). In this way, Woolf emphasises the need for both truth and imagination in the literary writing of lives, described as ‘granite and rainbow’ in the theory of biography she outlines in ‘The New Biography’ (1927).230 Orlando was an attempt to ‘revolutionize’ the genre by putting this idea into practise.231 This is an acknowledgement both of what has been hidden from view, and what might always remain unseen or unknowable. Cohering with her attention to other sensory faculties beyond sight, no life, Woolf emphasises, can ever be fully known or captured; the imagination is required to fill in the blanks. 230 Woolf, ‘The New Biography’ in Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 231 Micir, p.121. 100 The way of seeing that constitutes literary sensitivity must therefore take unseen and unseeable dimensions into account. In an early essay that criticises the DNB, Woolf appears to do just that. Highlighting its narrow subject matter in ‘The Eccentrics’ (1919), she asks, ‘do you never pause for a moment to wonder where all those nimble lives have gone to and what pranks they are playing beyond your sight and whether, after all, the solid and the serviceable fulfil every need of the soul?’.232 In Orlando, which explicitly questions ‘whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say,’ Woolf brings the queer woman as an example of such hidden life to the centre of her narrative, illuminating Other experiences (177). However, both in this question and in the ways that Orlando eludes the biographer’s gaze, she also highlights the value of the unseen as part of her holistic sensory engagement. Emphasising another aspect of early twentieth-century knowledge that undermines modernity’s obsession with the visual, this points to the possibilities of the unseen that were being uncovered via, for example, the discovery of DNA in 1900, Roentgen’s work on x-ray machines, psychoanalysis and exploration of the unconscious.233 These and other developments were drawing increased attention to aspects of embodied life that are imperceptible to the human eye. The dissipation of visual-based pseudo-sciences such as phrenology and physiognomy was likely influenced by this changing understanding of visual knowledge, even as this change continued to highlight sight’s symbolic disconnection from the body. In Orlando, both Woolf and her subject appear to embrace the possibilities of unseen, bodily knowledge while reclaiming the capacity to see as women. The novel therefore performs work like that of feminist visual culture scholars such as Shawn Michelle Smith and Avery Gordon, who build upon Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida 232 Woolf, ‘The Eccentrics’ in The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1919-1924 ed. by Andrew McNeillie, Stuart Nelson Clarke (London: Hogarth Press, 1986) p.41. 233 I am not suggesting that Woolf has been definitively influenced by any of these visual technologies as she does not make direct reference to them in Orlando or earlier works. However, she would have been aware of the visual limitations that such technologies were increasingly drawing attention to during this period. Her references to Orlando’s nerves indicate engagement with an aspect of the human body that cannot be seen by the naked eye. Furthermore, as I examine in the next chapter, she refers to photographic snapshots as providing only a ‘limited eye’ (Maggie Humm, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002) p.46). 101 (1980). In this, Barthes famously observes that death is elicited by the presence of all sentient beings in photographs.234 Death lurks beyond the frame, he argues, and is resultantly both absent and present in the image. He illustrates that to engage with the photographic unseen – to consider what is not visible or not immediately visible within a photograph – is to acknowledge a blurring of boundaries between absence and presence. In At the Edge of Sight (2013), Smith moves away from Barthes’ melancholic focus, arguing that photography can also gesture towards and thereby make present what is often problematically absent.235 This includes the bodies and lives of the marginalised. For Smith, much like Beckman’s thoughts concerning the vanishing woman of the nineteenth-century magic show, the overwhelming presence of white subjects in early photography, emphasises the contrasting absence of those from other ethnic backgrounds. The presence of these bodies is evoked via their absence; the photos reveal what Avery Gordon calls a ‘visible invisibility’.236 Orlando’s presence, particularly as male in the first half of the text, highlights the absence of other/Other bodies: of women, queer women, and foreign peoples. In this sense, Orlando becomes synonymous with the photographed figures described by Smith. Woolf plays with this dynamic of absence and presence in ways that mirror the concurrently concealing and revealing nature of much intersensory language in the text regarding queerness. So does Orlando. As well as eluding the biographer, Woolf’s protagonist escapes the scrutinizing stares of eighteenth-century British society by dressing as a man when she wishes to walk alone. Similarly, when spying on Alexander Pope, she attains a visual advantage while choosing to remain hidden. Orlando consistently manipulates gendered social categories of identity to her own advantage. Like Woolf, she seeks to outsmart and discredit hegemonic ways of seeing and knowing so that she may embrace an alternative self and vision. To use Sara Ahmed’s term, Orlando is what we 234 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage Books, 2000). 235 Shawn Michelle Smith, p.16. 236 Shawn Michelle Smith, p.6. 102 might call a “wilful subject.” In wishing to be seen and not seen in ways that cannot be dictated by the imperial male gaze, she demonstrates her wilfulness; her intention is ‘to annoy, arrest’ and ‘disrupt the flow of things’.237 This is crucial to Woolf’s revision and indeed “re-visioning” of biography; it is a sensory and visual process that is inseparable from generic subversion. Disorientation and affect In Queer Phenomenology (2006) – a precursor to Wilful Subjects – the deviation from heteronormativity that Orlando presents, is described by Ahmed as a deviation from the straight line – a form of resistance that relies on instances of disorientation to find new orientations in physical, symbolic, and sexual terms. She writes that: moments of disorientation are vital. They are bodily experiences that throw the world up, or throw the body from its ground. Disorientation as a bodily feeling can be unsettling, and it can shatter one’s sense of confidence in the ground or one’s belief that the ground on which we reside can support the actions that make a life feel liveable. Such a feeling of shattering, or of being shattered, might persist and become a crisis. Or the feeling itself might pass as the ground returns or as we return to the ground.238 Throughout Woolf’s novel, when Orlando moves from one historical period to the next, and when she transitions, unexpectedly, from male to female, she must undergo a process of re-orientation, of relocating the feeling, sensuous body in physical space. It is particularly telling in this respect that her sex change takes place in the Orient – a place, as Ahmed notes, that is 237 Sara Ahmed, Wilful Subjects (USA: Duke University Press, 2014) p.7. 238 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) p.157. 103 etymologically tied to notions of orientation.239 These moments of navigation culminate in the final scenes when Orlando emerges from disorientation in the twentieth century as an empowered and creative, queer figure. As Ahmed argues, disorientation’s dizzying affects are shown to be necessary, and potentially radical, in finding and accepting new orientations, sexual and otherwise. This is, simultaneously, the realisation of Orlando’s new, sensitive way of seeing. Although Orlando recognises she is ‘losing some illusions’ in the eighteenth century, it is only in Woolf’s present day of 1928, that ‘the immensely long tunnel in which [Orlando] seemed to have been travelling for hundreds of years’ finally widens to let the light fully pour in (103, 184). In this visual-spatial metaphor, the revelation that Orlando is about to undergo is an emergence from modernity’s darkness and its imperial male gaze. The revelation begins with disorientation, with the sense of being ‘violently struck on the head’ and of needing to rediscover balance as she traverses ‘the narrow plank of the present’ and strives to avoid the sensory ‘torrent’ below (173). But Orlando transcends this. She finds the ground, the re-orientation, that Ahmed describes. The sensory attack becomes an experience of sensory pleasure; modernity’s violent, severing touch is transformed into a desirable feeling of connection. Born out of the synaesthesic chaos described at the beginning of this chapter, Orlando’s artistic denouement – the completion of her epic poem ‘The Oak Tree’ – is at the centre of this shift. Recognising poetry as a ‘secret transaction,’ whilst asking ‘what…praise and fame [have] got to do with poetry?’, Orlando (and Woolf) become foils to both the Futurist movement and its hegemonic predecessors (187-8). The question is a renunciation not only of Futurism’s modernity and the biographer but of the fame-hungry Nick Greene (the text’s portrayal of a “great” Victorian literary critic) and other male writers who make Orlando feel that she ‘must never, never say’ what she thinks (166). As my introductory chapter notes, she gains the literary insight of Shakespeare but emerges as a distinct and modern female artist. 239 Ahmed, p.116. 104 Staring down the ‘tunnel’ of her life as the ‘innumerable sights’ of her past compose themselves before her, as mind and body unite via Woolf’s chiaroscuro prose, Orlando-as-poet recognises that she has a ‘great variety of selves to call upon’ – all of which are ‘different’ and ‘trying to communicate’ (184, 187, 179, 181). As she watches the ‘vast view,’ ‘varied as an ocean floor,’ multi-sensory memories of the east even blend with the English landscape: ‘what is it that I taste?’, she asks, ‘I hear goat bells. I see mountains’ (176). Recognising the sheer complexity and multiplicity of embodied life, this signifies an acceptance of her queer identity. Twentieth-century modernity is presented – or re-presented – as a vehicle for more complex and diverse understandings of human experience. Orlando’s multitude of selves engender a rejection of modernity’s fragmented notion of the body and thus, the sensorium. The scene puts the senses and different aspects of subjectivity in contact with one another in ways that triumph over the imperial male gaze and all it represents. The multiplicity of the novel’s intersensory language reflects this idea throughout. Its capacity to paradoxically conceal and reveal queerness, and signify both chaos and harmony, disorientation and stability, effects the transformative, hierarchical collapse that Orlando’s final scenes suggest. However, these paradoxes also serve to disorient the reader. This is crucial to outwitting censors. Such disorientation can potentially train up, appeal to and thus, re-orient the sensitive gaze of more attentive and empathetic audiences. As Victoria Smith argues, navigating the text’s various contradictions including its blurring of realism and fantasy, requires a ‘double vision’.240 The text needs, as Judith Allen observes, ‘keen and active reading practices’ that ‘read on at least two levels at once’.241 Hagan similarly notes that the novel trains us ‘to become more agile, creative and discerning readers’ by representing oppositional modes 240 Victoria L. Smith, ‘“Ransacking the Language”: Finding the Missing Goods in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,’ Journal of Modern Literature, 29 (2006) p.70. 241 Judith Allen, ‘Orlando and the Politics of (In)Conclusiveness ‘in ’Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence ed. by Elsa Hogburg and Amy Bromley (Edinburgh Scholarship Online, 2018) p.199. 105 of reading.242 Orlando’s depiction of both the imperial male gaze and its antithesis – a more sensitive, intersensory way of seeing and thinking – epitomises these oppositional modes. So does the tension between absence and presence that infuses Woolf’s intersensory discourse. This persistently invites readers to scrutinize and question what they are shown. Woolf asks for an audience who can become, as she puts it, her ‘fellow-worker and accomplice’.243 Outsmarting the censors, she recognises, depends on such an audience. She asks us to aid her in the ongoing process of recovering queer female bodies from censoring culture: to transcend cultural and socio-political manifestations of the imperial male gaze. Thus, she presents her new way of seeing as that which can be furthered through author-reader reciprocity; it is a rejection of hegemonic power, that calls for and relies upon a communal effort to acknowledge and challenge problematic absences in the public sphere. Arguably, then, the affect that Woolf’s intersensory language celebrates in Orlando, is not simply a depiction of an empowered and empowering, body-based form of emotion, but a gesture towards literature’s ability to prompt such an embodied, radical response in its readers. When Orlando experiences the oppressiveness of the damp Victorian era, Woolf appears to anticipate Lauren Berlant’s materialist theory of affect. For Berlant, affect is something with a worldly basis that acts not upon individuals (as Giles Deleuze argues) but upon a group, community, or nation to produce a shared affective atmosphere. Affect is not just ‘a metaphysical category spanning what’s internal and external to subjectivity,’ she argues, but something that ‘saturates the corporeal, the intimate, and political performances of adjustment that make a shared atmosphere something palpable’.244 It is something that saturates literary form too; the world produces literature, and the affects of that world, categorised by genre, are 242 Hagan, p.176. 243 Woolf, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ in Collected Essays II (The Hogarth Press: London, 1966) p.2. 244 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (USA: Duke University Press, 2011) p.15. 106 reflected therein.245 The chilling, palpable damp is the Victorian affect, in Woolf’s view, that saturates both its social atmosphere and the literature it produces. Elsewhere, however, in ‘Phases of Fiction’ – an essay written alongside Orlando – Woolf suggests that literature can produce its own alternative affects. Identifying and analysing six different categories of literary prose whilst locating the value of each category in affect, the essay states that authorial ‘truth-tellers’ provide emotional relief that is ‘fertilizing and refreshing’.246 Similarly, literature by ‘romantics’ encourages our senses to become ‘strained and apprehensive’ while prose by ‘psychologists’ prompts emotion that put us in ‘touch with different physical experiences’ (70, 87). 247 Contrary to the saturation of oppressive affect that Woolf attributes to Victorian literature, these ideas suggest that literary affect can also be radical in its evocation of emotion and sensation; it challenges bodily suppression in general terms, but can also connect us with and help us to better understand the embodied realities of others/Others.248 If, as Berlant argues, affect saturates form, then Woolf’s subversion of traditional biography can be understood, together with intersensory language, as an attempt to create such alternative affect – another disorienting experience in how it alters readerly expectations – as part of Woolf’s re-visioning process. In this thesis’ introduction, I emphasise that generic subversion, and its affective potential, is tied to the text’s episodic form. Orlando’s ability to connect with the multiple subjectivities scattered throughout her memory, is reflected in the novel’s weaving together of different historical periods. Since even the most conventional of biographies must demonstrate some affiliation with the episodic in its organisation of a subject’s life stages, Woolf’s generic subversion in this case accentuates both the sensory and temporal disruption that is often conveyed via women’s engagement with episodic forms. The 245 Berlant, p.16. 246 Woolf, ‘Phases of Fiction’ in Collected Essays II (The Hogarth Press: London, 1966) p.58. 247 Ibid. 248 As I mention in my thesis’ introduction, Teresa Brennan presents a theory of affect that similarly emphasises communication. 107 historical jumps effectuated by each chapter contribute to the reader’s own repeated need to re-orient themselves in the narrative following temporal disorientation. Together with sensory language, textual experimentation portrays and advocates an ongoing, touching, and feminist recovery of the queer, female body. The affective disorientation accompanying these aesthetics can also enable readers to extend this recuperative, revisionary project to other marginalised bodies. It can help us to look/feel beyond what is usually visible/tangible. It can also direct our gaze beyond that of the author, as Woolf herself encourages. For Woolf, as emphasised by the doubleness of her text and the multi-faceted nature of Orlando’s subjectivity, the power of art is not about control. While discussing the ‘duty of the reader’ in ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, she invites us, as Allen summarises, ‘not to defer to authorities, but to come to [our] own conclusions’.249 Thus, the merger between English and Turkish landscapes in Orlando’s mind’s eye towards the novel’s end, not only reiterates Woolf’s anti-imperial sentiment as bound to her feminism, but points to the necessity of similar revisionary and recuperative work concerning racial and foreign Others. In detecting the kinship between Woolf’s feminism and anti-imperialism, as she strives to represent the problematic absence of women and queer women in literature, our capacity to perceive the equally though less intentionally constructed absence of the non-white body, first within and then outside of the novel, is heightened. Breaking down boundaries between culture and nature, and mind and body, the amalgamation of east and west, reflects the collapse of the British Empire in the early twentieth century, and Woolf’s view that the concept of nationality was therefore ‘over’.250 In the text’s closing revelatory scene, Woolf is reappropriating imperial language to gain, as Garrity says of this method in other texts by female modernists, a sense of citizenship for women while imbuing the national ‘gaze with redemptive agency’.251 Building upon the use of colonial 249 Allen, p.207. 250 Garrity, p.9. 251 Garrity, p.28. 108 language throughout the text, the vastness of the hybridised east-west landscape in this moment seems to replace the biographer’s use of the same word at the beginning of the text when describing Orlando’s imperial activities in the ‘vast attic room’ (11). Accompanied by an antagonistic depiction of shrinking imperial territory when Orlando observes that ‘everything seemed to have shrunk’ and ‘long vistas had steadily shrunk together,’ it symbolises a reclamation of sight that seeks to separate artistic control and revision of literary space from territorial, imperial action (172, 177). Such reappropriating methods continue to point beyond Woolf’s own authorial focus, towards the ongoing, problematic absence of the colonial figure. Orlando’s realisation that ‘the shrivelled skin of the ordinary…satisfies the senses amazingly’ when it is ‘stuffed out with meaning’ is particularly telling in this respect (182). While this sensory language enables Woolf to reiterate the importance of more complex approaches to lived experience, for the postcolonial reader, the ‘shrivelled skin’ also recalls the shrunken Moor’s head, bringing renewed attention to the additional unexplored meanings that his sensory life might reveal. In this way, the intersensory vision that is constructed within and concludes Woolf’s novel reveals a new epistemology. Derived from a different kind of modern chaos to that feared by Simmel, this calls for readers as well as writers to destabilise hegemonic structures. It encourages us to develop new, sensitive thinking about the phenomenologies and ontologies of various marginalised subjects. For Woolf, as I explore in the next chapter, this process, and the more optimistic modern world view it engenders, is also crucial to the novel’s exploration and preservation of her personal thoughts and feelings concerning the experiences of Sackville-West. 109 Photographic Texts and Images in Passenger to Teheran (1926), Twelve Days in Persia (1928) and Orlando (1928): The Intersensory Communications of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West Towards the end of her second 1920s travelogue, Twelve Days in Persia (1928), Vita Sackville-West describes her impression of an oil field. After spending almost two weeks in the ‘wild’ and ‘free’ Bakhtiari mountains, this contrasting sight – the ‘hell of civilisation’ at her journey’s end – initially causes her to experience ‘an almost physical shock’.252 Shortly afterwards, however, she recalls that the juxtaposition also generated a sense of newfound understanding. She writes: as I stood there, my head full of the things I had seen that day, half understood words and explanations jostling together and producing a sort of thunder of incomprehensible magnificence and audacity, the remembered solitudes of the Bakhtiari mountains rose up and swelled together with the energy of the oil field into a vast, significant, and as it were, symbolic symphony. (TD, 130). In this sensory moment, Sackville-West describes a cognitive process that while ‘incomprehensible’ at the time, can subsequently be likened to the sound of thunder, a musical composition and a vision of merging landscapes in the mind’s eye. It is a moment in which her personal journey not only begins to gain a symphonic narrative clarity, but as part of this, her notions of east and west are (re)connected. Overseen by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, established in Teheran in 1909, the oil field symbolises a return to the modern ‘world 252 Vita Sackville-West, Twelve Days in Persia: Across the Mountains with the Bakhtiari Tribe (London: Tauris Parke, 2009) pp.33-34 & p.121. 110 of…mechanical invention’ in which Persia and Sackville-West’s native England are economically entwined (121). The scene is remarkably like the moment in which Turkish and English landscapes merge at the end of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando – a text dedicated to and based upon the life of Sackville-West. As argued in the previous chapter, Orlando’s revelatory moment is the culmination of Woolf’s effort, via intersensory aesthetics, to counter hegemonic ways of seeing. Its resemblance to Sackville-West’s own descriptions emphasises the influence of Twelve Days in this endeavour. The same chaotic shock of modernity occurs in Woolf’s text before being similarly resolved by the acquisition of new vision and knowledge. Orlando’s sense of having a ‘microscope stuck to her eye’ and hearing Turkish ‘goat bells’ even alludes to the travelogue’s opening comments in which Sackville-West writes that she finds herself looking back on her journey ‘as through a telescope’ to see ‘moving flocks and ruined cities’ (O, 185; O, 176; TD, 10).253 Orlando and its intersensory aesthetics are connected not just to Sackville-West, but her travel writing. In addition to Twelve Days, this includes Passenger to Teheran (1926), which details Sackville-West’s first experiences of Persia as well as Egypt, India, and Russia. Written during the height of Sackville-West’s intimacy with Woolf, these travelogues seem to anticipate a response from Woolf as their publisher and primary reader. Orlando, described as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’ by Sackville-West’s son, Nigel Nicholson, forms part of this response.254 Together, the novel and Sackville-West’s travelogues become extensions of the letters the women exchanged while Sackville-West was abroad. This chapter is the first piece of scholarship to emphasise such links between Orlando and Sackville-West’s 253 Woolf, Orlando (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Of course, microscopes and telescopes are not synonymous, but they are both visual technological instruments that show similarity between Woolf’s and Sackville-West’s writing. 254 Whitworth, ‘Introduction’ in Orlando (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). p.xiii. 111 travel writing in detail.255 The sensory elements of each text not only create and convey their communications with one another but also express Woolf’s and Sackville-West’s intersensory desire to remain in touch with and in view of one another. The photographic and its own sensory and intersensory assignations particularly illuminate this. All three texts include and refer to photography in ways that are discussed throughout the chapter. In the first two sections, I focus on Sackville-West’s travel writing and how this provides further insights into Orlando’s sensory and, especially, visual motifs. Referencing theories of modernist and women’s travel writing, I argue that the sensory content in Passenger and Twelve Days perpetuates and subverts the hegemony of the imperial male gaze. Anticipating Woolf’s critical and radical characterisation of Orlando, as shaped by her multifaceted sensory aesthetics, this emphasises Sackville-West’s own, seemingly paradoxical, entanglement with and resistance to socio-literary norms. Such duality is also connected to Sackville-West’s complex thoughts and feelings about Woolf as her friend, lover, and reader. As a receptive reader, Woolf expands the transformational aspects of Sackville-West’s travelogues in Orlando, and critiques their elitist, imperial viewpoints, particularly with respect to Sackville-West’s use of and comments on photography. Thus, in one sense, the camera emerges as an extension of the imperial male gaze. The second half of the chapter argues that Woolf’s engagement with photography in Orlando alludes to and counters this hegemony. The photographic not only becomes part of Woolf’s radical recovery project but illuminates its personal dimensions. First, I draw on existing Woolf scholarship to argue that the physical photographs in Orlando both exemplify and contribute to the recuperative, intersensory aesthetics outlined in Chapter One, in ways that directly relate to Sackville-West and her travels. Second, drawing on sensory and affective 255 Leslie Kathleen Hankins discusses the influence of travel writing and travel film on Orlando but only briefly mentions Sackville-West and does not specifically refer to Twelve Days or Passenger. Hankins argues that Woolf offers the “gift of travel” to Sackville-West. I suggest that Sackville-West’s travels instead inspire Woolf. See Leslie Kathleen, “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”: Travel Films “projected into the shape of Orlando” in Contradictory Woolf, ed. by Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012) pp.250-258. 112 theories of photography and Maggie Humm’s work on Woolf’s personal albums, I assert that Orlando can be theorised as a photograph album. Expanding my previous chapter’s analysis of generic experimentation, I demonstrate using Henri Bergson’s photographic memory metaphors, that this album – consisting of prose snapshots and physical images – is allied with what Humm calls the modernism of Woolf’s Monk’s House albums. As an album, I suggest, Orlando expresses Woolf’s desire to maintain and preserve her relationship with Sackville-West. It also elucidates the novel’s communicative affiliation with the intersensory. In the chapter’s concluding section, I argue that Orlando’s closing scenes are a culmination of this modernist and intersensory photographic work as well as the recovery project enacted by the text more broadly. Using Freud’s photographic memory metaphors as well as Bergson’s, I suggest that the landscape merger scene is a celebration not only of Woolf’s and Sackville-West’s personal relationship but of their creative influence on one another.256 This reiterates the intersensory nature of the communication taking place between these authors and their texts, and suggests that recuperative feminist revisionary work more broadly, might be conceived in intersensorial and figuratively haptic terms of communication. The photographic presents just one avenue through which to explore this idea, and technology’s potential role in helping to overturn the mechanical modern sensory order that was feared by Simmel and epitomised by the emotional detachment of Futurism. By making these arguments, I stage several critical interventions. Firstly, the chapter continues to draw sensory studies together with feminist modernist studies. Like DeMaagd, I bring Danius’ materialist work on modernism, technology, and the senses into conversation with sensory studies and gender. The way I do so, however, differs from DeMaagd in its consideration of memory and queer relationships. This not only constitutes a nuanced approach 256 Humm applies both Bergson and Freud to her analysis of Woolf’s Monk’s House photograph albums. I am applying the same ideas to Orlando. 113 to the much-discussed relationship between Woolf and Sackville-West but brings more attention to Sackville-West’s critically neglected travelogues. Although many scholars have acknowledged Sackville-West’s travels, only Alexandra Peat and a handful of others, including Joyce E. Kelley and Mary Henes, have examined Passenger more thoroughly. Twelve Days remains largely unremarked upon. While Sackville-West’s successful poem The Land has been analysed alongside Orlando by critics in some detail, the equally significant travelogues have not.257 Addressing this omission in studies of Woolf and Sackville-West, my chapter brings Orlando together with the travelogues via a sustained focus on the sensory.258 Additionally, the chapter’s sensory focus brings new context to existing work on travel writing. Critics such as Carl Thompson and David Farley have each argued that travel writing, although often embroiled in imperialist ideologies, occasionally contests such hegemony too. Passenger and Twelve Days highlight this duality. Challenging Thompson’s and Farley’s tendency to align women’s travel writing with resistance alone, Sackville-West’s texts prompt a consideration of women’s complicity in imperialistic travelogues. This brings a more complex gendered perspective to Farley’s emphasis on the relationship between modernism, travel and visuality – an intersection that is similarly explored by Robert Burden. Finally, my intersensory approach brings new perspectives to existing research on visual culture within Woolf studies. My focus on the radical role of figurative as well as literal photographs in Orlando – a transposition of comments by Vara Neverow and Colin Dickey concerning the photographic quality of fragmented viewpoints in Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922) – expands existing conversations on relationships between 257The relationship between Orlando and Sackville-West’s travel writing is mentioned by Sackville-West’s biographer, Victoria Glendinning, but only briefly. See Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West (London: Penguin, 1984) p.1723. Critics who explore the relationship between Orlando and the ‘The Land’ include Jane de Gay and Suzanne Bellamy. 258 I build on Whitworth’s observation that Orlando was conceived during Sackville-West’s second trip to Persia and was described as a ‘Defoe narrative’ (evoking the explorations and travel of Robinson Crusoe) in Woolf’s diary (Whitworth, p.xviii). 114 photography and generic subversion in Woolf’s texts.259 By emphasising connections between the photographic, Sackville-West and her travelogues, I explore the personal importance of photographs for Woolf in new ways. While most existing work on Woolf’s own photographic practice focuses on familial relationships and ancestry, I consider how the themes of influence, connection and memory discussed in such scholarship are also relevant to her relationship with Sackville-West.260 This builds on articles by Talia Schaffer and Christine Fouirnaies in which Orlando’s photographs and Sackville-West’s presence in them are examined without reference to Woolf’s personal albums. This chapter demonstrates that sensory approaches to women’s writing can provide nuanced readings even of familiar texts, particularly in how they illuminate new connections between female authors and their works. Vita Sackville-West’s Travelogues The imperial male gaze Woolf visited Turkey and Greece in 1906 with her siblings Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian and a family friend, Violet Dickinson.261 She records the experience in a travel notebook that she kept from 1906-1909. As Vassiliki Kolocotroni has demonstrated, the trip influenced her portrayal of the Orient in Orlando.262 Sackville-West’s photographs and accompanying 259 As well as Orlando, some of Woolf’s later texts include photographs: Flush (1933), Three Guineas (1938) and the 1940 biography of Roger Fry. For photography and genre on Orlando see, for example, Erika Flesher, 2006; Natasha Aleksiuk, 2000; Talia Schaffer, 1994 ; Christine Fouirnaies, 2016. For photography and genre on other Woolf texts see, for example, Helen Wussow, 1997; Julia Duffy and Lloyd Davis, 1996; and Floriane Reviron-Piegay, 2017. 260 Many critics have explored the influence of Woolf’s aunt Julia Cameron, who was a photographer (Gillespie, 1993; Aleksiuk, 2000; Setina, 2007). Some of these and others have also focused on the relationship between Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell (Gillespie, 1993; Humm, 2002). Both Gillespie and Humm mention Sackville-West, but she is not the primary focus. 261 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 1997) p.226. 262 Vassiliki Kolocotroni, ‘Orlando, Greece and the Impossible Landscape’ in Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence ed. by Elsa Hogburg and Amy Bromley (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018) pp.92-103. 115 descriptions in Passenger and Twelve Days, are also significant influences. Persia was a recurrent destination for Sackville-West in the mid-1920s because her husband, Harold Nicholson, worked in Teheran within Britain’s Diplomatic Service from 1925.263 As the travelogues reveal, she was fascinated by the country, and was keen to explore and record its landscapes both in writing and photographs. The language in each text emphasises the presence of her camera at numerous points. In Passenger, for instance, she explains that she is ‘taking photographs with different kodaks’ (66).264 Similarly, in Twelve Days she lists her ‘camera’ and ‘films in tin cylinders’ among her essential equipment, and later recalls having ‘just enough energy left to take a photograph’ after an arduous trek from Naghan to Do Polan. Many photographs – taken by Sackville-West and her travel companions – are printed with titles in each of the original texts (16, 35). In Twelve Days, some photos including ‘The Karoun at Godar Landar’ and ‘Looking Towards Arabistan’ were provided by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. These landscape images and others including ‘Above the Karoun,’ ‘Bakhtiari Country’ and ‘On the Murvarid Pass’ in Twelve Days, and ‘Peitak Summit’ and ‘Road to Isfahan’ in Passenger, resemble Woolf’s descriptions of eastern scenery in Orlando. The ‘vast high solitudes’ and ‘jagged crests of Isfahan’ pictured in Passenger, and the other long shots among these examples, seem to inform Woolf’s reference to the ‘bald and stony prominence’ of ‘the inhospitable Asian mountains’ on Orlando’s ‘right and left’ in Constantinople (PT, 106; O, 73). Even at great distance, the similarly rocky terrain of the mountains is discernible in ‘Bakhtiari Country,’ ‘Looking Towards Arabistan,’ and ‘Road to Isfahan.’ The medium range shots such as ‘On the Murvarid Pass’ and ‘Above the Karoun,’ which depict the travelling party and their donkeys show this more clearly, and correlate with Orlando’s later immersion in mountains and valleys when she travels with ‘the gipsy tribe’ 263 Karen Lawrence, ‘Orlando’s Voyage Out,’ Modern Fiction Studies, Vol 38, Issue 1 (1992) p.257. 264 Vita Sackville-West, Passenger to Teheran (Heathfield: Cockbird Press, 1990). 116 (84). Like Sackville-West, Orlando finds herself ‘riding a donkey’ through mountains, sitting ‘on the banks of streams’ and observing ‘the majesty of the hills’ (84, 86). Twelve Days even includes a photograph of Sackville-West, with mountains in the background, riding a donkey on the plains of Malamir. It is likely that this image guided how Woolf imagined and wrote these scenes in Orlando. Similarly, Orlando’s return to England by boat, may have been influenced by a photograph in Passenger which shows Sackville-West sitting on the edge of a ship. Her legs are inside the vessel, but her head is turned sideways, so that she is looking out to sea. The fact that Orlando’s bare ankles on board the ship represent her last taste of freedom before disembarking in eighteenth-century London, seems inspired by Sackville-West’s own liberatingly modern dress and pose in this photo. Donning a mid-length skirt and cropped hair, she is smoking a cigarette and gently swinging her legs while holding onto rigging ropes for support. As Farley and Burden argue of modernist travel writing, for Sackville-West, the visual is crucial to her understanding of this genre and the way she positions herself within it as narrator and subject.265 This is evident not just in her literal camera use, but in the filmic bird’s eye view descriptions that she frequently adopts when describing foreign landscapes. In Passenger, for example, she writes that the absence of ‘grime and over-population’ is ‘like being lifted up and set above the world on a great, wide roof – the plateau of Iran’ (77). In Twelve Days, she recalls seeing ‘the wild Bakhtiari country lying below [her] for the first time’ (33). Both moments anticipate the scene in which Orlando looks over the landscapes of Turkey ‘beneath him’ from his raised vantage point of ambassadorial accommodation (72). Sackville-West’s travelogues foreshadow what I refer to in Chapter One as Orlando’s portrayal of an imperial male gaze. According to Thompson, all travel writing ‘must, arguably, engage in an act of othering in the first sense, since every travel account is premised on the 265 David Farley, Modernist Travel Writing (US: University of Missouri Press, 2010) p.17; and Robert Burden, Travel, Modernism and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2015) pp.11-19. 117 assumption that it brings news of people and places that are to some degree unfamiliar and ‘other’ to the audience’.266 When Sackville-West asserts that it is ‘almost as hard, in Persia, to believe in the existence of England, as it is, in England, to believe in the existence of Persia,’ she participates in this inevitable othering while emphasising the difference between east and west (PT, 82). Woolf echoes this sentiment in Orlando when her protagonist views the Turkish landscape as ‘nothing…like the counties of Surrey and Kent or the towns of London and Tunbridge Wells’ (72). However, such dichotomous perceptions, Thompson argues, are often attached to the promotion of ‘racial and cultural supremacism’ within the travel writing genre.267 This is evident in Sackville-West’s writing. Her bird’s eye descriptions suggest an imperialistic sense of superiority, mirrored by language in which she figuratively looks down on foreign peoples and lands. As her reaction to the oil-field demonstrates, she is occasionally repulsed by the country’s landscapes. The salt fields of Aden, for instance, are ‘hideous’ (PT, 50). Moreover, when she describes her view of ‘a skeleton-coloured cliff of a town’ with the ‘eye sockets of a skull’ she seems to merge humanity with landscape in the dehumanising way that Mary Louise Pratt describes in Imperial Eyes; she aligns this foreign community with a morbid, subjugating sense of lack (TD, 19).268 The description seems to parallel Woolf’s description of the Moor’s head in Orlando’s opening paragraphs. Reflecting Orlando’s perception of Turks as ‘barbaric’ and gesturing towards a eugenicist mindset, subjugation is also more explicitly highlighted when Sackville-West describes non-Europeans as ‘weak and vigorous races’ (O, 72; PT, 128). In Twelve Days, she not only calls Persia a ‘primitive country’ where ‘natural genius’ is ‘hard to imagine’ but draws on ‘Plato’s system of guardians’ to propose an educational system that is barred from those with ‘half-trained minds’ for whom, she claims, complex ideas might be ‘dangerous’ (TD, 112). 266 Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011) p.133. 267 Thompson, p.5-6. 268 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (USA: Routledge, 1992). 118 More often, though, reflecting the ‘passion’ that Orlando feels for Turkey’s wildness, Sackville-West’s imperialist sentiments masquerade as love.269 She is frequently awed by Persian scenery. In the fourth chapter of Passenger, for example, she writes that ‘no one had mentioned the beauty of the country’ and ‘nothing pleased [her] more than the Persian uplands’ (O, 73; PT, 69). Likewise in Twelve Days, she describes ‘the stage between Deh Diz and Qalah Madresseh’ as ‘the most beautiful country we had as yet seen’ (75). Such awe in relation to travel, for Peat, is linked to a modernist reconceptualization of spirituality and sacred journeys.270 Since Sackville-West describes herself as a ‘weary pilgrim’ in a long letter to Woolf from 8th February 1926, this certainly seems applicable to her.271 In the travelogues themselves, Sackville-West frequently emphasises a sense of spiritual calm, derived from the vastness of space around her. In Passenger, she writes that she finds ‘serenity’ in the mountains’ ‘sense of space’ (67). There are ‘no boundaries anywhere,’ she explains, and she finds herself ‘pleased by enormous views’ and ‘surveying unknown distances’ (91, 69, 70). The following year, this awe remains but has more knowledge attached to it. Indeed, she states in relation to Asia as a whole: ‘I know how vast are the spaces which on the map cover one inch’ (TD, 11). Throughout both travelogues, this desire to gain understanding and familiarity, occasionally lends itself to the same appropriation of colonial discourse that emerges in Orlando. While discussing the limitations of words, for example, Sackville-West writes that authors are the ‘slaves of language’ (PT, 28). As Peat observes, when Sackville-West compares herself-as-traveller to ‘Sinbad in the Valley of Gems’ and ‘Aladdin in the Cave’ she repeats ‘the old Orientalist clichés’ (PT, 129).272 More insidiously, her quest for knowledge and this attempt to affiliate herself with the east, betrays possessive elements of imperialist thinking. Expressing the same 269 Moslund, p.139. 270 Alexandra Peat, Travel and Modernist Literature: Sacred and Ethical Journeys (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011). 271 Sackville-West, ‘S.S. Rajputana in the Indian Ocean 8th February 1926’ in The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf ed. by Mitchell Leaska and Louise DeSalvo (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2001) p.100. 272 Peat, p.29. 119 sense of ownership over landscape as Orlando, she often makes awe-inspired references to ‘my Persia’ and ‘my ideal Persia’ (PT, 146; TD, 110). She attempts to impose her authority over this foreign nation through a “loving” gaze. On occasion, it becomes clear that the camera, and Sackville-West’s attitude towards it, are an extension of possessive, imperialistic viewership. In Twelve Days, she describes some ‘unfortunate’ incidents that occur due to her intrusive camera use (94). In one ‘photographic misadventure,’ she causes a ‘holy man’ to fall from his horse after spooking the animal with her device (100). In another, she recalls that she terrified a local woman who believed, Sackville-West assumes, that the machine was ‘a weapon or an instrument of the evil eye’ (94). Sackville-West’s accounts of these events and the amused tone she uses to describe them, not only indicate her participation in a masculine and imperialistic European tradition regarding encounters with the east but demonstrate that the camera is being used to modernise this tradition in the early twentieth century. She shows explicit awareness of this when she states that she wants to ‘be where no white man has ever been before’ but ‘the globe is too small and too well mapped, and the cinema too active’ (TD, 27). Here, because it has granted widespread access to previously unseen and unknowable “exotic” sights, she recognises that the cinema has made it more difficult to impress western audiences with tales of foreign lands.273 Nevertheless, Sackville-West acknowledges, she wants her own discoveries and photography to make an impact in the traditional vein. The camera incidents in Twelve Days show not only that she is attempting to collect images in places where the device remains unfamiliar, but that she is referring to the camera in ways that continue hegemonic othering traditions while 273 One such film that Sackville-West ‘dragged’ Woolf along to see was Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925) – a documentary about the hardships experienced by the Bakhtiari during their annual migration (Hankins, p.254). Hankins explains that in a letter from Sackville-West to Woolf on 19th February 1927, she reminds her of when she ‘dragged’ her ‘to see the film called ‘Grass’ (DeSalvo and Leaska, p.173). Other 1920s films on eastern peoples and culture, cited by Hankins, and possibly seen by Sackville-West and/or Woolf include: Chang: A Drama in the Wilderness (1927) which was discussed in Close Up journal, Crossing the Great Sahara (1924) and the subsequent mockumentary, Crossing the Great Sagrada (1924). 120 pandering to a western audience. When she discloses that some villagers ‘besieged’ her to show them her photographs and were ‘disappointed’ when she explained they would have to ‘wait at least three weeks’ for them to develop, Sackville-West emphasises Persian technological ignorance while revelling in her own knowledge (PT, 103). The camera, as a symbol of western modernity, is pitted against eastern cultures – an example of hierarchised difference that presents the west as more technologically advanced. In stressing this difference, Sackville-West perpetuates patriarchal as well as imperialistic seeing. While she asks the holy man for his permission before photographing him, she does not seem to offer the same courtesy to the woman she startles, demonstrating a sense of entitlement regarding her image. Stating that she longs to see native Persian women in ‘velvet…embroidered with gold’ and is ‘sorry’ to discover they ‘no longer [wear] the old Bakhtiari dress’ that leaves ‘the breast bare,’ she gazes on foreign women in voyeuristic ways (TD, 29). This, coupled with her reluctance to reveal her own gender, which is only mentioned at the end of Passenger and remains unremarked on in Twelve Days, reiterates her entanglement with masculine writing traditions. As Orlando reflects, her perceptions of the foreign Other are gendered as well as raced in problematic ways. The camera and Sackville-West’s descriptions of its use, preserve these impressions while also appeasing, on some level, an imperialistic possessive impulse. Sackville-West’s travelogues present the camera as part of the oppressive and emotionally-detached sensory environment that is variously warned against by Simmel, Heidegger, Rancière and Mignolo in their theorisations of modernity.274 Contributing to the ‘sensory crisis’ that modernist aesthetics ‘enact and respond to’ by combining technology with the aesthetic, according to Danius, these inferences about the camera are testament not only to ‘the ever-closer relationship between the sensuous and the technological,’ but the way that this evidences a modern continuation of post-Enlightenment sense hierarchies and their hegemonic 274 See my introductory chapter for more detail regarding these theorists. 121 elevation of the visual.275 The ongoing influence of racist and sexist nineteenth-century pseudosciences, explored in the previous chapter, is partly aided by the camera. Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, for example, used physiognomy to analyse and disseminate photographic “evidence” of race, class, and gender hierarchies as well as physical “abnormalities” in alleged criminals and Jews. 276 As Sackville-West’s reader, it is possible that Woolf not only made similar connections between perceptions in the travelogues and modern societal problems but incorporated these into her characterisation of Orlando. I begin the next section by contextualising this idea more thoroughly. Formal innovation and new eyes Woolf’s dislike for modern uses of photography in the public sphere has been widely discussed. Critics such as Humm have emphasised that Three Guineas is a critique of the manipulative and patriarchal photographs in nationalistic wartime propaganda.277 This perhaps explains why Woolf refers to snapshots as providing only a ‘limited eye’.278 Her similarly sceptical approach to film has also been discussed, particularly with reference to her 1926 essay, ‘The Cinema.’ While film and photography are separate media, Woolf’s critique of each is united by her concern regarding camera usage and output. In ‘The Cinema,’ Woolf uses synaesthesic language to criticise a link she perceives between the camera and intrusion. Aligning such 275 Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Aesthetics (US: Cornell University Press, 2002) p.2. 276 Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton, and Marey (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). In the twentieth century, this influenced Nazi propaganda and its visual elements, including pro-Arian film Das Erbe, and photography accompanying articles on sterilization in Neues Volk (Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (US: Harvard University Press, 2003) p.119). 277 Maggie Humm, ‘Memory, photography and modernism: Woolf’s Three Guineas’ in Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002) pp.195-216. 278 Humm, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002) p.46. 122 intrusion with a ‘mechanical skill’ that is divorced from meaningful artistry, she writes that the ‘eye licks’ up film without ‘bestirring itself to think’.279 In this image, the human eye, functioning ‘epidermically…in ‘licking’ – both touching and tasting the screen,’ as Garrington writes, becomes ensconced in a grotesque and illusory form of tactile and gustatory intimacy that is encouraged by the camera’s ‘titillating,’ ‘simple-minded’ products.280 These, in Woolf’s view, as Garrington writes, ‘parasitically raid the glories of literature’.281 In this public setting, the camera’s projected, moving images seem to take over the human sensorium; they fuel intrusive traits in the human eye itself. In Orlando, the protagonist’s experience of uncomfortable electrical sensations in the Victorian era presents a form of perception that seems analogous to this intrusive mechanised description of the eye. Signalling her single status, as explored in the previous chapter, Orlando’s experience of these sensations not only reiterates the increasingly close relationship between technology and the sensory by synonymising Orlando’s nerves with the ‘wires’ of a machine, but also resembles the intrusive zooming in of a camera on her body (O, 138). The passage moves from describing a ‘tingling and vibration all over her’ to ‘her hands; and then in one hand, and then in one finger of that hand, and then finally to…the second finger of the left hand’ (O, 139). The audience seem to view this scene as through a lens gradually moving from medium range to close up. The increasing level of discomfort and confusion it suggests, harks back to the distress that Sackville-West incites with her camera in Persia. Since, as the previous chapter explains, the pre-marriage scene in Orlando both depicts and resists Orlando’s own subjection to the imperial male gaze, Woolf’s novel gestures not only to Sackville-West’s perpetuation of this gaze with her camera, but her subversion of it elsewhere in and beyond the travelogues. In Passenger and Twelve Days, sensory language, 279 Woolf, ‘The Cinema’ in Collected Essays II (The Hogarth Press: London, 1966) pp.268-272. 280 Garrington, p.144. 281 Ibid. 123 anticipating Woolf’s more complex aesthetics, is part of this subversive content. Although visuality is a dominant aspect of the texts, at the beginning of Passenger, Sackville-West conceives travel and travel writing in more synaesthesic and thus intersensory terms. She writes that ‘travel is a taste’ that ‘consists entirely of things felt and things seen – of sensations received and impressions visually enjoyed’ (29). Prior to this, she even undermines the visual focus of contemporary travel writing (and therefore traditional sensory hierarchies) when she writes that language was ‘never designed to replace or even complete the much simpler functions of the eye’ (27). While this comment seems to elevate visual processes above language, it also diminishes the power of sight by suggesting that the eye alone possesses only simple functions. Highlighting an attempt to create a travel narrative that might overcome language limitations, this movement beyond visuality alone not only undermines the imperial male gaze but sets up other subversive elements of both texts. For Sackville-West, travel and travel writing become part of her wider lived effort to break free from gender binaries. As Kathryn Aalto writes, Sackville-West ‘swapped feminine skirts, smock blouses, and ribboned hats for mannish breeches and leather gaiters. Being tomboyish brought her intense freedom, not just for practical movement in her gardens but also through wildly subversive gender reinvention in her love affairs’.282 To travel as a woman, and thus challenge norms surrounding the identity of explorers, was part of this subversion too. Sackville-West’s desire to capture something new with her camera, as a woman, was likely motivated by the same resistance to convention, even if the results reveal imperialistic attitudes. Demonstrating that travelogues are only superficially ‘associated with men,’ the delayed gender reveal in Passenger indicates a carefully-constructed and impactful challenge to readerly expectations.283 Orlando’s transition 282 Kathryn Aalto, Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World (Portland: Timber Press, 2020) p.61. 283 Thompson, p.3. 124 and the over-declamatory insistence on ‘He’ at the beginning of Woolf’s novel seem to pay tribute to this challenge and how Sackville-West embeds it into her narrative structure. Likewise, the generic experiment and episodic form of Orlando – a subversion of the “normal” reading experience, as I explain in Chapter One – resembles that used by Sackville-West in her travelogues. Peat has argued that Passenger's apparent ode to tradition is countered by its modernist fragmentation, subjectivity and ‘in-between moments of the journey’.284 The narrative is full of ‘digressions rather than adhering to any linear trajectory,’ and blends fact and fiction to undermine western travel writing traditions.285 Although Sackville-West uses Oriental clichés, Peat writes, she also turns these metaphors ‘on their heads’ to imagine ‘herself as the Oriental Other’.286 By comparing herself ‘to Sinbad and Aladdin as well as Marco Polo and Alexander, Sackville-West...merges the fictional and the historical, in the process turning herself into another fictional character and positing the narrative as another fictional construct’.287 Destabilising the text’s stance on imperial and patriarchal attitudes, this renders it difficult ‘to locate any single or authentic version of the journey or to imagine’ Sackville-West’s ‘travel narrative as unique, factual or completely final’.288 In Twelve Days, this is less obvious, but the text’s anti-linear circularity – created by the retrospective gaze with which it starts and ends – together with its continuing use of asides and contemplations, demonstrates a similar formal emphasis on subjective multiplicity. This anticipates Orlando’s multitudinous identity and Woolf’s reflection of this in her own generic subversions. It also foreshadows the multi-faceted nature of Woolf’s intersensory aesthetics, and how these relate to both genre and gender subversion.289 Like the simplicity that Passenger attaches to the eye when separated from the rest of the sensorium, the text’s blurring of fact and fiction, as in Orlando, seems to 284 Peat, p.29. 285 Peat, p.31. 286 Peat, p.29. 287 Ibid. 288 Peat, p.29. 289 As discussed in the previous chapter. 125 question what is knowable and what can truthfully or realistically be presented in literature and language. This uncertainty, together with gender ambiguity, not only questions tradition, but challenges it by enabling subtle and playful expressions of same-sex desire without fear of censorship. As well as in the descriptions of Persian women, this kind of expression emerges in Twelve Days when Sackville-West describes a ‘queer sensation’ on her ‘hand,’ caused by the sun; it is ‘analogous,’ she explains, to ‘the sensation with which one wakes at night’ when ‘convinced that one's bed has turned itself round the other way’ (TD,67). Woolf’s remarkably similar focus on the concentration of ‘queerest sensations’ in the hand, brings out the potentially euphemistic terms of Sackville-West’s statement and therefore her influence on Woolf’s sensory language (O,139). The scene is also reminiscent of a letter she sends to Woolf on 8th December 1925 – six weeks before her first trip to Persia, but still connected to her travels since she describes herself as ‘drunk with journeying’– in which she suggestively states: I have seen something so odd, so queer – or rather, something which though perhaps neither odd nor queer in itself, has filled me with such odd and queer sensations, - that I must write to you (The thing, by the way, was entirely connected with you…).290 It is evident that Orlando’s revelatory, sensory scenes are connected to Sackville-West’s own trajectory of personal transformation across Passenger and Twelve Days. At the end of both texts, Sackville-West, like Orlando, adopts new ways of seeing. Guided by the questions ‘what am I?’ and ‘where am I?’, ‘intertwined throughout her journey,’ Passenger reflects on how travel grants new perspectives and self-knowledge; the ‘horizon,’ she stresses, ‘alters the shape of the mind’ (69).291 Her first trip helps her to feel that ‘all old habits’ are gone and she can 290 Sackville-West, ‘Long Barn, Tuesday 8th December 1925’ in DeSalvo and Leaska, p.76. 291 Peat, p.30. 126 ‘approach the old ideas with a new eye’ (82). Informing the scene in which Turkey and England merge in Orlando’s mind’s eye, the scene at the end of Twelve Days similarly emphasises new visions and understanding. This multi-sensory moment, like Orlando’s new perceptions, undermines the imperial male gaze, and its reliance on social-sensory hierarchies. By bringing east and west together, it symbolises a rejection of the emotional detachment associated with this gaze specifically within modernism; it moves away from what Burden defines as the estrangement motif in modernist travel writing. Rather, as Farley argues of the genre, Sackville-West’s texts close with a freeing sense of ‘crossing borders’ and ‘a modern world grown beyond the boundaries of nation’.292 Sackville-West’s acknowledgement of her own limitations represents another aspect of this revelatory trajectory that undermines the imperial male gaze. As a travel writer, she claims not to ‘cherish any idea that [she is] seeing “the life of the people”; ‘no foreigner,’ she states, ‘can ever do that, although some talk a great deal of nonsense about it’ (PT, 92). For Sackville-West, it is, Peat notes, ‘the viewer who is limited here, not that which is being viewed’.293 Her doubts about language reveal concerns about her capacity to use language well. In Orlando, Woolf represents this self-doubt in her protagonist’s initially frustrated poetic endeavours. These doubts are also linked to Woolf in the sense that they are fuelled by Sackville-West’s awareness of Woolf as her reader. She knew that the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press would be publishing each text and in a letter to Woolf dated 23rd February 1926, she writes about her initial work on Passenger in disparaging terms while praising Woolf’s own literary mastery.294 From the beginning of Passenger, as Peat argues, Sackville-West demonstrates she is conscious of her audience.295 Stressing, as Burden theorises, that modernists replace ‘moralizing and didactic 292 Farley, p.12. 293 Peat, p.29. 294 Sackville-West, ‘British India Steam Navigation Company., Ltd, S.S. Varela, 23rd February 1926’ in DeSalvo and Leaska, p.106. 295 Peat, p.30. 127 styles of Victorian travel writing’ with ‘a more subjective form, more memoir than manual,’ she insists on the reader’s co-operation.296 As Peat states, this accompanies an effort to highlight ‘the personal nature of her text – comparing it to the more personal narrative forms of the letter or the journal – and travel itself, which she describes as “the most private of pleasures”.297 However, as Peat also notes, the text seems impersonal.298 As well as the speaker’s gender, neither the author’s travelling companions nor husband are mentioned. Concurring with Peat’s point that ‘the transition from letter to travelogue is neither clear nor quite complete,’ for this reason, I argue, Passenger can be understood as an extension of Sackville-West’s letters to Woolf.299 Indeed, her early statement in Passenger that ‘travel is a source of annoyance to our friends,’ seems like a direct reflection of Woolf’s grief at Sackville-West’s absence (PT, 26). Sackville-West’s erasure of Harold Nicholson and travel companion, Dorothy Wellesley, suggests sensitivity to Woolf’s potential jealousy. Although dedicated to Harold Nicholson, both travelogues are “haunted,” as Peat writes, by Woolf-as-reader.300 In his introduction to Passenger, Nigel Nicholson, even emphasises this connection, and includes a photograph of Woolf at Monk’s House (taken by his mother) to frame the women’s relationship alongside the travelogue itself.301 It is Woolf who ensures that Sackville-West’s texts remain connected to, rather than estranged from, home. She becomes a touchstone of familiarity for Sackville-West while abroad. Not surprisingly, then, the merger of eastern and western landscapes in Twelve Days is paralleled by another image in a letter to Woolf from 9th February 1927. She writes that she feels on this second trip, ‘as if England and Persia are somehow ‘mixed’.302 With its Woolfian context, England and Persia begin to function metonymically 296 Burden, p.8. 297 Peat, p.30. 298 Peat, p.30. 299 Peat, p.28. 300 Peat, p.28. 301 Nigel Nicholson, ‘New Introduction’ in Passenger to Teheran (Heathfield: Cockbird Press, 1990) pp.17-29. 302 Sackville-West, ‘Teheran 9th February, 1927’ in DeSalvo and Leaska, p.170. 128 here for Woolf and Sackville-West respectively. This brings new understanding to Sackville-West’s expressions of love and loathing for Persia: they can be mapped onto her love for Woolf and her hatred of being away from her. As the letters between them demonstrate, the women missed each other greatly during Sackville-West’s absences. Woolf’s letters on 26th January and 31st January 1926, respectively state: ‘I have missed you. I do miss you. I shall miss you’ and ‘I miss you, yes I miss you’.303 Sackville-West writes on the 21st January 1926 that she is ‘reduced to a thing that wants Virginia’.304 Subsequently attempting to convince Woolf to visit Asia and Africa with her in a letter from 29th January, the “loving” impression she presents of Persia is also an entreaty to Woolf, an attempt to convince her of its pleasures. She frequently states, ‘I wish you were here’ or ‘why weren’t you there?’.305 Likewise, her more critical descriptions of Persia might be understood in connection with a desire to return home to Woolf; the homesickness and ‘depressed’ feeling that Sackville-West experienced during her second journey, correlates with an intensified sense of intimacy in her letters to Woolf. 306 Immediately after leaving on 28th January, Sackville-West writes a letter thanking Woolf for ‘the happiness’ she brings her, and states ‘I hate leaving you’.307 Addressing Woolf variously as ‘lovely,’ ‘beloved’ or ‘darling,’ Sackville-West’s 1927 letters explicitly ‘pine for Virginia’ and on one occasion, state that their separation makes her ‘angry’.308 While she was accompanied once more by Wellesley and another friend, Leigh Ashton, she writes that she is missing Woolf ‘frightfully’ and even seems concerned about whether this feeling remains mutual when in a letter from 31st January, she states ‘I hope you miss me’.309 In what seems 303 Woolf, ‘Tuesday 26th January 1926’ & ‘Sunday Jan 31st 1926’ in DeSalvo and Leaska, p.90. 304 Sackville-West, ‘Milan Thursdy 21st’ in DeSalvo and Leaska, p.89. 305Sackville-West, ‘S.S. Rajputana in the Red Sea 4th February’ and ‘Teheran 8th April 1926’ in DeSalvo and Leaska, p.95 & p.119. 306 Sackville-West, ‘Near Hanover Saturday 29th 1927’in DeSalvo and Leaska, p.164. 307 Sackville-West,‘182, Ebury Street, Pimlico, 28 January 1927’ in DeSalvo and Leaska, p.162. 308 Sackville-West, ‘Teheran 4th March 1927’ and ‘Moscow Monday 31st January 1927’ in The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, p.182 & p.167. 309 Sackville-West, ‘Moscow Monday 31st January 1927’ in DeSalvo and Leaska, p.166. 129 like an effort to remedy this low mood, a letter written in Teheran on 4th March 1927 describes a game she has invented in which she imagines that ‘Virginia’s world’ – a ‘once whole and complete’ entity – has been ‘scattered,’ and must be pieced back together.310 Explaining how she imagines finding and joining the pieces, Sackville-West’s letter indicates another attempt to draw Woolf to her in Persia. Much like the synaesthesic description of travel in Passenger, the activity relies on touch as well as sight, and becomes embedded in the imaginary of her travel experience. In this way, Sackville-West’s epistolary communications with Woolf not only become aligned with the intersensory, but emphasise that the travelogues themselves also carry these communicative, intersensory features. As well as using intersensory language, they are imbued with an intersensory desire not only to see Woolf, but to remain physically and emotionally in touch with her. This, too, disrupts the hegemony of the imperial male gaze. Establishing a relationship based on queer love and creativity, this communication reaches out to its intended recipient in non-intrusive ways. This does not erase the imperialistic and patriarchal aspects of Sackville-West’s texts, of course, but it does stand in contrast. In the next section of the chapter, I not only continue to consider how Woolf’s response in Orlando appears to both criticise Sackville-West’s hegemony and expand upon its more progressive, transformational elements, but I do so specifically in relation to photography as another aspect of her radical, intersensory aesthetics. 310 Sackville-West, ‘Teheran 4th March, 1927’ in DeSalvo and Leaska, p.180. 130 Orlando, Vita, and the Photographic Photography and intersensory aesthetics As Humm has shown, Woolf enjoyed amateur photography and demonstrates her knowledge of its development processes in an early review piece entitled ‘Gold and Iron’ (1919).311 In Orlando – the first of her novels to include photographs – Woolf begins to explore this personal interest and its artistic potential within her own literary work. Numerous critics have already commented on this.312 Much of what they have discerned can be understood as contributing to the radical work of the text’s intersensory aesthetics. Indeed, the photographs are also used to undermine the imperial male gaze. They, too, resist the biographer and the androcentric literary traditions he represents. For instance, emphasising the limitation of the biographer’s gaze, his comparative comments on the photographs of the female Orlando and the portrait images that depict the male Orlando, do not fully correspond with what the reader can see. He asserts that while ‘the man has his hand free to seize his sword, the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders’ (O, 111). However, in the cited male portrait, no such hand, or sword within reach, is visible. Similarly, the biographer states that ‘the man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking’ while ‘the woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion’ (O, 111). Here, by subjectively reading ‘suspicion’ on the female face, the biographer reveals his own suspicion about women, reinforcing his preference for the male subject (O, 111). Concurrently, Woolf uses photographic evidence to undermine this opinion and the stereotypical exaggerations of gender difference accompanying it. Although her head is slightly tilted, the female Orlando is looking directly at the viewer, as is the male. Furthermore, the male Orlando not only appears as constrained by 311 Humm, ‘Woolf and the Visual’ in A Companion to Virginia Woolf ed. by Jessica Berman (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016) p.294. 312 See Flesher, 2006; Aleksiuk, 2000; Schaffer, 1994; and Fouirnaies, 2016. 131 his clothing as the female Orlando but is wearing similar satin fabric and jewellery. While emphasising the role of the sartorial in gender constructions, Dickey argues, this enables Woolf to depict a figure who transcends gender distinctions altogether.313 In one sense, Woolf uses photography to reveal a “truth” that the biographer’s words strive to deny and conceal. Simultaneously, however, by placing these photographs in the context of a mock-biography, Woolf suggests that photographs can be as deceiving as words; they give an illusion of ‘truth’ and thus reveal ‘truth’ itself to be illusory. The interplay between images and prose, the space that is created by their conflicting nature in Orlando, solidifies Woolf’s resistance to the mythology of biographical fact. The photographs aid Woolf’s emphasis on the limits of visual perception, but also suggest that the camera, when used creatively, can help us to better understand and interrogate these limits. In this way, the novel’s photographs not only contribute to the radical vision created by the text’s intersensory aesthetics but embody the disorienting contradictions of these aesthetics. Suggesting the camera is a device that paradoxically aids and hinders the perception of truth, the photographs become attached to the tension between concealing and revealing that is, as I discuss in the previous chapter, an intrinsic part of the novel’s intersensory content and its uncensored recovery/re-visioning of the queer female body. Since three out of four of the included photographs are of Sackville-West herself, this is clearly linked to Woolf’s relationship with her.314 Elucidating that her recovery project has personal dimensions, the photographs emphasise an attempt to explore Sackville-West’s character and their relationship, from various angles, and in ways that are protected from hostile and censoring social norms concerning same-sex love. As such, the photographs embody the multifaceted and contradictory nature of 313 Colin Dickey, ‘Virginia Woolf and Photography’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts ed. by Maggie Humm (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010) p.386. 314 The fourth photograph is of Woolf’s niece, Angelica, who posed as Sasha. Talia Schaffer, ‘Posing Orlando’ in Genders 19: Sexual Artifice: Persons, Images, Politics ed. by Ann M. Kibbey et. al. (NY: NYU, 1994) pp.26-63. 132 the novel’s intersensory aesthetics because they are imbued with a wide variety of Woolf’s complex thoughts and feelings about Sackville-West, particularly in the context of her travels and travel writing. In one sense, Woolf seems to use photography to mock the class-based elitism that underpins Sackville-West's perpetuation of the imperial male gaze. Woolf’s mockery of Sackville-West's obsession with her heritage is not only implied in Orlando’s character throughout the novel, as Amy Bromley, Kolocotroni and Fouirnaies have each demonstrated, but felt by Sackville-West in relation to the photographs. As Fouirnaies records, Sackville-West was not always comfortable posing for Orlando.315 Regarding “Orlando on her return to England” – the photograph that the biographer subjugates – she told her husband that she felt like ‘a victim,’ ‘draped’ in an ‘inadequate bit of pink satin’.316 She ‘looks equally uncomfortable in “Orlando around the year 1840,” propped up and weighed down by an excess of clothes and accessories’.317 Arguably creating a false impression of Sackville-West, in staging these photos, Woolf appears to emphasise materialistic and middle-upper class attitudes at the expense, perhaps, of other more favourable traits. While the first two images focus on the material – the satin and jewellery she is wearing – the final photograph, taken on the grounds of Sackville-West’s property, highlights the importance of land ownership for its subject. The potentially critical attitude this suggests is reiterated by the three portraits that Woolf includes to depict the male Orlando. Having relied heavily on Knole and the Sackvilles (1922) in her research for the novel, these are images of Sackville-West’s genuine male ancestors.318 As Fouirnaies states, the original front cover – portraying Elizabethan statesman, Thomas Sackville – becomes a joke about the family’s socio-historical status and their veneration of ancestry.319 Kolocotroni writes that such chastisement of 315 Christine Fouirnaies, ‘Was Virginia Woolf a Snob? The Case of Aristocratic Portraits in Orlando,’ Woolf Studies Annual, 22 (2016) p.36. 316 Glendinning, p.182. 317 Fouirnaies, p.36. 318 Micir, p.127. 319 Fouirnaies, p.26. 133 Orlando/Sackville-West ‘by Woolf may be read politically as an instance of the latter’s deep ambivalence about the kind of hereditary entitlement that licenses’ the ‘proprietorial pastoral vision’ of Sackville-West’s poem, The Land.320 This, she elaborates, is ‘a vision which Woolf cannot countenance, least of all when it is offered by a male persona – and it is in the male voice that The Land is written’.321 Since the same vision and voice is on display in Passenger and Twelve Days, Woolf is responding in similarly critical ways, via photography and text, to these travelogues. Conversely, the images and Sackville-West’s willingness to pose for them, attest to the women’s closeness and Woolf’s warmer feelings towards Sackville-West. Perhaps informed by the more progressive and transformative visions within the travelogues, Woolf uses the photographs and their interplay with text to also praise and empower Sackville-West. As Fouirnaies posits, Woolf uses photography to distinguish Orlando from Sackville-West’s painted ancestors, separating her from them and, by extension, the traditions they represent.322 She removes Sackville-West from the narrative of tradition and heredity that prevented her, as a woman, from inheriting her family estate – her ‘greatest life sorrow’ according to Aalto.323 Depicting Sackville-West as more real and present than the men in ‘the “preserved” and “dead” paintings from Knole,’ Fouirnaies argues, the photographs emphasise that in the modern, present-day, it should be the living Sackville-West who has the greater affiliation with and claim to her family property.324 This brings new context to both Orlando’s and Sackville-West’s possessive nature; the desire to own is tied not just to the British imperial tradition but to the possibility of property ownership that such tradition has denied British women at home. For 320 Kolocotroni, p.95. 321 Ibid. 322 Fouirnaies, p.21-22. 323 Aalto, p.60. 324 Fouirnaies, p.32. This is not to say, I add, that photography is more effective in conveying subjectivity or the modern than painting, but that this is the symbolism presented by the specific paintings and photographs used by Woolf in Orlando. 134 this reason, Woolf returns Knole to Sackville-West in the novel; while she cannot own her family home, Orlando eventually wins the right to inherit hers.325 The final photograph in Orlando – ‘ most likely taken by Leonard Woolf at Long Barn’– can be seen as part of Woolf’s effort not only to return Knole to Sackville-West, but to highlight the importance of ownership rights for her and British women more broadly.326 As Erika Flesher explains, in the image, Sackville-West stands ‘territorially’ at the gate with her dogs, signifying her ‘protection of the boundaries of her estate’ and asserting ‘her right to wander’.327 Capturing the same intrepid spirit and liberating immersion in landscape presented by photos of Sackville-West in Passenger and Twelve Days, this provides another direct, and more dedicatory link to the travelogues. The photographs suggest that this dedication is motivated by feelings that Woolf experiences in connection with her lover’s prolonged absences while abroad. In the next section, I explore this idea in relation to Orlando’s intersensory recuperative purpose and how this can be further theorised through discussion of the photo album form. Orlando as photo album Research by Humm and others including Dickey and Diane F. Gillespie, has emphasised the important role that photography played for Woolf in maintaining relationships with family and friends. For instance, Humm explains, she implored Violet Dickinson to send photographs of herself so she could feel closer to her as a friend.328 Photographs offered Woolf a way of preserving and re-connecting with people and places from her past. Containing close ups and group shots of her parents, household servants, some wider family members and herself as a 325 DeSalvo, ‘Lighting the Cave: The Relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf”, Signs, 8.2 (1982) p.205. 326 Fouirnaies, p.25. 327 Erika Flesher, ‘Picturing the Truth in Fiction: Re-visionary Biography and the Illustrative Portraits for Orlando’ in Virginia Woolf and the Arts ed. by Diane Gillespie and Leslie Hankins (New York: Pace UP, 1997) p.43. 328 Humm, p.50. 135 young child, the Monk’s House albums that she constructed in the mid-1920s, are described by Humm as ‘an unconscious testimony to her childhood’.329 The arrangement of these albums, she explains, is strikingly modern in their intermingling of class representation and anti-linearity.330 Placed symbolically rather than chronologically, the photographs are ‘not crudely arranged by events,’ but present ‘a panorama of times and peoples’.331 They are sometimes arranged by motif; in one section the photographs are linked by the presence of a chair while another is connected by windows.332 They often focus on the unrepresentable and are not always in focus.333 These techniques are owed to ‘Woolf’s knowledge of modernism, including Cezanne’s painting series and Eisenstein and the German cinema’.334 She uses the same layering, montage and composite techniques that have been described as ‘modernist developments’ in the 1920s and 30s.335 More specifically, they follow Cezanne’s attempt to express emotion not mimetically, but spatially, in art.336 Her albums do ‘not memorialise public events,’ like the photographs of pageantry that she mocks in Three Guineas, but are designed to convey emotions of the private sphere in intelligent, creative ways.337 Focusing on maternal memories, Humm argues that the albums allow Woolf to construct a new relationship with her deceased mother.338 Modernist techniques are used to bring her essence into Woolf’s modern-day setting and to remove this from the masculine narrative of her father’s photograph album, The Mausoleum Book – a text that presented Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen, as an idealised ‘Sistine Madonna’.339 Woolf’s albums unravel 329 Humm, p.43. 330 Humm, p.72. 331 Humm, p.55. 332 Humm, p.70. 333 Humm, p.44. 334 Humm, p.72. 335 Ibid. 336 Ibid. 337 Humm, p.70. 338 Humm, p.78. 339 Linda Anderson, Women’s Lives/Women’s Times (NY: State University of New York Press, 1997) p.123. 136 this narrative, becoming part of the maternal recovery project that Jane Marcus argues is intrinsic to Woolf’s feminism.340 Combining sight with figurative notions of touch – of communicating and being emotionally in tune with pictured subjects – her approach to photography is intersensory. It points to the contemporary thought of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean Piaget, who each emphasise kinship between touch and sight.341 Woolf’s application of this relationship to photography anticipates intersensory theorisation of this medium by affective theorists of photography such as Margaret Olin, Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu. Examining both the tension and fluency between sight and touch while tracing these ideas back to Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin, Piaget and others in Touching Photographs (2012), Olin considers how we view and handle photos, and how they in turn, can literally and metaphorically touch us.342 Although, Olin writes, ‘the two activities’ of looking and touching ‘seem to alternate like a blinking eye, as though we cannot do both at the same time,’ photography is a gestural practice that requires touch in its creation and creates metaphorical forms of “touching,” of connection and communication, through viewership, even if physical touch is absent in this process.343 Photographs, Olin argues, can create communities and networks; they do not merely represent the world, but connect us to it and each other. They can even ‘substitute for people,’ building family ties and a sense of intimacy through resemblance and identification.344 Similarly, Brown and Phu’s Feeling Photography (2014) draws on Eve Sedgwick’s Touching 340 Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and The Languages of Patriarchy (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987), quoted by Humm, p.78. 341 Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012) p.9. Benjamin’s concept of distraction declares that touching is a form of seeing, while Piaget sees touch and sight as reciprocal senses with which to discover the world. For Merleau-Ponty ‘touch and vision are interchangeable in lived experience.’ 342 In relation to the literal aspect of this, Steven Connor argues in the early 2000s that it is partly the ‘contiguity between grasping and looking’ that explains the ‘continuing popularity of the glossy finish of the photograph’ (p.59). 343 Olin, p.2. 344 Olin, p.16. 137 Feeling (2002) to explore the relationship between textuality and feeling before moving on to consider how photography can help us to further understand this relationship. While photography depends on tactile processes, they argue, in viewing, they also rely on an ‘emotional circuit between viewer and photograph’ – a circuit that suggests ‘the subjects pictured on the surface can somehow touch back’.345 To theorise photography in this way, Phu and Brown explain, is to contribute to a long history of attempts to prove that photography is an art form, and not just a mechanical process. It overturns early problematic relationships between emotion and photography that are enshrined, for example, in the unethical collaborative experiments between Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Bulogne and Adrien Tournachon that took place in the 1850s. Influencing Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, these sought to capture a range of emotional expressions via torturous techniques of electrical stimulation.346 Representing another example of hegemonic nineteenth-century observation, this emotionally-detached and mechanical form of camera use is countered by Woolf’s intersensory approach as that which supports Olin, Phu and Brown’s theories. Unlike the intrusive “licking eye,” the modernist techniques in her photo albums craft a sincere emotional intimacy divorced from the small-minded and solely mechanical camera use that she criticises. Acting on the same intersensory principles, it is this kind of intimacy, too, that Woolf and Sackville-West shape and enhance in their exchange of photographs. For Woolf and Sackville-West, sharing images of each other (and for Sackville-West, the places she visited too) became a way of feeling connected while apart. As Ira Nadel explains, their correspondence reveals that they regularly sent each other photographs of themselves.347 In one missive, Sackville-West asks if her photograph has arrived yet, and 345 Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu, Feeling Photography (London: Duke University Press, 2014) p.14. 346 Brown and Phu, pp.8-9. 347 Ira Nadel, ‘Caterpillars of the Commonwealth Unite: Photography and Trauma in Three Guineas’ in Virginia Woolf and the Common(wealth) Reader (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014) p.147. 138 describes the ‘torment’ of ‘not being able to visualise’ Woolf in new ways while waiting to receive one in return.348 Supporting Olin, Phu and Brown’s theories, the letters show that Woolf and Sackville-West sought comfort in photographs of one another during such “tormented” absences. For this reason, the correspondence between Woolf and Sackville-West takes on an exemplified intersensory status; it is already a method of staying in touch that requires visual attention and tactile handling, but the photographs carry additional emotional currency. The continuation of such text and image interplay in Passenger, Twelve Days and Orlando, presents these texts not only as an extension of the women’s correspondence, but as communications motivated by and embodying the intersensory. In the case of Orlando, the novel’s intersensory qualities can be understood as an extension of Woolf’s albums and their motivations to preserve and maintain relationships via modernist techniques. Certainly, the photographs of Sackville-West present similar montage effects to those in Woolf’s albums. Posed in different locations and in different outfits, she, too, becomes a motif that undermines traditional temporalities through Orlando’s multi-century lifespan. The photos become part of a particularly modern understanding of memory because as Humm says of the Monk’s House albums, they present a ‘chain of perceptions’.349 In Matter and Memory (1896), Humm explains, Bergson asserts that rather than seeing perception as ‘a kind of photographic view,’ it is the ‘chain of perceptions’ constituting memory that has a stronger kinship with photography.350 The photographs in Orlando represent such a memory chain. Emphasising a literal kinship between memory and the photographic, they suggest that Orlando can be understood as a kind of photograph album. Also contributing to the novel’s memory chain and, therefore, Orlando as photo album, are metaphorical snapshots conceived by Woolf in prose. Neverow and Dickey have each applied this idea to their analyses of photographic scenes in Jacob’s Room. The short story 348 Sackville-West, ‘Teheran, Persia, 9th March 1926’ in DeSalvo and Leaska, p.112. 349 Humm, p.84. 350 Humm, p.80. 139 ‘Blue and Green’ (1921) presents an even earlier attempt to construct self-contained (or framed) pictures through words. The story consists of two short paragraphs entitled ‘Green’ and ‘Blue.’ Starting with a focus on a specific object, though it is not completely clear what these are (hanging ‘green glass’ suggests a chandelier while ‘the snub-nosed monster’ suggests a fish), each paragraph describes a landscape and ocean scene corresponding with their titular colour. On the page, the paragraphs – of almost equal length – look like paintings or photographs, hanging one above the other. Each paragraph might also represent the phenomenon of the photographed painting – a dual mode of representation that coheres with the two modes of image and narrative combined in the piece. Woolf’s language intensifies the reader’s sense of viewing one or many of these visual media. In ‘Green,’ we look at how ‘the light slides down the glass, and drops a pool of green’ while in ‘Blue’ we see the blue ribs of a ‘wrecked rowing boat’ on ‘the beach’.351 However, also focusing on – for example – in ‘Green,’ the ‘harsh cries’ and ‘feathers of parakeets,’ the story remains in tune with the wider sensorium.352 In Orlando, multi-sensory language is similarly used to conceive snapshot images of landscapes. Every time Orlando gazes at such a scene, we are being presented with a photographic image. The first of these emerges when the male Orlando casts his possessive gaze over the English landscape surrounding his home. Secondly, in the Jacobean period he looks down at the Turkish landscape, the surrounding ‘inhospitable Asian mountains’ and the so-called ‘barbaric population’ (O, 73). Other subsequent snapshots include Orlando looking out at the Turkish hills while in the company of the gypsies, and her view of London as she returns home by ship. Woolf’s use of the word ‘panorama’ to describe Orlando’s first view of Turkey explicitly connects such viewing moments to the photographic (O, 73).353 As a term 351 Woolf, ‘Blue & Green’ in Virginia Woolf: A Haunted House The Complete Shorter Fiction (London: Vintage, 2003) p.136. 352 Ibid. 353 In travelogues of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, panorama – the wide-angle view of a landscape or cityscape as presented in photography or words – played a significant role in documenting experiences of travel. See, for example, Moslund, pp.135-36. 140 that was becoming increasingly popular in the film industry at this time, it also evokes cinema.354 Rather than undermine the text’s affiliation with Woolf’s albums, this reinforces understanding of the text as a particularly modern photo album that is, like ‘Blue and Green,’ indicative of multi-modal visuality – a multiplicity that complements and adds to the novel’s subversive blend of fantasy and reality. It reiterates that Orlando is Woolf’s own creative challenge to mechanical and uninspired camera-use in both photography and film.355 The context of Vita Sackville-West and her travelogues, however, illuminates the specific potency of the novel’s photographic ‘chain,’ and especially its multi-modal prose photographs. As visions of east and west, these snapshots point to Sackville-West’s journeys. Like the recovery of her mother in the Monk’s House Albums, Woolf strives to recover Sackville-West in Orlando via the photographic. This, too, is an attempt to maintain and preserve a relationship, to reconnect both physically and emotionally, but motivated, in this case, by Sackville-West’s absence rather than bereavement. In the next and final section of this chapter, I turn once again to the closing revelatory scenes of Orlando, and their affiliation with Sackville-West’s travelogues, to discuss the culmination of this recovery and its wider literary implications. Memory and creativity In Bromley’s reading of Orlando, she asks whether Woolf’s dedication to Sackville-West is merely ‘performative’ and if this, in turn, is a violent action.356 Sackville-West’s sense of being a ‘victim’ when Woolf photographed her seems to corroborate this idea whilst ironically gesturing towards the kind of problematic, intrusive camera use that Woolf argues against in 354 Thus, it simultaneously reminds us of the films mentioned earlier, that Woolf may have seen about foreign travel, including with Sackville-West, and which Hankins examines in more detail in her own reading of Orlando. 355 With this in mind, it might be apt to reconfigure Bergson’s photographic memory chain as that which also speaks not only to filmic techniques, but the fact that film itself is a series, or a ‘chain,’ of photographic images. 356 Amy Bromley, ‘In Amorous Dedication: The Phrase, the Figure and the Lover’s Discourse’ in Sentencing Orlando, p.160. 141 ‘The Cinema.’ Also affiliating Orlando with possessiveness, Louise DeSalvo suggests that after writing ‘the history of her separation from her mother’ in To the Lighthouse, Woolf ‘may have needed to write a book in which she could possess Vita utterly’.357 However, in presenting Orlando’s multiple selves via images and prose, Woolf seems to relinquish the control that would align such possessiveness with imperialistic violence. Woolf’s characterisation of Orlando/Sackville-West is of someone who cannot be pinned down; she is like the ‘wild goose’ that Orlando sees in the text’s final paragraph (O, 193). Upon completing the novel, Woolf even expresses doubt as to whether she knows Sackville-West at all. In a letter to her, she asks: ‘I’ve lived in you all these months – coming out, what are you really like? Do you exist? Have I made you up?’.358 While the mock-biography was certainly motivated by Woolf’s interest in Sackville-West and her desire to know more about her, it is not, it appears, an attempt to constrict her identity or possess her. Together with Woolf’s emphasis on Orlando’s multiplicity, the fact that the subject is still alive at the end of the text – in contrast to most Victorian biography – is liberating. In this respect, Melanie Micir argues, the text can be considered “unfinished”; its narrative is left open for numerous interpretations.359 Moreover, she explains, it is unfinished in the sense that it ends on the same day that Sackville-West received her copy of it: ‘Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight’ (O, 191). As Micir observes, Woolf seems to hand over the narrative to Sackville-West for her to continue immediately in the reality of her lived existence.360 In this way, the dedication to Sackville-West is confirmed not only as a loving gift, but one that relies on non-violent reciprocity – a form of desirable and shared touch, opposing the intrusive and controlling contact of the imperial male gaze. 357 DeSalvo, p.204. 358 Woolf, ‘20th March 1928’ in DeSalvo and Leaska, p.263. 359 Micir, p.112. 360 Micir, p.112. 142 The final revelatory scenes in which England and Turkey merge in Orlando’s mind’s eye, are crucial in presenting this mutuality. In the previous chapter, I argue that this scene not only presents Orlando’s artistic realisation, but embodies a new, intersensory way of seeing, affiliated with recovery of the queer female body, and generated through the novel’s disorienting, multi-faceted and often contradictory aesthetics. Here, I add, this moment is the culmination of the novel’s Bergsonian photographic memory trail, and thus, confirmation not only of the relationship between these aesthetics, their radical recovery project, and the influence of Sackville-West, but of how engagement with the photographic helps illuminate this connection in personal and artistic ways. In blending together the locations of earlier snapshots, this scene, too, becomes a prose photograph characterised by modernist notions of montage. It even seems to develop like a photograph itself. Gesturing towards the transition from dark to light that defines photographic development, Woolf writes of Orlando’s changing perception that ‘the immensely long tunnel in which she seemed to have been travelling for hundreds of years widened; the light poured in’ (172-3). It is only after this development, that Orlando begins to be flooded with new multi-sensory visions including the merging landscapes and, in an even more explicit camera reference later, the walls that ‘looked like a scraped new photograph’ (185).361 As well as concluding a Bergsonian ‘chain of perceptions,’ the landscape merger aligns with Sigmund Freud’s similarly photographic description of memory in relation to the unconscious. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he argues that the process of cognitively retrieving memories from the unconscious is like viewing a sequence of ‘camera images’.362 In Orlando’s denouement, we see this process in action. Specifically, we witness a 361 In early writings on photography, the term “scraping” is sometimes used to describe processes in which a photograph is restored or improved. Woolf was perhaps aware of this. If so, “scraped” has been purposefully chosen to emphasise Orlando’s increasing sense of clarity and new vision. For early references to photograph scraping see, for example, Sir William de Wivelesley ABNEY, Instruction in photography, for use at the S.M.E., Chatham (US: Battalion Press, 1871) p.29. 362 Humm’s work refers to this theory as well as Bergson’s in its discussion of Woolf’s photo albums (Freud quoted by Humm, p.204). 143 portrayal both of Sackville-West’s emerging memories of the east and a final representation of Woolf’s desire to retrieve her absent lover. As a preservatory act, this final snapshot memorialises not only Woolf’s personal relationship with Sackville-West, but – in its allusion to Twelve Days and Orlando’s own transformation – the creative influence they had on one another. The blended landscapes become metonyms not just for Woolf and Sackville-West, but for their romantic and literary connectedness: they suggest that their personal and artistic journeys are entwined. As such, the multifaceted Orlando becomes as much a representation of Woolf as Sackville-West. This further discredits the notion of violent performativity that Bromley discusses. Woolf is mocking herself as much as Sackville-West throughout the novel. As Suzanne Bellamy notes, she parodies ‘Time Passes’ from To the Lighthouse when she writes: ‘how things remain much as they are for two or three hundred years or so, except for a little dust and a few cobwebs which one old woman can sweep up in half an hour; a conclusion which, one cannot help feeling, might have been reached more quickly by the simple statement that “Time passed”’.363 The clearing out of old values in To the Lighthouse, becomes a self-clearing out in Orlando. Since the merging landscape image aligns with both women’s descriptions of creative processes elsewhere, the photographic trail seems to trace this “clearing out” as a representation of the creative processes embarked upon by Woolf and Sackville-West alike. Cohering with Freud’s theory of memory development, for instance, in ‘The Leaning Tower’ (1940), Woolf explains that creative ideas need time to rest in the unconscious before they can come to the surface.364 Similarly, Sackville-West connects the photographic, the mind and creativity when she writes in a letter to Woolf that she has ‘pictures in the mind of things seen, like photographs pushed 363 Suzanne Bellamy, ‘and nothing whatever happened’: Orlando’s Continuous Eruptive Form’ in Sentencing Orlando, p.80. 364 Woolf, ‘The Leaning Tower’ in Collected Essays II (The Hogarth Press: London, 1966). 144 higgledy piggledy into a drawer, waiting to be stuck into an album’.365 These images, she suggests, are stored in the mind, but require thought and organisation, like that potentially found in the construction of a photograph album, to gain meaning and value. In this respect, it might be possible to think of Sackville-West’s travelogues as photograph albums too, containing their own mixture of figurative and literal images. Reducing Woolf’s potential affiliation with imperialistic ideas at the novel’s end, the merging landscapes present an anti-imperial image of dismantled national boundaries.366 This is perhaps a slight dig at Harold Nicholson who held the Empire in high esteem.367 Opposing hegemonic associations between women and landscape, the scene breaks down the traditionally gendered dichotomy between nature and culture in its links to female artistry. This contributes to the non-hegemonic vision Woolf is constructing. The photographic nature of the moment additionally emphasises that this vision is made possible by a coming together of the literary/aesthetic and the technological. The camera and its influence as linked to Sackville-West allows Woolf to perform as well as simply present a new way of seeing, aided rather than hindered by modernity. This mirrors the more positive interpretation of Woolf’s description of Orlando’s nerves as ‘wires’ and ‘future telegraph wires,’ discussed in my previous chapter (138-9). Technology helps Woolf to communicate Other sensory experience in personal and socio-political ways. Orlando’s photographic chain anticipates Woolf’s desire in A Sketch of the Past (1939) for a wireless form of memory technology that can be tuned into past emotions – a ‘device…by which we can tap into them’.368 She states: ‘I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace, and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to 365 Sackville-West, ‘S.S. Rajputana in the Red Sea, 4th February 1926’ in Desalvo and Leaska, p.96. 366 This is discussed in Chapter One. 367 Jean Kennard, ‘Power and Sexual Ambiguity: The Drednought Hoax, “The Voyage Out”, “Mrs Dalloway” and “Orlando”, Journal of Modern Literature, 20 (1996) p.163. 368 Woolf, quoted by Lee, p.98. 145 it’.369 Aligned with the visual as well as both physical and metaphorical forms of touch, the photographs and the Bergsonian photographic trail in Orlando are indicative not only of such a trace and Woolf’s effort to remain attached to it, but the intersensory nature of this text itself and its communications with both Sackville-West and her own writing. The photographic seems to become the thread that joins the fabric of the text together – to be felt, touched, and viewed by its audience, but particularly by Sackville-West herself. It is interesting, in this respect, that Woolf refers to memory as ‘the seamstress’ in Orlando itself (48). Her intersensory and haptic approach to photography as that which embodies various forms of touch, is complemented by this explicitly tactile image of memory. Tracing the photographic in Orlando reveals that memory itself is connected to the sensory and intersensory. In The Senses Still (1996), Constantina Nadia Seremetakis emphasises this when she posits that memory is a ‘meta-sense,’ which not only ‘transports, bridges and crosses all the other senses’ but is ‘internal to each sense’.370 It becomes increasingly evident, therefore, that Woolf’s sensorially engaged recovery project – as that which deals with personal and socio-political histories in its revisioning – is simultaneously a memory project. For Sara Ahmed, all ‘feminist work is memory work’ in its quest to challenge dominant historical narratives.371 Thus, literary texts that engage in processes of historical recovery and revision regarding women’s lives and gender, can be considered new memory forms. Produced by the kind of sensory and creative processes that the end of Orlando’s photographic memory chain present, they become like cultural artifacts according to Seremetakis’ definition; they store sensory and emotional memories that have the capacity, through touch and observation, to connect us with that past.372 In sensory studies, this idea is 369 Ibid. 370 Constantina Nadia Seremetakis, The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) p.9. 371 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2017) p.17. 372 Seremetakis, p.10. 146 similarly suggested, specifically in relation to the photograph album, by Elizabeth Edwards. The ‘physical action of holding’ a photograph album ‘and turning its pages,’ she argues, allows the viewer to activate ‘the temporality and narrative’ it contains.373 Its materiality connects us with past experience, demonstrating that touch has a temporal aspect and ‘sensing touch relates directly to visualising’.374 Emphasising that photograph albums represent a process of re-temporalisation and re-spatialisation, Edwards’ work suggests that this form has some kinship with radical sensory and intersensory uses of the episodic, as discussed in my introductory chapter. From this perspective, Orlando’s own radical use of the episodic particularly via generic subversion is further illuminated by the novel’s photographic album chain. For Danius, modernist texts ‘indirectly present themselves as literary artifacts that may appeal to all the senses’ in their use of sensory language and aesthetics.375 This, she argues, is a ‘synaesthesic ideal,’ symptomatic of modernity’s sensory crisis.376 Yet, in the context of Woolf’s and Sackville-West’s work, the assertions collectively made by Seremetakis, Ahmed and Edwards about memory forms, demonstrate that such aesthetics in women’s writing often have radical and intersensory communications to convey. They can not only tap into historical and personal memories that exist outside of dominant narratives, but in doing so, connect women, women writers and their texts across time and space. The example of such communication and connection that this chapter explores, I have shown, is illuminated through consideration of photographic, modernist, and queer contexts. However, as my next two chapters demonstrate, such connecting theory, as linked to sensory and historical disruption of hegemony, not only 373 Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Grasping the Image: How Photographs are Handled’ in The Book of Touch ed. by Classen (Croydon: Berg, 2005) p.423. 374 Ibid. 375 Danius, pp.3-4. 376 Danius, p.4. 147 becomes manifest in numerous other ways, but has especially important implications for Black women’s writing and Black feminisms. 148 Sound, Gender, and Communication in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982) In ‘Dawn’ – the opening frame of Gloria Naylor’s 1982 debut novel The Women of Brewster Place – the text’s narrator outlines the development of the novel’s eponymous urban location, from its post-war origins to its status as a poverty-stricken African American neighbourhood in the early 1970s.377 The discrimination that permeates this trajectory, and comes to define the home of Naylor’s protagonists, is presented in sensory terms. Gesturing towards post-war redlining practises, the narrator reveals that Brewster Place was ‘walled off from the central activities of the city’ after it became dominated by Meditteraneans who ‘offended’ older residents with their ‘rounded guttural sounds’ and ‘pungent smells’ (2).378 The subsequent Mediterranean exodus is similarly propelled by distrust of Black sensory outputs. The street’s first African American resident, Ben, is met with ‘cold and suspicious eyes’ because he is ‘a man with strange hair and skin’ with ‘hints of stale liquor on his breath’ (3). Suggesting that segregation can be understood as an attempt to contain the sensory realities of racial Others, this anticipates the work of sensory historian, Mark M. Smith, who claims that segregation is embedded in the senses.379 It is a method of control, he elaborates, that stems from postbellum efforts to detect the perceived threat of Blackness not just visually but, due to increasing awareness of racial “passing,” via all sensory modalities. Supporting the claims of Sachi Sekimoto and Christopher Brown in Race and the Senses (2020), the beginning of Naylor’s text illustrates not only that ‘race is felt and sensed into being,’ but that historically, due to the 377 Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place: A Novel in Seven Stories (Minerva: London, 1995). 378 As Rebecca K. Markiel explains in After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), redlining was the refusal ‘to make loans in aging, integrated and majority-minority neighbourhoods’ (p.1). This, in turn, often prevented those living in such neighbourhoods from accessing better housing, health services, education and employment opportunities. 379 Smith, How Race Is Made (2006). 149 dominant ideology of white supremacy, this process has been marred and limited by hegemonic constructions of racial difference.380 These include sensory stereotypes such as the ‘pungent odour’ that was, according to Andrew Kettler, considered an innate feature of slave bodies.381 Naylor’s sensory language in ‘Dawn’ highlights the enduring impact of such ideas in the early twentieth century.382 The legacy of older sensory stereotypes infiltrates the contemporary sociological language that Naylor seems to be parodying. This, as Saidiya Hartman argues, often referred to urban ghettos as spaces wherein ‘smells and sounds and looks’ are changed by each wave of migrant newcomers, so that upon entering, an outsider finds their ‘senses are solicited and overwhelmed’.383 Naylor’s archive confirms her engagement with such sociological discourses. Indeed, editorial notes on a draft of Brewster’s opening passages explain that the dense sociological passages have been cut.384 As the novel’s title and the final section of ‘Dawn’ make clear, Naylor’s primary concern is the Black female subject. Shifting her attention to the sensory and emotional lives of Brewster’s women residents, and setting up the seven stories to follow, she writes: their perspiration curled on the edges of the aroma of vinegar douches…that drifted through the street where they stood together – hands on hips, straight-backed, round-bellied, high-behinded women who threw their heads back when 380 Sekimoto and Brown, p.1. 381 This odour was attributed to what was imagined as an immoral, cannibalistic African past (Kettler, p.xix). 382 Smith argues that the rise of segregation in the twentieth-century is informed by the history of racialised sensory stereotypes. Their legacies linger in the kind of early twentieth-century sociological discourse that Hartman records. My chapter is suggesting that this legacy has a gendered dimension, illuminated by Naylor’s text, particularly in relation to voice. Thus, I focus not on contemporary manifestations of raced sensory stereotypes, but on raced and gendered stereotypes concerning women’s voices; these, I show, are relevant both to the post-war and post-civil-rights settings in Brewster Place. 383 Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2019) p.4-6. 384 The Gloria Naylor Archive, Editorial notes on The Women of Brewster Place draft, June 29 1981, Box 16, Folder 3. 150 they laughed and exposed strong teeth and dark gums. They cursed, badgered, worshipped and shared their men (4-5). This moment gestures towards Kenneth L. Kusmer’s and Joe W. Trotter’s assertion that residential segregation and the spread of urban poverty are not just race and class-inflected processes but highly gendered too.385 It suggests that the Brewster wall is a metaphor for the suppression of Black women’s embodied realities. The wall represents, as Naylor herself explains, sexism as well as racism.386 The shift to female orality in ‘Dawn’ suggests that the racialised and historical sensory hegemony outlined by Smith, has patriarchal dimensions. It points to derogatory constructions of the Black female voice. In this chapter, I argue that Naylor’s sensory language in Brewster Place critiques and resists such constructions. Whilst highlighting the possibility of bringing more gender-oriented approaches to race-based sensory studies, like those cited above, it emphasises the need to articulate the often-silenced experiences and histories of African American women. The first half of the chapter examines the thematic relationship that Naylor presents between the silencing of Black women’s voices and cultures of racist and sexist abuse surrounding the Black female body. Exposing painful continuities in terms of how Black women’s experiential realities are suppressed in the post-war and post-civil rights periods, this enables Naylor to illuminate the shortcomings of the civil rights movement from a Black feminist perspective. Anticipating the work of historians such as Katie Eyer whilst contributing to a growing body of Black feminist criticism, Naylor suggests that contemporary progress narratives are misleading. In focusing on abusive forms of silence – that illustrate violent contact, and thus a violent haptic relationship with the Black female body in physical and 385 Kenneth L. Kusmer, and Joe W. Trotter, ed., African American Urban History Since World War II (US: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p.11. 386 Kay Bonetti, ‘An Interview with Gloria Naylor’ in Conversations with Gloria Naylor (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2004) p.54. 151 emotional terms – Naylor advocates a continuous understanding of history to address ongoing issues more effectively. This contributes to what critics such as Aida Levy-Hussen have called the historical turn in post-civil rights literature, and connects the contexts of the post-civil rights era to the modernist moment. Demonstrating this connection, I consider the similarities between Brewster Place and the works of Harlem Renaissance author, Marita Bonner. Since Bonner’s works are critically neglected, this constitutes another, albeit brief dimension, of my own recovery project within this thesis. The second half of the chapter explores how Naylor’s multi-sensory depictions of Black female vocality and aurality, resist the suppressive discourses outlined in part one. Together these depictions advocate an empathetic and radical form of communication. Rooted in listening as well as speaking, and emanating from non-verbal and verbal sound, this emerges between the Brewster women in intimate one-to-one settings. Such communication and its healing, empowering touch, Naylor suggests, provides a foundation for radical socio-political action that can transcend divisions both within and beyond African American communities. It is an emotional and sometimes physical way of being in touch with others, imbued with what Terri E. Givens calls “radical empathy.” As in the work of Howes and other sensory studies scholars, communication itself becomes inseparable from notions of the sensory in this text.387 The chapter concludes by arguing that the radical possibilities of empathetic communication are embodied by the novel and thus, Naylor’s own authorial communicative practises, enabling further consideration of Naylor’s relationship to both modernism and post-civil rights literature. In making this argument, I draw upon a vast body of scholarship on race and sound, as well as the recent turn towards listening within much of this work. Like Carter Mathes, David 387 Howes, The Sixth Sense Reader, p.3. 152 Messmer and Nicole Brittingham Furlonge, I build upon the early work of race and sound scholars such as Paul Gilroy, Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and more recently, Fred Moten, Jennifer Stoever, Emily Lordi and Mae G. Henderson, to argue that oral features of Black literature not only present a challenge to modernity’s logocentric and white supremacist structures, but do so whilst dismantling the binary between “Black orality” and “white literacy.” Like Furlonge, I take a multi-sensory but orally-inflected approach to consider how empathetic listening constructed in, through and beyond the literary text can contribute to opposing hegemonic dichotomies and the inequalities they represent. I also intervene in literary studies of race and sound in several ways. My attention to communication moves beyond a focus on listening alone. Drawing on Henderson’s claim that speaking and listening are interdependent as well as Nelle Morton’s concept of “depth hearing,” I focus upon reciprocal sound production and receptivity. 388 My main intervention is to bring holistic attention to the intersection between gender, race and sound within literary studies.389 Whilst Stoever, Henderson, and Lordi provide some work on African American women and gender in their broader cultural studies of race and sound, there is little that considers these topics alongside a focus on literary depictions of the sonic. The scholarship that does exist is notably fragmented in terms of which sounds it examines. In Carole Boyce Davies’ Black Women, Writing and Identity (1994) one chapter draws upon research by Hazel Carby and Daphne Duval Harrison to discuss the blues in Black women’s writing, while another uses Henderson’s work to separately examine speech. I unite these two strands by looking comprehensively at depictions of verbal, non-verbal, musical and silent/silenced female voice sounds in Naylor’s novel. This involves bringing Roshanak 388 Mae G. Henderson, Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora: Black Women Writing and Performing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) p.17. 389 This, in turn, highlights how race, gender and sound studies beyond sensory studies might aid more intersectional sensory studies scholarship that considers race and gender together. As my introductory chapter explains, sensory studies has explored raced and gendered hegemony, but these discussions are not often presented in intersecting ways. 153 Kheshti’s work on gendered and racialised listening together with Stoever’s discussion of gendered and racialised vocality as well as wider research on gender and sound. Drawing on Doveanna S. Fulton’s narrative theory of “Black feminist orality” whilst bringing renewed and nuanced attention to Brewster Place, this represents a gender-focused approach not just to race-based historical sensory studies, but to Black modernisms and Levy-Hussen’s description of historical post-civil rights literature as an ‘articulation of collective racial grief’.390 Like Mathes, I argue that sound as an aesthetic tool for African American writers offers an emotional response to history that fuses the sensory and the political in ways that elude and challenge post-civil rights containment.391 Pointing to criticism that explores Black female embodiment such as Jennifer Griffiths’ Traumatic Possessions (2009) and Simone A. James Alexander’s African Diasporic Women's Narratives (2014), Naylor’s novel demonstrates that for African American women writers, this response is additionally tied to an ongoing project of recovery regarding Black women’s experiences and histories – a project that parallels and brings valuable Black feminist contexts to recuperative work in both sensory studies and feminist modernist studies. Historical Silences Brewster’s suppressions Several critics including Levy-Hussen and Brian Norman have explored the importance of historical setting in post-civil rights literature. Interrogating what Saidiya Hartman calls ‘the afterlife of slavery,’ this turn to the past indicates an effort to uncover hidden and often painful 390 Aida Levy-Hussen, How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation (New York: NYU Press, 2016) p.11. 391Carter Mathes, Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights (US: University of Minnesota Press, 2015) p.8. 154 histories.392 In ‘Mattie Michael’ – the first and lengthiest of seven stories that comprise Brewster Place – historical endeavour contextualises the sensory, particularly sonic, containment that defines the novel’s location in sexist and racist terms by the early 1970s. Whilst tracing its title character’s ‘long winding journey to Brewster’ via flashback, the story introduces a thematic relationship between the silencing of Black women and attempts to control the female body (8). Raised by conservative, Christian parents who work as sharecroppers in 1930s Tennessee, the adolescent Mattie is hemmed in by post-slavery structures and her domineering father, Samuel. Limiting what his daughter can say and hear about sexuality, Samuel selects a suitor for her (a man named Fred whom Mattie finds tedious) and proceeds to supervise all meetings between them. As Virginia Fowler argues, when Mattie is later seduced by the charismatic Butch Fuller, she therefore discovers ‘a freer…way of being in and looking at the world’.393 Butch’s instructions to Mattie on how to maximise the pleasure of eating sugar cane, ‘to stop chewing’ before you ‘find yourself with a jawful of coarse straw,’ emphasise the sexual nature of this discovery (18). The initial taste of the sugar cane anticipates the liberating sexual pleasure that Mattie experiences with Butch. As critics have suggested, the transitoriness of such freedom and of Butch’s sexual interest in Mattie, however, are foreshadowed by his declaration regarding the inevitable loss of sweetness.394 Such loss of freedom for Mattie, I add, is also anticipated by the power dynamics depicted between Black and white, and male and female voices during Mattie’s interactions with Butch. 392 Levy-Hussen, p.7. 393 Virginia Fowler, Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996) p.28. 394 As Fowler explains, Susan Meisenhelder argues that Butch’s approach to the sugar cane represents his “seize the day” mentality, particularly in relation to his sexual encounters. Meisenhelder suggests that from Butch’s perspective, women, like sugar cane, are to be disposed of after the sweetness has been enjoyed. Fowler argues that this attitude is less cruel that Meisenhelder suggests because Mattie never expresses any desire for a long-term relationship with Butch (p.28). Anissa J. Wardi, Trimico Melancon and Margaret Earley Whitt have also examined the sexual imagery in this scene, emphasising that the presence of the natural world illustrates the naturalness of sex itself, and that this idea in turn, is separate from Mattie’s restrictive home life. 155 When Butch mimics Mattie’s deferential words to white landowner, Mr. Mike, Naylor’s text gestures towards the existence of what Jennifer Stoever calls “the sonic color line” – a sound-focused version of “the visual color line,” defined by W.E.B. Du Bois as the visible barrier between segregated Black and white communities.395 Dusk of Dawn (1940) is one work by Du Bois that discusses the colour line, and is perhaps alluded to by Naylor in her novel’s opening and closing frames, named ‘Dawn’ and ‘Dusk’ respectively. As Stoever explains, notions of sonic as well as visual difference, have historically been used to enforce racial segregation because all ‘sounds linked to racialized bodies’ are codified as “noise” – a sound that is bothersome or frightening according to Tony Schwartz.396 In white supremacist epistemologies, as Cornel West describes, Black sound is heard only as ‘incomprehensible and unintelligible’.397 Historical work by Mark M. Smith and Bruce R. Smith in sensory studies provides further evidence of this. In his work on slave history, M.M Smith states that African Americans were considered to be among the greatest noise-makers in colonial America.398 As B.R. Smith writes, they ‘disrupted the acoustemology of English speakers in fundamental, frightening ways: they chattered like monkeys, they bellowed like beasts, they mourned in chants’ and ‘they spoke a language that was no language’.399 Defying the surveillance of writing through illiteracy, Black slaves made sounds that ‘threatened to fracture the acoustic world of English settlers’.400 In Brewster Place, like the sensory containment epitomised by the wall, Mattie’s brief, polite responses to Mr. Mike are testament to these historical constructions of Black sounds and enduring efforts to contain them. 395 Jennifer Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016) p.10. 396 Stoever, p.13. 397 Ibid. 398 Smith analyses eighteenth-century newspapers to demonstrate this and argues that these sonic stereotypes have an enduring legacy. 399 Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) quoted by M.M Smith in Listening to Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) p.10. 400 M.M. Smith, p.10. 156 Yet, Butch’s control over the conversation also elucidates the subjugation of women’s voices under patriarchy, as explored, for example, by Anne Carson’s, ‘The Gender of Sound’.401 In this essay, Carson outlines how, since Aristotle, female vocality has been associated with unpleasantness, wildness and madness.402 Similarly, Christine Ehrick posits that patriarchy has formulated the female voice as “noise” or “unwanted sound” that is ‘dissonant, disruptive, and potentially dangerous’. 403 The voices of African American women are doubly coded as “noise,” explaining why Black women’s speech, as bell hooks observes, is often stereotyped as being too assertive.404 In the 1965 Moynihan Report, this is even used as evidence for the growing number of Black single-mother families at the time.405 Accusing African American women of aggressive language-use and unfeminine promiscuity, this document supports Carson’s claim that fear of the female voice is attached to fear of women’s bodies and sexuality. In patriarchal discourses, Carson explains, the female body is treated as a leaky vessel with two mouths in need of containment: – the literal mouth and the symbolic vaginal mouth. When Butch tells Mattie that her female relatives have ‘the sharpest tongues in the county’ but he would risk ‘being cut to death by’ her mouth, he plays into this oral idea of leaking and dangerous female sexuality (9). Although Butch appears to encourage both female mouths to run free in this moment, such a sentiment is contradicted by his ongoing domination of their interaction and its sensual climax. Highlighting the implied Aristotelian ideal of “male speaking” and “female listening” – a binary Kheshti alludes to when, using an analogy remarkably like Carson’s, she considers 401 Carson’s essay provides an example of feminist theory that coheres with the interests of sensory studies, particularly in the way that she traces modern hegemony back to Aristotle. 402 Anne Carson, ‘The Gender of Sound’ in Glass, Irony, and God (London: Cape Poetry, 1995) pp. 119-142. 403 Christine Ehrick, ‘Vocal Gender and the Gendered Soundscape: At the Intersection of Gender Studies and Sound Studies,’ <https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/02/02/vocal-gender-and-the-gendered-soundscape-at-the-intersection-of-gender-studies-and-sound-studies/>, published 02/02/2015, accessed 28/07/2020. 404 bell hooks, Ain’t I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism (New York: Routledge, 2014) p.180. 405 Celeste Fraser, ‘Stealing B(l)ack Voices: The Myth of the Black Matriarchy and The Women of Brewster Place’ in Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr and K.A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993) p.91. 157 the ear’s symbolic work alongside that of the vagina to examine the feminization of modern listening – Mattie’s interactions with Butch prompt her to adopt an ‘intelligent listener’ role (11).406 This suggests an internalisation of gendered social-sonic hierarchies. So does Mattie’s uncharacteristic effusiveness while explaining to Butch that her surname is ‘Michael’ rather than ‘Michaels’ because her grandfather – a slave who lived through the emancipation – was hard of hearing and would only respond to his name, when it was shouted twice. Since ‘her father loved telling that story and she loved repeating it’ this moment illustrates Mattie’s keenness to recite the approved narratives of her paternal line (17). The anecdote indicates both the cruel, exploitative slave trade and the androcentric histories that erase women’s voices. The devastating impact of erasure and the patriarchal culture it connotes is revealed later when, having fallen pregnant with Butch’s child, Mattie refuses to say who the father is; she cannot bring herself to vocalise any narrative that deviates from her father’s plan. Thus, when Samuel launches a ferocious physical attack on his daughter – an attempt to reassert control over the two “unruly” female mouths – Mattie, believing she deserves to be punished, does nothing to resist his aggressive touch. Taking ‘the force of the [first] blows with her neck muscles’ whilst maintaining a ‘continued silence’ that causes ‘the blows to come faster and harder,’ she seems to renounce both voice and body (23). When Mattie subsequently moves north, this self-destructive internalisation remains. Becoming sexually abstinent, she neglects her bodily needs and instead dedicates herself to the overly indulgent mothering of her son, Basil. When Basil is arrested for manslaughter thirty years later, Mattie is cheated out of her home not only by a prejudiced justice system, but by Basil himself, who manipulates her into funding his bail before fleeing the county. As the story 406 Roshanak Kheshti, Modernity's Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (New York: NYU Press, 2015) p.7. Aristotle’s “male speaking” vs. “female listening” is an example of the stereotypical ways in which the sensorium has traditionally been split within as well as across modalities. Classen gives other examples in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire, p.3. 158 concludes, we learn that these circumstances bring Mattie, alone and destitute, to Brewster Place in the novel’s 1970s present day. In the later stories, since Basil is never mentioned by his mother, and as the flashback form exemplifies, this traumatic past and its violent trigger remains shrouded in silence. In one sense, such ongoing vocal and bodily suppression allows Naylor to illuminate similarities between the oppressions experienced by African Americans in the north and south during the early twentieth century. This, in turn, gives voice to women’s oft-neglected experiences of the Great Migration. Boarding ‘one of a legion of buses, trains and rusting automobiles that carried the dark children of the south toward the seductive call of wartime jobs and freedom in urban areas above the Mason-Dixon,’ Mattie joins millions of Black southerners who migrated north at this time in search of better jobs, housing, and an escape from the threat of lynching (24). Yet, as Hartman explains, while leaving the south meant an immediate relief from more violently enforced forms of segregation and openly abusive discrimination, similar attitudes and inequalities persevered implicitly in the north.407 When Mattie first arrives, she therefore struggles to support herself and Basil. Even when she obtains a book-binding job, her bank account grows ‘painfully slowly’ and she frequently goes hungry to feed her son (28). The discrimination she experiences as a single Black mother is apparent when she struggles to find accommodation. During her search, she learns not to waste energy visiting ‘the white neighbourhoods that displayed vacancy signs’ or even ‘neatly manicured black neighbourhoods’ (30). She is not perceived as ‘respectable’ by either (30). The wall on Brewster – a place that was eventually populated by African Americans who had fled ‘starving southern climates’ – is a tangible reminder not only of sexism and racism in the north, but of often imperceptible linkages between this and southern life (4). Naylor’s particular evocation of these continuities through intertwined notions of silence and abuse, of the voices and bodies contained by the wall, is reiterated by the story of Mattie’s childhood 407 Hartman, p.94. 159 friend, Etta Mae Johnson. Like Mattie, she flees the violent Jim Crow south before arriving on Brewster three decades later. In Etta’s case, the silencing of abuse is conveyed by an absence of full narrative explanation. It is implied, not stated, that Etta suffered an attempted sexual assault when she declares, in conversation with Mattie, that she should have killed Johnny Brick – ‘the horny white bastard’ – while she had the chance (60). This moment, Margaret Earley Whitt observes, speaks to ‘the history of racist sexual practice’ in the south where ‘both law and social thought encouraged white men to assume sexual access to female slaves’.408 As Maxine Lavon Montgomery observes, Mattie and Etta’s stories highlight ‘the role of sexual violence and domestic abuse in women’s decision to migrate’.409 The same issue is raised in the penultimate story when we discover that Ben’s disabled and now-estranged daughter was sexually abused by his white employer in the south. This, too, is only revealed to the reader through third-person narration; it is a memory that breaks into the narrative as Ben tries to suppress it with alcohol. Together, these stories emphasise that hegemonic constructions of Black and female voices transcend spatial boundaries in their influence. This is true even of characters with no direct link to the south such as Cora Lee, whose history of domestic abuse is similarly undiscussed by the characters themselves. In presenting these persistent silences across time and geographical location, Naylor’s text gestures towards shortcomings of the civil rights movement, particularly concerning gender. As Levy-Hussen ascertains, the historical interests of post-civil rights authors are often prompted by the disillusionment that followed the sixties and the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior in 1968.410 Embracing the ‘possibilities of historical repair,’ they attempt to better understand enduring socio-cultural issues through (re)examination of the past.411 For Naylor, 408 Margaret Earley Whitt, Understanding Gloria Naylor (USA: University of South Carolina Press, 1999) p.26. 409 Montgomery, The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance (Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 2010) p.4. 410 Levy-Hussen, p.101. 411 Levy-Hussen, p.5. 160 and other Black female authors, this involves examination of self-defeating divisions within the radical campaigns of the 60s and beyond. As Black feminist scholars including Angela Y. Davis, Frances Beal and bell hooks have shown, women were often sidelined in these movements.412 In reference to Black Power, hooks writes that Black women were simply not valued as much as men and, perpetuating Moynihan’s stereotypes, male leaders frequently blamed African American women for the misery of their male counterparts.413 In Brewster Place, the silences that pervade the residents’ histories are indicative of such divisions. This space, Naylor emphasises, is not conducive to the expression of women’s pain. Reinforcing this and the stark consequences of an enduringly divided culture, are the novel’s two climactic and tragic events. Presenting further forms of female silence and silencing that are aligned with the control and harm of Black women’s bodies, these are crucial to Naylor’s critique of ongoing post-civil rights divisions and the lack of empathetic communication accompanying them. The gendered nature of such divisions is emphasised by Ciel’s story, within which the accidental death of the title character’s toddler, Serena, is inseparable from the breakdown of Ciel’s marriage to the emotionally abusive, Eugene. Frequently leaving Ciel and Serena for long periods as he allegedly searches for work, Eugene is a liar and a bully who internalises Moynihan’s suggestion that Black women restrict Black men’s lives. When Ciel tells him she is pregnant with their second child, he therefore reacts aggressively, yelling that he ‘ain’t never gonna have nothin’’ with a wife and family on his back (95). He sees the ‘responsibility of children as an obstacle to his own advancement in life’ and without directly addressing the matter, he manipulates Ciel into having an abortion she does not want.414 Eugene not only shows an unwillingness to listen to Ciel as he shouts her down into silence, but omits language 412 Joan S. Korenman, ‘African American women writers, black nationalism, and the matrilineal heritage,’ CLA Journal, 38 (1994) p.143. 413 hooks, p.99. 414 Fowler, p.39. 161 specifically about abortion from his tirade in a way that both castigates and continues to silence female sexuality. When Ciel suggests that she could have a hysterectomy ‘after the baby comes,’ Eugene’s retort, ‘and what the hell are we gonna feed it when it gets here, huh – air?’ confirms his desire, instead, for abortion, which Ciel undergoes in the next scene (95). The murkiness of Eugene’s speech and character is represented metaphorically when, after he loses his latest job and refuses to explain why, Ciel concurrently considers that the water she is using to wash rice, will never be ‘totally clear’ (94). As Fowler argues, the sound of the water bubbles bursting stands in for Eugene’s unspoken words including ‘his desire for her to abort the baby’; they are uncommunicated ‘nagging whispers of trouble’ between them (94).415 Later, during an argument, as Ciel begs Eugene not to leave her, Serena is electrocuted while playing in the kitchen. Killed before she can speak, the toddler falls prey to violent, silencing strategies within the challenging context of racism and poverty. So does Ciel, who subsequently becomes entirely mute and dissociated. In the presence of well-meaning visitors, she nods but makes ‘no sound’ as ‘if her voice was too tired to make the journey from the diaphragm through the larynx to the mouth’ (102). Their ‘impotent words,’ Naylor writes, ‘flew against the steel edge of her pain, bled slowly, and returned to die in the senders' throats’ (102). Reminiscent of Elaine Scarry’s description of pain as that which annihilates the world of the sufferer, emotional pain becomes Ciel’s entire universe – another totalizing sensory and emotional enclosure on Brewster, epitomised by ‘the seven feet of space between herself and her child’s narrow coffin’ on the day of Serena’s funeral (101). 416 When Lorraine – one partner in Brewster’s only lesbian couple – is brutally gangraped in the novel’s second shocking climax, she is similarly unable to produce sound after having a 415 Fowler, p.42. 416 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 162 ‘bag’… ‘stuffed…into her mouth’ (170). Like Ciel, she dissociates from her surroundings. Slowly losing ‘the cells that nurtured her memory,’ ‘her powers of taste and smell’ and finally her capacity ‘to love – or hate’(170-1), this results in an irreversible insanity.417 As Pamela E. Barnett argues, the perpetrators – a gang of six youths led by a C.C. Baker – are motivated by an internalisation of compulsory heterosexuality, stemming from wider beliefs in male and masculine superiority.418 Contextualising this by highlighting the exclusion of African Americans from masculinised notions of American military, political and scientific achievement, Naylor writes: ‘these young men wouldn’t be called upon to thrust a bayonet into an Asian farmer, target a torpedo…point a finger to move a nation, or stick a pole into the moon – and they knew it’ (169-70). Instead, the ‘three hundred-foot alley’ where they rape Lorraine becomes their ‘stateroom, armored tank and executioner’s chamber’ (170). Bringing state-sanctioned brutality and rape into alignment, as Anissa J. Wardi notes, Naylor asserts that violence against women is inseparable from ‘the cultural ideal that privileges male aggression, acquisitiveness, and dominance’.419 Lorraine, as lesbian, becomes a scapegoat for the threat that the white supremacist state poses to Black men’s sense of power. As with Samuel’s attack on Mattie, the rape illustrates an attempt to regain authority through control of the two female mouths. The rape, as Barbara Christian asserts, is enabled by the entire community’s ostracization of Lorraine and her partner, Theresa.420 This isolation is symbolised by their 417Many critics have assumed that Lorraine dies after the attack, but Naylor has clarified that she survives, suffering from severe, irreversible psychological damage (Fowler, ‘A Conversation with Gloria Naylor’ in Conversations with Gloria Naylor, p.125). 418 Pamela E. Barnett, ‘“Lesbians Are Not Women”: Rape as “Compulsory Heterosexuality” in The Women of Brewster Place’ in Dangerous Desire: Sexual Freedom and Sexual Violence since the Sixties (Oxford: Routledge, 2004) p. pp.115-134. 419 Anissa J. Wardi, ‘The Scent of Sugarcane: Recalling "Cane" In "The Women Of Brewster Place",’ CLA Journal, 42 (1999) p.499. 420 Barbara Christian, ‘No More Buried Lives: The Theme of Lesbianism in Audre Lorde's Zami, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Ntozake Shange's Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple,’ in Black Feminist Criticism (New York: Pergammon Press, 1985) p.105. 163 impersonally named story, ‘the two,’ and their late introduction, which means, unlike the other women, they do not feature in any other story. Additionally, as Fowler observes, we are four pages into the chapter ‘before Theresa and Lorraine are presented directly to the reader’.421 Instead, it begins by describing how, through speculation, rumour, and gossip, it becomes known ‘that the two in 312’ are ‘that way’ (131). Sophie, an elderly woman living opposite the couple, is the main source of this information and its contempt. Like Samuel (and the Reverend in Etta’s story) Sophie uses her Christian beliefs to present herself as a morally superior citizen. Subjecting the whole street to her surveillance, she is the ‘official watchman for the block,’ attempting to police its residents (131). Critics such as Barnett and Michael D. Hill have considered the visual dimensions of this. Hill notes that when Sophie observes Lorraine and Theresa kissing, ‘she bewails their “nasty ways” and complains that the two “ain’t wanted here” in scenes that illustrate how spectatorship and surveillance can disintegrate fellowship’ (145).422 However, no critics have considered the spreading gossip in wider sensory or sonic terms. This is odd not only given its basis in speech, but because in the first pages of the story, Naylor figures it synaesthesically as a series of sounds that create a ‘scent drifting down’ the street, a ‘yellow mist’ and by implication, a taste ‘that gets into people’s mouths’ (130). This is an infecting form of communication characterised by speaking about but not listening to its subject. Taken up by men and women alike, the rumours and the gendering of Sophie as a male ‘watchman’ exemplify that hate-speech on Brewster is a perpetuation of white supremacist patriarchy. Creating a destructive sense of solidarity between those who revel in articulating, hearing, and spreading derogatory rumour, it even illustrates a toxic fetishization of queerness 421 Fowler, p.49. 422 Michael D. Hill, ‘One to Write On: Communion Without Consensus in The Women of Brewster Place and Jazz’ in The Ethics of Swagger: Prizewinning African-American Novels, 1977-1993 (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2013) p.106. 164 that resembles how, according to Kheshti, white listeners found pleasure in seeking out recordings of “exotic” race sounds in the early twentieth century.423 The damage this does to the whole community becomes clear when a Block Association meeting descends into chaos following a scathing verbal attack on Lorraine. Led by Kiswana – a middle-class radical who participated in civil rights action while at college – the meeting, in which the Brewster residents shout at one another and get into physical altercations, epitomises the failings of the civil rights movement. It points not only to patriarchal influences that divided its campaigns along gendered lines, but to homophobia, which was rampant even in Black feminist groups such as the National Black Feminist Organisation and Combahee River Collective.424 Kiswana’s inability to prevent the chaos indicates these exclusions and her own political naivety. As Peter Erickson argues, her politics falls short because it fails to include lesbian relationships.425 Indeed, when she meets Lorraine a few weeks later, she is quick to call Sophie a liar before awkwardly realising that “the two” may genuinely be lesbians. When Lorraine is raped, it symbolises the community’s abandonment of her. Yet, Naylor stresses, ‘what happens to Lorraine could happen to any of [the women] and has indeed happened to many of them in milder forms’.426 This event is the culmination of violent attacks on women’s bodies and voices throughout the text, made possible by hegemonic division both within and without the Black community, and indebted to the historical social-sensory hegemony alluded to in ‘Dawn.’ The fear of emasculation propelling Baker’s attack on Lorraine is also what fuels Samuel’s violence towards Mattie, Eugene’s emotional abuse towards Ciel and the domestic abuse suffered by Cora. Furthermore, the rape not only 423 This pleasure, in turn, Khesti argues, can be considered a “queer power play” because the female listener who gains agency through such titillation is motivated by ‘a phallic desire’ (Kheshti, pp.7-8). 424 Barnett, pp.115-16. 425 Peter Erickson, ‘Shakespeare's Naylor, Naylor's Shakespeare: Shakespearean Allusion as Appropriation in Gloria Naylor's Quartet’ In Literary Influence and African American Writers ed. by Tracy Mishkin (New York: Garland, 1996) p.331. 426 Fowler, p.54. 165 actualizes the attempted assault on Etta, but since Lorraine reminds Ben of his own child, it revisits Ben’s inability to protect his daughter from sexual abuse. The next section considers the literary and socio-political implications of Naylor’s attention to enduringly violent touch. Modernist connections Unveiling another problematic form of silence, the ‘uncomfortable continuities’ in Brewster Place anticipate recent historical work such as Katie R. Eyer’s review-essay, ‘The New Jim Crow is the Old Jim Crow,’ which warns against the post-civil rights emphasis on linear progress narratives. 427 Exploring scholarship on this topic by Jeanne Theoharis and Elizabeth Gillespie Mcrae, Eyer posits that racism endures because there is a vast divide ‘in the national imagination between the racial struggles of the civil rights era and the racial inequality of the present’.428 She argues that this is partly reflected in and fuelled by the laudatory, but reductive narratives that politicians attach to the civil rights movement.429 Naylor articulates the same idea in Brewster Place from a gender-focused perspective; the temporal and spatial continuities of struggle in the text suggest that linear narratives of progress need to be reassessed. This is not to say that Naylor ignores the triumphs of equal rights campaigns or the history of African American resistance, but that like Eyer, she calls for a more complex understanding of racial history – one that considers more than just the divisions between Black and white, and refuses to gloss over enduring issues. Naylor’s perspective aligns with those of other contemporary Black women writers including Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Her writing contributes to a body of work that not only exposes ongoing sexism and the suppression of Black women’s voices in radical Black 427 Katie R. Eyer, ‘The New Jim Crow is the Old Jim Crow,’ Yale Law Journal, 128:4 (2019) 1002-1077. 428 Eyer, p.1002. 429 Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018). 166 socio-political movements but constitutes a cultural counterforce to the manifestation of sexism in, for instance, the Black Arts movement that was twinned with Black Power.430 By engaging with the sensory to specifically present painful continuities between this period and the early decades of the twentieth century, Naylor’s turn to history is also a turn towards the concerns of the modernist moment. Demonstrating how some of these concerns are of continuing relevance, it gestures towards a certain parity between radical post-civil rights commentary and the New Negro movement central to the Harlem Renaissance. Both are propelled by desire to speak out against racial segregation and other race-based inequalities. The frustrations with contemporary socio-political systems and the desire for change remains. Thus, the concerns of various modernist authors, especially those who were part of or interested in the Harlem Renaissance, still speak to Naylor in the post-civil rights world. With reference to Brewster Place, several critics have highlighted the influence of such figures including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer and even William Faulkner, whose prose on the old south was not only admired by Naylor, but consistently features what Jay Watson calls a ‘thick stew of sensory detail,’ like much of Naylor’s own prose.431 The most explicit connection between Naylor’s text and the modernism of the Harlem Renaissance is its epigraph – a notably sensory segment from Hughes’ Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). As Jill L. Matus argues (with reference to King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech) the entire novel rethinks this poem in its ‘attention to dreams and desires and deferral’.432 Its short story form even reflects Hughes’ montage concept, and as my thesis’ introduction explains, such episodic forms have strong modernist links. Yet, the correlation between vocal and bodily suppression in Brewster Place encourages us to uncover the continuity of gendered 430 James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (US: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 431 Jay Watson, William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) p.99. 432 Jill L. Matus, ‘Dream Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place’ in Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr and K.A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993) p.127. 167 as well as raced hegemony, when acknowledging these modernist links – an idea that has influenced my entire thesis. Indeed, to identify and examine a twentieth-century tradition of feminist revisionary writing is to look for, expose and subsequently challenge oppressive continuities, as recorded both between and within texts by women, particularly those whose voices have previously been ignored or neglected. Adding to my thesis’ wider recovery project, I posit that the suppressive continuities in Brewster Place particularly resonate with the concerns and sensory aesthetics of little-known modernist and Harlem Renaissance writer, Marita Bonner, especially Frye Street and Environs (1987).433 While many critics including Fowler and Montgomery have compared Naylor’s novel to Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), commentary on this earlier potential influence is almost non-existent.434 Containing twenty short stories, three plays and two essays, the collection, published together for the first time in 1987, revolves around a fictional eponymous setting remarkably like Brewster. Although more ethnically diverse than Naylor’s post-civil rights community, the Chicago-based Frye Street is as squalid, violent, and sensorially enclosed. It is, Bonner writes, ‘a sealed pod’.435 As in Brewster Place, the stories and experiences of its residents are presented in an episodic, sketch-like manner. 436 Exploring the lives of the African American working class – a topic neglected by female contemporaries such as Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset – Bonner began publishing Frye Street stories in journals such as The Crisis and Opportunity in the 1920s.437 It was only from 1930, however, that she started to publish 433 Marita Bonner’s work has been explored as modernist by, for example, Jennifer M. Wilks’ Race, Gender and Comparative Black Modernism (Louisiana: LSU Press, 2008). The stories in Frye Street and Environs were initially published separately in the 1920s and ‘30s, but they were not published together as a collection until 1987. 434 Naylor and Bonner are often listed together along with other Black women writers such as Petry, Larsen and Fauset but there is little scholarship that compares their work in detail. See, for example, Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford: OUP, 1996) pp.119-121. 435 Marita Bonner, Frye Street and Environs, ed. by Joyce Occomy Stricklin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987) 436 In their portrayals of working class city life, both Bonner’s and Naylor’s short story cycles are perhaps particularly comparable to James Joyce’s The Dubliners, though clearly different in terms of content on race and gender. 437 Bonner, p.xxii. 168 separate stories together.438 In ‘Nothing New’ (1926) Bonner’s introduction of Frye Street anticipates Naylor’s multi-ethnic and sensory, particularly vocal, description of Brewster in ‘Dawn.’ In her classic use of the second person pronoun, Bonner writes: you’ve been down on Frye Street. You know how it runs…from freckle-faced tow heads to yellow Orientals; from broad Italy to broad Georgia; from hooked nose to square black noses. How it lisps in French, how it babbles in Italian, how it gurgles in German, how it drawls and crawls through Black Belt dialects. Frye Street flows nicely together. It is like muddy water (xv). Like on Brewster, this notion of communicative ease and flowing ‘nicely together’ is later disrupted by two violent incidents that split the community. In this case, division is along racial lines. However, like Naylor, Bonner often focuses on gender issues and Black women’s perspectives too, providing sensitive depictions of their aspirations and struggles. This is the subject of her 1925 essay ‘On Being Young – A Woman – and Colored.’ Describing her growing awareness of racist and sexist structures, in this she writes: ‘you decide that something is wrong with a world that stifles and chokes; that cuts off and stunts; hedging in, pressing down on eyes, ears and throat. Somehow all wrong’.439 This language of bodily and oral suppression, its gesture towards violent, downward-pressing haptics, brings Naylor’s work to mind and goes on to inform many themes throughout Bonner’s fiction. As Maria Balshaw argues, Bonner’s stories highlight the pressures of motherhood, the threat of racism and sexual 438 Bonner, p.xx. 439 Bonner, p.5. 169 harassment in urban space and the feminization of poverty.440 In ‘The Hands,’ she outlines the dreams and setbacks experienced by a young Black woman while describing her concurrent bus journey through the city. Written in the late 1930s or early ‘40s but unpublished until 1987, ‘Light in Dark Places’ addresses the pervasive threat of rape that Black women face in the city.441 This story was not something that Naylor could have read prior to writing Brewster Place. It is possible, however, that she had read some of Bonner’s earlier work. In their similar use of sensory language and form, Naylor and Bonner highlight painful and disturbing continuities concerning Black women’s vocal and bodily suppression; they uncover and emphasise the relevance of past struggles to the present.442 Identifying this writerly connection reiterates the existence of these continuities. Additionally, it begins to demonstrate the radical possibilities of a more continuous approach to narratives of literary history. Illustrating kinship between literature of the post-civil rights era and modernist period, the aesthetic and political connection between Naylor and Bonner evidences the perseverance of women writers in challenging the historical erasure of Black women’s embodied realities.443 Pointing to a radical tradition of women’s writing, it disrupts conventional approaches to the twentieth-century literary canon, which tend to separate both modernism from Black writing and early twentieth-century works from later texts.444 Allied with feminist revision, the continuous approach that prompted my consideration of Naylor’s relationship to Bonner, opens up a space for alternative and radical trajectories, including those which offer a more complex 440 Maria Balshaw, ‘New Negroes, New Women: The Gender Politics of the Harlem Renaissance,’ Women: A Cultural Review, 10:2 (1999) 127-138. 441 Bonner, p.xxiv. 442 Certainly, Bonner, like Naylor is informed by and often cites both slavery and its legacy in her stories’ critiques. In ‘Hate is Nothing’ from Frye Street, for instance, she describes this as being ‘cursed by the old inferiority hangover left from slave days’ (p.163). 443 In addition to the omission of Black women from dominant literary and historical records (as Saidiya Hartman examines in Wayward Lives) this erasure is effected, as I have shown, through the misrepresentation of Black women’s voices and bodies in documents such as the Moynihan report, and the sidelining of women within Black radical movements. 444 This is explained in my thesis introduction. 170 understanding of racial history, and literature’s raced and gendered histories. Spurred on by Naylor’s suppressive themes as well as Eyer, the approach suggests we must attend to painful and uncomfortable continuities if these alternatives are to be identified and fully appreciated. I therefore now move on to consider how Naylor’s engagement with the sensory in Brewster Place, especially the sonic and haptic, goes beyond the exposure of problems in her resistance to suppression. Communicating Radical Empathy Brewster’s sonic resistance In ‘The Two,’ Lorraine’s retreat into insanity is linked to an inability to vocally release her pain. Although after being gagged, she desperately tries to continue screaming through other parts of her body including her ‘corneas,’ Naylor writes that ‘the tough rubbery flesh’ sends the sounds ‘vibrating back into her brain’ (170). In contrast, emphasising the radicality of women’s speech particularly, as bell hooks stresses, when it emerges from silence, it is because Ciel rediscovers her voice, with Mattie’s support, that she regains physical and mental strength.445 As Whitt writes, for Ciel to reconnect with life and language, ‘Mattie knows she has to first hear a moan’ from the woman who has buried all sound deep within her.446 Ciel has entered the stage of trauma where a kind of break, according to Dori Laub, occurs between body and language.447 In scenes that constitute what Fowler describes as the novel’s ‘emotional centre,’ Mattie commits to remedying this break as she enfolds Ciel’s feverish and ‘tissue-thin body in her huge ebony arms’ (103).448 She rocks her ‘back and forth, back and forth’ in bed 445 hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist Thinking Black (Oxford: Routledge, 2014) p.12. 446 Whitt, p.40. 447 Jennifer L. Griffiths, Traumatic Possessions: The Body and Memory in African American Women's Writing and Performance (US: University of Virginia Press, 2010) p.2. 448 Fowler, p.43. 171 until ‘somewhere from the bowels of her being’ comes a faint ‘moan’ (103). In the extended metaphor that follows, Ciel’s moans grow louder as Mattie rocks her ‘above time…over the Aegean seas’ where ‘blood of sacrificed babies torn from their mothers arms and given to Neptune’ can be seen ‘on the water…past Dachau, where…Jewish mothers swept their children’s entrails off floors…[and] past the spilled brains of Sengalese infants whose mothers had dashed them on the wooden sides of slave ships’ (103). Ciel’s vocalized expulsion of pain and the comforting rocking motions that generate it, connect her and her grief not only to that of other African American women, but to numerous other women throughout time and space. The localised sensory confinement of Brewster Place becomes analogous to the embodied, emotional experiences of women across the globe and within various historical moments. Enabling Ciel to cry for the first time since Serena’s death, this boundary-breaking sense of connectivity, brought about by Mattie’s maternal healing touch, amounts to a cathartic rebirth. Indeed, when Mattie proceeds to bathe her like ‘a new-born’ being ‘baptised,’ Ciel begins to reconnect with her own body and regains her desire to live; she acknowledges a ‘sensation of fresh mint coursing through her pores’ and after weeks of self-starvation begins ‘feeding on’ the saltiness of her tears (104-105). Rejecting both vocal and bodily suppressions, Black female vocality is presented as a rejuvenating force. The celebration of non-verbal sound highlights a particularly significant challenge to the hegemonic order and its preoccupation with visuality and logos. As Fred Moten argues in his work on the radical jazz tradition, non-verbal sounds such as screams, cries, groans and hollers, disrupt this order whilst preserving earlier forms of sonic resistance in the calls, songs and ring shouts of slaves. 449 Providing repeated, amplified evidence of Black bodies and Black suffering, these sounds are part of an oral tradition that resists the suppressive discourses and 449 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (US: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 172 historical narratives of white supremacy, including those discussed within sensory studies. In Naylor’s text, they represent a reclamation of vocal forms that have traditionally been coded, through the sonic color line, as noise. This includes gendered as well as raced constructions. The rocking scene is not just a celebration of Black orality but, as Jenny Brantley argues, of sounds often conflated with women because they are overtly affective and thus traditionally constructed as “wild” and feminine.450 These are, additionally what Julia Kristeva refers to as the ‘preverbal’ – the sounds that humans learn to produce prior to language acquisition. 451 Reflecting these stages of development, Naylor suggests that in her rebirth, Ciel must access the preverbal realm before fully regaining speech. The figurative nature of this birth highlights the restorative power of the preverbal not just during early development but throughout women’s lives and histories as well as Naylor’s novel itself. Ciel recovers, Brantley asserts, because she is taken on a journey to ‘the place of the female collective scream, the place beyond words, a place of pure pain’ where ‘she can be healed’.452 For Brantley and other critics including Carole Ann Taylor and Montgomery, healing in the text is also evidenced by sounds of laughter. Citing the ‘hearty laughter’ that permeates conversations between Mattie and Miss Eva (the kind elderly woman who takes Mattie and Basil in when they struggle to find housing) Taylor argues that laughter enables the women to forge revitalizing connections with one another.453 The same can be said for the laughter shared by Kiswana and her mother at the third story’s end. It is most apparent, however, in conversations between Mattie and Etta because as Brantley observes, Etta’s story is bookended by unguarded, profuse laughter between the two friends – a laughter that goes ‘bouncing crazily 450 Jenny Brantley, ‘Women's Screams and Women's Laughter: Connections and Creations in Gloria Naylor's Novels’ in Gloria Naylor's Early Novels ed. by Margot Anne Kelley (US: University Press of Florida, 1999) pp.21-38. 451 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (US: Columbia University Press, 1984). 452 Brantley, p.26. 453 Carole Anne Taylor, ‘Humor, Subjectivity, Unctuousness: the case of laughter in the color purple and the women of Brewster place’ in The Tragedy and Comedy of Resistance: Reading Modernity Through Black Women’s Fiction (US: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) p.70. 173 against the walls’ of their living room, creating a more positive, homely space of containment and safety, a sanctuary within Brewster’s wider oppressive locale (59).454 Montgomery argues that the laughter the women share ‘harks back to the novel’s oral roots in the folk tradition and a survivalist ethic involving black triumph over adversity’.455 As Etta’s story emphasises, it also points to how this developed into the blues, and women’s blues especially. Etta’s appreciation for Billie Holiday’s vocals – the lyrics of which punctuate her story to comment on and foreshadow ‘events in Etta’s tumultuous life’ – is also an appreciation of the preverbal.456 As Brantley notes, for Etta (whose name is perhaps a tribute to Etta James) it isn’t just ‘the words or the music or the woman’ that captures her but ‘the pain’ in her ‘thin, scratchy voice’ (55). 457 In women’s blues, non-verbal expulsion of pain becomes part of an empowered reclamation of sensuous femininity. As Carby and Lordi have each suggested, Black female performers represented freedom and mobility in the early twentieth century. They were able not only to express the oft-neglected experiences of African American women, but constructed themselves as empowered sexual subjects. The blues singers, Carby writes, ‘had assertive and demanding voices; they had no respect for sexual taboos or for breaking through the boundaries of respectability and convention’.458 Putting on a ‘visual display of spangled dresses, of furs, of gold teeth, of diamonds, of all the sumptuous and desirable aspects of their body,’ they used their performances to reclaim ‘female sexuality from being an objectification of male desire to a representation of female desire’ (55).459 As a Black woman who has fled the south to escape 454 Brantley, p.25. 455 Montgomery, The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010) p.10. 456 Montgomery, p.9. 457 Brantley, p.25. 458 Hazel Carby, “it jus be’s dat way sometime: the sexual politics of women’s blues” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (NY: Columbia University Press, 1998) p.482. 459 Carby, p.479. 174 abuse and seek sexual pleasure on her own terms, Etta identifies with Holiday’s own painful history and admires her ability to express and transcend such pain, even if only temporarily, in her performances.460 At the story’s end, when Etta returns home after being used for sex by Reverend Woods – a man she fantasises about as a future husband – the emptiness she feels therefore begins to fade when she realises that Mattie is waiting up for her and ‘playing her records!’ (74). Foreseeing Etta’s disappointment over Woods, Mattie realises the ‘loose-life’ music will help to restore Etta’s rebellious and independent spirit (74). Together with the laughter she shares with Mattie, the preverbal quality of Holiday’s voice is intrinsic to ‘the love and the comfort’ that awaits her at home (74). Reverberating throughout the women’s stories, particularly in one-to-one conversations, these alleviatory and defiant sounds indicate resistance to oppressive social codes produced and reflected by “rational” language. They emphasise a rediscovery of bodily drives, feelings and experiences that might resolve the tension Kristeva explores between non-verbal substance and the Law of the Father – a resolution, she argues, that must take place if there is to be real, revolutionary social change. 461 Recalling the words of Hélène Cixous in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ they enable Ciel to see that ‘as subject for history, woman always occurs simultaneously in several places’.462 As Brantley asserts, Naylor’s text brings an African American perspective to Cixous’ claim that women must ‘work with the preverbal – ‘the sounds of moans and screams and laughter’ – to unthink ‘the unifying, regulating history’ recorded by men.463 It also stresses that the radical potential of the preverbal is dependent on receptivity. The catharsis that Etta finds in Holiday’s music is grounded in listening. In the rocking scene, too, Mattie’s receptiveness is crucial to Ciel’s recovery, and epitomises the kind 460 In Wayward Lives, Hartman explains that Billie Holiday was raped as an eleven year old and forced into prostitution at fourteen years old (p.223-4). 461 Brantley, p.23. 462 Brantley, p.26. 463 Brantley, p.26. 175 of listening that, Stoever argues, is needed to disrupt the sonic colour line. Ensuring that her lips are ‘clamped shut’ as she comforts and listens, Mattie chooses a form of silence in this moment that differs from what she has previously displayed (103). As well as simply showing a willingness to listen to the voices and experiences of Othered subjects, she actively helps to bring such voices, and their painful experiences, out into the open. Disrupting the feminized notion of listening as a passive practice, this is a method of radical aurality, which like that described by Stoever represents ‘agency,’ ‘community-building’ potential and a ‘mode of decolonization’.464 It demonstrates that listening can be ‘a practice of self-care,’ because Mattie not only helps Ciel in this moment, but appears to catalyse her own healing process.465 She, too, is rocked into connectivity with other women by her own motions. Subsequently, Mattie therefore seems to move towards freeing herself from the grip of internalised hegemonic discourses. In conversation with Etta, Mattie later comes closest to expressing empathy for Lorraine and Theresa when she states that homosexuality is ‘maybe…not so different’ (141) from heterosexuality. Moreover, while Mattie is too late to save Lorraine, the scream she expels upon finding her bloodied body is significant because, despite the many screams within Mattie’s own story (explored by Brantley) this is the first she articulates herself.466 It suggests that her own vocal and bodily restraint has been loosened. For this reason, the listening that Mattie practises in the rocking scene can be likened to what Nelle Morton calls “depth hearing” – a form of aurality that is ‘far more than acute listening. A hearing engaged in by the whole body that evokes speech – a new speech – a new creation’.467 Ciel’s moans and Mattie’s scream not only anticipate such new speech but, as non-verbal sounds that disrupt standard linguistic and social structures, they symbolise that speech. As well 464 Stoever, p.17. 465 Ibid. 466 Brantley discusses the screams in Mattie’s story, but does not mention Mattie’s first genuine scream in ‘The Two.’ 467 Nelle Morton, ‘Beloved Image’ in The Journey is Home (Boston: Beacon Press, 1977) pp.127-8. 176 as emphasising a connection between the aural and oral in relation to sonic defiance, Naylor’s rocking scene, as in Kheshti’s theory of alternative listening, ‘brings the listener and sound into a copresence of coming together – an ontology,’ Kheshti posits, ‘that can imagine a different imaginary order’ from that of racist and sexist hegemony.468 This amounts to the portrayal of a radical and empathetic mode of communication. Contrary to the hate speech surrounding “the two,” this is grounded in listening as well as speaking and non-verbal sounding. Emerging in conversations between Kiswana and her mother, Mattie and Etta, and Mattie and Eva as well as the rocking scene between Ciel and Mattie, such communication, imbued with the radicality of its oral, aural and restorative touching components, filters not only through the stories themselves in intimate one-to-one scenarios, but down from one character and generation to another. Reflecting the preservation work of Black oral traditions, it becomes a form of positive continuity that counteracts enduringly suppressive forces. The way that Mattie comforts Etta and then Ciel is pre-empted by the support she receives from Miss Eva. Rather than judging Mattie, Eva allows her to articulate her own experience and the things ‘she had buried within her’ in long conversations that become a ‘blending of their lives’ (34). She becomes the empathetic listener that Mattie needs. The wider sensory comfort and sense of healing accompanying this is highlighted when Mattie reminisces about falling asleep surrounded by the ‘smell of lemon oil and the touch of cool starched linen’ in Eva’s house (35). Although she does not heed Miss Eva’s advice concerning Basil’s spoilt behaviour or allowing herself a sexually fulfilled life, Mattie’s care for Etta and Ciel, suggests that she subsequently adopts a similar role to Eva on Brewster. Negating the previously self-destructive relationship with her son, she demonstrates a newfound motivation to help other women. Similarly, the reconciliatory moment between Kiswana and her mother, which I explore in more detail momentarily, seems to influence an 468 Kheshti, p.12. 177 important moment of transformation for Cora. Demonstrating an improved capacity to connect with and help other residents, the next time Kiswana appears is when she successfully persuades Cora to attend her partner’s rendition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the park – a multi-sensory experience that Cora and her children are enthralled by. Reiterating the connection between this helpful communicative domino effect and not only Black oral traditions, but their importance within families – a crucial part of African American resistance to voicelessness according to hooks – the mother-daughter interaction that proceeds this moment involves discussion of race history.469 Having braided her hair and dispensed with her original name, Melanie, Kiswana has moved to Brewster from the wealthy African American neighbourhood of Linden Hills, in order to seem more authentically Black. Yet, her mother emphasises, this demonstrates a limited understanding of racial history and identity. By reminding her that her birth name was also that of her great-grandmother – ‘a woman who bore nine children and educated them all’ and ‘who held off six white men with a shotgun’ when they tried to drag one of her sons to jail for ‘not knowing his place’’– Mrs. Browne informs her daughter that her approach to race leads not to celebratory preservation, but to reductive erasure (86). She exclaims, Black ‘isn’t beautiful and it isn’t ugly – black is! It’s not kinky hair and it’s not straight hair – it just is!’ (86). In other words, Blackness is not reducible to superficial visual categories. Mrs. Browne tells her daughter that by dropping out of college to be an activist, she is being ‘counterrevolutionary!’ because she has forsaken opportunities that her ancestors fought for (83). That the conversation concludes in resolution and laughter, is testament to Kiswana’s capacity to eventually listen to and empathise with her mother’s viewpoint. Recognising that ‘her mother had trod through the same universe that she herself was now traveling,’ Kiswana’s aural engagement with the history being orally passed on to her, not only strengthens the bond she has with her mother, but as her subsequent 469 hooks, Talking Back, p.162. 178 interactions with Cora imply, complicate her historically-inflected understanding of identity, race and family relations in ways that benefit her socio-political causes (87). This scene reiterates Naylor’s call for more complex interrogations of historical narratives concerning race whilst gesturing towards the radical possibilities of doing so. In the final story, ‘The Block Party,’ Naylor builds on this to present a vision of what radical empathetic communication might look like on a wider scale. Describing a dream as it unfolds in Mattie’s mind, in this, all of the novel’s female characters (except the now institutionalised Lorraine) come together in rebellion to tear down the wall. With their hearts beating in ‘perfect unison’ amidst the sounds of smashing bricks and the shouts of the women, this moment of solidarity is a vision of what needs to happen next (188). Contrary to the acrimony of Kiswana’s Block Association meeting, it is indicative of empathetic communication, of emotional and physical connection, that has a broader, community-wide basis. Moving beyond the confinement of the women’s homes, and into the public space of the street, it marks a collective rejection of the sexist and racist structures that are epitomised by the sensory and emotional containment of the wall. The scene emphasises that empathetic communication provides the strengthening groundwork that is needed to participate in and effectuate progressive socio-political change, to address hegemonic rifts both in and beyond African American communities. It gestures towards what Givens calls “radical empathy” – the ability ‘not only to understand the feelings of others, but also to be motivated to create the change that will allow all of us to benefit from economic prosperity and develop the social relationships that are beneficial to our emotional wellbeing’.470 For the characters, the question of whether this dream will become reality remains unanswered. By leaving the ending open, however, Naylor encourages us not only to decide if the dream is deferred in the text, but to 470 Terri E. Givens, Radical Empathy: Finding a Path to Bridging Racial Divides (Bristol: Policy Press, 2021) p.1 179 assess how we can assist in making such dreams a reality in our own active, communicative practices. We are encouraged to listen to the painful histories recorded in the text, and to subsequently speak and act in ways, both within and beyond the literary world, that will counter enduring suppressive discourses surrounding the marginalised. As Furlonge says of other texts by African American authors, the novel suggests that literary listening – especially as that which disrupts the ‘traditional separation between acts of reading (highly visual and focused on the eye) and reception of orality (highly audible and focused on the ear)’ – enables readers and writers to join together in their own discursive, radical community.471 The novel’s closing scenes encourage us to think of Naylor’s text itself as an innovative and potentially radical communication. The destruction of the wall – the climax of Naylor’s resistance to vocal and bodily suppression – is the culmination not only of empathetic communication as depicted within the text, but of the sounds and themes that constitute both this positive form of narrative continuity and its oppressive silence-based counterpart. As repetitious and cyclical features of the text, these threads epitomise the Black oral traditions being alluded to within the novel – the intergenerational storytelling presented between Kiswana and her mother, and the patterns that characterise jazz, blues and other African American musical genres. This narrative embodiment of oral features demonstrates how Naylor’s writing, like much African American literature, according to Mathes, Furlonge and Henderson, disrupts the binary between Black orality and white literacy. As Lordi explains, this dichotomy has been constructed not only in hegemonic terms by critics such as Walter J. Ong whose Orality and Literacy – published in the same year as Brewster Place – theorises a distinction between oral and written cultures, but inadvertently by early race and sound scholars 471 Nicole Brittingham Furlonge, Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African-American Literature (US: University of Iowa Press, 2018) p.9. 180 who presented Black orality as a metaphor for Black life.472 In Henderson’s work, a sensory approach is employed to undo this construction. Sonic tropes generated by race and sound studies – the vernacular “talking book,” Robert Stepto’s “call and response,” Henry Louis Gates’s “signifyin’,” Houston Baker’s “bluesman,” Geneva Smitherman’s “talkin’ and testifyin’,” bell hooks’s “talking back,” and Henderson’s own “speaking in tongues” – demonstrate not only ‘the power of voice and sonance in the African American literary tradition,’ but ‘a continuity between the oral and written forms of black American expressivity’.473 Bringing the sonic and the visual together, she explains that to engage with Black literature is both an act of listening and an act of bearing witness. 474 Similarly, building upon Stoever and Moten, who each argue that listening emerges from an “ensemble of senses,” Mathes and Furlonge dismantle the orality/literacy binary by embracing ‘the complexities of visual and aural exchange within black cultural production’. 475 They posit that African American literature not only diverges from white modernity’s preoccupation with the visual, but moves, instead, towards a non-hierarchical, multi-sensoriality.476 This is certainly true of Brewster Place. As we have seen, oral and aural descriptions throughout the text, whether liberatory or suppressive are always connected to wider sensory and emotional states. Since these centre on Black women and the female body, however, the orality of Naylor’s narrative is particularly akin to what Doveanna S. Fulton theorises as “Black feminist orality.” For Fulton, this includes a “sass” reminiscent of hooks’ “talking back” and more abstract notions of ‘circularity and multiplicity’ that ‘counter western 472 Emily Lordi, Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American literature (US: Rutgers University Press, 2013) p.12. Lordi’s work adds to sensory studies existing criticism of Ong’s work in relation to “Great Divide” scholarship, which I mention in my introductory chapter. It brings both a raced and gendered element to this critique that is relevant to sensory studies’ recovery of the other. 473 Mae G. Henderson, Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora: Black Women Writing and Performing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) p.2. 474 Henderson, p.17. 475 Mathes, p.3. 476 Ibid. 181 hegemony’ and create resistance networks between women that can transcend temporal and spatial boundaries.477 In Brewster Place, the positive and negative oral threads I have discussed, together with their culmination in the final story, embody Fulton’s definition of Black feminist orality. They tie the women’s stories together not only across time and space as depicted within the text, but across the text as space. Symbolising a breakdown of the textual barriers between each woman’s story, the loud, communal destruction of the wall exemplifies the ways in which orality brings the women’s individual experiences together in this way. Black feminist orality is fundamental to the haptic and feminist sensory aesthetic that is specific to this text and its connecting episodic form. Reflecting and adding to the connections enshrined in the episodic, Black feminist orality constitutes a formal embodiment of the emotional and sometimes physical connections between women that the novel conveys in its multi-sensory depictions of empathetic communication – a form of touch and of being in touch that has the capacity to remedy the damaging impact of traumatic experience. It is in this embodiment too, in its own communicative and affective appeal to its community of readers/listeners (as shared by the episodic) that the text itself attempts to counter the race and gender discrimination that often enables such trauma. Naylor’s voice By putting Naylor in conversation with other twentieth-century women writers, this thesis, as my introductory chapter explains, attempts a transgressive and community-building form of communication which, like that in Brewster Place, transcends temporal and placial boundaries 477 Doveanna S. Fulton, Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women's Narratives of Slavery (US: SUNY Press, 2006) p.13. 182 whilst centralising the sensory and emotional experiences of women. This, as I now elaborate in ways that conclude this chapter and introduce the next, was inspired by Naylor’s attempt to not only establish her authorial voice in Brewster Place, but to begin positioning this within an alternative tradition and community to that of the standard literary canon. Connected to the empathetic communication embodied by Black feminist orality in the text, this endeavour becomes most pronounced in the final story. Like other female post-civil rights authors, Naylor’s turn to history indicates, in one sense, a search for what Alice Walker calls ‘our mothers’ gardens,’ for Black, artistic female predecessors.478 Yet, in turning to the early twentieth century in particular, Naylor’s text also finds kinship with works not only by Black men such as Hughes, but with white women such as Virginia Woolf, whose call for women writers to ‘think back through our mothers’ influenced Walker’s later rallying cry.479 Solidifying a sense of community with these authors and Black women writers from the modernist period such as Bonner, Naylor’s text is bound up with similar socio-political concerns, and employs similar aesthetic resistance strategies. The feminist haptics of her work illustrate her particular connection to women already aligned with modernism who employ the sensory to unmute women’s voices, liberating their bodies from the confines of various patriarchal discourses – to present and construct an alternative ontology of modernity through sensory language and subversive formal strategies. Her epigraph’s sensory reference to Hughes performs the same work in relation to race. At the end of Brewster Place, however, it becomes explicitly clear that such haptic aesthetics are additionally attached to the revisionary tactics that have been repeatedly aligned with modernism itself. 478 Alice Walker, ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’ in Within the Creole: An Anthology of African American Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. by Angelyn Mitchell (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994) pp.403-409. 479 Woolf, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, p.57. 183 As Peter Erickson argues, Naylor’s ‘Block Party’ is partly a revision of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.480 When Ciel begins discussing her own dream within Mattie’s, it creates a dream-within-a-dream scenario that alludes to the play-within-a-play motif at the end of Shakespeare’s text. Performed in celebration of Midsummer’s triple marriage, ‘The Most Lamentable Comedy and the Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe’ features a wall that separates its eponymous lovers. Since this is comedically represented by Snout, an actor in Peter Quince’s troupe, who even speaks in the role, Shakespeare’s wall simply saunters off stage once the resolution is near. The gravity and effort surrounding the destruction of the Brewster wall, in contrast, is emblematic of how Naylor’s experiences and authorial concerns differ from those of canonical white men; her task, she acknowledges, is more difficult. Representing another anti-linear and oral repetition, this concluding moment looks back upon and reiterates the sentiments of ‘Cora Lee,’ in which an all-Black version of the play is performed. Together with Cora’s assertion, when asked by her son, that Shakespeare is ‘not yet’ Black, it is a moment that directs us back to Hughes’ poem and the novel’s epigraph (127). As a Shakespeare-based revision, it also recalls Hughes’ 1942 poetry collection, Shakespeare in Harlem. Like Hughes, Naylor highlights the potential for a Black Shakespeare-like figure. Additionally, in Naylor’s focus on women, an equally apt modernist comparison along revisionary lines is Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. In this, Woolf famously invents a sister for Shakespeare, before going on to imagine how her own writing talent would have been ignored on account of her sex.481 Like Woolf, Naylor stresses and strives to counteract the fact that Shakespeare’s genius is not yet associated with women either: while Cora can imagine her son as a future writer, she identifies her daughter only with the play’s ‘fairy queen’ role.482 480 Erickson, ‘“Shakespeare’s Black?”: The Role of Shakespeare in Naylor’s Novels’ in Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr and K.A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993) p.236. 481 Woolf, p.261. 482 Matus, p.133. 184 In terms of both race and gender, the revisionary closing scenes of Brewster Place strengthen the connection between Naylor and Bonner. In ‘On Being Young – A Woman – and Colored,’ Bonner invokes and subverts Shakespeare when she asks why a ‘colored woman’ is seen ‘only as a gross collection of desires,’ as ‘a feminine Caliban craving to pass for Ariel?’.483 Why, in other words, in this reference to The Tempest, are women of colour cast as monstrous, colonized figures, who should wish to shed their racial identity? In one sense, these revisionary allusions emphasise the longevity of modernism and its enduring relevance where race and gender are concerned in the latter half of the twentieth century and in post-civil rights literature more specifically. This is reiterated by the publication of Bonner’s collected Frye Street works in 1987. Such an idea of modernist legacy is complicated, however, by West’s assertion that Black writers have continually ‘had to revamp, revision and recast themselves’ in the face of various obstacles that impede their ‘economic, social and even spiritual journey’.484 While revisionary techniques, and their inherent temporal experimentation, are certainly popular among modernists, these were already consistent features of Black writing before the twentieth century – a literature, as Charles E. Wilson states, that was therefore modern before modernism.485 Indeed, the allusive revisionary technique of “signifyin’” – a Black sonic trope theorised by Gates – predates, co-exists with and moves beyond the traditional modernist period. This, in turn, supports Daylanne K. English’s suggestion that Black temporal experiments, including Du Bois’ emphasis on the ‘continuous past’ of slavery, work over and against modernist temporal concepts including Gertrude Stein’s well-known “continuous present” and Henri Bergson’s “durée”.486 Suggesting that we might see the historical turn in 483 Bonner, p.5. 484 Wilson, p.19. 485 Wilson, p.19. This is explained more thoroughly in my thesis introduction. 486 English, p.19. For Du Bois, the ‘continuous past’ is inseparable from the what he calls the ‘present-past’ of slavery. English and other scholars such as Gregory Laski and Michelle M. Wright theorise notions of “Black time” - a circular and anti-linear temporal conceit that challenges the linearity and rationale of white supremacy. The parallel and equally radical, but gender-focused concept of women’s time has been theorised by scholars 185 post-civil rights literature as a continuation of this entwined Black and modernist process, Naylor’s revision of Shakespeare at the end of Brewster Place illuminates the entanglement between modernism and Black writing as well as its complex raced and gendered dimensions. This is not to say that Naylor can be neatly placed into a modernist category, but rather that her text initiates a reconsideration of this category. Performing as well as presenting the connecting work of “Black feminist orality,” the novel’s multi-sensory aesthetics point to and enable theorisation of a wider twentieth-century women’s writing tradition that both acknowledges and builds upon understanding of specifically Black and Black women’s authorship. This is a tradition – its own form of multi-sensory and haptic “re-visioning” – that can only be fully identified once the unsegregated and more complex historical thinking advocated in Brewster Place, is applied to our evaluation and re-evaluation of the literary past. For Naylor, her first contribution to this – described retrospectively as an ‘outpouring’– can be understood as her own cathartic scream.487 Allowing her to establish her authorial voice and preserve her own history, it is a record of her experiences and those of her family. As Fowler observes, her references to the Great Migration are informed by her family’s journey north from Mississippi in 1950.488 Similarly, the house numbers that she specifies on Brewster match those of her grandparents’ apartment buildings in Harlem.489 Ciel even shares the name of Naylor’s maternal grandmother.490 Influenced by the stories she heard within her familial circle, particularly between female relatives in domestic spaces, the text is a personal and political gateway to the new language that becomes her writing career. It even emerges from her own depth hearing – her need, she explains in interviews, to ‘listen internally’ to her such as Kristeva and Elaine Showalter. Both concepts are, arguably, bound together within Fulton’s theory of “Black feminist orality”, and within the temporal experiment, therefore, of Naylor’s linguistic and formal sensory revision strategies. 487 Sharon Felton and Michelle Loris, ‘The Human Spirit is a Kick-Ass Thing’ (1996) in Conversations with Gloria Naylor ed. Maxine L. Montgomery (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2004), p.140. 488 Fowler, p.1. 489 Fowler, p.22. 490 Ibid. 186 characters.491 These are recuperative authorial practises that she develops throughout her career, and which, as the next chapter shows, become most radical (and even more explicitly revisionary) in Bailey’s Cafe. 491 Angela Carabi, ‘An Interview with Gloria Naylor’ in Conversations with Gloria Naylor ed. by Maxine Lavon Montgomery (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2004) p.122. 187 Jazz, Blues, and Black Women’s “Wayward” Lives in Bailey’s Cafe (1992) In a 2000 interview, Gloria Naylor comments on her wide-ranging love of music. She states: ‘music energises me, and I have a very eclectic taste...I like certain operas. I like rhythm and blues. I like some jazz’.492 The growing body of scholarship on musical aspects of Naylor’s novels, is testament to the numerous ways in which this interest permeates her work.493 In particular, such scholarship has focused on her fourth novel, Bailey’s Cafe (1992), which uses musical terms and references especially concerning jazz and blues, to structure its seven stories and their encompassing narrative frames. Interestingly, while critics have examined this musical form in various ways, they have overlooked the fact that the novel’s episodic structure not only mirrors that of Brewster Place, but gestures towards thematic and aesthetic similarities between the texts.494 Addressing this omission and building on my previous chapter, this chapter argues that in Bailey’s Cafe Naylor continues her sensory interrogation of the vocal and bodily suppressions suffered by Black women, but does so by engaging more explicitly with music. Like Brewster Place, Bailey’s Cafe, set in 1948 but containing narratives of earlier twentieth-century events, presents a historicised correlation between the silencing of Black women’s voices and cultures of racist and sexist abuse. The novel uses oral-aural and haptic 492 Wilson, p.187 493 In addition to the Bailey’s Cafe scholarship cited in this chapter, see: Chekita T. Hall, Gloria Naylor's Feminist Blues Aesthetic (NY: Garland, 1998); Brantley, ‘Women’s Screams and Women’s Laughter: Connections and Creations in Gloria Naylor’s Novels’ in Gloria Naylor’s Early Novels (Florida: University Press of Florida. 1999) pp. 21-38; and Montgomery, ‘Navigating a Blues Landscape: The Women of Brewster Place’ in The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance (US: University of Tennessee Press, 2010) pp.1-19. 494 See: Fowler, Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996); Montgomery, ‘Authority, Multivocality, and the New World Order in Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe’ in The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor ed. by Felton and Loris (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997) pp.187-194; Sylvie Chavanelle, ‘Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Cafe: The Blues and Beyond,’ American Studies International, 36.2 (1998) 58-73; Whitt, Understanding Gloria Naylor (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999); Karen Schneider, ‘Gloria Naylor’s Poetics of Emancipation: (E)merging (Im)possibilities in Bailey’s Cafe’ in Gloria Naylor’s Early Novels ed. by Margot Anne Kelley (US: University Press of Florida, 1999) pp.1-20; and Margot Anne Kelley, ‘Framing the Possibilities: Collective Agency and the Novels of Gloria Naylor’ in Kelley, pp.133-54. 188 features, including jazz and blues references, to create a radical narrative imbued with what Doveanna S. Fulton refers to as “Black feminist orality”.495 This orality remains connected to empathetic, healing modes of communication. Reiterating literary and socio-political connections between the modernist and post-civil rights eras, enables Naylor to further address uncomfortable continuities concerning race and gender inequality. In addition to its increased musicality, Bailey’s Cafe focuses more consistently on the demonisation of Black women’s sexuality. As several critics have noted, the text revises the virgin/whore dichotomy, particularly as perpetuated by the Judeo-Christian tradition from which its female characters take their names.496 Like Naylor’s first novel, each story in Bailey’s Cafe focuses on a different character’s journey both to and within the title location. In this case, the location is a café managed by “Bailey” (whose real name is not revealed) and his wife, Nadine. Existing beyond usual temporal and placial boundaries, the café lies ‘at the edge of the world’ and can only be found by those whose lives are in turmoil (28).497 Among the café’s patrons we find: Sadie, a prostitute forced into sex work as a child; Jesse, who turns to drugs for reprieve from years of ostracization on account of both her sexuality and working-class status; Mary (also known as Peaches) whose subjection to incessant sexual harassment leads her to self-harm; Mariam, an Ethiopian Jew who has undergone female genital mutilation (FGM); and Esther who is sold into sexual slavery at twelve years old by her older brother. Since these women and others reside in a brothel, located on the same street as the café, Naylor’s text emphasises the unobtainable nature of the quiet and chaste womanly ideal within patriarchal and dualistic perceptions of female sexuality. All women, but especially women of 495 Doveanna S. Fulton, Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women's Narratives of Slavery (US: SUNY Press, 2006). 496 See Karen Schneider (1999), Shirley Stave (2001), Adriane Ivey (2005), and Dorothea Buehler (2011). Virginia Fowler explains that Naylor joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses with her mother when she was a teenager. Before later becoming disillusioned with the religion, she participated in door-to-door preaching. This was important for her, Fowler explains, because it was one of the few arenas in which Black women were able to use their voices with authority (Fowler, pp.9-11). 497 Gloria Naylor, Bailey’s Cafe (NY: Vintage, 1992). 189 colour, she suggests, are at risk of being constructed as “whorish monsters” within white supremacist and patriarchal societies such as the novel’s toxic masculine, post-war setting. Whether they have attempted to comply to the ideal or not, Naylor’s characters’ unique and varied experiences have led them all to the same place of “whoredom.” The virgin/whore binary itself, Naylor suggests, is a form of vocal and bodily suppression in its reductive erasure of women’s embodied realities. Countering this erasure more directly than the third-person narrative of Brewster Place, Bailey’s Cafe is written as a series of first-person monologues. Naylor doesn’t just voice women’s stories in this text but gives her characters the power to voice their own embodied experiences. These critical and radical articulations, specifically in the context of the “whore” figure are inseparable, I argue, from the jazz and blues that infuse the novel. I build on existing Bailey’s Cafe scholarship by bringing together currently separate critical discussions concerning the text’s revisionary approach to female sexuality and its musicality.498 Crucial to this intervention is my engagement with Gloria Naylor’s archive, which has not yet been utilised in connection with the novel’s musical or sexual content.499 Containing far more extensive research material on Bailey’s Cafe than earlier works, the archive speaks to the intrinsic relationship between music and sexuality in the text.500 Archived research files, correspondence, notes and drafts reveal that for Naylor, music becomes a staging ground for conversations about sexuality, sex work, the policing of Black women’s sexuality and visions 498 In formal readings of musicality, the revision of female sexuality is not a consistent, parallel focus. Conversely, scholars such as Ivey, Stave and Buehler, who consider this topic in most detail, do not present music as central to their claims. 499 Naylor donated her archive to Sacred Heart University, Connecticut in 2009. Thanks to a prestigious grant, awarded in 2020, much of the material has now been digitised. The documents have been on loan to Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, for the duration of this process. I visited the archive at Lehigh in April 2022 to carry out research for both this thesis chapter and my contribution to an upcoming edited collection on Gloria Naylor’s archive – the first piece of scholarship to focus on this aspect of her work. 500 All the research materials I cite within this chapter (apart from those discussed in relation to the Bailey’s Cafe play and Parchman) have been specifically filed by archivists as documents that Naylor accumulated and engaged with while writing Bailey’s Cafe. 190 of sexual autonomy. Demonstrating this, the first half of this chapter begins by outlining instances of vocal and bodily suppression concerning sexuality in the women’s stories, as informed by Naylor’s wide-ranging research on sexual harassment culture. Drawing on archived documents about jazz and blues, I not only confirm the importance of these musical influences in Bailey’s Cafe, but argue that these genres are specifically selected by Naylor to frame and add more poignant expression to her characters’ painful experiences. Examining crossovers between “whoredom,” jazz, and blues in Naylor’s research files, I assert that Naylor not only criticises derogatory depictions of the “whore” but considers how raced and gendered perceptions of jazz and blues themselves have shaped notions of “whoredom.” As reinforced by Naylor’s archived criticism of contemporary pop music, she is concerned not just about the persistence of damaging sexual stereotypes, but their specific, ongoing manifestations in the music industry. The second half of this chapter argues that Naylor attempts to revise the “whore” figure and Black music simultaneously. The archive reveals that this resistance can be understood as an effort to recover the sexually-empowering, and in itself revisionary, tradition of women’s jazz and blues, represented by figures such as Ella Fitzgerald, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday.501 In the wider context of my thesis, this endeavour highlights how Naylor’s sensory aesthetics are simultaneously engaged with the recovery of what Audre Lorde describes as the power of the erotic, embedded in sensation and affect, for women.502 Aiding Naylor in this are a select number of contemporary Black female singers including Joan Armatrading, Jevetta Steele and Nina Simone. Their works oppose the objectifying depictions of female sexuality that Naylor criticises in other pop music, allowing her to access and re-enliven the liberating mantras of women’s jazz and blues. These 501 As mentioned in my previous chapter, Carby discusses the sexual empowerment afforded by the blues for women in “it jus be’s dat way sometime: the sexual politics of women’s blues” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (NY: Columbia University Press, 1998) pp.470-83. 502 My introduction explains the relevance of Lorde’s work in framing my sensory approach throughout the thesis. 191 singers are fundamental to the healing, communicative touch of “Black feminist orality” that not only flows through Bailey’s Cafe but illuminates such communications between as well as within Naylor’s texts. Representing the beginning and end of what Naylor refers to as her “quartet,” Brewster Place and Bailey’s Cafe employ haptic oral-aural features to reach out to one another and their readers. The archive reveals that this thread extends beyond the quartet to Naylor’s later theatrical and televisual projects. This is especially apparent in her stage adaptation of Bailey’s Cafe (1994) and Parchman (1998) – a fascinating, yet unproduced television screenplay that examines women’s lives within Mississippi State Penitentiary (otherwise known as Parchman Farm) during the 1930s. I conclude this chapter by discussing how both the Bailey’s Cafe play and Parchman (which refers to blues music throughout) continue Naylor’s sensory revisionary work. Since no scholars have yet explored Parchman or the dramatized script for Bailey’s Cafe, this chapter uses the archive along with my sensory approach to produce a nuanced understanding of Naylor’s work and career trajectory. It highlights the importance of archival recovery work for feminists and brings a new angle to the musicality of Bailey’s Cafe. While critics have acknowledged the influence of Duke Ellington and the fact that the novel’s music pushes against the boundaries of a predominantly white and male literary tradition, they have yet to identify specific female musical influences.503 Granting us insight into the female artists who inspired Naylor and how Naylor herself reflects on these and related subjects, the archive makes this possible. It is this revelation that particularly draws together Naylor’s depictions of sexuality and music, bringing a new musical dimension to her revisionary exploration of the virgin/whore dichotomy.504 Building on Chapter Three, this chapter continues to bring a 503 Montgomery and Whitt, for example, discuss Ellington. Fowler explores how music challenges literary norms. Chavanelle does briefly mention Nina Simone in relation to the text, but apart from this there have been no scholarly references to the influence of female singers. 504 As previously examined, for example, by Stave (2001); Ivey (2005), Montgomery (1997); Montgomery (2010); and Buehler (2011). 192 gendered element to the race-based sensory histories produced by Andrew Kettler and Mark M. Smith.505 It continues to present a multi-sensory and gender-focused disruption of the Black orality and white literacy binary discussed by critics such as Carter Mathes and Nicole Brittingham Furlonge. Similarly, it contributes to a more holistic and multi-sensory understanding of the intersection between gender, race, and sound studies while its increased musical focus aligns with recent work on the mutuality between Black performance practice and Black writing.506 Such scholarship, Jennifer Stoever asserts, ‘enables contemporary scholars to engage with the sonics of black cultural production on a more granular level— a “search for resonances” in Lordi’s terms’.507 Like Lordi, and with reference to both Hazel Carby and Angela Y. Davis, my focus on historical continuities and “resonances” between Naylor and female vocalists, explores what this specifically means within Black women’s cultural production.508 Concurrently, this chapter stages a gender-based intervention in studies of Black modernism that focus on the role of jazz.509 This assists my continuing effort to situate Naylor, via the sensory, in several literary traditions concerning Black women’s writing, twentieth century women’s writing and post-civil rights literature. Race, Music, and Whoredom “Wayward” women Naylor’s archive reveals that Bailey’s Cafe was informed by extensive research on sexual harassment culture in early twentieth-century America. Gesturing towards the detrimental 505 See my thesis’ introduction. 506 This includes critics such as Stoever and Furlonge as well as Josh Kun, Henderson and Lordi who often refer back to earlier work by Moten, Daphne Brooks, Farah Jasmine Griffin and Gayle Wald. 507 Stoever, p.16. 508 This does not mean I shift my attention entirely away from vocality. 509 These include Lemke’s work on primitivist modernisms as well as more recent scholarship by John Lowney, Sweeney and Marsh. 193 impact of the culturally pervasive virgin/whore dichotomy, archived materials on subjects such as adolescent prostitution, sex-trafficking, abuse within religious cults and the sexual profiles of men in power, draw attention to the exploitation of women. This sexist culture is exacerbated in the post-war period, as other archived documents show, by the concurrently unjust policing of women’s sexual behaviour. In Naylor’s copy of Delinquent Girls in Court – a 1947 study of “wayward” women and girls by Paul W. Tappan – attempts to control female sexuality are alluded to in a statement that Naylor underlines: ‘though the woman is generally treated more leniently than the male in our courts, the contrary is true in cases involving violation of the sexual code’.510 Such violations, the document reveals, mainly concern sex work. This was not only considered a form of social deviance, but as Tappan inadvertently demonstrates, it was something the law had less interest in remedying in relation to ethnic minorities. Highlighting Tappan’s observation that there were fewer rehabilitation options for African Americans and Jews, Naylor acknowledges this discrimination and its implication that women from these marginal groups were more readily perceived in derogatory terms, as whores.511 Naylor’s research therefore anticipates Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), which examines how the experiences of Black women and girls were impacted by ideas and regulations surrounding “waywardness” in urban spaces during the early twentieth century. From the early 1900s, as migration from the South intensified, Hartman explains, women and girls of colour became increasingly vulnerable to sexual exploitation and assault – to unsolicited and aggressive touch.512 Men would prey on naïve Black girls who arrived unescorted in the city and in some areas such as ‘the tenderloin’ in San Francisco, a woman of colour ‘could be grabbed in the street’ by a white man at any time.513 Like Naylor, Hartman 510 The Gloria Naylor Archive, Paul W. Tappan, Delinquent Girls in Court, 1947, Box 30, folder, 8, p.87. 511 Ibid. 512 Hartman, p.48. 513 Hartman, p.163. 194 stresses that Black women’s sexuality was consistently treated with most suspicion and rigorously policed. Between 1882 and 1925, several were passed that led to regular convictions of women for prostitution, vagrancy and disorder.514 These were often imposed irrespective of individual circumstances, age or other factors such as coercion. When a fourteen year-old Billie Holiday was arrested for prostitution in May 1929, it was not unusual that her one-year prison sentence exceeded that received by the man who raped her when she was eleven.515 A prostitute, particularly a Black prostitute, the law determined, could not be a victim. In Naylor’s novel, Bailey’s opening narrative situates discrimination in the toxic masculinity that is enshrined in and perpetuated by the Second World War. The nationalist American chants that Bailey engages in on foreign territory – ‘who you gonna kill? / we’re gonna kill Japs!’ and ‘Who you gonna fuck? / we’re gonna fuck Japs!’ – point to the sexism as well as racism within America as perpetuated by Bailey, whose initially objectifying advances are rebuked by Nadine when she tells him she is ‘more than [her] body’ (21, 18). These contexts underscore the women’s stories and the forms of vocal and bodily suppression they articulate via sensory language. Both Sadie’s and Esther’s stories highlight the lack of protection for Black girls in relation to sexual exploitation. Since Sadie is forced into sex work by her alcoholic and mentally unstable mother – another prostitute who is herself a victim of physical and sexual abuse – her story emphasises that her subjugated identity as “whore,” a label Bailey explicitly attributes to her when introducing her story, is imposed on her by an abusive system in which she not only has no say, but is motivated to relinquish her vocal and bodily agency altogether. Deciding she must become ‘very good’ to attain love, Sadie exists in a sensorially-restricted ‘world of May I, Please, and Thank You; speaking quietly’ and ‘walking softly’ (43). Even after ‘her mother takes her to a back-street doctor for an abortion 514 Hartman, p.61. 515 Hartman, pp.223-4. 195 and complete sterilisation,’ Sadie believes she must obey her commands to secure her approval.516 Similarly, to please the brother who sold her, twelve-year-old Esther obediently performs sex acts in a dark basement, using ‘leather-and-metal things’ for a white man whom she is told is her husband (97). Reiterating associations between bodily control and vocal suppression, the words of her “husband” – ‘we won’t speak about this, Esther’ – echo throughout her brief, disturbing story and its depiction of sensory confinement and emotional neglect (95). In ‘Eve’s Song’ – a retelling of the Fall – suppression is clearly attached to Judeo-Christian discourses. Like Mattie in Brewster Place, Eve is raised conservatively, and thus denied sexual knowledge. Her guardian, referred to only as Godfather (a symbol of God the father according to Fowler) is ‘a looming silent presence,’ except ‘when he [is] angry’ (84). 517 Discouraging her from ‘too much talk’ and tactile interaction with others, Godfather’s attempt to police female sexuality is presented as a form of sensory and emotional deprivation for Eve (84). This is emphasised by the additional distance that Godfather inserts between himself and his adopted daughter when she reaches adolescence. It is only once Eve reaches her early teenage years that he stops bathing her. This cleansing ritual, unlike Mattie’s bathing of Ciel in Brewster Place, has possessive and unsettling connotations. So does Eve’s sense of loss at the change in Godfather’s behaviour. While telling her story, she reflects upon being ‘forced to go through months and months with no one and nothing to touch [her]’ apart from ‘anger’ (83-4). Later, when Eve accidentally discovers sexual sensation during a game of hide-and-go-seek, the pleasure she experiences is intense and revelatory. Lying with her body pressed to the ground as her companion, Billy Boy, searches for her, Eve becomes aroused when Billy’s 516 Heike Raphael-Hernandez, ‘The Creation of a Messiah: Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe’ in The Utopian Aesthetics of Three African American Women (Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Julie Dash): The Principle of Hope (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008) p.74. 517 Fowler, p.124. 196 heavy-footed approach sends tremors through the earth below her. Henceforth, Eve recalls, ‘I sought him out and sought out the earth whenever I needed release from the tight silence in my home’ (87). Upon discovering these masturbatory pursuits, Godfather reacts with extreme cruelty. Aligned with the Satanic – as Billy Boy’s ‘goat’ aroma suggests – Eve’s sexual knowledge results not only in her being thrown ‘out of his church’ and ‘out of the world,’ but in first being forced to undergo a brutal purging process that leaves her ‘kneeling in a pool of vomit and shit’ while Godfather laughs over her ‘heaving body’ (88, 85, 89). This scene criticises what Joanne Brown and Rebecca Parker call the abusive glorification of suffering in Christian theology.518 It points to how glorified suffering has been used to justify the abuse of women. For Black women, as Delores Williams writes, this religious celebration of pain often ‘asks black women to accept their own suffering and exploitation as if it were sacred’.519 Like her Biblical predecessor, Naylor’s Eve is forced to walk naked through the desert for disobeying the patriarchal order; she is deemed a “whore,” and worthy of physical punishment, simply because she embraces the pleasures of her own body. Highlighting the pervasiveness of the “whore” label, the same punishment befalls fourteen-year-old Mariam, who is Eve’s diametrical opposite in symbolic terms. Representing the virgin Mary, Mariam is an Ethiopian Jew who has been subjected to FGM. As Shirley Stave explains, within this Jewish minority, infibulation is perceived as important in making women ‘acceptable marriage material in a culture where marriage is an economic necessity for women’.520 When Mariam inexplicably falls pregnant, it is assumed that the value attached to her circumcised and unpenetrated body has been destroyed. Recalling Mattie’s story in Brewster Place as well as Eve’s, this results in severe 518 Ivey, p.87. 519 Ibid. 520 Stave, pp.112-113. Thus, Mariam’s mother, Stave explains, ‘not only permits but seeks out the torture of her daughter’s flesh, understanding that, simply, the alternative is starvation’ due to poverty. 197 physical abuse and ejection from her family and community. Like Eve, she subsequently wanders through the wilderness, searching for food and shelter, before discovering the street where the café and brothel are situated. She, too, is punished by a patriarchal religion that deems her a “whorish” outcast. Even more so than Eve, the abuse Mariam suffers is presented as a suppression of female vocality. While Eve and most of the other women tell their own stories, Mariam has no voice. She is not only physically mutilated, as Dorothea Buehler explains, but deprived of free speech: ‘just as her outer sexual organs are tied together in order to suppress any lust…her lips are tied together to prevent the development of her own free will and feelings’.521 She is expected to recite only the accepted narratives of her faith. 522 When Mariam arrives on the street, she is so traumatised she can only repeatedly utter the words, ‘no man has ever touched me’ – a sincere denial of the “depraved” sexual activity she has allegedly been involved in (143). For this reason, Eve and Nadine articulate Mariam’s experiences for the reader. Nadine recalls how Eve explained FGM to her using a ripe plum and a knife. Switching between flashback descriptions of Mariam’s mother in childbirth and Eve’s gradual severance of the fruit’s ‘fleshy walls,’ the scene is unsettling. As Karen Stokes writes, ‘Eve and Nadine begin to talk about the plum as if it were a body, not a fruit’ (147).523 It is ‘tender’ and ‘will bruise easily’ (147). When Eve cuts ‘out the large pit,’ ‘ragged pieces of dark amber flesh’ are extracted with 521 Buehler, p.441. 522 Naylor’s archive reveals a substantial amount of research not only on this culture in Ethiopia, but the relationship between this and the growth of Black Jewish communities in Harlem from the early 1900s. In particular, archived files on Harlem’s Black jews focus on the emergence of cult-like groups, including one led by self-proclaimed “Messiah”, Warren Robinson. Exploiting young girls and therefore perpetuating some of the abuses suffered by Ethiopian women within Beta Israel sects, these groups are another aspect of the abusive sexual culture that Naylor is researching in relation to American’s post-war cities. As a 1931 article announcing his death reveals, for instance, Robinson taught young virginal girls ‘to believe that it was a supreme honour to bear children’ for him. In 1926, more than twenty of his babies (whom he had separated from their young mothers at birth) were used as evidence against him in a trial that resulted in just an eighteen-month prison sentence. (The Gloria Naylor Archive, ‘Founder of Jewish Cult has Promised to Rise in 60 Days,’ 1931, Box 30, Folder 11). 523 Karen Stokes, ‘Ripe Plums and Pine Trees: Using metaphor to Tell Stories of Violence in the Works of Gloria Naylor and Charles Chesnutt’ in Felton and Loris (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997) p.203. 198 it, and the moment is aligned with a ‘white-hot world of pain’ in Ethiopia (151). The plum becomes a metaphor for mutilated female genitalia. Using kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory images, Naylor presents this process as a suppression of the sensory at large; it is an aggressive form of touch that recalls the corporeal and emotional confinement presented by the Brewster wall. The fact that words such as “infibulation” and “circumcision,” are not explicitly mentioned, reinforces the attachment of violent, multi-sensory touch to silence and silencing. As in Brewster Place, Naylor’s attention to these silences presents an ongoing contribution to what Aida Levy-Hussen and others have dubbed, the historical turn in post-civil rights literature. Articulating the histories of its characters, this text similarly returns to the early twentieth century and the post-war moment to examine the endurance of hegemonic structures. Reiterating the tragic circumstances of Brewster’s women on a more international scale and with more focus on religious influence, this novel, even whilst making use of fantastical settings, asks its readers to acknowledge a similarly bleak reality built on decades of oppression. The narrative continuity of demonised female sexuality, and its suppressive impact, in all the women’s lives, epitomises the endurance of sex-based discrimination towards Black women in Naylor’s present day. This is corroborated by her research on prostitution, which looks at contemporary discrimination too. By the late 1970s, as one archived article reveals, there was greater awareness of links between prostitution and other contemporary youth problems including ‘running away, physical and sexual abuse, incest and child pornography’.524 However, institutional biases and ostracising perceptions of Black women’s sexuality persevered. In Deviant Street Networks (1980) – a study of prostitution in New York City that can be found in Naylor’s archive – statistics expose these enduring issues. They show that white women constitute less than a third of all arrests for prostitution in 1978 even though 524 The Gloria Naylor Archive, Michael Baizerman et. al, ‘“An Old, Young Friend”, Adolescent Prostitution,’ 1979, Box 30, Folder 16. 199 ‘street deviance’ is widespread and not limited to certain neighbourhoods or communities.525 The stereotype of the promiscuous, sexually aggressive Black woman presented by Moynihan’s Report (as referenced in Chapter Three) still has influence in the post-civil rights era.526 In Bailey’s Cafe, jazz and blues, as I now explain, allow Naylor to give particularly poignant expression to the painful and long-lasting impact that such dominant narratives have had. An emotive musical frame As Naylor explains in a 1992 interview shortly before her fourth novel’s publication, Bailey’s Cafe ‘exists within the jazz and blues milieu of the 1940s… [its] characters are the music and each has some sort of song’.527 Instructing the reader to ‘look and…hear the blues open a place never closing,’ the synaesthesic epigraph, as Montgomery notes, renders the blues context immediately clear (1).528 Including sections entitled ‘the vamp,’ ‘the jam’ and ‘the wrap,’ the entire narrative is structured as both a jazz standard and a blues session.529 The vamp sets up the main seven stories that comprise ‘The Jam’ (including chapters such as ‘Eve’s Song’ and ‘Miss Maple’s Blues’) while ‘the wrap’ brings all the soloists back together before taking the performance to its end. Bailey is introduced as the ‘maestro’ who establishes the narrative as a ‘whole set to be played’ with ‘points’ and ‘counterpoints’ (1, 4). For Montgomery and Stave among others, the two minor characters introduced in ‘The Vamp’– Sister Carrie, a religious woman who is ‘afraid of her own appetites’ and Sugar Man, a ‘hustler and pimp’ – embody this notion of counterpointing in their antithetical characterisation (33). They also constitute one of 525 The Gloria Naylor Archive, Bernard Cohen, Deviant Street Networks, 1980, box 30, folder 16. 526 As also demonstrated in Chapter Three, this portrayal by Moynihan represents a continuation of raced and gendered sensory stereotypes, particularly regarding sound. 527 Carabi, p.121. 528 Montgomery (1997) p.191. 529 Rebecca S. Wood, ‘“Two Warring Ideals in One Dark Body”: Universalism and Nationalism in Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe’ in The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor ed. by Sharon Felton and Michelle C. Loris (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997) p.248. 200 the novel’s first instances of call-and-response – a pattern found in both jazz and blues – because Carrie’s catchphrase ‘Lord Jesus’ is always followed by Sugar Man’s exclamation, ‘five-alive’ (35).530 Echoing jazz and blues, the novel includes various refrains; often separated from the rest of the text in italics that emphasise song-like movement, these include Bailey’s ‘we weren’t getting into Tokyo,’ Mariam’s ‘no man has ever touched me,’ and the ‘we won’t speak about this, Esther’ motif (23, 143, 95). Containing various articles on jazz and blues, and handwritten notes on music of the 1930s and ‘40s, the archive illustrates that the musical atmosphere of Bailey’s Cafe was always to be a significant feature. Naylor was thinking meticulously about the jazz and blues tradition while writing. She records that the ‘classical combo’ of 1940s jazz includes piano, drums and bass in the rhythm section as well as saxophone, trumpet, guitar and optional clarinet.531 Although uncited in the novel, she lists many African American musicians from the 1930s radio era including Earl Hine, Chick Webb, Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Lockwood.532 Her notes also cite a Charlie Parker live album entitled ‘Bird Lives!’ released in 1992.533 Together with a 1993 letter to Mimi Perrin, who translated the novel into French, this explains the carefully-crafted use of musical terms in the formal framework of Bailey’s Cafe. In her letter to Perrin, Naylor clarifies that the vamp is ‘the lead-in for a piece of jazz music’ and ‘the jam’ is ‘slang for an impromptu music session by musicians’.534 Furthermore, the archive reiterates Naylor’s understanding of the characters themselves as music. An archived chapter from Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe’s 1946 musical memoir, Really the Blues, states that blues musicians ensured their instruments ‘grunted and growled, sobbed and laughed too, like human 530 Stave, p.186. 531 Naylor archive, ‘Handwritten notes on Bailey’s Cafe,’ Undated, Box 30, Folder 17. 532 Naylor archive, ‘Handwritten notes on Bailey’s Cafe,’ Undated, Box 30, Folder 13. 533 Naylor archive, ‘Handwritten notes on Bailey’s Cafe,’ Undated, Box 30, Folder 17. 534 Naylor archive, ‘Letter to Mimi Perrin,’ April 21 1993, Box 12, Folder 10. 201 voices…they spoke on their horns’.535 Appearing to draw on this in her characterisation process, Naylor’s notes connect some of her characters to specific instruments. Bailey is written next to ‘the horn,’ for example, and Sugar Man is affiliated with ‘the sax’.536 Together with the story of Miss Maple – a cross-dressing man who also experiences gender-based discrimination – the women’s stories comprise ‘The Jam,’ the middle (and lengthiest) section of the text. Jazz and blues music surrounds and flows through these stories, giving voice, along with the narrative’s wider use of sensory language to painful and oft-ignored experiences concerning Black women’s bodies and sexuality. As well as recording Naylor’s research on this topic, archive materials indicate her awareness of these genres’ associations with pained, emotional expression. In addition to their personification of growling, sobbing and laughing instruments, Mezzrow and Wolfe describe the ‘sorrows’ and ‘heartfelt sounds’ of the blues in the extracts Naylor has archived.537 Mark Evans’ 1987 article for American Visions, ‘Jazz: Made in America,’ also among Naylor’s research files, not only highlights the hardship that Duke Ellington and others faced as African American composers and musicians but argues that Ellington considered ‘the emotional effect on the listener’ to be ‘the only thing that counts’ in jazz.538 Reinforced by the archive, the prominent musical form and content of Bailey’s Cafe illustrates a poignant continuation of Naylor’s effort to articulate and challenge the vocal and bodily suppressions that Black women are subjected to. This is most evident in Sadie’s story, which takes its name from Ellington’s ‘Mood Indigo.’ As the first narrative in ‘The Jam,’ Sadie’s story exemplifies the importance of jazz and blues in framing the women’s experiences. Its explicit reference to jazz has been much 535 Naylor archive, Mezzrow, Mezz and Bernard Wolfe, extracts from Really the Blues, 1972, Box 30, folder 17, p.306. 536 Naylor archive, ‘Handwritten notes on Bailey’s Cafe,’ Undated, Box 30, Folder 13. 537 Mezzrow and Wolfe, p.306. 538 Naylor archive, Mark Evans, ‘Jazz: Made in America: Part Two,’ American Visions, October 1987, Box 30, folder 17, p.41. 202 commented on by critics. For example, Karen Schneider discusses a radio interview in which Naylor describes story as an attempt to ‘transliterate Duke Ellington’s ‘Mood Indigo,’ a composition that leaves her “feeling every sort of lack”’ and ‘“might have been” imaginable’.539 The emptiness that punctuates Sadie’s fruitless search for love: first in her relationship with her mother and then in her marriage to Daniel – a controlling older man whose death leaves her poverty-stricken – reflects this lack. Sadie’s rejection of Iceman Jones’ marriage proposal, despite finding some happiness in her relationship with him, reinforces a sense of unfulfillment as the story concludes. Choosing ‘the stars’ – a reference to the wine she drinks and a metaphor for a bluesian ‘fall from hope to vice’ – she remains a ‘wino’ and a ‘twenty-five cent whore’ (78, 40).540 As Montgomery asserts, this trajectory is a ‘commentary on the lack of viable options for Black women in the city’.541 Indeed, Sadie reluctantly returns to prostitution after Daniel’s death to support herself financially. Archival documents help us to understand why jazz, blues and Ellington specifically are viewed by Naylor as conducive to this story. Evans’ article, and its attention to Ellington’s emphasis on emotion, for example, perhaps turned Naylor onto Ellington as an artist whose work cohered with her intended tone. A colourful cardboard sleeve in the archive which reads, ‘Duke Ellington Studio Sessions, New York 1963,’ and looks as though it could be from a volume of cassette tapes, suggests that Naylor listened to Ellington’s work widely.542 Additionally, her notes imply that his influence was important to the structure of Sadie’s story. By dividing the narrative into four parts in her notes – ‘her story,’ ‘his story,’ ‘their story’ and ‘the dance under the stars’– Naylor, like Ellington, appears to be thinking of her work in terms of emotive movements.543 Even more fascinating is Naylor’s brief note in pen at the end of one 539 Schneider, p.17. 540 Chavanelle, p.65. 541 Montgomery (2010) p.56. 542 Naylor archive, Illustration of Duke Ellington on cardboard, Undated, Box 30, folder 17. 543 Naylor archive, Handwritten notes on Bailey’s Cafe, Undated, Box 30, Folder 2. 203 draft: ‘end it. High G over C’.544 This was perhaps intended to imitate the kind of instructions that generated the distinctively deep and brassy tones of the “Ellington effect.” Alternatively, the note might indicate a perfect cadence. This would not only reflect the presence of the G minor chord and low C that feature in some guitar versions of the song’s chorus but would cohere with what Will Friedwald has described as the final, emotional sense of acceptance in Ellington’s composition, which falls on a ‘bright major third (C)’.545 Perhaps gesturing towards the fact that such a cadence is sometimes called a “money note,” this acceptance in Naylor’s ‘Mood Indigo’ is synonymised with prostitution since, as the story ends, Sadie’s fingers close ‘tightly around the quarter in her pocket’ (78). Perceptions of jazz and blues In the previous section, I demonstrated that jazz, blues and sexuality are intrinsically linked in Bailey’s Cafe because, the archive confirms, Naylor is aware of its conduciveness to expressing painful and often-silenced experiences like those explored in the novel concerning the sexual control and policing of Black women. Additionally, the archive suggests that jazz, blues and sexuality are bound together in Bailey’s Cafe because these musical genres themselves are entangled with the hegemonic thinking that propelled notions of the virgin/whore binary in the early twentieth century. Highlighting one aspect of this hegemony, Evans’ article draws attention to racist perceptions of jazz. While jazz grew in popularity amongst white Americans and Europeans from the 1920s onwards, he explains, jazz and blues were often trivialised when compared to European classical music. Many musicians and promoters could ‘not take seriously music that had been created by Blacks’.546 This attitude ‘plagued many artists’ 544 Naylor archive, Early Bailey’s Cafe draft, Undated, Box 30, folder 21. 545 Will Friedwald, ‘Sing a Song of Ellington: The Accidental Songwriter’ in The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) p.231 546 Naylor archive, Evans, p.41 204 including “Fats” Waller, Louis Armstrong and Ellington.547 Even in the 1980s, when Evans is writing, ‘some performers…regard the popularity of jazz as a threat to their own music…so it is to their advantage to trivialise jazz’.548 This stems from the wider denigration of jazz that rose alongside fascism in the 1930s. As Sieglinde Lemke explains, ‘the Black face of jazz’ was ‘subordinated’ as “primitive”.549 It was a musical form that the Nazis famously loathed for this reason.550 In literature, while jazz is primarily intrinsic to “Afro-modernism,” as John Lowney demonstrates, it therefore also became a topic of interest for left-leaning modernists in the 1930s and ‘40s.551 For authors such as Jean Rhys, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, jazz and “the jazz age” symbolised rebellion and innovation.552 Demonstrating further racial biases, enthusiasm for the jazz age among white modernists often amounted to appropriation in which jazz was either detached from Blackness or fetishized for its “exotic” roots. Attempting to claim jazz as their own, the Futurists, Przemysław Strozek argues, associated jazz with ‘the exoticism…of new technologies’.553 As demonstrated by Piet Mondrian’s 1927 essay ‘Jazz and the Neo-Plastic,’ Futurism, for many in the art world, became synonymous with jazz; it incorporated, Mondrian claimed, ‘a freer rhythm, a jazz-like style’.554 Such appropriation prompts Lemke to ask whether modernism itself was “passing” – a question that appears to find affirmation not only in modernism’s jazz interests, but in its temporal experimentation.555 Introducing a syncopated means of keeping 547 In 1955, for example, when Ellington was commissioned to write “Night Creature” for a broadcast orchestra directed by Arturo Toscanini, ‘no American symphony orchestra was willing to record the work’ (Naylor archive, Evans, p.41). 548 Naylor archive, Evans, p.41. 549 Lemke, p.6. 550 Moritz Föllmer, Culture in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) p.83. 551 John Lowney, Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2017). 552 Lemke, p.146. 553 Przemysław Strozek, ‘Futurist Responses to African American Culture’ in Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde, ed. by Fionnghuala Sweeney and Kate Marsh, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013) p.47. 554 Ibid. 555 Lemke, pp.1-7. 205 musical time, jazz itself might even be thought of as a new temporality that modernists laid claim to in their temporal subversions. Like Brewster Place, then, the historical turn in Baileys Cafe looks back not just to the early twentieth century but to modernism. It acknowledges, as Lowney does, that jazz connects these eras both as a sign of ongoing racism and resistance to it. Lowney argues that jazz functions as a radical discourse of enduring Black resistance and Afro-modernism in the twentieth century.556 It is an indicator of what he and others such as Paul Gilroy call the “long civil rights movement”.557 Evans similarly discusses how the longevity of jazz is testament to Black resilience. This article implies that his present-day in the 1980s, which he describes as a ‘jazz renaissance,’ offers an opportunity to fully recover the radical history of jazz in relation to Black culture. In Bailey’s Cafe, this is partly Naylor’s aim too. With specific homage to Ellington, the novel’s jazz and blues content demonstrates and celebrates the radicality enshrined in Black music and its endurance. By helping to frame and articulate painful African American histories, this engagement with music resists the vocal and bodily suppressions I have outlined and the racist stereotypes and appropriations that have suppressed jazz and blues history. Like the oral-aural features of communication in Brewster Place, the musicality of Bailey’s Cafe presents a positive form of historical continuity in the text that reflects the notion of a “long civil rights movement”.558 Reiterating this is the jukebox that resides in the corner of the café. Often ‘on the blink’ and constituting its own archive, this becomes a symbol of musical continuity amidst struggle (223). In ‘Mood: Indigo,’ its temporal associations are acknowledged when Sadie remembers ‘the ghosts of the ragtime professors’ who ‘lived on in the red-and-blue lights speckling the walls from jukeboxes’ (62). Since ragtime is a precursor to jazz, in this moment, 556 Lowney, p.5. 557 Ibid. 558 The non-verbal aspects of this are particularly significant which, as I explain in the previous chapter, gesture towards radical jazz traditions. 206 the jukebox transports Sadie both her own past and the musical past. In Naylor’s archive, too, the jukebox becomes emblematic of links between the post-war and post-civil rights eras. In a flier advertising the Wurlitzer 1015 model, the ‘golden age’ of the jukebox is pinpointed as 1946.559 Yet, as another archived article from February 1989 states, the jukebox is ‘big again’ when the century enters its last decade.560 The revival of the jukebox parallels the ‘jazz renaissance’ described by Evans. Naylor’s attentiveness to this indicates her similar interest in musical as well as socio-political links between the post-civil rights era and the early twentieth century. Unlike Evans and Lowney, Naylor is approaching these links, and perceptions of Black music, from a feminist perspective.561 Pointing to the ways in which jazz and blues have been gendered as well as raced in derogatory ways, several of Naylor’s archived research files highlight the geographical relationship between jazz, blues, and prostitution. Evans states that jazz thrived in prominent red-light districts. The archived chapters from Really the Blues reiterate this association, referring to the ‘whorehouse pianos’ that were commonplace in jazz and blues bands.562 Also hinting at this connection is an archived glossary of ‘special lingo…used by prostitutes and pimps, police, lawyers, and journalists’ that reveals “jazz” was a slang term for sex during this period.563 As Fowler has noted, the term “vamp” is similarly used not only to describe the introductory section of a jazz or blues piece, but ‘a woman who uses her charms to seduce’.564 The corresponding section in the opening frame of Bailey’s Cafe therefore alludes to the relationship between jazz, blues and female sexuality, and sets this up as an important aspect of the novel. For Evans, acknowledging this relationship is crucial to 559 Naylor archive, Johnston Jukebox Classics, ‘Wurlitzer 1015 flier,’ December 1989, Box 30, folder 13. 560 Naylor archive, James Barron, ‘Golden Oldies: Jukeboxes Are Big Again,’ February 23 1989, Box 30, Folder 13. 561 Naylor’s interest in musical continuity parallels, and is entwined with her socio-political focus on women and gender. 562 Naylor archive, Mezzrow, p.305. 563 Maria Leach, ‘Glossary’ in Cast the First Stone by Chester Himes, 1952, Box 30, Folder 13, p.305. 564 Fowler, p.137. 207 understanding how jazz spread across America; it was only once ‘the federal government closed Storyville, New Orleans’ area of legalised prostitution in 1917,’ he writes, that jazz ‘began moving’.565 Interestingly, though, Evans fails to connect this context to the racist perceptions he later discusses. As Amber C. Clifford Napoleone alternatively explains, jazz and blues were often synonymised with prostitution, in demonising ways, due to their prevalence in red light districts. 566 When the New York City police department chose to close the ‘legendary Savoy Ballroom in 1943,’ where jazz was incredibly popular among Black and white audiences alike, the decision was reportedly made because ‘white servicemen had contracted sexually transmitted diseases from prostitutes who were allegedly working there’.567 The outrage expressed throughout Harlem and in the African American newspaper, People’s Voice, was immense. While ‘Negroes are losing their lives abroad,’ observed the newspaper’s editor, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., ‘Hitler has scored a Jim-crow victory in New York’.568 The closure of the ballroom meant an end to one of the least segregated venues in the city. Such information is omitted not just from Evans’ article, but from the other archived materials that Naylor collected on jazz and blues. Correspondingly, these materials pay little attention to female musicians and vocalists. In Bailey’s Cafe, Naylor is responding to these omissions – another “broken” aspect of the musical history and renaissance symbolized by the jukebox. Highlighting how histories of “whoredom” are intertwined with histories of jazz and blues, the “whorish” identities imposed on the text’s female characters are defined in part by their affiliations with jazz. The wayward histories that Naylor traces are also histories of the jazz and blues tradition. As Whitt ascertains, references to New Orleans, Chicago’s South Side and Kansas City – three places 565 Naylor archive, Evans, p.42. 566 Amber R. Clifford Napoleone, Queering Kansas City Jazz Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2018) p.111. 567 Lowney, p. 94. 568 Ibid. 208 where jazz exploded in the dance halls and cabaret rooms of the 1920s and 1930s – are mentioned in the stories of Eve, Sadie, and Peaches respectively.569 Eve’s trek through the desert is a journey through the bluesian ‘Delta dust’ (81).570 The “stomp, stomp” of Billy Boy’s feet in Eve’s story even ‘plays on the beat of the music’ pouring out of New Orleans when Eve arrives in the city.571 Enabling Eve to discover sexual pleasure, this “stomp, stomp” and Godfather’s subsequent outrage, present the demonisation of female sexuality as something that was partly shaped through and by perceptions of jazz. So does Naylor’s portrayal of Jesse Bell, whose name alludes to the Biblical Jezebel. This is clear when Jesse states that although she ‘played jazz and played it loud,’ her parties ‘were not orgies’ (126). Having parties and playing loud music, she exclaims ‘is a far cry from being a loose woman’ (127). The defensiveness of this statement suggests that such a judgemental association nevertheless exists. It implies that jazz is infused with the same ideas of waywardness as prostitution itself. Since Jesse’s main antagonist is her father-in-law, Eli King – an elite Black man who embodies the divisive nature of racial uplift in his disparagement of Jesse’s working-class roots – Naylor highlights that such gendered ideas are perpetuated by Black men and Black communities, as well as white people.572 Jesse’s story therefore builds upon the familial betrayal in Sadie’s and Esther’s stories in a specifically music-focused way. In the previous chapter, I drew on Carby and Lordi to discuss the sexual empowerment that jazz and blues enabled Black female performers and listeners to express. By highlighting how these genres were also derided in relation to female sexuality, Bailey’s Cafe draws attention to the difficulty of staging such a challenge. It speaks to how this initially ‘freeing tradition’ was, as Margot Anne Kelley writes, gradually ‘compromised by – or at least 569 Whitt, p.166. 570 The Delta blues is one of the earliest forms of the blues that originated in Mississippi. 571 Whitt, p.177. 572 Jesse’s own defensiveness about being perceived as a “loose woman” indicates that she, too, has internalised some of these beliefs. 209 complicated by – its own marketplace success’.573 The use of sexual metaphors in jazz and blues, she explains, was eventually used to ‘titillate prospective record buyers’ and in this capitalist context, reinforced the ‘dichotomized sexual stereotyping’ of African American women.574 This contributes to the ongoing mistreatment of sex workers and policing of female sexuality that Naylor’s archived documents evidence. It also offers further explanation for the omission of female artists in Evans’ article and other contemporary pieces. Naylor’s concern about how stereotyping continues to impact the music industry in her present day is particularly evidenced by a twelve-page list of contemporary pop songs in her archive. These have been annotated by Naylor and a person named P.B. Duff. Including tracks such as ‘I Want Your Sex’ by George Michael, ‘Smooth Operator’ by Sade and ‘Be My Girl’ by The Police, Naylor’s and Duff’s comments critique portrayals of female sexuality in pop music.575 Naylor is aware, this shows, of how the modern music industry, leading on from capitalist and patriarchal mistreatment of jazz and blues performers, is saturated by subjugating and objectifying images of women. I now go on to demonstrate that Bailey’s Cafe uses the sensory, particularly sonic touch, to revise perceptions of Black women’s sexuality and music simultaneously. Crucially, the archive suggests, this depends upon the recovery of a women’s jazz and blues tradition. Female Vocalists and the Archive Bailey’s Cafe As the beginning of this chapter outlines, several critics have established that Naylor revises dominant narratives of female sexuality in Bailey’s Cafe. Together with her turn to the post-war era, this further allies her work with modernist and Black writing traditions as well as the 573 Kelley, p.140. 574 Ibid. 575 Naylor archive, Pop song annotations by Naylor and P.B. Duff, Date unknown, Box 30, folder 16. 210 crossovers between them and radical women’s writing more broadly. As I explain in my thesis’ introduction, revision itself is a prominent strategy within modernism, Black writing and radical women’s writing beyond and before modernism.576 Thus, Naylor’s revisions reinforce the longevity of a resistant afro-modernism. Naylor’s inclusion of jazz as part of a wider revision of the “whore” figure gestures towards both Black modernist and female modernist re-workings of hegemonic myths, especially as influenced by religion. It finds kinship with Woolf’s destruction of “the angel in the house” and the Black revisionary processes that were modern before modernism according to Charles Wilson.577 Simultaneously, it is part of a tradition in Black women’s writing, identified by Patricia Hill Collins, through which archetypes of Black women – the dichotomous mammy and jezebel in particular – are deconstructed.578 More broadly, it reflects feminist theory concerning revision that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s when Naylor was writing. This includes Alicia Ostriker’s ‘The Thieves of Language’ (1982) in which revisionism is defined as the employment of ‘a figure or story previously accepted and defined by a culture’ for ‘altered’ ends.579 For women, Ostriker elaborates, it is an attempt to correct ‘gender stereotypes embodied in myth’; it is an ‘attack on familiar images and the social and literary conventions supporting them’.580 Naylor’s revision strategy is influenced by the experience of female jazz and blues vocalists of the early twentieth century. She revises sexual stereotypes concerning women, particularly Black women, as not only circulated by Black and white communities, but as 576 Among the research materials for Bailey’s Cafe, I found a copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s short piece, ‘Story in Harlem Slang’ – a text that examines themes of prostitution and the sexual harassment of women whilst revelling in the Harlem dialogue of its two male protagonists. Set outside a café, both the content and location of the narrative are clear influences on Naylor’s novel and its oral-aural themes of resistance, reinforcing its interaction with modernism and the modernist period (Zora Neale Hurston, ‘Story in Harlem Slang,’1942, Box 30, Folder 11). 577 Wilson, p.17. Woolf’s description of “the angel in the house” comes from ‘Professions for Women’ – a speech given to the National Society for Women’s Service on January 21, 1931. 578 Buehler, p.427. 579 Alicia Ostriker, ‘The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking,’ Signs, 8:1 (1982) p.72. 580 Ibid. 211 manifested within music. She engages in the revisionary tradition that Davis attributes to blues women such as Rainey and Smith who altered ‘precomposed lyrics,’ often by men and through improvisation, to voice women’s experiences.581 The archive reveals that contemporary Black female vocalists help Naylor to access this tradition; they become her gateway to jazz and blues women, and the female empowerment they created in their performances, from within a post-civil rights landscape in which they seem neglected. In an archived letter to Nikki Giovanni, Naylor cites both Nina Simone’s ‘Just Like a Woman’ and Jevetta Steele’s ‘Calling You’ as songs that inspired her when she ‘thought [she] was blocked’ on Bailey’s Cafe.582 Both carry forward the radical methods and articulations of women’s jazz and blues. Simone’s performance reinterprets Bob Dylan’s original work to prioritise the experiences of Black women. The lyrics can be found among Naylor’s research files.583 As well as cohering with the bluesian pain that the novel expresses, the lines ‘she aches just like a woman / But she breaks just like a little girl,’ perhaps inspired Naylor’s exploration of “adultified” Black girls. In their blurring of womanhood and girlhood, they recall the stories of Esther, Sadie and Peaches who are all sexualised as children.584 It is likely that Naylor was also inspired by Simone’s ‘Four Women.’ Exploring themes of slavery, sex work and the abuses suffered by Black women, each of the four verses in this song voices a different woman of colour’s story. One of the characters is named Peaches. Another, available to ‘anyone who has money to buy’ goes by ‘Sweet Thing’ – an influence, perhaps for Esther’s story, which is titled ‘Sweet Esther.’ Like the episodes that constitute ‘The Jam,’ these verses bring women and their pain together, creating a community in which their 581 Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday (NY: Pantheon Books Inc., 1998) p. xvi. 582 The Gloria Naylor Archive, “Other Places” Exhibition Playlist, <https://wordpress.lehigh.edu/naylorarchive/archive-highlights/other-places-exhibition-playlist>, accessed 11/07/23. 583 Naylor archive, Lyrics to Nina Simone’s ‘Just Like a Woman,’ Box 30, Folder 13. 584 Peaches is groped by her choirmaster when still at school. 212 words can be put in touch with one another and the audience. Similarly, Steele’s song, from the soundtrack of the 1987 film, Bagdad Cafe (another influence on Naylor’s text) captures a sense of bluesian longing and desire reminiscent of Rainey, Smith and others.585 Naylor’s own perception of this emerges in her epigraph. The words, ‘look and you can hear it / the blues open…Bailey’s Cafe,’ build on and reinforce Steele’s vocalisations of ‘I am calling you / Can’t you hear me?’ from ‘a little café just around the bend.’ Adding to Montgomery’s work on call and response in the novel, the multi-sensory epigraph can be seen as another bluesian feature, constituted by the text’s interaction with Steele across mediums, genres and temporalities. Steele’s song together with early twentieth-century blues, the archive reveals, draws us and Naylor into the novel’s 1948 setting. The most significant influence in relation to the women’s stories is Joan Armatrading’s ‘No Love for Free.’ This stands out as the only song on Naylor’s and Duff’s annotated list that is not criticised for its portrayal of female sexuality. Instead, Duff writes next to it that they have finally found what they are looking for, ‘a non-repentant whore’.586 Naylor’s annotated response in the margins simply reads: ‘yes, we have. And thank goodness’.587 Through this brief exchange, it becomes clear that Naylor is not only acknowledging problematic links between music and constructions of “whoredom,” but seeking alternative conceptions, via music, of female sexuality. Armatrading’s song, narrated by a sex worker who describes herself as a ‘lady’ who ‘loves / and goes where she pleases,’ presents such an alternative. She refuses to conform to society’s expectations of her, and does not feel any guilt over her work. She also rejects a marriage proposal in favour of sex work: ‘you think I’ll take your name…I’m flattered 585 Set at a similarly run-down café, this 1987 film celebrates human connection, particularly between women, as forged during times of adversity. It brings together a diverse and international community much like that in Bailey’s Cafe. I discovered Naylor’s reference to Steele at a late stage in my research and have therefore been unable to explore the connection between film and novel in more detail here, but would like to return to this in future. As far as I can tell, no scholarship has explored this connection yet. 586 Naylor archive, Pop song annotations, Box 30, Folder 16. 587 Ibid. 213 / But I can’t leave my trade’.588 Knowing that Naylor viewed this as ‘non-repentant’ and thus liberating, encourages us to re-evaluate Sadie’s similar rejection of marriage at the end of ‘Mood: Indigo.’ Montgomery has suggested that Sadie’s rejection of Jones is an empowered refusal to accept ‘a life lived on his terms, not hers’.589 Armatrading’s song and Naylor’s interpretation of it not only confirm this reading, but illustrate that Naylor is revising Ellington’s piece and its bleaker sentiments along with the “whore” figure. When setting up Sadie’s story, Bailey describes her both as a ‘lady’ and a ‘twenty-five cent whore’; like Armatrading’s narrator, her character dismantles the virgin/whore dichotomy that places these archetypes in opposition (39, 40). As a prostitute and a ‘lady’ who sells her body only for what is necessary to pay her bills, Sadie ‘defies the stereotypic image of the hypersexual black female’ and presents a challenge to the capitalist system that objectifies the female body (39).590 By the story’s end, having rejected Jones, Sadie has transformed more fully into the ‘non-repentant whore’ whom Naylor and Duff seek. In this moment, for the first time, neither her trauma nor her autonomy are denied. It is a radical choice to embrace “whoredom” and to resist the conventional narrative ending of marriage for women. She articulates a new and resolute ‘no’ that not only subverts the acceptance that is symbolised by her childhood obedience – the ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ that she continues to whisper at her mother’s graveside – but both the solemn ‘no, no, no’ lyric of Mood Indigo’s original first line and the acceptance Friedwald attributes to its ending (47).591 Identifying Armatrading’s influence reveals that Naylor’s ‘Mood: Indigo’ is more aligned with a women’s tradition of jazz and blues than with Ellington himself. She follows in the footsteps of vocalists such as Fitzgerald, Holiday and Vaughan who each recorded their own versions of many Ellington compositions, including 588 Ibid. 589 Montgomery (2010) pp.58-9. 590 Kelley, p.141. 591 In perhaps another revisionary gesture towards canonical modernism, Sadie’s ‘yes, yes, yes’ as a child appears to subvert the ecstasy of Molly Bloom’s famous monologue in James Joyce’s Ulysses, 214 ‘Mood Indigo’ in the case of both Fitzgerald and Vaughan.592 The scat sections that these performers add to the piece enunciate a liberation of female voice, released from the strictures of the original standard, and rendering the emotion of the music a part of their own improvised and thus, raw bodily response. This includes the song’s melancholic expression of longing and desire, as evidenced, for example, by the lines: ‘since my baby said goodbye… I’m so lonesome I could cry.’ In their expressions of desire, Fitzgerald and Vaughan participate in sexually-empowered performance. Naylor’s ‘Mood Indigo’ similarly reclaims desire and musical self-expression.593 Like Fitzgerald and Vaughan, Naylor rewrites Ellington’s work from a female perspective. Like them, she carves out space for African American women’s stories and histories. The name, Sadie, additionally suggests revision of the 1926 jazz song ‘Sadie Green (The Vamp of New Orleans)’ by Johnny Dunn and Gilbert Wells. Like Green, Naylor’s Sadie enjoys dancing, but while Green dances with her many ‘beaus,’ Naylor’s Sadie reserves this form of intimacy for Jones alone. Unlike Green, she is not characterised as a ‘vamp’ by the voyeuristic gazes of men. She is a deeply sympathetic character whose dancing goes unobserved, and whose resilience is rendered in exquisitely rich and compelling detail. Naylor’s archived references to Armatrading’s song make it possible to see these connections and suggest that she saw Armatrading as her ally in recovering the sexually-liberating mantras of women’s jazz and blues. Indeed, since the speaker in ‘No Love for Free’ wears ‘twenties print’ clothing, it seems Armatrading was thinking about the jazz and blues era in relation to female sexuality too. Sadie’s story illustrates how Armatrading’s work guides Naylor’s effort to better understand the present via examination of the past. This is relevant not just to ‘Mood: Indigo,’ but the entire novel; the whole text, like Naylor’s research process, can be viewed as 592 Later, Nina Simone also recorded a version of ‘Mood Indigo.’ 593 We see the seeds of this reclamation process in direct references to Billie Holiday in Etta’s story in The Women of Brewster, and Roberta’s comments about both Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith in Linden Hills. 215 a quest for the ‘non-repentant whore’ in its revisionary effort. ‘Eve’s Song’ corroborates this and is even established as the point in which the ‘non-repentant whore’ fully arrives in the novel since it follows the triumphant ending of Sadie’s tale. Although Eve is thrown out of her home by Godfather, she, like Armatrading’s speaker, harbours no guilt about her sexual “deviance.” Revising Eve’s Biblical exile from Eden, her thousand-year trek through the ‘Delta dust’ to New Orleans is not a walk of shame, but a renewal, fortified by jazz and blues (81). As Regina N. Bradley argues, Eve’s journey allows her to ‘transcend religion and its impact on secular constructs of gender representation’.594 Like the speaker in Armatrading’s song, Eve escapes those who ‘want to save [her] soul’ and becomes a lady who ‘loves / and…goes where she pleases.’ Arriving in New Orleans – ‘a city of death, hoodoo, and supernatural occurrences’ – as an unidentifiable ‘body of mud,’ Eve discovers that gender is performance based whilst taking on her own alternative mythical qualities (91).595 This not only brings her to Bailey’s, but enables her to set up the unconventional boardinghouse-bordello that becomes a refuge for the women who find it.596 As Fowler explains, Eve strives to heal and mentor the women.597 Like Naylor herself, she attempts to rewrite Biblical female archetypes. 598 To make Peaches psychologically ‘whole,’ she ‘teaches her to cast out the deforming duality imposed by stories like that of Mary Magdalene’ upon whom Naylor bases her (113).599 Similarly, although resorting to torturous cold-turkey methods, Eve vows to rid Jesse of her heroin addiction. All these women have been wronged, Naylor emphasises. Yet, 594 Regina N. Bradley, ‘Lady Eve’s Garden Sings the Blues Spirituality and Identity in Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe’ in Race and Displacement: Nation, Migration, and Identity in the Twenty-First Century (US: University of Alabama Press, 2013) p.18. 595 Bradley, p.20. 596 Eve’s boardinghouse is unconventional because resident sex workers are under no obligation to work and are paid with flowers of their choice, rather than money. 597 Fowler, pp. 125-6 598 Naylor’s research into Barbara Sherman Heyl’s late 1970s sociological work on the madam as entrepreneur and teacher, seems to inform this characterisation of Eve. (Naylor Archive, Barbara Sherman Heyl, The Madam as Entrepreneur, 1978, Box 30, Folder 16). 599 Schneider, p.13. 216 since they do not belong to a patriarchal, idealistic form of myth-making, they are not perfect either. They contain seemingly contradictory multitudes. As Bailey himself states, Eve ‘is not a charitable person’ (80). Although a healer, she does turn some women away. Only those who ‘have the capacity to envision a different future, thus empowering themselves, are admitted into Eve’s boardinghouse-bordello’.600 They must demonstrate potential to shed their internalisations of patriarchal perceptions, as jazz and blues women do in their self-empowering performances. In the closing frame, ‘The Wrap,’ all the characters witness the birth of Mariam’s child, George. This process is aided by Eve, who conjures a display of ‘sparkling’ and ‘shimmering’ ‘waves of light’ that magically ease Mariam’s pain, replacing the lights of the temperamental jukebox and, therefore, the problematic histories it represents (224). Heralding a potentially new historical era with the birth of a new symbolic Christ figure – a Black man – this transformation anticipates and is reiterated by the spiritual, ‘Tell Him I’m a Child of God,’ which is sung by the entire cast of characters.601 The lyrics for this can be found in the archive including a powerful verse that asserts a divine collective identity: ‘anybody ask you who he is / who she is / who I am / anybody ask you who you are / tell him, oh, tell him / you’re a child of God’.602 Challenging any imposed notion of immorality, this new religious discourse, performed by a self-proclaimed divine, yet “wayward” community, breaks free, at least momentarily, from the virgin/whore dichotomy. As Montgomery observes, the spiritual, which begins with Peaches’ ‘high and sweet’ tones, takes on a call-and-response pattern whilst privileging the oral, the female and the collective (225).603 As a moment of visual and sonic spectacle, and emotional connection, this is a culmination of the multi-sensory and haptic 600 Raphael-Hernandez, p.69. 601 Ivey, pp.85-6. A Black Christ figure was often emphasised in Malcolm X’s speeches, and Naylor is perhaps alluding to this. 602 Naylor archive, Lyrics to ‘Tell Him I’m a Child of God,’ Box 30, Folder 21. 603 Montgomery (1997) p.192. 217 connotations of the novel’s connecting musical thread, and its work to resist vocal and bodily suppressions. Yet, the sombre note with which Bailey’s Cafe ends, indicates that such a radical vision is not entirely fulfilled for the characters. When Mariam later tries ‘to create a running stream to bathe in,’ Bailey explains, she accidentally conjures ‘a wall of water’ in which she drowns (228). This confounds the symbolic rebirth, reminding us that the United States is not a mythic icon, but a country in need of genuine reform.604 Like the lack of closure that the dream vision engenders at the end of Brewster Place, this conclusion points to unfinished socio-political campaigns for equality, epitomising, as I now explore, both Naylor’s and our own unfinished revisionary work. Beyond the novel The thread of “Black feminist orality” in Bailey’s Cafe culminates in the song performed in ‘The Wrap.’ In more musical terms, this parallels the climax of “Black feminist orality” in Brewster Place’s dream vision, ‘The Block Party.’ As the previous chapter explains, this moment sees the text’s female characters come together to destroy the Brewster wall – a symbol of the sexism and racism that envelops their lives. Punctuated by the cries and shouts of the women, and the smashing of the wall’s bricks, this scene is more explicitly disruptive than the finale of Bailey’s Cafe. Reminiscent of the noise riots that occurred at The Bedford Hills Reformatory in New York State in December 1919, it is even interpreted as a ‘riot’ by a taxi driver who consequently flees the location without his waiting passenger, Theresa (187).605 Both scenes present a “wayward” community, resisting sensory and emotional confines 604 Ethan Goffman, ‘Imag(in)ing Each Other: Blacks and Jews in Recent Literature,’ Shofar, 14:4 (1996), p.58. 605 Described variously as a “noise strike” and a “wailing, shrieking chorus” by The New York Times as well as a “deafening”, “vocal outbreak” by The New York Tribune, these riots were orchestrated by African American women who ‘screamed and cried about the unfairness of being sentenced to Bedford’ from their specific segregated part of the prison in Lowell Cottage (Hartman, p.279). 218 through vocality. In both texts, this communal solidarity gestures towards the empathetic and radical communication discussed in my previous chapter. Both depict community acts of what bell hooks calls “talking back” and the “sass” that partly defines “Black feminist orality” for Fulton. Both resist the silencing strategies of white supremacist patriarchy and give voice to Black female experience, especially concerning pain and injustice. To identify this inter-textual symmetry, is to identify another instance of “Black feminist orality.” It indicates that the oral-aural features I have discussed, and their connecting haptic work, exist not only within Naylor’s texts but between them; the novels reach out to communicate with each other as well as with their audiences. Significantly, Naylor refers to her first four novels in musical terms as a “quartet.” In her essay on screams and laughter, Jenny Brantley has already attended to some of the sonic interconnections implied by this title. Whitt’s observation that ‘each of the novels in turn connects with the one to follow’ by mentioning ‘a character or a place,’ is equally indicative of “Black feminist orality”.606 In Bailey’s Cafe, for example, the baby born to Mariam is the male protagonist of Naylor’s previous novel, Mama Day (1988) wherein the café is also briefly mentioned. Reiterating the relevance of Naylor’s texts to multiple literary eras and movements as well as their congruence with notions of Afro-modernism, such connections allow the novels to journey backwards and forwards in time between and within narratives. Collectively, they perform the temporal disruption that is fundamental to Fulton’s theory and exemplified by the novels’ connecting episodic structures. 607 Together and apart, they find kinship with Black oral traditions, and the musical genres they inspire, to resist the reductive progress narratives of a white supremacist and patriarchal modernity. 606 Whitt, p.1. 607 Both Linden Hills (1985) and Mama Day (1988) can also be described as episodic in the ways that their chapters move between different places and characters. 219 The archive reveals that this thread and its increased focus on sexuality in Bailey’s Cafe moves not only beyond the quartet, but beyond the novel form to projects for stage and screen. Naylor, who established her own production company, One Way Productions, in 1990, had long been interested in contributing to the dramatic arts.608 The stage adaptation of Bailey’s Cafe, which ‘had a successful run at the Hartford Stage in Connecticut in April 1994,’ became her first successful drama-based project.609 Stating in an interview that ‘Naylor was most concerned with the music,’ the play’s producer, Novella Nelson, confirms Naylor’s interest in sound and music remains at the forefront of this work.610 Archived drafts demonstrate that this interest shaped her script’s development. In the earliest version from 1992, multi-vocality is a significant aspect of the play’s opening. Setting the scene, Naylor writes that as ‘the a-bomb cloud mushrooms,’ ‘the collective voices from Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe and Australia break off to chant’ “welcome to limbo”.611 In the December 1993 draft, a saxophonist, which blends in with a child’s song – ‘a dirge for those of lost dreams’ – has been added to the scene.612 In the 1994 opening night version, a contrasting moment of ‘extended blackout’ in ‘total silence’ and a refrain to match those of the novel, symbolised by regular insertions of the note, ‘cash register rings’ have also been added.613 The gradual accumulation of these sonic features illustrates that music remains essential to shaping Naylor’s critical and revisionary content. 608 Prior to Oprah Winfrey’s well-received television adaptation of The Women of Brewster Place, released in 1989, Naylor had even written a teleplay version of her first novel in 1984. This was to be co-produced as a ninety-minute film by Ohlmeyer Communications and KCET for American Playhouse. Unfortunately, the project was never brought to fruition, and it is unclear why this was the case (Naylor archive, The Women of Brewster Place teleplay draft, Box 1, Folder 13). 609 Whitt, p.155. 610 Novella Nelson, Nikki Giovanni and Virginia Fowler, ‘Bailey's Cafe: From Novel to Play: Christiansburg, Virginia, 3 August, 1997,’ Callaloo, 23:4 (2000) p.1475. 611 Naylor archive, Bailey’s Cafe script,1992, Box 26, Folder 28. 612 Naylor archive, Bailey’s Cafe script, 1993, Box 26, Folder 28. 613 Naylor archive, Bailey’s Cafe script, 1994, Box 28, Folder 13. 220 Further demonstrating this is Naylor’s television screenplay, Parchman. A full draft can be found in her archive along with an accompanying treatment and additional versions of some scenes and notes. The script builds upon the themes of Bailey’s Cafe, continuing to think through relationships between music and the policing of female sexuality. Set in the Depression of the late 1930s at the Mississippi prison, Parchman Farm, it focuses not just on sexual harassment culture, but on the relationship between this and the unjust carceral system in the Jim Crow south. The narrative follows Alberta – a wife, mother, teacher, and devout Christian – who receives a ten-year sentence at Parchman after being falsely accused of prostitution by a police officer. The shocking opening scenes that establish this context, launch the text’s interrogation of widespread institutional and gendered racism, as compounded by capitalism. In transactional scenes between the judge and superintendent, Naylor stresses that such arrests were the result of financial corruption as well as racism. As Sarah Haley explains, the imprisonment of innocent Black people was commonly practiced to acquire free labour during the economic instability of the 1930s.614 For Black women, this experience was exacerbated by ongoing subjection to sexual harassment and abuse within the prisons themselves. Rigorously researched by Naylor, this, too, is emphasised in Parchman.615 Monroe, one of the guards, routinely rapes the female inmates, including Alberta, and encourages male prisoners to do the same. Precious, the daughter of another inmate named Lou Anne, is rumoured to be the superintendent’s daughter through rape. For Lou Anne – a once-homeless, working-class prostitute who is imprisoned for killing her abusive pimp – institutionalised abuse is a 614 Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2016) p.4. 615 Naylor’s notes from Siobhan Flynn, a researcher for TNT (who were producing the film) confirm the accuracy and well-informed nature of this portrayal. Flynn tells Naylor, for instance, that shortly after Parchman opened in 1904, ‘focus quickly shifted to profitability’ and the ‘arbitrary’ judicial system helped prison-owners to maximise financial gains (Naylor archive, Siobhan Flynn, Parchman research notes, July 7 1998, Box 44, Folder 6). Another research document, Worse than Slavery by David M. Oshinsky, discusses the financial corruption attached to this in more detail as well as the sickening physical and sexual abuse that Parchman’s Black prisoners endured (Naylor archive, David M. Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, Box 44, Folder 7). Haley similarly draws on Oshinsky to explain that both in and out of prison, women ‘faced violence of an order that is unrepresentable’ (Haley p.7). 221 continuation of what she has already known. So, too, for Ma Bailey, a woman in her seventies who is serving life for killing ‘a white man who tried to rape her thirty years ago’.616 All the women, Naylor stresses, including those who have committed crimes, are only viewed as and transformed into criminals because they are trapped within a system of racialised and gendered terror. As in Bailey’s Cafe, music gives expression to this pain: blues songs infuse Naylor’s script. Male prisoners in the cotton fields sing numbers such as ‘Noah Built the Ark’ and ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.’ More integral to the story, however, are the women’s songs. These include ‘I Got A Man in New Orleans,’ ‘How’m I Doin’ It?’ and ‘Make the Devil Leave Me Alone’.617 All of these and more were recorded by John Lomax and Herbert Halpert who visited Parchman several times between 1933 and 1939.618 As Haley explains, the men’s songs were Lomax’s and Halpert’s priority. The women were eventually recorded, albeit ‘as an afterthought’ in 1939.619 Their songs can be found on Jailhouse Blues: Women's A Capella Songs from the Parchman Penitentiary, rereleased by Rosetta Records in 1987. Naylor listened to this album and read its transcripts.620 In her original treatment, Lomax even features as a character.621 By subsequently editing Lomax out, Naylor gives more centrality to female voices. Like the revision of Ellington in Bailey’s Cafe, this challenges the subordination of women, and highlights Naylor’s intention to memorialise the women’s songs and their radicality. Featuring soloists including Alma Hicks, Mattie Mae Thomas, Hattie Goff, Eva 616 Naylor archive, Parchman treatment, Box 44, Folder 6, p. 8. Ma Bailey’s name is perhaps a symbolic gesture to Bailey’s Cafe. 617 Naylor archive, Parchman full draft, 1998, Box 44. Folder 5. 618 Interestingly, another song that Naylor includes that is not from Jailhouse Blues is called ‘Billy Boy.’ Its title and lyrics, ‘did she ask you in Billy Boy?’, seem to hark back to Eve’s sexual awakening via Billy Boy’s stomping in Bailey’s Cafe (Naylor archive, Parchman scenes, 1998, Box 44. Folder 6, p.72). 619 Haley, p.216. 620 These can be found in the archive along with a letter from Jeffrey Levine (the vice-president of original programming at TNT) who sent the materials to her (Naylor archive, Box 44 Folder 6). 621 Naylor archive, Parchman scenes, 1998, Box 44 Folder 6. Lomax is described as being given a tour by the wardens and later introduces himself to Alberta and others in the sewing room. 222 White, Edna Taylor and Josephine Parker, the Jailhouse Blues recordings are radical not only in their voicing of Black women’s mental and physical suffering, but in their expressions of desire for sexual autonomy and emancipation.622 In Parchman, Naylor emphasises the songs’ capacity for sabotage in ways that are comparable to the noise riots at Bedford Hills and the concluding chapters of both Brewster Place and Bailey’s Cafe. For example, as the women sing ‘Ricketiest Superintendent’ – a song that criticises prison staff – Monroe grows aggravated by their show of unity, and yells at them to stop their ‘noise’.623 Songs about sex and sexuality enable the women to reclaim some sense of control over their bodies and challenge the dominance that Monroe and other authority figures assert. Demonstrating this most clearly is the women’s rendition of ‘How’m I Doin’ It?’. Including lyrics such as, ‘I pull my dress above my knees, I give myself to all I please,’ the song’s performance in the sewing rooms indicates a reclamation not only of the women’s bodies, but of how and when they choose to both dress and undress them.624 In its striking lyrical similarity to Armatrading’s ‘No Love For Free,’ the song distances the women from guilt when considered in relation to Naylor’s and Duff’s archived annotations.625 Rejecting perceptions of Black women and their bodies as criminal, Naylor presents the prisoners, too, as non-repentant “whores.” Like the play version of Bailey’s Cafe, this continues Naylor’s effort to recover a more sexually-empowered and revisionary women’s jazz and blues tradition. As Haley explains, ‘How’m I Doin’ It?’, performed by Parker on Jailhouse Blues, has multiple revisionary layers concerning both gender and sexuality. For one thing, revising Hollywood romance narratives, it is a reworking of ‘the 1932 Don Redman Orchestra song ‘How'm I Doin'?’ featured in Ginger Rogers's first film, Twenty Million Sweethearts’.626 The song also 622 Haley, pp.215-216. 623 Naylor archive, Parchman full draft, 1998, Box 44, Folder 5, p.71. This line reiterates how Black women’s voices have been coded as noise. 624 Naylor archive, Parchman full draft, 1998, Box 44, Folder 5, p.24. 625 Naylor archive, Pop song annotations, Box 44, Folder 6. 626 Haley, p.238 223 unashamedly replaces Sadie Green’s love of dancing ‘with the lifting of skirts and shaking in bed as her chosen pleasure’.627 Thus, Parchman is another archival document that evidences Naylor’s musical recovery project in Bailey’s Cafe and its revision of “whoredom.” Documenting the role of women’s blues in survival and protest during incarceration under Jim Crow, however, Parchman is also an important story itself that warrants more critical attention. For the women of Parchman, as for those in Bailey’s Cafe, music engenders healing and radical forms of connection. As Naylor writes in her treatment, the women ‘fight every day when they open their mouths to sing’.628 For Ma Bailey, singing together ‘is about enduring…about keeping on’.629 Underscored by Naylor’s regular insertion of ‘a beat’ in the script’s parenthetical directions, Alberta’s gradual participation in the women’s bluesian rhythms correlates with her growing resilience.630 When Alberta first arrives at Parchman, she remains ‘silent’ as the other women sing.631 She doesn’t ‘follow the beat of the music’ while sewing; she works faster and makes the rest of them ‘look bad’.632 Exemplifying her inability to understand how she, with the ‘safety net’ of a ‘home and family’ could be in the same place as them, this separation from the women highlights Alberta’s initial naivety concerning class 627 Haley, p.240. The placement of ‘How’m I Doin It?’ on Jailhouse Blues intensifies the song’s subversiveness since it is connected to the equally radical ‘I Got a Man in New Orleans.’ Also sung by Parker, this piece has the same track number as the previous song despite being ‘listed separately in the liner notes’ (Haley p.237). It, too, is revisionary: it is recorded to the same tune as ‘Another Man Done Gone,’ made famous by recordings of male voices at Parchman, and later performed by artists such as Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan (Haley p.240). Parker’s rendition revises the original song and its ‘I Got a Gal’ lyric (Haley p.240) from a female perspective. Moreover, although seemingly unintentional, Parker initially sings this original line in the recording before correcting herself. This destabilises heterosexual norms and speaks to the queerness often articulated in the works of Rainey and Smith, who were lovers (Haley p.215). Bringing these contexts together, the continuity between ‘How'm I Doin It’ and ‘I Got a Man’ on the album ‘provides a narrative that challenges the politics of respectability and shatters carceral and moral regulation through the reversal of gender roles and the threat of violence’ (Haley p.240). This challenge is further amplified by the album’s movement from Parker’s tracks to the sacred song, ‘The Last Month of the Year.’ This embodies the subversive combination of spirituality and sexuality often present in women’s blues (Haley p.243). In Parchman, Naylor replicates the significance of this structure and its themes since these three songs appear in the same order in her script as on the album. Like the women singers of Parchman, she is reclaiming the blues for female voices. 628 Naylor archive, Parchman treatment, 1998, Box 44, Folder 6, p.11. 629 Naylor archive, Parchman full draft, 1998, Box 44. Folder 5, p.83. 630 Naylor archive, Parchman full draft, 1998, Box 44, Folder 5. 631 Naylor archive, Parchman full draft, 1998, Box 44, Folder 5, p.23. 632 Naylor archive, Parchman full draft, 1998, Box 44, Folder 5, p.9. 224 and race relations; she believes her middle-class status will protect her from racist injustice.633 Since the opening scenes tell us that Alberta ‘loves’ singing with her church choir, her refusal to sing in prison suggests not only a lost sense of self, but an internalisation of the virgin/whore dichotomy; the sexually suggestive lyrics of the female prisoners seem to oppose Alberta’s religious understanding of group singing.634 Thus, her ability to later embrace friendships and finally sing with the women coincides with a questioning of faith – made clear not only when Alberta challenges the words of a visiting preacher, but when, instead of prayer, she adopts a repetitive, bluesian counting strategy ‘to stay sane’ in solitary confinement.635 Suggesting the blues gradually opens a new form of spirituality and community for her, like that in Bailey’s Cafe, this process empowers Alberta. Through the blues, she finds solace, resilience, and the courage to successfully escape the prison with Precious as the script concludes.636 Although Parchman was never produced, Naylor’s meticulous documentation preserves its important content as an individual text and as part of her wider oeuvre. Parchman and the Bailey’s Cafe play reinforce the sensory, particularly sonic nature of Naylor’s haptic and feminist revisionary work concerning the Black female body. They also highlight ongoing communications between Naylor’s texts and their Black feminist orality. The lack of closure in Brewster Place and Bailey’s Cafe reflects Naylor’s desire to expand her work and its reach, particularly via stage and screen. Together with the unfinished nature of Parchman, these endings encourage us as scholars, writers and activists to carry such work forward in our own communicative practices, including the empathetic listening advocated by theorists such as Stoever, Lordi and Furlonge. While Naylor’s episodic novels depict and embody the kind of radical and empathetic connections required in feminist recovery work, her archival practice 633 Naylor archive, Parchman scenes, 1998, Box 44, Folder 6, p.17. 634 Naylor archive, Parchman full draft, 1998, Naylor, Box 44, Folder 5. 635 Naylor archive, Parchman full draft, 1998, Box 44, Folder 5, p.42. 636 The eighteen-year-old Precious is pregnant through rape when these final scenes take place. Her escape therefore breaks the cycle of sexual violence and imprisonment that she and her mother have been subjected to. Unlike Precious herself, her child will not be forced to reside in the prison from birth. 225 emphasises her wish to generate more such work among her readers. Encouraging us to listen to the songs that inspired her, and to continue using music as well as literature to reflect on and reshape our socio-political realities, the archive reiterates her attempt to create a new ‘discursive community’ of readers and writers across time and space.637 Continuing my own construction of such a community in this thesis, as particularly inspired by Naylor’s work, my final chapters explore how Mitchison similarly advocates sensory communications in revisionary feminist science fiction whilst taking these themes to extrasensory, futuristic and intergalactic levels. 637 Nicole Brittingham Furlonge, Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African-American Literature (US: University of Iowa Press, 2018) p.3. As I explore in the previous chapter, Furlonge suggests that African American writers strive to create these communities by asking readers to listen to their texts. 226 Telepathic Communication in Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) In 1962, Naomi Mitchison published her first science fiction novel, Memoirs of a Spacewoman (MOAS). 638 Set in Earth’s future and written as a series of diary-like episodes, the text recounts the experiences of its first-person narrator, Mary – a communications expert who travels to distant planets as part of a scientific research team. Enabling interaction between the explorers and the various alien species they encounter, Mary’s abilities, and those of all communication professionals in this future, are presented, though not named, as telepathic. Communication is achieved ‘not in sounds,’ but through ‘psychic processes’ that enable one’s thoughts and feelings to converge with the unique sensory reality of the lifeform being engaged (31, 11). Described as a ‘kind of rapport’ that is ‘mental and manual since it involves instruments,’ it is a sensorially and emotionally immersive method of mental, non-verbal contact (18).639 Although enhanced by technological tools, it is an innate sensory ability – a ‘semi-intuitive technique,’ dependent on ‘genetic make-up’ (18, 7). Mitchison’s depiction of telepathic communication coheres with telepathy’s original definition and its recent explorations within sensory studies. First described in 1882 at a meeting of London’s newly-formed Society for Psychical Research (SPR), telepathy has always been imagined in sensory terms. In the words of poet and philologist, F.W.H. Myers, it was conceived as: ‘the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognized channels of sense’.640 Both aligning it with and distinguishing it from existing senses, Myers presented telepathy as a sensory modality and process that was physiological and cognitive. 638 Naomi Mitchison, Memoirs of A Spacewoman (Glasgow: Kennedy & Boyd, 2011). 639 In this instance, “non-verbal” means unspoken/without sound whereas in Chapter Three, the “non-verbal” was frequently called upon to discuss sounds that are distinct from language. 640 John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A history of the idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) p.105. 227 Howes, Blackman, and other sensory studies scholars have explored ideas of telepathy, like communication itself, in relation to notions of a sixth sense.641 In particular, they emphasise, telepathy not only represents an expansion of the sensorium, but like all other senses and as a mode of contact, it is bound to the haptic. It has, since its inception, been considered a form of ‘mental touch,’ Blackman explains, aligned not only with physical touch and emotional feeling, but the metaphorical notion of being in contact, even at distance, which became increasingly common following the invention of electrical tele-phenomena such as the telephone and telegraph.642 As a mode of getting in touch with alien life, telepathic communication in MOAS presents a similarly literal and figurative tactility that operates, in emotionally-invested ways, both at distance from and in close proximity to the body. While Mary stresses the care and empathy attached to this tactility, Mitchison implies that communication is also a manifestation of more destructive and invasive haptic experience.643 This not only reiterates the SPR’s original definition of telepathy, since it is ‘remarkably indefinite’ as Nicholas Royle points out, but reflects its varied reception from contemporary audiences.644 Attempting to bring scientific credibility to elements of the occult, the SPR saw telepathy as ‘a progressive evolutionary step’ that could offer new ways of knowing the self and forming interpersonal connections.645 Inspired by spiritualism, evolutionary theory and eighteenth-century mesmerism in addition to new long-distance communication technologies, they welcomed the notion that telepathy could enable transmission of thought and emotion not only between different sentient beings, but between the living and dead.646 Others like Max 641 See The Sixth Sense Reader ed. by Howes (Oxford: Berg, 2009). 642 Lisa Blackman, Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation (London: Sage, 2012) p.51. 643 As such, like Steven Connor, whose work is referenced in my thesis’ introduction, Mitchison articulates the variety and contradiction among notions of touch. Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion Books, 2004). 644 Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) p.2. 645 Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) p.2. 646 Ibid. As Blackman illustrates, the idea of emotional transmission associated with telepathy is comparable to affective process. Indeed, as my thesis’ introduction mentions, Teresa Brennan’s theory of affect focuses on notions of transmission too. 228 Nordau and Freud, however, respectively expressed concerns about the moral and psychological implications of such ideas. Furthermore, considering telepathy to be a ‘long lost but once serviceable’ faculty that had become one of many ‘evolutionary cast-offs,’ biologists Arthur H. Pierce and Frank Podmore dismissed the concept as a regressive scientific focus.647 Both in origin and development, as Blackman states, telepathy is a complex and ‘contradictory creature’.648 It seems to emerge from and represent antithetical interests in the rational and irrational; the material and immaterial; as well as notions of distance (tele) and intimacy (pathos). For Roger Luckhurst, these contradictions reflect the various fears and fantasies that constitute an ‘ambivalent modernity’.649 Considering its association with touch, I add, the concept of telepathy speaks to fears and fantasies concerning the body as a sensed, sensing and porous entity that can be touched and touching in both desirable and invasive ways. Telepathy embodies oppressive and progressive notions of social-sensory regimes under modernity. This chapter argues that Mitchison embraces the multifaceted and contradictory nature of telepathy to interrogate fears and fantasies surrounding modern embodied life from a mid-century, feminist, and anti-colonial perspective. It demonstrates that MOAS and the history of telepathy itself elucidate consistencies between embodied concerns and dreams in the early twentieth century and its later decades. Since the 1950s and ‘60s saw a resurgent interest in telepathy, which was re-branded and popularised as extrasensory perception (ESP) by J.B. Rhine in the 1930s, Mitchison’s portrayal of thought transference reflects contemporary culture and telepathy’s fin de siècle origins.650 Thus, like the Black feminist orality in Naylor’s novels, Mitchison’s feminist and sensory engagement with the telepathic highlights both problematic 647 Thurschwell, p.26. The journalist, Joseph McCabe was another vocal critic of the SPR. 648 Blackman, p.60. 649 Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy 1870-1901 (Oxford: OUP, 2002) p.276. 650 Rhine’s work influenced depictions of telepathy in other science fiction of this period too. Some examples mentioned later include Frederick Pohl’s Slave Ship (1956) and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the extrasensory as any sensory faculty or process ‘made by other means than those of the known sense-organs.’ Other ideas of the extrasensory include clairvoyance and telekinesis. 229 and valuable continuities concerning race and gender between the beginning and middle of the twentieth century. In the first part of the chapter, I argue that Mary’s depiction of telepathy details a utopian future in which social discrimination no longer exists. Drawing on explorations of telepathy’s associations with sympathy, empathy and the erotic, I assert that Mary’s communicative practices illuminate and become a metaphor for idealistic visions of sensory and emotional connection. With a particular focus on women’s freedoms, Mitchison’s sensory aesthetics, from this perspective, present a feminist erotics of telepathy. This celebrates contemporary race and gender-based activism whilst also highlighting links between such activism and the progressive early twentieth-century attitudes of the SPR. As the subsequent section of the chapter argues, Mitchison’s depiction of telepathy also gestures towards fears surrounding control, surveillance and invasion during the Cold War era – a continuation, I suggest, of the fears surrounding bodily “degeneration” in the late nineteenth century. Buried within Mary’s unreliable narration, these dystopian aspects of telepathic touch are covert. Undermining Mary’s utopian proclamations, they represent the discreet tactics and propaganda of the Cold War itself. Mitchison’s text not only explores the western fear of communism, but critiques how this was used to reinforce the marginalisation of women and people of colour within powerful western nations. Additionally, the novel draws attention to how women on both sides of the Iron Curtain were manipulated and exploited by their own nation’s propagandic discourses. By combining utopia and dystopia within the communicative extremes of the extrasensory, Mitchison not only challenges masculinised social and literary norms, but urges her readers to decipher and challenge reductive hegemonic discourses. Her sensory engagement with telepathy’s contradictions advocates truly empathetic forms of communication, like those championed by Naylor’s works, that can counteract enduring forms of suppressive contact. 230 Even while appearing to look to the future, Mitchison, like Woolf and Naylor, is critiquing the dominant social-sensory regimes of modernity’s past and their lasting impact.651 By engaging with extrasensory realms and inter-planetary ideas of connection, however, Mitchison strives more overtly to emphasise the radical socio-political possibilities of transcending conventional epistemologies of identity and embodiment. This chapter continues to build on this thesis’ sensory focus on haptic ideas of communication, community and connection. By focusing on telepathy and the relationship between this and the Cold War, it produces a nuanced reading of a critically neglected novel and author. Like Donna Haraway and Gavin Miller, I view MOAS as a feminist rebuttal to the predominantly male-authored science fiction that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century.652 My reading also reflects MOAS’ affiliation with feminist sci-fi in a new way: it demonstrates that a combination of utopia and dystopia – more commonly found in feminist science fiction than mainstream science fiction, as both M. Keith Booker and Jenny Wolmark have noted – becomes apparent through analysis of telepathy both in and around the text.653 My reading builds on Ashley Maher’s recent analysis, which briefly highlights the text’s link to the Cold War by noting the influence of the space race.654 Drawing upon this existing scholarship, together with Cold War studies of race and gender, and sensory and literary scholarship on telepathy, I explore this Cold War context in more detail and therefore bring a new combination of historical and theoretical contexts to bear on the novel’s depictions of embodied life. 651 As the idea of the futuristic memoir itself indicates, MOAS’s connecting, episodic form presents an amalgamation of past, present and future. 652 See Donna Haraway, ‘Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms’ in Material Feminisms ed. by Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman (US: Indiana University Press, 2008) pp.157-187; and Gavin Miller, ‘Animals, Empathy, and Care in Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman,’ Science Fiction Studies, 35:2 (2008) pp.251-265. 653 M. Keith Booker, ‘Woman on the Edge of a Genre: The Feminist Dystopias of Marge Piercy,’ Science Fiction Studies, 21:3 (1994) 337-350; and Jenny Wolmark, ‘Time and Identity in Feminist Science Fiction’ in A Handbook to Science Fiction ed. by David Seed (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2007). 654 Ashley Maher mentions that MOAS was ‘published only one year after the first manned spaceflight’ by the USSR’s Yuri Gagarin (Maher, ‘Memoirs of a Spacewoman: Naomi Mitchison’s intergalactic education,’ Textual Practice, 22:12 (2020) p.2140). 231 My analysis draws together two usually separate strands of enquiry in Cold War research, as outlined by Marko Dumančić: one considers how gender norms shaped the evolution of the conflict while the other explores how Cold War politics, economics and culture influenced ‘post-war gender ideals and practices on both sides’.655 Reflecting the intersectionality of Mitchison’s feminism, I place Cold War studies of gender into closer alignment with those that concern race and colonialism.656 I also bring Cold War studies into contact with sensory studies.657 As such, I intervene in established historical links between the Cold War and science fiction. Critics including Booker have demonstrated that post-war sci-fi provided an outlet for society’s imaginings about contemporary warfare, global relations, and nuclear threat.658 By considering the influence of Rhine and the SPR, however, my reading of MOAS emphasises that these imaginings link back to early twentieth-century ideas about the body. I therefore demonstrate that sensory studies can further enrich existing scholarship on the extrasensory in science fiction and feminist science fiction.659 Importantly, though, I don’t focus on science fiction to the same extent as Haraway or Miller. I aim to suggest that 655 Marko Dumančić, ‘Spectrums of Oppression: Gender and Sexuality during the Cold War,’ Journal of Cold War Studies, 16:3 (2014) p.190. Focusing on masculinity, the former scholarly strand demonstrates ‘that elite masculine subcultures constituted a central element of political and cultural’ post-war life, ‘especially in foreign policy and high culture’ (p.191). In contrast, the latter concentrates on femininity, consumerism and domestic life. 656 Scholarship by, for example, Justin Rogers-Cooper and Helen Laville explores gender roles and the oppression of women during the Cold War, but often make points that run parallel to those made in relation to race and colonialism by scholars such as M. Keith Booker and Brenda Gayle Plummer. 657 This intersection is beginning to garner interest among Cold War historians. Indeed, the call for papers issued by the Berlin Centre of Cold War Studies in the summer of 2020 invited potential conference speakers to consider the conflict ‘as a war not only on the senses, but as a war through the senses’ Christopher Ball, Humanities and Social Sciences Online, <https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/5872618/cfp-%E2%80%9Cconflict-and-senses-global-cold-war%C2%A0-propaganda-sensory>, published 14/02/2020, accessed 26/04/2021. 658 M. Keith Booker, Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946-1964 (US: Greenwood Press, 1999). 659 Of course, texts that discuss mid-century sci-fi have explored extrasensory motifs, but these are not connected to sensory studies or conversations about gender. See Brian Clegg’s Extra Sensory: The Science and Pseudoscience of Telepathy and Other Powers of the Mind (London: St. Martins, 2013); and The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, ed. by Rob Lathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Similarly, there are studies of feminist sci-fi that discuss the extrasensory, but these do not intersect with sensory studies. See, for instance, Kara Kennedy, Women’s Agency in the Dune Universe: Tracing Women’s Liberation Through Science Fiction (London: Springer, 2022); and Ritch Calvin, Feminist Science Fiction and Feminist Epistemology: Four Modes (London: Springer, 2016). 232 telepathy’s rich and diverse symbolic history could enrich wider literary work on the twentieth-century body, especially in relation to race and gender.660 Telepathy and Feminist Utopia Progressive scientific communication The future Earth that Mitchison’s protagonist invites us into (and refers to as ‘Terra’) is in many ways, utopian. Animals are no longer slaughtered for food or subjected to vivisection, and childbirth has become a painless process due to medical advancement.661 Race and gender equality seems to have been reached. As the focus of the novel, Mary’s occupation is the reader’s gateway into recognising and understanding these utopian qualities. Although a career in communications involves important, exciting, and dangerous work, Mary’s narration reveals, it is open to anyone who can develop, a ‘stable personality’ (9). Pioneered by physicists and molecular astronomers like ‘old Jane Rakadsalis’ whom Mary remembers fondly as having a ‘wonderful black, ageless face,’ this includes women and women of colour, even at the most influential levels (9).662 Mary explains that she has been asked to lead expeditions ‘several times’ and, while she does not ‘care for that sort of responsibility,’ she appreciates the freedom to decline without professional consequence (5). Emphasising the sexual and reproductive freedoms that her society affords, Mary’s career remains unimpeded by her motherhood. In the 660 Certainly, as I explore in the next chapter, Mitchison herself saw science fiction as similar to and interconnected with various other genres. She did not wish each of her own works to be confined to any one category. 661 Mitchison’s short story, ‘A Conversation with an Improbable Future’ (1990) is set in the same future as MOAS and additionally gestures towards environmental improvements when its narrator explains that the colour changing seasons have now returned following ‘that terrible bit of history we call money-and-bombs.’ See A Girl Must Live: Stories and Poems (Glasgow: Richard Drew Publishing, 1990) p.226. 662 Mitchison therefore diverges from and resists mainstream sci-fi’s relationship with race and racism during this period. This, as Thulani Davis expresses in her 1983 essay/lecture ‘The Future May Be Bleak, But It's Not Black,’ was dominated by ‘wilful blindness’ to racism. All too often, she observes, African peoples in particular are ‘missing and presumed extinct’ in futuristic sci-fi (Thulani Davis, ‘The Future May Be Bleak But It’s Not Black,’ Village Voice, (1983)). 233 novel’s first paragraph, we learn, Mary has four children and a haploid daughter called Viola – the accidental, but beloved result of intimacy with a two-sexed Martian named Vly. One of her sons, she explains, was fathered by a distinguished scientist while one of her daughters is conceived with T’o M’kasi – a fellow explorer whose Blackness is emphasised as Mary, describing her sexual attraction to him, mentions that he has ‘the delicious springy hair of his father’s ethnic group’ (12). Such a diverse sexual and reproductive life, existing in harmony with career choice, is this world’s norm. For Mary, her profession even helps to generate this dynamic since she meets the fathers of her children through work. Mary’s career symbolises and seems to affirm a utopian Earth, particularly as gained by women. So does her description of communication itself. As a process that depends on empathy and sympathy, it reflects and propels the importance of more equitable and compassionate relationships. As Miller observes, ‘Mary frequently refers to the “sympathy or empathy with other forms of life” that she is called upon to exercise’ (92).663 Extensive training, undertaken to prepare not only for communication work, but for space travel itself enhances these qualities. Anticipating simulated/virtual reality technology, such training, like the contact it develops, is immersive and multi-sensory. 664 Mary writes, one must steep ‘oneself in 3D and 4D’ to practise ‘taking bizarre points of view’ and to grow accustomed to space-time as a shifting, fourth dimension of experience (7). In training and practise, communication is presented as that which fully engages the mind, body, and emotions to get in touch with alien life. It is simultaneously a science that requires objectivity. While communications experts must empathise with their contacts to effectively interact, Mary explains that the strict policy of ‘non-interference’ requires a certain level of emotional distance too. Since scientific observation is their primary aim, explorers must not intervene in the societies they discover (31). Mary writes, 663 Miller, p.254. 664 Virtual reality technology was developed in 1968, so Mitchison pre-empts this. 234 one must practise ‘detachment in the face of apparently disgusting and horrible events’ during the pre-travel training programme (7). Miller convincingly aligns Terran communication with ethical scientific methods prescribed by Wilhelm Dilthey in the human sciences and in feminist animal studies.665 When additionally recognised as telepathic, though, Mitchison’s portrayal of communication also indicates telepathy’s etymological and conceptual origins. Telepathy, as well as being scientific, Pamela Thurschwell asserts, is ‘genealogically linked to the older concept of sympathy’ and ‘the newer word empathy,’ which was coined not long before telepathy itself.666 It emerges in the late nineteenth century, she explains, from a desire ‘for complete sympathetic union with the mind of another’.667 Royle similarly posits that telepathy is the ‘inevitable outcome or hyperbolization of the importance accorded to ‘sympathy’ in Romanticism’.668 In MOAS’ third chapter, Mary highlights the challenge of balancing such emotionally-invested contact with scientific objectivity when she describes, in vivid sensory prose, a disturbing trip to a colonised world. The colonisers, a flat and slithery species known as the Epsies, are highly intelligent and technically excellent in their own space travel capacities. They provide accommodation for the Terrans and are keen to communicate with them. However, Mary finds that she ‘[cannot] like the Epsies,’ instead growing fond of the colonised ‘Rounds’ – a ‘non-intelligent’ native fauna who have ‘rounded heads, large dark eyes with eyelashes’ and ‘paw-like hands’ (25, 31, 26, 27). Full of ‘liveliness,’ these creatures frequently engage in ‘pleasing sexual activity’ and a form of play Mary likens to ‘singing and dancing’ (30). In contrast, the Epsies, ‘distressingly like centipedes’ with large, hanging ‘mouth parts,’ had ‘none of these lovable qualities; they were only intelligent’ (25-26). Given that communication depends on ‘thinking oneself into the 665 Miller, p.253. 666 Thurschwell, p.14. 667 Ibid. 668 Royle, p.5. 235 shape of one’s contact’ and experiencing their ‘state of mind,’ Mary consequently becomes extremely uncomfortable when thinking herself ‘behind that mouth’ (27, 19, 27). Later, when the ‘carnivorous’ Epsies reveal that the Rounds have become ‘a food source to supplement’ the ‘scanty resources’ of their home planet, Mary experiences a brief, but perilous moment of contact failure; her ability to imagine identification with the Epsies is overwhelmed by the ‘helpless’ feeling she has ‘failed, perhaps betrayed’ the Rounds (27, 40).669 Recounting the ‘agony’ of this revelation, Mary explains that she and her team leader, Peder, were taken to an enclosed courtyard ‘packed with Rounds…in a really terrible state of agitation, fear and anxiety’ (35, 34). A large Epsie, whom the explorers name Glitterboy, guided them, she recalls, onto a parapet above the enclosure. They were then asked to watch as the Epsies stunned their captives into submission with ‘some kind of metal instrument’ (35). Afterwards, Mary records, there was no more ‘jumping or yelling or singing or…violent emotion’ and the Rounds were ‘set upon and sucked by the Epsies’ (36, 37). Even in this moment of communication failure, Mary’s telepathic practice highlights Terran utopia. Mary’s response indicates that the human world is nothing like that of the Epsies’. Emphasising the progressive postcolonial attitude that Terrans possess in contrast to the Epsies and their own planetary history, Mary writes, ‘we know enough about [colonialism] from our own history, but it was the first time I had met it in real life’ (29). The Epsies, who were not colonists when humans first communicated with them, she summarises, had regressed into ‘a period of moral crudity’ (26). Thus, communication reminds Mary, and her colleagues of the socio-political progress humanity has made and must maintain. In the later chapters, a similar scenario unfolds when Mary and her research team arrive on a planet dominated by a butterfly-like species that suppresses the sexual behaviour of its 669 Maher, p.2150. 236 own larval forms. As with the Epsies, the crew compare the butterflies’ ethos to oppressive regimes in Earth’s history. Miller notes that Mary ‘sees a religious parallel with periods when “people were tortured and burnt alive in order to save their souls in another life”’ (127).670 Another crew member, Olga, likens the relationship between the butterflies and caterpillars to the ‘postponement of enjoyment’ that ‘happened...in the capitalist countries during their periods of major industrial development’ (127).671 This reinforces that the contemporary explorative and ontological beliefs of Terra stand in stark contrast not only to those of the Epsies and butterflies, but to humanity’s own history. Both incidents suggest that communication, as grounded in empathetic, scientific enquiry, can reinforce and even enhance Terran morality. Demonstrating her resilience and a reaffirmed sense of moral and professional duty, Mary concludes the Epsies tale by repeating a piece of advice Peder gives her: ‘when the moral and intellectual self one so carefully builds up has been pulled down, when there is nothing between one and the uncaring trampling foot of reality, then one may at last genuinely observe and know’ (40-41).672 Communication and the values that drive it, Mary’s narration implies, can lead to a moral strengthening of oneself. Like telepathy in both the early and mid-twentieth century, according to Blackman, it is imagined as an epistemological ‘path towards spiritual or earthly utopia’.673 The erotics of telepathy In one of her contributions to The Sixth Sense Reader (2009), Thurschwell argues that telepathy is intertwined with the erotic because it speaks to a desire for sensual touch.674 Accordingly, 670 Miller, p.260. 671 Miller, p.260. 672 By implication, one can only observe this ‘uncaring, trampling foot of reality’ on other planets, reinforcing the idea that Earth’s reality is, by contrast, one that prioritises care. 673 Blackman, pp.60-61. 674 Thurschwell, ‘The Erotics of Telepathy: The British SPR’s experiments in telepathy’ in The Sixth Sense Reader ed. by Howes (Oxford: Berg, 2009) p.198. 237 the sensorially-immersive communication that Mitchison presents in MOAS opens up exciting opportunities for new sensual experiences, including intergalactic relationships; it is an erotic pursuit inseparable from a quest to expand knowledge.675 Intensifying the figurative intimacy suggested by telepathy’s empathetic and sympathetic properties, sensory and especially haptic language elucidate this eroticism. Mary’s consistent records concerning the bodily pleasures of alien life-forms, covering sex, eating habits and in some cases, defecation, are often erotic in their sensual and sensory focus. She learns through communication, for example, that the caterpillars express their pleasure at ‘being touched…in certain parts of their bodies’ (92). Similarly, the creatures communicate ‘a great accession of pleasure’ during regular and prolonged periods of sexual wallowing in ‘bogs of violet algae’ (94, 93). The larvae also communicate to Mary that they derive corporeal and ‘aesthetic pleasure’ from their ability to form ‘elaborate pattern structures’ with the ‘deep blues and reds’ that infuse their bodily waste (92, 93). Since Mary’s fascination with alien embodied life often revolves around insect-like creatures, including the caterpillars, butterflies and centipede-resembling Epsies, Mitchison’s portrayal of telepathy reflects early biological research into thought transference. MOAS seems to allude to Charles Bingham Newland’s What is Instinct? Thoughts on Telepathy and Subconsciousness in Animals (1916) and William Barrett’s On The Threshold of the Unseen (1917), which each hypothesise that insects depend upon telepathic processes for evolutionary survival.676 It is likely that Mitchison was aware of these texts because, as I explore in the next chapter more thoroughly, she had an advanced understanding of biology.677 Since Mary uses telepathy to highlight a socio-political utopia, however, the erotics underpinning the telepathic specifically emerge in MOAS in radical ways that align more 675 See Freud’s ‘Telepathy and Psychoanalysis’ and ‘Dreams and Occultism.’ As I explain in the next section and as mentioned in this chapter’s introduction, Freud had concerns about telepathy but saw valuable possibilities in it too. 676 Blackman, p. xviii; and Thurschwell in Howes, p.193. 677 Both Mitchison’s father, John Scott Haldane, and her brother, J.B.S. Haldane, were influential biologists too. 238 closely with the progressive attitudes of the SPR. Many of those who embraced the idea of telepathy and other psychic phenomena during the fin de siècle period, Thurschwell explains, campaigned for reforms that aimed to ‘assert the rights of other underrepresented communities such as women, the working class, and, through vegetarianism and anti-vivisectionism’.678 They strove to discover more pleasurable ways of being both as and for the marginalised. For them, telepathy, like electricity, became a catch-word that expressed growing excitement about new ways of knowing and connecting.679 Even as the SPR ‘attempted to maintain a code of scientific objectivity,’ Thurschwell observes, their meetings therefore became an intimate space that accommodated ‘transgressive cross-class/cross-gender contact’ and intimate practices like the séance.680 The telepathic idea of merging minds and bodies – a transmission of ideas, beliefs and emotions – reflected an erotic urge to explore new, or even taboo, forms of intimate tactile experience.681 It was, as Thurschwell writes, a ‘prosthetic extension of the senses into previously unimaginable realms’.682 Notably, queer female modernists including H.D. and Bryher were drawn to the SPR.683 Woolf, although not a member, shared an interest in the 678 Thurschwell, p.17. 679 Thurschwell in Howes, p.191. 680 Thurschwell, p.8. 681 Blackman, p.64. 682 Thurschwell in Howes, p.190. 683 When H.D. and Bryher formed the POOL Group with Kenneth Macpherson in the 1920s, for instance, the avant-garde films they would go on to produce together such as Wing Beat (1927), Foothills (1928) and Borderline (1930) often included psychical content (Carrie J. Preston, Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (Oxford: OUP, 2014) p.310). All three of these starred H.D. alongside Macpherson, and in Foothills – although only fragments remain – telepathy is central to the film’s exploration of relationships between ‘the nature of the psyche and the concept of motion’ (Rachel Connor, H.D. and the Image, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) p.21). As Luckhurst notes, H.D. and Bryher (both members of the SPR) were drawn to psychic phenomena because to them it represented an imaginative gateway to new realms of experience and understanding (Luckhurst, p.226). Indeed, in H.D’s writing, creative visions are often aligned with psychic episodes involving telepathy. For example, in Notes on Thought and Vision (1919), H.D. articulates her own, empowered sense of aesthetic awareness by describing herself as a jellyfish with telepathically-attuned ‘super-feelers’ (19); her tentacles do not just make contact with their immediate environment but apprehend ‘coded messages of the past’ transferred via ‘sympathy of thought’ (Ana Tomcic, ‘Gods and Goods: Psychoanalysis, Holism and Modernist Women,’ <https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/40386/TomcicA.pdf?sequence=1>, accessed 08/09/2021, published 2019, p.91). According to Luckhurst, such a link between ‘telepathic connection and visionary powers’ is particularly radical in the context of H.D and Bryher because their joint interest in the psychical world is intertwined with their same-sex desire for each other (Luckhurst, p.226). Similarly, the psychic and telepathic film projects of the POOL Group are bound to radically reimagined sexual relationships because H.D, Bryher and Macpherson shared a long-term ménage à trois relationship. 239 psychic phenomenon of palm-reading too.684 Encapsulating their writerly interests in relationships between consciousness and being, the erotics inherent in telepathy and other psychical ideas appealed to their attempts to live and write new female subjectivities in the early twentieth century.685 Looking back to these ideas, the utopian qualities of Terran society in MOAS represent much of what radical SPR members campaigned for. The erotic embedded in Mitchison’s language anticipates Audre Lorde’s conception of it which, as my introductory chapter explains, represents a source of often-suppressed power for women, connected to feeling and sensation.686 Sarah Shaw has already discussed Lorde’s erotics in relation to MOAS.687 However, her reading does not include exploration of the text’s extrasensory elements. Combining Lorde’s ideas with Thurschwell’s notion of telepathy’s erotics, I suggest that MOAS, in one sense, presents a feminist erotics of telepathy, embodying the empowering and intimate connections sought out by the SPR and the queer female modernists who supported them. The socio-political radicality and moral importance of such an erotic for Terrans is exemplified by the contrast between Mary’s bodily autonomy and the suppression of sensual expression imposed by the butterflies and Epsies on distant planets. The suffering of the caterpillars and Rounds is effected through the restriction of their sensory and sensual life.688 The butterflies, we learn, inflict pain upon the caterpillars for their wallowing and pattern-making. As the next section explores more thoroughly, they consider the caterpillars’ sensual pleasures a sign of moral and biological degeneration. Likewise, the sensory numbing inflicted 684 See Garrington on Woolf’s interest in palm-reading (2013) pp.115-118. She writes about hypnosis while discussing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in ‘The Cinema’ too. 685 Luckhurst makes this point in relation to H.D and Bryher (p.226), but I add in the context of the erotic. 686 Lorde, pp.43-50. 687 Sarah Shaw, ‘Monstrous Sex: The Erotic in Naomi Mitchison's Science Fiction,’ Michigan Feminist Studies, 16 (2002) 141-68, < https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mfsfront;c=mfs;c=mfsfront;idno=ark5583.0016.006;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mfsg>, last accessed 08/09/2021. 688 There is, of course, a difference in this suffering too. Since the butterflies are related to the caterpillars, their relationship could also be described in more parental terms. 240 on the Rounds before they are consumed by the Epsies – a practice that reminds Mary of ‘what used to be called’ a ‘mental hospital’ and according to Miller, reflects the views of the 1960s anti-psychiatry movement – is presented as an oppressive strategy that deprives the Other of power and erotic pleasures (34).689 Another aspect of what Mary compares to Earth’s colonial past, this discovery of alien, suppressed erotics is fundamental to the process of moral rebuilding that telepathy can afford. It, too, reinforces Terra’s utopian values in the minds of the explorers. As well as sympathy and empathy, and as an extension of the intimate touch they represent, the erotic is allied with the creation and maintenance of Earth’s utopia. Emphasising the particular importance of this erotic for Terran women are Mary’s communications with the Martian, Vly. While Martians and Terrans do not typically become friends or lovers, Mary explains, she and Vly develop a close personal relationship after working together on a collaborative mission that takes a catastrophic turn. Highlighting the notoriety of this event, Mary addresses her assumed Terran reader directly as she begins the story: ‘you will remember about that’ (55). The narration proceeds to reveal that the mission ended in a ‘blast’ that killed ‘most of the Terrans’ on the team and left Mary badly injured (55, 56). The Martians, ‘whose tough and spongy shells were better adapted to what happened than the human covering of skin and muscle over brittle bone,’ Mary explains, rescued the few surviving humans (56). When she regained consciousness, Mary recalls that Vly was communicating with her, as all Martians communicate, through ‘the tactile senses’ that lie beneath their outer coverings (55). As Mary informs us, Martians ‘rarely speak’ and instead communicate thought and emotion primarily through physical touch – another form of telepathy (55). Since their most emotive communications involve the entire body – which alternates between male and female forms – these can take on a sexual appearance from a Terran perspective. Thus, Olga blushed ‘a bright northern pink the first time she saw two 689 Miller, p.252. 241 Martians in full communication’ (57). Normally, the Martians ‘respected our taboos’ regarding touch, Mary explains, but during this emergency, Vly (in male form) panics when he sees Mary’s injuries and begins communicating reassurance ‘all over with his tongue, fingers, toes and sexual organs’ (59, 55). Mary, who has been temporarily deafened by the explosion and realises she has broken at least ‘two or three bones’ is thankful for this conveyance. She writes, it was ‘so kind of him […] I was not fully myself and needed contact’ (56, 55, 59). Aiding Mary’s mental and physical healing, this moment clearly illustrates MOAS’ feminist erotics of telepathy, as present not only in an aesthetic sense throughout the novel’s sensory language, but in specifically erotic and empowering portrayals of telepathy itself. Telepathic communication becomes a rejuvenating touch that Mary needs and desires to regain her sense of self. Since she later elatedly reaches for Vly’s ‘sexual organ’ to communicate that their interactions have activated one of her ova, this episode affirms not only that Mary’s own telepathic abilities extend to physical touch, but that her relationship with Vly has expanded her sphere of bodily experience in positive ways; she doesn’t blush like Olga, but embraces the possibilities of these new connections (63). Capturing the sexual and non-sexual aspects of the erotic, Mary’s communications with Vly lead to the birth of Viola, whose haploid status, Mary recognises, has given her a ‘special gift’ – an intellectual ability to ‘solve big problems’ (174). Performing the work of the erotic, telepathic communication seems to produce new female power. In the context of my wider thesis, this gestures towards a parallel between Mitchison’s sensory portrayal of telepathy’s erotics and Woolf’s sensory language in Orlando.690 Considering that telepathy and its touch-oriented imaginings were inspired by the ‘community-instant access to others’ that was made possible by electric communication technologies, Mitchison’s erotics echo Woolf’s emphasis on electrical telegraph wires in her recovery of the 690 I explore this more thoroughly in the next chapter. 242 queer female body.691 Since many SPR members saw telepathy as the next stage beyond electricity for collapsing distances and creating connections in innovative ways, we might even think of Mitchison’s sensory aesthetics in MOAS as expanding Woolf’s excavation of the erotic in their engagement with the extrasensory realm.692 Unlike Woolf, who had to avoid sexual explicitness to evade censorship, Mitchison embraces the sensuality of the erotic more openly. Published two years after the famous ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) was lifted, MOAS’ inclusion of sexual language evades being subjected to the same disapproving scrutiny.693 Celebrating the dissolution of the Obscenity Laws, the sexual yet non-sexual nature of the scenes with Vly, which mirror Woolf’s concealed and revealed queerness in Orlando, appear to mock this previous literary regulation of sexual content.694 Like telepathic communication itself, MOAS represents new communicative possibilities in literature concerning sensory and sensual life. Mitchison’s novel concurrently brings a feminist interpretation to the contemporary popularity of Rhine’s work on telepathy, which began in the 1930s at Duke University and gained its largest audiences in the 1950s and 60s.695 Attaching his new brand of telepathy to the emerging discipline of parapsychology, Rhine claimed that he had proven the existence of ESP through a number of experiments including the statistical analysis of millions of Zener-card guessing game trials.696 In 1957, he established the Parapsychological Association (PA) – a reformulated version of the SPR – which despite its equally pseudoscientific basis, was made an official affiliate of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1969.697 Coinciding again with major 691 Thurschwell in Howes, p.192. 692 See my first chapter for analysis of the erotic, sensory aesthetics in Woolf’s Orlando. 693 Mitchison experienced such literary regulation earlier on in her career. Her radical 1935 novel, We Have Been Warned, for instance, was initially rejected by publishers for its graphic scenes of sex, sexual violence and abortion. MOAS therefore celebrates Mitchison’s greater sense of freedom in her writing as society changed too. 694 Again, see Chapter One for analysis and explanation of the queerness attached to Woolf’s sensory, erotic language. 695 Luckhurst, pp.252-253. 696 Ibid. 697 Ibid. 243 technological advancements in connectivity including the beginnings of mass commercial air travel, the first satellite launches and, for the middle classes, the increasing affordability of telephones and television, the resurgent interest in telepathy via Rhine’s work suggests some continuity between embodied, communicative fantasies of the early twentieth century and its midpoint. Mitchison, who was almost certainly aware of Rhine ensures that this continuity maintains a progressive strand.698 Mitchison’s focus on empathy, sympathy and erotics challenges mainstream science fiction, which typically applied Rhine’s ideas to masculine and explicitly violent imaginings of telepathy. As Miller asserts, Mitchison’s explorers are contrastingly ‘not interested in the conquest of territory…but in the psychological voyage necessary to intersubjective understanding’.699 Mitchison celebrates socio-political changes that are already taking place in the 1960s, and satisfying not only the radical aims of the SPR, but Mitchison’s own commitment to campaigns for race and gender equality.700 Appearing a year before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) – a text often credited with the beginnings of Second Wave feminism – MOAS enthusiastically anticipates the resistance movements of the 60s and 70s. In its emphasis on Terran race equality it similarly supports the American civil rights movement, which had already begun, and which Mitchison herself called for at a rally when she visited the American south in the 1930s.701 Moreover, Mitchison’s depiction of Mary’s free sexuality praises the fact that contraceptive pills had recently been made available via the 698 Mitchison would have been aware of Rhine not just due to widespread knowledge of his ideas, but because her close friends, Julian, and Aldous Huxley (the biologist and writer) were in regular correspondence with him. Duke University Libraries, ‘Parapsychology Laboratory records, 1893-1984,’ <https://archives.lib.duke.edu/catalog/paralab>, accessed 26/04/2021. I have not found any parallel evidence to suggest that Mitchison actively engaged with the SPR. However, interested in the possibility of ‘group-mindedness or group communication’ and hoping for breakthroughs in ‘universal consciousness,’ she did briefly investigate ideas of telepathy herself when she formed the Engineer’s Study Group with Gerald Heard in the 1930s (Calder p.97). I return to this point in the next chapter. 699 Miller, p.254. 700 I discuss these biographical elements to Mitchison’s work in more detail in the next chapter. 701 This will also be discussed more thoroughly in the next chapter. 244 National Health Service – a cause Mitchison had been dedicated to since the 1920s.702 For Shaw, Mitchison’s language in MOAS articulates the erotic and its power because it uses feeling as well as sensation to dismantle racist and misogynist society.703 By combining utopian discourses of telepathy with the erotic, MOAS more specifically links experiential improvements in the lives of women and people of colour to open and expansive forms of communication – a contact embodied by the text’s episodic form too. Advocating the same kind of empathetic interaction as Naylor, Mitchison asks us to communicate empathetically and sympathetically with the “alien” to not only establish potentially new, progressive connections, intimacies and, within literature, subjects, but to learn about and morally improve ourselves. As I now explore, this message does not come without contemporary socio-political warnings. Mitchison’s portrayal of telepathy indicates that a sensorially oppressive regime of modernity persists beneath the surface. Like Naylor, she encourages us to explore this sinister angle as well as the progress narrative. Extrasensory Perception and The Cold War The fear of invasion The advent of telepathic concepts challenged the notion of a self-contained human individual. It presented, as Blackman articulates, an ontology where the ‘borders and boundaries between bodies, human and non-human, were considered porous and permeable’.704 As we have seen, this idea gave way to progressive fantasies concerning communication and connection. However, in its affiliation with emotional and sensory life, telepathy also revealed and fuelled 702 At first, contraception was available for married women only. See Mitchison’s Comments on Birth Control (1930). 703 Shaw, < https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mfsfront;c=mfs;c=mfsfront;idno=ark5583.0016.006;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mfsg>, last accessed 08/09/2021. 704 Blackman, p.xiii. 245 ideas of dangerous intimacies. In the early twentieth century, thought transference ideas influenced Freud’s concern about harmful communications with his patients. In 1911, he writes to Carl Jung: ‘we must never let our poor neurotics drive us crazy. I believe an article on “countertransference” is sorely needed’.705 Suggesting that the use of telepathy in therapy sessions could lead to crippling emotional mergers, he argues that psychologists should develop ‘countertransference’ techniques to protect themselves from the possibly overwhelming thoughts and feelings of the mentally unwell. In this case, telepathy, although presented as a force for good, is imagined as a risk to the therapist as communicator. This reflects wider cultural fears ‘about being governed and controlled by imperceptible forces and agencies that distribute agency between the self and other in asymmetrical ways’.706 It suggests that a fundamentally “good” person or nation might be vulnerable to attack from something they cannot perceive or resist. This was fuelled by psychical revelations too: the mind, as Thurschwell summarises, was ‘not necessarily a sealed, protective space’ anymore, but open to potentially threatening new forms of contact.707 During the fin de siècle, this concern manifested in novels such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), wherein the monstrous title character establishes telepathic connections with his victims, after close, vampiric contact with them.708 In addition to fantasies of touch, Mitchison’s depiction of telepathy in MOAS presents these fears. The Terrans strive to use telepathy for moral and scientific advancement but, as Freud fears in relation to his clinicians, they consequently come under attack on many occasions. Mary certainly feels threatened by the Epsies. To regain control of her mind and the communications taking place in especially hazardous moments, she repeatedly reminds herself of her training: ‘if you feel yourself in 705 Thurschwell, p.115. 706 Blackman, p.xiii. 707 Thurschwell, p.36. 708 Thurschwell in Howes, p.199. 246 danger, ask questions’ (34). To prevent the Epsies’ bloodthirst from overwhelming her and the telepathic process, she must distract them with questions. Similarly, Mary and her colleagues experience threat as linked to communicative endeavours when an intelligent dolphin-like species lay a trap for them – ‘a kind of electric fence’ that leads to a number of fatalities (72). More overtly telepathic in threat is the ‘entirely beamed form of communication’ expressing ‘emotional and intellectual states,’ which the butterflies use to bombard the explorers upon first sighting them with the caterpillars (105). This is also the method the butterflies use to punish the caterpillars for their supposedly immoral sensual activities. It therefore reflects how, according to Thurschwell, telepathy fanned fears of moral “degeneration” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.709 In addition to biologists such as Pierce and Podmore, who thought of telepathy as an evolutionary cast-off, Nordau incorporated telepathy into his criticism of writers’ “depraved” sensuality in Degeneration.710 As highlighted by increased contemporary interest in Rhine’s telepathic research, Mitchison’s depiction of dangerous telepathy speaks to the threats and paranoias enshrined in the Cold War. As Booker demonstrates, turn-of-the-century concerns over ‘degeneration underwent a remarkable resurgence in the 1950s’ because it was feared that nuclear radiation would lead to mutation.711 Like radiation, ESP was imagined as something that could surreptitiously inflict serious harm on the body.712 Indicating and further propelling fears of control and invasion by the foreign Other, the idea of telepathy was consequently weaponised. Both the western powers and the Soviets carried out telepathic experiments during this period to master military intelligence and espionage. The CIA’s Stargate Project – an Army Unit established in 1978 – was created for this purpose and continued to investigate the military 709 Thurschwell, p.26. 710 Max Nordau, Degeneration (1892), (Germany: Outlook Vertag, 2018). Referring to Henrik Ibsen as ‘a mystic and an ego-maniac,’ for instance, Nordau refers to the ‘travesties’ of ‘investigations into hypnotism and telepathy,’ deeming engagement with them a ‘diseased constitution’ (p.406). 711 Booker, p.9. 712 Howes, p.1. 247 potential of psychic phenomena up until the mid-90s.713. In science fiction, sinister depictions of telepathy such as those in Frederick Pohl’s Slave Ship (1956) and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) attest to this. They show, as Wolmark writes of sci-fi in this period, that the Cold War produced narratives that questioned whether ‘science and technology were’ as ‘inherently progressive’ as once thought.714 In MOAS, the dangers that alien life-forms often pose to Mary are similarly indicative of Cold War fears concerning the foreign Other and how telepathic research became embroiled in this. Mitchison’s description of the butterflies’ hostile telepathic abilities is especially telling. Surrounded by a ‘flurry of light and colour,’ the explorers experience a wave of guilt radiated down upon them and the larvae who resultantly seem ‘to shrivel as from an inward searing’ (91, 95). Mary recalls that the butterflies’ colours were: beyond anything I have ever perceived on any planet of any sun, the antennae stiff and pointing like weapons of offence, the legs glittering and jointed as strange armour might have been. There were several of them, and for a moment one or another might be poised so that it could be seen, as doubtless it could see us from its flashing and faceted jewel eyes, now diamond, now sapphire or emerald (96). Here, Mitchison juxtaposes images of the natural world with military lexis. This combination points to the more subtle form of threat that distinguishes cold war from the outright violence of hot war. Together with Mary’s later discovery of the butterflies’ chrysalids, which results in 713 Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis (New York: Little Brown, 2017). Recently declassified documents from this project even reveal the CIA’s specific investigation of Soviet scientists Konstantin Buteyko and Vlail Kaznacheev who claimed to have ‘perfected’ a method of ESP that would enable them to ‘transmit bioenergy’ in the 1980s (Lauren Aratani, ‘CIA file on Russian experiments released – but you knew that, didn’t you?’ <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/27/russian-esp-experiments-cia-memo>, published 27/01/2021, accessed 26/04/2021). 714 Wolmark in ed. by Seed, p.158. 248 telepathically-induced pain, distress and more than one ‘attack of vomiting,’ it suggests that sensory and emotional onslaught is as much a part of the Cold War as any other conflict (103). In this way, the text anticipates Mark M. Smith’s observation that all war ‘is hell’ on the senses.715 As far as the senses are concerned, he writes, ‘all war is total war, pushing them to their limits and beyond, dulling and then overwhelming and then dulling them again. Distinctions become muddied, nerves fray, and the sense of self shatters’.716 On Mary’s first mission, the communication she establishes with an alien species known as the radiates, provides a first glimpse into this sense of loss in MOAS. Mary struggles ‘desperately, angrily’ to get back to her own personality and ‘point of view’ after interaction with the radiates (23). In the context of the Cold War, this initially seems to represent communism’s perceived threat to the west. Since the radiates possess only ‘group names shading into one another,’ Mary’s adjustment to radial thought, which causes her to ‘forget [her] own name’ and lose her ability to make basic decisions, seems indicative of what was considered communism’s obliteration of the individual (19). The fact that the radiates look like ‘five-armed starfish’ perhaps alludes to the five-pointed communist star (11). Mary’s general warning that communication can leave a person ‘shattered in an irreversible way,’ seems to reflect the western fear that contact with communist thought might change a nation’s mindset in potentially damaging, long-term ways (7). Complicating this, however, while reiterating the contradictory nature of telepathy, Mary’s communication with the radiates provides her with new and important insights. By ‘thinking radially,’ Mary escapes dualistic thought-patterns, enabling consideration of ‘general philosophical problems in a way that seemed new and full of possibilities’ (22, 20). If we continue to align the radiates with communism, this emerges as a show of praise for the Soviet Union’s emphasis on communality. Yet, from another 715 Mark M. Smith, The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (USA: OUP, 2014) p.7. 716 Ibid. 249 perspective, ‘the five-choiced world’ of radiate consciousness contradicts communist homogeneity in its emphasis on increased variety – an idea that is, in economic terms, allied instead to capitalism (20). It is unclear, then, whether the positive or indeed negative aspects of communication are meant to represent one political side or the other; the Terrans cannot be said to represent the Soviets or the western powers.717 Instead, the Terrans seem to align with both sides. They criticise capitalism and share Russia’s progressive approach to women’s roles, particularly in relation to space travel, at this time.718 Yet, they also worry about the loss of the individual and, as I demonstrate shortly, possess attitudes towards race, gender and class that align with western anti-communism. In one sense, this blurring of international, political boundaries suggests a utopian transcendence of division in Earth’s future. However, it also hints at the muddiness and vagueness of meaning in this world, as influenced by Mitchison’s awareness of deceptive and manipulative communications on both sides of the Cold War. Revealing that there are virtues beyond Terran grasp, Mary’s interactions with the radiates give us reason to doubt the extent of her utopian proclamations. This is the first, mild indicator that beneath its glossy front, Terran communication and society possess less ideal, and maybe even sinister dimensions too. As I demonstrate in the next two sections, both Terran communication itself and Mary’s narration as a written extension of it, have a dystopian undercurrent. This not only reiterates the Cold War’s weaponization of the extrasensory but indicates that Terran telepathy becomes a metaphor for propagandic Cold War discourses. Utopian on the surface and dystopian underneath, Mitchison’s depiction of telepathy embodies and interrogates how such discourses 717 It seems equally plausible that Mary’s adaption to radial thought signifies a movement either towards or away from communism. 718 Certainly, as a spacewoman, Mary’s characterisation anticipates and aligns with the USSR’s success in sending the first woman to space, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963. Women were involved in work for the space race in the US too, but were less celebrated and/or less influential in these roles. Books such as Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures (2016), which explores the mathematical work that three African American women – Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan – carried out for NASA in the early 1960s, have sought to uncover how American women contributed to space travel. 250 themselves often employed a dystopia-utopia dualism in their antithetical characterisation of foreign and domestic powers. This, MOAS illuminates, was a smokescreen for ongoing racism and colonial perspectives in the west as well as gender inequality on both sides. Mary’s affiliation with the Soviets and the western powers reinforces that this is a critique of both sides; Mitchison gestures towards the similarly insidious nature of their Cold War strategies and the clandestine sensory hell they produced. I close this section by therefore suggesting that radiate thought is not indicative of either side, but an alternative to the binary opposition of war, accessible only through a shedding, more specifically, of a national sense of self. Propagandic communication and colonialism Although on the surface the communication that Mary practises, and the Terran world it both reflects and creates, are utopian, there are textual hints that suggest otherwise.719 When Mary’s colleague, Françoise, is accused of interference during the butterfly world expedition and is consequently banned from future space travel, for example, Mary explains it is better that she has confessed to her wrongdoing and accepted her punishment because when explorers have previously attempted ‘to get away with not telling,’ the thing ‘they have hidden has to be dug out of them, with all the resulting unpleasantness’ (136). Although communication-as-thought epitomises care and scientific progress, according to Mary, this moment suggests more malevolent uses of telepathy. So does Mary’s decision not to ‘pry into Viola’s mind’ when she is concerned about her (154). Though Mary decides against it, this ability to breach privacy suggests telepathy is not entirely disconnected from unethical forms of surveillance or, indeed, espionage. There are no measures in place, it seems, to prevent those trained in ESP from 719 Mitchison’s warning in MOAS about utopian national discourses reinforces the arguments presented in her 1938 book, The Moral Basis of Politics, where she criticises the false images of good prevalent in the west. I explore this essay in more detail in the latter half of the next chapter. 251 abusing their power on Terra – perhaps significantly a homophone of “terror.” Like the ‘startingly repulsive’ communications of the colonizing Epsies and the painful sensory-emotional onslaught inflicted by the butterflies, human ESP in these moments embodies the Cold War’s weaponization of telepathic phenomena (35). The colonial and racial references that further illuminate the dystopian undertones of telepathy in MOAS are particularly indicative of western propaganda and regimes in both Britain and America. As Booker argues, ‘Cold War fears of Soviet expansionism’ on both sides of the Atlantic were ‘directly related to the legacy of colonialism’.720 Mapping fears of the foreign Soviet Other onto wider fears of the racial Other, western propaganda, whilst appearing to oppose the USSR alone, was used to exercise control over the Other on national as well as international levels. In America, Oriental and African stereotypes were imposed on the Soviet Union to justify the ‘state-backed social terror’ that constituted racial segregation policies.721 Attempting to maintain America’s utopian “land of the free” image, as Brenda Gayle Plummer shows, these were presented by governments as time-honoured traditions that would endanger national security if dissolved.722 The terror of containment policy was buried beneath a narrative of national care. Similarly, in Britain, the millions of jobs in the National Health Service (NHS) and other public services that were offered to potential migrants (particularly those from the Caribbean who became known as the Windrush generation) during post-war reconstruction, were presented as a compassionate, welcoming gesture.723 In reality, this strategy was implemented with little effort to discourage the various forms of discrimination that these new, much-needed workers faced on arrival and long after. Mid-century Britain was 720 Booker, p.8. 721 Ibid. 722 Brenda Gayle Plummer, ‘Race and the Cold War’ in The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War ed. by Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) p.518. 723 Linda McDowell, Working Lives: Gender, Migration and Employment in Britain, 1945-2007 (London: Wiley, 2013). 252 a nation clinging to its imperial legacy but attempting to hide this behind utopian visions of a new welfare state. 724 This socio-political context emerges in MOAS when Mary mentions that she watches the news to see how police on Terra are fending off ‘lapses and atavisms: occasional colonial difficulties and all that’ (154). Reflecting life within western nations, this implies that colonial attitudes have been suppressed rather than ousted on Terra. Listed as one of many news stories and related by Mary with flippancy and brevity, the serious implications of this statement are diluted by what comes across as an attempt to stress the relative safety and fairness of life on Earth. Such sugar-coating regarding Terra’s relationship to colonialism is also evident in the explorers’ professional activities and attitudes away from Terra. Mary explains, for example, that whilst they use ‘the preliminary clearing technique’ to ‘give as much warning as possible,’ the process of landing on alien planets inevitably destroys some vegetation and is ‘always’ accompanied by a worry that they ‘might unwittingly destroy some life which was not induced to move out by any of [their] stimuli’ (74). Sounding much like the interference the Terrans aim to avoid, this is worsened by the fact that on most occasions, they are not invited to the worlds they visit, but simply arrive. Worse still, the code of interference depends upon the explorers’ own imposed understanding of what constitutes “life” and “not-life” on alien planets. In the radiates’ world, when Mary sees a ‘jag’ hurtling towards her, she is therefore able ‘to kill it in flight’ without being accused of interference because the explorers have decided to ‘provisionally’ label these creatures, ‘nearly without consciousness,’ ‘as ‘not-life’ (17, 15). 724 Since many of the jobs needed to support the welfare state were haptic-based and sympathy oriented, this indicates a corrupting touch, like that presented by telepathy in MOAS itself. See, for instance, Sidney Jacobs ‘Race, empire and the welfare state: council housing and racism,’ Critical Social Policy, 5:13 (1985) 6-28; and Stuart Hall, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); and Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London: Taylor & Francis, 2013). Mitchison’s own nursing background perhaps made her particularly attentive to this context of care. 253 Both the looseness of this justification and the Terrans’ awareness that ‘one can make a mistake’ in such categorisations, destabilise Mary’s emphasis on morality and ethics in relation to her career (15). The moment suggests an affiliation between the researchers’ work and dehumanising attitudes of colonists. Indeed, there are moments where a Terran desire for imperial-like acquisition arises. For example, Mary mentions that the mineralogists seek ‘valuable’ materials on a planet named Jones97 (74). On the butterfly world expedition, too, the team not only ‘collect a number of eggs’ but attempt to take a butterfly corpse back to Earth before being angrily confronted and stopped by the winged creatures themselves (122). All this extra-terrestrial contact, including telepathic communication itself, has an underlying imperial intent that not only reflects the ideologies behind propagandic Cold War discourses in the west, but epitomises their hidden and deceptive nature. The Terrans have more in common, therefore, with the oppressive telepathies and outlooks of both the Epsies and the butterflies than Mary suggests.725 The explorers even begin to side with the butterflies over the caterpillars upon discovering, as Clare Hanson writes, that the former are effectively acting as eugenicists for their own species.726 When the larvae engage in sensual activity, the butterflies communicate, it damages their future wing development and increases the likelihood of death during egg-laying. A butterfly whose larval form avoids these pleasurable activities completely, in contrast, they assert, will become a perfect, immortal specimen. The butterflies aim to elevate their entire species to this ideal and murder any “degenerate” butterflies that emerge from the chrysalids. Mary observes as one such emergent with ‘uneven’ wing mass is destroyed via telepathic transference; the butterflies ‘were killing it,’ ‘withering and blasting it’ by ‘the burning of their blame’ (104). 725 It is telling, too, with this in mind that the most healing form of telepathy that we see in the novel is provided not by a Terran, but by Vly, a Martian. 726 Clare Hanson, ‘Genetics and Eugenics’ in Eugenics, Literature, and Culture in Post-war Britain (Oxford: Routledge, 2012) p.92. 254 Though she is aware there is ‘no means of knowing if the butterfly theory [is] correct’ without committing ‘anatomical’ interference, Mary convinces most of her colleagues that the butterflies are ‘not a direct enemy’ after witnessing their murderous activities (111, 106). She concludes that their beliefs provide ‘justification’ for their actions (127). This directs our attention to the explorers’ own elite Terran status. Like the butterflies, they not only possess the privilege of flight and an accompanying desire to transcend the limits of ordinary mortality but appear to shun those on their own planet who do not. Perhaps harbouring their own eugenic ideas, they only appear to breed among themselves too. 727 Mary’s view of the ‘non-exploring Terrans’ seems to echo the butterflies’ disdain for the caterpillars when she writes that ‘they are mostly interested in power and pleasure which the rest of us cannot help considering to be of a rather worthless kind’ (127). Similarly elitist views are discernible when Mary considers participating in some grafting experiments on Terra. She writes: ‘I would put myself into intimate relation with an unintelligent form of life. Could one go lower? Yet at the same time I was aware that it was also an exciting and novel piece of research’ (52). Averse to the feminist erotics described earlier in the chapter, this contemplation reveals a hegemonic pleasure to be derived from explorer status and telepathy like that enjoyed by the ‘only intelligent’ Epsies (26). Like the Epsies, in this moment, Mary seems to accept the militaristic post-war fetishization of national intelligence that Hanson argues was evident, for example, in Britain’s increasing preoccupation with IQ levels.728 More a criticism of Terran society than of Mary herself, however, these hegemonic sentiments indicate the explorers’ own imprisonment in propaganda’s confusing hermeneutics. Mary and her colleagues believe that ‘interference’ is allied with coloniality and ‘non-interference’ with morality. Yet, as we have seen, some incidents that they interpret as non- 727 Hanson, p. 93. 728 Hanson, p.83. 255 interference are morally questionable. Another example of this is the way that non-interference policy accommodates imperial control and violence in the case of the Epsies. To take this strategy as ‘one’s prime directive,’ Miller observes, is to undermine the ethic of care being professed because it assumes ‘that one’s interests are primarily separate from those of others’.729 Like the concept of telepathy itself, “interference” is riddled with paradox. As Haraway notes, ‘interference is static, noise, interruption in communication; and yet, interference, making contact, is the implicit condition of leaving’ what Mary calls ‘the nursery world’ on Earth.730 Inextricably linked to the explorers’ telepathic work, this term adopts multiple meanings so that such work, however problematic, is justified to continue. When Mary states that some Terrans take it for granted that explorers are too stable to ‘ever deviate’ or find interference a ‘temptation,’ she does show some recognition, as Haraway observes, that absolute adherence to ‘non-interference’ is impossible (9). However, rather than simply representing what Haraway terms the ‘tragicomic process of becoming a social subject webbed with others,’ this moment demonstrates Mary’s failure to recognise that the vague, binary terms of Terran morality are intensifying this impossibility.731 Explaining the contradictory ways in which these terms have been interpreted and applied, the explorers’ understanding of what constitutes interference is enmeshed in internalised imperial ideas in ways (and with consequences) that are more complex and morally dubious than they perceive. Mary and her colleagues are being manipulated by propaganda too. In addition to their confusion around interference, their increasing faith in the butterflies after establishing communication with them, highlights their vulnerability to suggestion despite their supposedly ‘stable’ explorer personalities (9). Françoise, who distrusts the butterflies and attempts to shield the caterpillars from them, is the only exception. She even warns her fellow Terran explorers 729 Miller, p.260. 730 Haraway, pp.181-182. 731 Haraway, p.181. 256 that the butterflies are controlling them, which prompts Mary to wonder: ‘was that true? Was I being unduly influenced by the butterflies – beyond the point where I could observe, critically, in detail?’ (125). Later, when the butterflies attempt to prove their narrative by introducing the explorers to an “undying” butterfly – ‘one who had escaped from the common doom’ – this appears to be the case (124). Gesturing towards the affective properties of telepathy (explored by Blackman) and the affective forms of manipulation that Lauren Berlant particularly attributes to western consumer culture, the butterflies radiate sensations of ‘complete and eternal happiness’ onto the explorers whilst in the presence of their “perfect” specimen (123). Forging an immersive connection with the Terrans, the butterflies’ use of telepathy represents propaganda that imperially-minded (and capitalist) nations used to control their citizens.732 It persuades its audience to feel content while concealing more divisive ideas and intentions. Declaring that the butterflies embody ‘cruelty and oppression’ Françoise is the only Terran to resist this manipulation, and it is her subsequent act of killing the “immortal” butterfly, proving her theory correct, that leads to her travel ban (125). In this episode especially, Mitchison warns her predominantly western audience to be wary of propagandic communications in their own environments.733 MOAS, as Mitchison’s literary communication, serves as an alternative discourse that encourages readers to critically assess information they are presented with whilst also highlighting, through Françoise’ punishment, the potential consequences of attempting to defy established propaganda and power structures. Anticipating Justin Rogers-Cooper’s 732 It produces the same manipulative, pleasurable affect that Lauren Berlant attributes to western consumer culture. I explore this idea in my thesis’ introduction. See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 733 This includes much mainstream sci-fi of the 1950s which not only perpetuated racial stereotypes and eugenic ideals according to W.D. de Kilgore, but was itself commandeered for propagandic purposes by NASA during the Cold War’s space race (W.D. de Kilgore, Astrofuturism: science, race, and visions of utopia in space (US: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) p.7). 257 assertion that ‘one of the true lessons of the Cold War’ is that ‘the regime one should fear most is one’s own,’ she stresses that the path to greater social equity is not easy or straightforward.734 Propagandic communication and gender MOAS’ use of telepathy, especially when considered alongside Mary’s first-person narration, invites discussion of how Cold War propaganda, and its utopia-dystopia narratives, impacted and influenced women. In the west, as epitomised by the archetypal image of the 1950s housewife, the predominant ideal ascribed to womanhood remained tethered to the roles of wife, domestic and mother. Representing another attempt to conceal hegemony, this conflated women with femininity in ways that, whilst presented as freeing and laudatory were, in reality, controlling and subordinating. As Miller observes, such essentialism sometimes seeps into Mary’s narrative despite her enjoyed working status. When the explorers find themselves ‘taking sides’ and experiencing emotional ‘tensions’ over the butterfly problem, for example, Mary claims the issue has only arisen because it is an all-female expedition (112). Mary considers ‘that this may not have happened if some men’ had been there (112). Essentialism also emerges when Mary states that, although anyone can pursue it, ‘communication is women’s work’ (8). Thus, upon first meeting the caterpillars, she explains ‘we felt great empathy and warmth towards the creatures partly because we were all women’ (95). As Miller asserts, this makes ‘the capacity for nurture and empathy...female, and not merely feminine’.735 By attaching this perspective to telepathy as an emotionally-attuned practice, Mary’s narrative gestures not only to the history of essentialist ideas surrounding emotion, but to how these were mapped on to early imaginings of telepathy. As Luckhurst explains in his discussion of 734 Justin Rogers-Cooper, ‘Rethinking Cold War Culture: Gender, Domesticity, and Labor on the Global Home Front,’ International Labor and Working Class History, 87 (2015), p.249. 735 Miller, p.263. 258 telepathy, the femininity attributed to sympathy and empathy became increasingly conflated with women in the nineteenth century.736 William Stead stated that ‘sex in woman is something which Nature has made more silent on the physical plane, in order that its sense may listen to whisperings on emotional and spiritual planes… this more silent woman-sense is in touch with some of Nature’s subtlest secrets’.737 In a similarly idealistic manner, thinkers including Bernard Hollander and John Ruskin complemented women’s nervous sympathetic capacity.738 Contrastingly, John Mitchell, Athena Vrettos and others argued that women’s “innate” sympathies could represent a dangerous form of emotional excess.739 Unsurprisingly, then, early associations between telepathy and emotional connection were entangled with these essentialist, gendered ideas. Spiritualists believed that women made better psychics because supernatural powers like telepathy were ‘a quantifiable extension to the sympathetic social instinct’.740 Demonstrating a ‘suspicious awe’ at menstruation, Stanley Hall even linked the adolescent woman’s predominance among ‘modern spirit mediums’ and ‘telepathic girls, like the Creery sisters’ to the psycho-physical changes of puberty.741 According to Miller, the presence of essentialism in MOAS is a disappointing endorsement of ideas that should not be given ‘affinity with modern feminist thought’.742 However, I maintain that we are meant to recognise Mary as a problematic and unreliable narrator, influenced by propaganda, whose views are certainly not synonymous with Mitchison. It is partly by employing a first-person narrator that Mitchison encourages the reader to look for inconsistencies in the belief system being presented. Warning that in spite of progress, society could slip back into these gendered traditions, Mitchison is celebrating traits 736 Luckhurst, p.214. 737 Ibid. 738 Luckhurst, p.216. 739 Luckhurst, p.216-217. 740 Luckhurst, p.218-219. 741 Luckhurst, p.219. 742 Miller, p.262. 259 such as empathy and sympathy that have been marginalised through feminization, but she does not solely align these traits with women. Not only does Vly demonstrate both empathy and sympathy in male form, for instance, but Peder is ‘extraordinarily sympathetic’ (42). Mitchison’s invasive depictions of telepathic contact clearly critique essentialism, particularly in terms of how it reduces women to mothering roles. This is clear when she describes Mary’s experiences with the grafts – living tissues that are physically and psychically connected to the bodies of volunteer subjects for scientific research. In the first experiment, the devastation Mary feels upon separation from her graft and the numb grief she experiences after its sudden death, represents the difficulty of an all-consuming, traditional mother role. As Lesley A. Hall suggests, the pleasure that Mary derives from the attached graft, as a representation of pregnancy, can even be read as the kind of reward that is offered for conformity to damaging ideological systems, leading women ‘further and further away from their previous selves’.743 During the second experiment, in which Mary gradually falls ‘under the complete control’ of her graft and narrowly avoids death as a result, the true extent of such damage is represented (167). Mary merges with the graft and loses her sense of self. Anticipated by the grief, pain and death that reproduction brings to the butterflies, this traumatic depiction of pregnancy and motherhood as invasion and potential destruction of the self, poses a direct challenge to western male fantasies ‘about a future of beautiful mothers working effortlessly with electric mixers to feed their Cold War kids’ (168).744 In one sense, this echoes contemporary criticisms directed towards the west by the USSR. In the famous 1959 Kitchen Debate, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev castigated US Vice President Richard Nixon for what he referred to as America’s ‘backward approach to women’s status.’745 As Helen Laville 743 Lesley A. Hall, Naomi Mitchison: A Profile of Her Life and Work (Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2007) p.127. 744 Rogers-Cooper, p.236. 745 Helen Laville, ‘Gender and Women's Rights in the Cold War’ in The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War ed. by Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) p.524. 260 writes, ‘the Soviet Union regarded domesticity, however technologically assisted, as a burden’ and ‘argued that the individual domestic appliances of American women were nothing less than the accoutrements of a gilded cage’.746 Promising state-run child-care, legal abortion and equal pay, the USSR’s alternative vision of womanhood ‘embodied communist values of collectivization, communal effort, and shared ownership’.747 Beneath these seemingly more progressive ideas, however, the Soviet Union, like the US, was more intent on using ideas of domesticity and its relationship with womanhood as a weaponised and propagandic measure of progress in the Cold War conflict, than on genuinely improving women’s lives.748 Mirroring the symbolic use of Britannia during Britain’s imperial age, male-constructed myths of women on both sides of the Iron Curtain were put forward as evidence of a national utopia and foreign dystopia.749 While both powers sought to present their own ideology in a utopian, caring light, the underlying attitude in each case was a hyper-masculinised drive for war and power that was ultimately detached from women’s sensory-emotional realities. While visiting the USSR in 1932, Mitchison discovered for herself, in advance of the Cold War, that her own initially utopian thoughts about Russia did not match reality.750 Like Woolf and other early twentieth-century feminists including Sylvia Pankhurst and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mitchison was drawn to what she perceived as Russian attempts to free women from traditional roles. She saw the Soviet Union as a potentially ‘socialist-feminist utopia that hitherto had existed only in imagination or as small-scale social experiments’.751 Once there, however, as Jenni Calder writes, she ‘caught glimpses 746 Laville, p.526. 747 Ibid. 748 Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 749 See my first chapter for a brief discussion of Britannia as a symbol for womanhood during Britain’s imperial age. 750 She travelled with a Fabian Society Group in an attempt to make peaceable connections. 751 Julia Chan, ‘The Brave New Worlds of Birth Control: Women’s Travel in Soviet Russia and Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned,’ Journal of Modern Literature, 42:2 (2019), p.45. 261 of the enormous human cost of making the system work’.752 Particularly startling was her visit to an abortion clinic where she witnessed the practice being performed, as was routine, without anaesthetic. In her diary, she describes the pain that women suffered during these procedures in excruciating detail and critiques this through a graphic depiction of abortion in We Have Been Warned (1935).753 Although she expressed in a letter to Edward Garnett after her trip that she was ‘getting increasingly red,’ these experiences taught Mitchison that the utopian claims of the USSR, especially around women, were to be interrogated as much as those within her home nation where both Mitchison and her husband were active members of the Labour Party.754 The characterisation of Mary, as a problematic narrator and frequent user of telepathy who is also an amalgam of Soviet and western thought, represents how the masculine binary underpinning Cold War propaganda, bled into the consciousness of women on both sides of the conflict.755 Suggesting that Mary’s essentialism and occasional colonial sentiment are products of an internalised hyper-masculine discourse similar to that fuelling the Cold War, Mary appears to perpetuate ideas of feminine weakness. Indeed, she considers Françoise’ care for the caterpillars to be ‘irrational’ (116). When Françoise kills the “immortal” butterfly, Mary suggests that such irrationality, rather than the other explorers’ dismissiveness towards Françoise, accounts for her desperate act of violence. Similarly, when Mary finds herself thinking ‘about Terra or Terran relationships’ which, she explains, is not normal while ‘on an 752 Jenni Calder, ‘Naomi Mitchison: Traveller and Storyteller,’ The Bottle Imp, 19, <https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/06/naomi-mitchison-traveller-and-storyteller/>, published June 2016, accessed 08/09/2021. 753 Calder, <https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/06/naomi-mitchison-traveller-and-storyteller/>, published June 2016, accessed 08/09/2021. 754 Calder, The Burning Glass: The Life of Naomi Mitchison (London: Virago Press, 1997). Mitchison joined the Labour Party in 1931, but had an ambivalent relationship with it (p.142). She was a representative for Kintyre East on the Argyll County Council from 1945 to 1966 (p.253). Her husband, Richard (known more commonly as Dick) was the Labour MP for Kettering from 1945-1964 (p.253-4 and p.342). 755 We might say that contrary to her idea of stable personality, then, Mary also represents how women might lose their sense of self in both regimes. 262 expedition,’ she reprimands herself (102-3). After the butterflies evoke a sense of grief for her deceased father via their emotional telepathic radiations, Mary contemplates that such a feeling is ‘most illogical’ because she is ‘proud and happy’ about her father’s work (119). Likewise, when she is prompted to think of her children and her mother who might be thinking ‘of her little child in a lonely and empty galaxy,’ she again states that she is being ‘irrational’ (120). Illustrating a continuation of gendered discourses concerning telepathy, these moments signify the presence of an ongoing sensorially and emotionally oppressive, masculine regime of modernity.756 Mitchison’s depiction of telepathy indicates that these older hegemonies still exist in the Cold War era. In the east and west, women as well as people of colour were conflated with notions of the foreign Other, particularly if seen to deviate from the national ideal.757 As Landon R.Y. Storrs explains, anti-communist sentiment in the west was often synonymous with sexism and anti-feminism during the Cold War.758 Anti-communists claimed ‘that communism—and the liberalism they viewed as a slippery slope to it—would erode men’s control of women’s sexuality and labor’.759 Mitchison’s text implies that the popular resurgence of interest in telepathy in the ‘50s reflects how ‘liminal and ambiguous aspects of gender and sexuality loomed large in public consciousness’ in ways that generated progressive narratives amongst liberals, and fear among conservative elites.760 Hyper-masculine discourses in the east and west that objectified women’s identities, such as those expressed during the Kitchen Debate, were a product of this fear and an example of how western anticommunism mirrored ‘the repressive 756 Much like that which intensified sensory hegemonies in the nineteenth century, as outlined in my thesis’ introduction. 757 Those with queer identities were also targeted in this way. See David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 758 Landon R.Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013). 759 Storrs, p.106. 760 Dumančić, p.193. 263 powers of elite Soviets’.761 In MOAS, Mary’s own internalised, masculine glorification of war is implied when she describes a scar on her colleague’s cheek as a ‘symbol of noble biological curiosity’ (107). She also describes a death that coincides with the explorer’s life of risk as ‘happy’ (99). This outlook not only reinforces Mary’s suppression of feminized familial feeling, but emphasises that the supposedly sympathetic and empathic roots of communication, are a mirage, including for Mary herself. Celebrating the caring approach of her career and even expressing pity for the butterflies’ lack of ‘maternal feelings,’ Mary ironically does not recognise that her own emotions are being restricted and manipulated (145).762 In gendered as well as elitist, colonial terms, her narration has been shaped by the surreptitiously intrusive contact of propagandic discourses, epitomised, in this text, by the telepathic. Yet, I close this chapter by stressing that these Cold War contexts do not cancel out the overall strikingly progressive and optimistic content of the novel. As Jane Donawerth observes, Mitchison does not leave her depiction of Mary, or communication itself, I add, at a ‘negative stage’.763 Throughout the process of writing her memoir, Mary is evaluating and re-evaluating her experiences in ways that begin to alter her thinking for the better. For one thing, she concedes that her essentialist views ‘may be out of date’ and articulates at least some doubt about present-day Terra when she states that: ‘the Epsies thought they were fine as they were, just as we ourselves do’ (9, 25). As the narrative draws to an end, she also begins to wonder whether the interference committed by Françoise ‘was really that bad’ (139). Going on to further question the non-interference policy, she contemplates: 761 Justin Rogers-Cooper, p.246. 762 Certainly, despite stating that explorers do not normally think of Earth or their loved ones whilst in space, the entire memoir, beginning with the lines, ‘I think about my friends and the fathers of my children. I think about my children’ (5), seems prompted by such thoughts in relation to professional life. In ‘A Conversation with an Improbable Future,’ Mitchison seems to reiterate such separation as problematic when her narrator (an explorer’s daughter) states: ‘it can of course be awkward for a really bonded pair if their home base times fail to synchronise at all. This happens rather too often for galactic well-being, or so some of us think’ (p.224). 763 Jane Donawerth, ‘Naomi Mitchison, Barbara Paul, and Octavia Butler: Questioning the Paradigm’ in Frankenstein's Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1997) p.34. This follows Donawerth’s own acknowledgement of Mary’s essentialism. 264 isn’t sometimes just observing and collecting information an interference – we were annoyed by it at first on Terra when other life forms viewed us… If there was no penalty, where would we stop? We Terrans who in the course of history have so often not stopped in time? (139). Where, Mary asks, does one draw the line, and how are linguistic and moral terms of interaction with others determined as a result? This is accompanied by a move away from eugenic attitudes when Mary begins to recognise Viola’s intellectual gifts, as granted by her haploid status. She transitions from wondering whether ‘it’ could be ‘happy’ or ‘loved’ – a gesture towards ideas of defectiveness – to exalting in Viola’s potential to make important scientific contributions (62). In these ways, Mary gains more credibility as a free-thinking, female subject through whom women’s embodiment, as Miller asserts, is presented as ‘the ally, not the enemy, of supposedly "mental" or "spiritual" phenomena such as thought, language, culture, and ethics’.764 An acknowledgement of the text’s dystopian undercurrent does not detract from the feminist erotics of telepathy in Mitchison’s sensory aesthetics. Rather, it adds another, strengthening layer to it as a critical mode of resistance. By combining utopia and dystopia, particularly through her depiction of the telepathic as a concept and metaphor already laden in numerous paradoxical combinations, Mitchison encourages her readers to see beyond the aggressive, oppositional dualisms of war to consider, in more open and realistic terms, how an embodied and truly empathetic form of communication might help to address even barely perceptible social inequities. Rejecting the racism and sexism often embedded in propagandic 764 Miller, p.256. 265 mainstream science fiction, the novel calls, as Haraway intimates, for epistemologies and ontologies that come from social and scientific connection rather than detachment.765 It promotes balance between objectivity and subjectivity; communality and individuality; and the feminine and masculine. Like the radial thought that Mary experiences, then, it advocates and performs a collapse of limiting wartime frameworks. However, exemplified by the communicative breakthrough that Françoise initially achieves with the caterpillars via dualisms such as ‘come – go; nice – nasty,’ it does so in a way that illustrates the importance of first acknowledging binary extremes in the process of creating new modes of thinking and understanding (93). Vindicating this principle, the more fluid and open ways of being, knowing and communicating that Mitchison champions, are only fully discovered in MOAS, through a dissection of opposites, as presented and symbolized by telepathic touch. These contrasting haptic ideas not only indicate Mitchison’s critical engagement with opposing social-sensory regimes of modernity but in their association with the extrasensory, they emphasise that resistance to the dominant regime (including through literary revision as the next chapter considers more explicitly) requires a willingness to first probe and then move beyond existing epistemological limits. With more emphasis on Mitchison’s personal experiences and career trajectory, the next chapter continues to explore how the extrasensory is employed to expose and resist the invasive, controlling touch of Cold War modernity. 765 Haraway, p.180. 266 Extrasensory Navigations: Solution Three (1973), Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) and a Radical Biography The problems facing a writer of S.F. are somewhat the same as those of a writer, either of historical fiction, or of stories about people in another culture, with another language. In the course of writing various books, I have had to consider all these rather similar problems of communication: how to make things readable – I hope attractively readable – in one’s own country or culture or historical epoch, without losing the feeling of somewhere else.766 The above excerpt from the foreword of Naomi Mitchison’s second science fiction novel, Solution Three (1973), reflects on the challenges of writing. For Mitchison, these challenges – inseparable from her desire to produce enduring, engaging works – remain ‘somewhat’ constant across genres. However, science fiction seems to specifically facilitate the recognition and articulation of this authorial difficulty. In addition to the context of Solution Three itself, Mitchison’s reference to communication problems recalls her first sci-fi novel, Memoirs of a Spacewoman, and aligns her own work with that of its protagonist. In discussing ‘S.F.’ Mitchison looks back on her foray into the genre and connects this to her earlier work. 767 Cohering with her belief that ‘to be a good scientist is to be a good historian,’ she highlights continuity between her science fiction and previous historical fiction.768 In her attention to other 766 Naomi Mitchison, ‘Foreword’ in Solution Three (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1995) p.5. 767 She had written several fairy tales, short stories and a vast amount of political and scientific non-fiction by this point in addition to historical fiction, but she was most well-known for historical narratives such as The Conquered (1923), The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) and The Bull Calves (1947). 768 This is stated in an earlier collaborative work on science and civilisation, An Outline for Boys and Girls and Their Parents (1932). Susan Squier ‘Conflicting Scientific Feminisms: Charlotte Haldane and Naomi Mitchison,’ Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science, (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press,1997) p.188. 267 cultures and languages, she also highlights consistency between these genres and her literary focus on Africa from the 1960s onwards. Thus, in her contemplation of writerly struggles, Mitchison presents science fiction not only as an important connection between the first and final periods of her lengthy and diverse writing career, but as a generic shift that has helped her to consider these connections herself. This chapter argues that continuities in Mitchison’s sci-fi and wider oeuvre can be traced, and better understood via consideration of the extrasensory. Since communication problems are extrasensory in MOAS, the Solution Three foreword sets up the extrasensory content of this second sci-fi novel and implies that the concept of the extrasensory itself can be employed to link Mitchison’s ‘various books.’ With comparative references to MOAS, the chapter begins with a reading of Solution Three. Published eleven years after MOAS, Solution Three similarly addresses contemporary forms of discrimination, depicting a human future that places moral improvement at its centre. However, Solution Three’s narrative is more explicit about past and present socio-political challenges. Unfolding via episodic, third person shifts in character focus, the novel describes life under the ruling council’s third attempt to solve over-population problems and food shortages following a nuclear war. This is a future of sensory deprivation – a situation made worse by the council’s “solution three” policies, which enforce human cloning and conditioned homosexuality to control population levels. Encouraging the suppression of certain emotions, perpetuating sensorial blandness, and generating new forms of social marginality, these policies are deeply flawed in concept and implementation, particularly, I posit, because they involve hypnosis. As Blackman explains, hypnosis like telepathy, has been imagined in antithetical ways as both a therapeutic and intrusive form of touch.769 Also investigated by the Society for 769 George Herbert Mead’s Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (1934) offers one example of how hypnosis was conceived in aggressive, invasive terms (Blackman, p.80). 268 Psychical Research (SPR) as an extrasensory concept, hypnotism is symbolically and sensorially akin with telepathy.770 Yet, the hypnotic’s interference in conscious will, and its detachment from the potential reciprocity of telepathy, often seems more sinister. In Solution Three, Mitchison captures the dualistic nature of hypnosis; the government uses it in an attempt to solve problems while unintentionally creating new ones. By leaning more explicitly into dystopian realms, however, the novel primarily focuses on hypnotic threat. I suggest that Solution Three issues an urgent warning regarding the weaponized and propagandic communications of ongoing Cold War culture. While Mitchison’s avoidance of the word ‘hypnosis’ represents the covert manipulation of such communications, this evasion does not come with the utopian veil that accompanies telepathy in MOAS. In Solution Three, although some characters believe in the utopian possibilities of their society, the reader is not placed under the same spell. The narrative’s extrasensory content emphasises a controlling form of contact that ensures national compliance and strives to influence international opinion. Continuing to address national inequalities, Mitchison’s engagement with the extrasensory in Solution Three voices concern about Cold War-era militarization of computer technology, warning against the pursuit of utopian technological visions within toxic masculine contexts. This concern reflects not only Cold War anxieties, but a revival of early twentieth-century human-versus-machine fears both in and around modernism. I argue that Mitchison’s novel offers an updated version of the technologically-mediated sensory crisis that Danius associates with the modernist movement. This suggests continuation of the oppressive social-sensory hierarchies that partly produced this crisis; even in its association with touch, hypnosis – an intersensory as well as extrasensory idea – points to hegemonic visual power in its 770 The modern theorisation of hypnosis dates back to the eighteenth-century work of Franz Mesmer, but became increasingly popular after members of the SPR, including Edmund Gurney, began to further investigate its potential. Gurney’s hypnosis research went on to inform Freud and other influential psychologists (Blackman, p.34). 269 affiliation with control via eye contact.771 Looking back to the early decades of the twentieth century whilst also scrutinizing the contemporary Cold War period, Solution Three not only responds to modernity’s ongoing sensory crisis through hypnotic tropes, as many modernists did, but aligns with Gabriel Tarde’s early twentieth-century theory of social conformity to depict modernity itself as a mechanizing, hypnotic force. Threatening diversity and creativity, Mitchison stresses, it is by incorporating the arts and humanities into political and social life more fully, that such forces can be countered. In making this argument I primarily bring more attention to the critically-neglected Solution Three. Like Isobel Murray and Sarah Lefanu, I emphasise that there are important, but so far unexplored aspects of the text beyond the existing scholarly focus on gender and sexuality.772 While I continue to emphasise the text’s feminist themes and motivations, I build upon Lefanu’s brief observation, that the novel articulates Mitchison’s ‘ambivalent feelings about science, technology and the nature of progress’.773 I consider relationships between artificial intelligence and the extrasensory to continue bringing 771 As Blackman’s analysis illustrates, this connection between hypnosis and the visual in addition to touch is particularly noted by scholars of film, as I mention later (Blackman, p.11, p.133). See part two of my thesis’ introduction for more on the relationship between post-Enlightenment social-sensory hierarchies and modernity’s oppressive and suppressive impact on the body. 772 In her 2011 introduction to Solution Three, Isobel Murray writes that the text’s ‘theme of feeding the world’ is equally significant, but rarely discussed (Murray, ‘Introduction’ in Solution Three by Naomi Mitchison (Glasgow: Kennedy & Boyd, 2011) p.vi). Similarly, Sarah Lefanu states that Solution Three’s complexity is reduced when it is solely read as a ‘sexual-identity role-reversal novel’ (Lefanu, ‘Difference and Sexual Politics in Naomi Mitchison’s Solution Three’ in Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference ed. by Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1994) p.165). Scholars who have written on gender and sexuality in Solution Three include Susan M. Squier, Anna McFarlane and Sarah Shaw. Examining how the clones are carried and birthed by women volunteers before being permanently separated from them, Squier argues that the novel asks us to consider what the costs of new reproductive models are to women, regardless of whether these are well-intentioned or not (Squier, ‘Afterword’ in Solution Three (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1995) pp.161-182). Quoting Sarah Lefanu, Anna McFarlane emphasises that Solution Three has ‘much in common with a feminist, and predominantly American, boom in science fiction at this time because of the way it foregrounds sexual politics: the novel’s characters represent a range of sexualities’ (Anna McFarlane, ‘“Becoming Acquainted with All That Pain”: Nursing as Activism in Naomi Mitchison’s Science Fiction,’ Literature and Medicine, 37:2 (2019) pp.291-2). For this reason, too, Shaw’s essay on erotics draws upon Solution Three (albeit, briefly) as well as MOAS to demonstrate that Mitchison presents ‘women's sexuality and pleasure derived from sexual experiences’ as ‘integral to women's subjectivity’ (Shaw, ‘Monstrous Sex: The Erotic in Naomi Mitchison's Science Fiction’ in Michigan Feminist Studies (MI: M Publishing) 16 (2002) < https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mfsfront;c=mfs;c=mfsfront;idno=ark5583.0016.006;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mfsg>, accessed 08/09/2021.) 773Lefanu, p.165. 270 Cold War studies together with sensory studies. I also put Danius’ work on modernism and the senses in touch with women’s writing, reiterating my thesis’ kinship with DeMaagd’s gender-based intervention in Danius’ work. Furthermore, my analysis of the extrasensory intervenes in both DeMaagd’s and Danius’ focus on quotidian sensory concepts. The second part of the chapter argues that Mitchison’s multifaceted life and work – often described as contradictory – bears symbolic kinship with the extrasensory. As the reference to problematic communication in Solution Three’s foreword encourages, the extrasensory becomes a helpful metaphor for exploring Mitchison's varying influences on a broader, biographical scale. Mitchison embraces extrasensory multiplicity in MOAS, I argue, not only to reflect on these influences herself, but to consider where her writing and activism will take her next. Mitchison’s retrospective glance in MOAS anticipates Solution Three, her own non-fictional memoirs and her work both in and about Africa. Bound up with the text’s generic subversion as a futuristic memoir that looks forward and back, there are deeply personal as well as socio-political dimensions to Mitchison’s portrayal of telepathic communication. To elaborate on this, I argue that MOAS is a revision of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Looking to her own literary past and the wider culture she was responding and contributing to, Mitchison expands Woolf’s 1928 feminist vision. However, reflecting critically on her own imperial heritage, she challenges Woolf’s approach to race. This informs her subsequent attempts to support people of colour in her writing and socio-political engagement. The sensorially-expansive extrasensory becomes a metaphor for Mitchison’s growing wish to connect with other cultures. Forming a communicative bridge between her earlier and later works within her mid-century sci-fi, it enables Mitchison and her audience to navigate her complex work, life and apparent “contradictions” in the more cohesive and generically flexible terms promoted by Solution Three’s foreword. In showing this, I build on recuperative scholarship, especially by Jenni Calder and Murray, who have sought to cement Mitchison and 271 her radicality more holistically within literary studies. Like Nickianne Moody, Carla Sassi and Ashley Maher, I stress that while MOAS is feminist science fiction, it is also a subversive take on life-writing with historical elements – a generic blurring that continues in Solution Three’s incorporation of history, satire, and multicultural themes. Attaching the extrasensory to such generic subversion, I reiterate Chapter Five’s assertion that the extrasensory is relevant beyond science fiction.774 This chapter emphasises that for Mitchison, as for Naylor, revising early twentieth-century literature, via the sensory, both constitutes and generates vital feminist work. The Hypnotic Modernity of Solution Three Sensory deprivation and emotional regulation Like MOAS, Solution Three depicts a future Earth recovering from a violent past. In this text, however, the ongoing consequences of such history are immediately clear. Although boasting improved race and gender equality, this world does not present itself in utopian terms because, as Gavin Miller observes, it has obviously been ravaged by nuclear war.775 Fuelled by ‘overpopulation getting worse. Poor countries getting poorer,’ ‘race war and national war,’ the ‘terrible crisis of aggression’ in Earth’s past has not only led to ‘genetically jumbled’ seasons that produce ‘strange’ and often-contaminated ‘combinations of fruits and flowers’ but has destroyed much of Earth’s arable and inhabitable land (50, 7, 26).776 Reflecting the growth of public fear and opposition surrounding Weapons of Mass Destruction during the 1970s, Mitchison’s novel provides a stark warning about the potentially severe socio-cultural and 774 Both sections of this chapter support Luckhurst’s suggestion that modernist studies, for example, would benefit from more rigorous engagement with telepathy (Luckhurst, pp.256-263). 775 Miller, ‘Different Strokes, Smokes, for Different Folks: Naomi Mitchison’s Solution Three,’ The Bottle Imp, 19 (2016) < https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/06/different-strokes-smokes-for-different-folks-naomi-mitchisons-solution-three/ >, accessed 08/09/21. 776 Naomi Mitchison, Solution Three (Glasgow: Kennedy & Boyd, 2011). 272 environmental devastation of war in the nuclear age. Besieged by shortages of food and residential space, humans have had to accept a significant, long-term depreciation of living standards, characterised by sensory deprivation and restriction. As well as limited gustatory variety among available foodstuffs, citizens endure cramped living conditions, residing in one-room apartments no more than ‘seven paces by six’ in ‘new,’ but wholly pragmatic and bland ‘mega-cities’ (24, 9). The ‘viewing screen’ – a multi-sensory television and communication device that can display ‘all the world’ in each apartment – has been created to compensate for lack of space and stimulation but falls short with its ‘unsatisfactory’ ‘scent programme’ (20). The public accept these circumstances not only through lack of choice following the war, but because they are crucial to the council’s recovery plan. The small living quarters are designed to dispel aggression by ‘equalizing the space’ (9). They are material sacrifices ‘uncontaminated by the old values’ and therefore deemed necessary to accommodate “Solution Three” – the focal point of the government’s social and moral regeneration strategy (9). Demonstrating Mitchison’s awareness of contemporary experiments in artificial fertilization, DNA replication and theories of behavioural psychology, this third post-nuclear attempt to bring food supply and population levels under control revolves around genetic engineering and social conditioning overseen by the council. Plants are genetically modified to ensure they are plentiful and safe for consumption, and cloning has become the most common form of reproduction.777 Created from the genetic material of ‘Her’ and ‘Him’ – a missionary doctor and a civil rights activist who served as moral beacons during the war – the clones represent an effort to lower birth rates, and to produce a future human race that will be non-violent (7). They 777 The double helix was discovered in 1958 and DNA was first created in a test tube in 1962. In the 1970s, research into genetically modified food, cloning (which was first considered in 1885) and In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) gained ground. Mitchison’s Solution Three demonstrates that she was far ahead of her time in understanding these processes and their potential impact. 273 are expected to become an ideal ruling class whose “goodness” is crafted not just through genome replication, but a conditioning process known as ‘the strengthening’ (35). Complementing this, wider society has been conditioned into accepting that ‘the old inter-sex pattern…had always led to violence and pain’ (16). The idea that romantic relationships should be ‘man to man and woman to woman’ is central to the values of peace and care constituting the government’s ethical ‘Code’ (16, 13). Highlighting the importance of the ‘popu-policy,’ the only larger and more aesthetically interesting spaces in the mega-cities are those central to solution three’s reproductive aims (102). As one councillor, Jussie, recognises, the council building that the clones are expected to take over is ‘a much pleasanter place’ than the ‘offices or laboratories or…living spaces’ because it contains ‘real flowers,’ ‘real fire’ and ‘real water, even drinkable’ (10-11). Similarly, the only green space – a garden full of flowers and ‘charming birds’ – is reserved exclusively for the enjoyment of clone children and their surrogate mothers (31). Containing ‘plenty of amusements’ including areas for music and a ‘splendid central building, dating back…to the almost remote past, incorporating… a cathedral in which sounds, smells, everything, was authentic,’ this place is designed to ensure healthy clone development during gestation and postpartum (31). The young clones are provided with space to play while the ‘clone mums,’ overseen by Jussie, experience a low-stress environment during pregnancy where lovers can engage in sexual ‘pretty play’ without ‘doing any harm’ to the clone foetuses (25, 26, 27). Even this space is punctuated by lack. When Jussie enters the garden, her awareness of sensorial deprivation elsewhere is heightened. It prompts her not only to acknowledge that ‘the air in the living space’ does ‘not please nostrils or lungs as well’ as the garden air, but that it seems ‘to be a human body-need to have, sometimes, earth underfoot and sky overhead’ (25, 26). Being in the garden causes Lilac, one of the clone mums, to wonder whether genetically engineered food will ever become ‘more special’ (61). When exposed to authentic glimpses of 274 pre-nuclear war environments, she, too, dwells on the contrasting sensorial dullness of everyday life. As much as anywhere else, the garden and the council building are reminders of what has been lost. Since these spaces have been specifically created for solution three, they illuminate the deficiency of the council’s policies (2). Solution three, whilst seemingly trying to tackle societal inequalities, generates new divisions. The genetic basis of the ‘popu-policy’ is undeniably eugenic in its elitist elevation of the clones (102). Furthermore, the normalization of same-sex relationships has created new forms of disgust between the sexes. While Jussie refers to male sex organs as ‘dreadful,’ another councillor, Ric, not only likens women’s bodies to ‘half decayed meat’ but acknowledges in his internal monologue that he feels ‘a revulsion against the other sex’ despite knowing this is ‘wrong’ (14, 17, 18). The attitudes and effects of prejudice are present in how heterosexuality has been constructed as Other. Widely considered to be ‘deviant,’ though not illegal, heterosexuality – particularly prevalent amongst the academic ‘professorials’ – is described as ‘disordered,’ ‘unpleasant’ and ‘difficult to understand’ in an early conversation between Ric and Jussie (56, 14). This feeling towards the professorials is something ‘they all [know]’ (13). Stig (another councillor) states that the professorials ‘smell bad’; heterosexuality is considered part of the unpleasant sensory environment that humans now endure.778 In these moments, the text gestures towards raced and gendered sensory stereotypes discussed by scholars such as Andrew Kettler and Classen.779 The odours said to emanate from non-white bodies in various post-Enlightenment discourses, are here briefly mapped onto Mitchison’s portrayal of discrimination concerning sexuality. Consequently, in Solution Three’s society, heterosexual couples and naturally-produced children are a monitored concern for the council. Indicating visual regulation that recalls the hierarchies from which racist and sexist sensory stereotypes 778 This is also implied by Ric’s ‘half decayed meat’ comment about women’s bodies (13). 779 See my thesis’ introduction for more detail about sensory studies work on sensory stereotypes. 275 emerge, non-clone children are ‘carefully watched’ (17).780 Councillors discuss ‘whether the behaviour of Professorials ought to be allowed to continue’ (13). The detrimental impact of this is conveyed through Mitchison’s depiction of professorial couple, Miryam and Carlo, who have two non-clone children. Constantly trying to escape the guilt imposed on them by colleagues’ ‘eyes and tongues,’ they are made to feel uncomfortable about their supposedly ‘painful and embarrassing’ lifestyle (40, 22). In conversation with Jussie, Miryam feels compelled to refer to Carlo as ‘my colleague’ instead of ‘my husband’ (44). Although ‘inter-sex’ couples are told the council isn’t there ‘to scare’ them, the elusive ‘black marks’ that Jussie refers to suggest otherwise (16, 22, 47). After unsuccessfully attempting to convince Miryam and Carlo to follow a hormone-based ‘normalizing’ process and give up their children, Jussie decides not to issue a black mark penalty, but only because she appreciates Miryam’s ‘excellent work’ on plant virology (45, 47). It is implied that defying the council usually carries professional risk for heterosexual people. We learn that heterosexual professorial couples are ‘always missing out when bigger living spaces [are] allocated’ (40). This, too, gestures towards racial discrimination since in both post-war Britain and America, people of colour were unable to access the housing benefits available to their white counterparts.781 Revelling in ‘the satirical’ and simultaneously revisionary ‘opportunities offered by a world turned upside down’ to give ‘straights a fictional taste of their own medicine,’ Mitchison’s text indicates support for the civil rights movement as well as the 1970 780 See the second section of my thesis’ introduction on sensory hierarchies and their relationship to sensory stereotypes. 781 In relation to Britain, see, for instance: Martin MacEwan, Housing, Race and Law: The British Experience (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002); and Sidney Jacobs, ‘Race, empire and the welfare state: council housing and racism,’ Critical Social Policy, 5:13 (1985) 6-28. In relation to America, see scholarship on race, redlining and urban planning such as: Rebecca K. Markiel’s After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021); Rothstein, Richard, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017); and Manning Thomas, June and Marsha Ritzdorf, Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows (US: Sage, 1997). 276 establishment of the UK Gay Liberation Front.782 Concurrently, Mitchison continues MOAS’ critique of Cold War propagandic narratives, especially regarding utopian experience in the west, and how this manipulated emotions alongside sensory experience. Much like Mary’s suppressed maternal instinct in MOAS, Miryam’s bond with her children is considered odd in its deviation from the code. So is Lilac’s emotional attachment to the clone she has birthed; as Jussie reminds Lilac, the clones, are only ‘on loan’ to the mums (36). The need to prevent violence, aided by the widespread, legal use of cannabis – ‘the aggression dispeller’ – indicates another form of emotional control since it has become synonymous with a tyrannical attempt to oust all anger (88). This homogenizing suppression is aggressive in its own way. Creating a literal and figurative smokescreen, the cannabis-use further numbs the population whilst convincing the majority that they are more content than they truly are. Like communication in MOAS, it gestures towards propagandic attempts to manipulate thought and feeling in ways that cover up or simply ignore national issues. Reinforcing the utopia/dystopia paradigm that much Cold War propaganda operated on in its characterisation of national and international oppositions, anti-aggression in the west is even used to emphasise national moral superiority in its persuasive methods. We learn that other parts of the world including areas of Africa, South America, and Asia, have not yet fully accepted the popu-policy or have resorted to violent means of implementation. The council find this deeply disturbing and are especially concerned about ‘dreadful inequalities’ and violence in Ulan Bator where conformity strategies such as ‘the whipping of deviants by non-deviants’ and ‘occasional public castrations’ have occurred (102). Suggesting rape or murder, ‘deviant women’ who are not recognised as heterosexual ‘until late pregnancy,’ have also been 782 Miller, < https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/06/different-strokes-smokes-for-different-folks-naomi-mitchisons-solution-three/ >, accessed 08/09/2021. The role reversal in this novel is itself a kind of revisionary narrative in its nuanced centralisation of the racial and sexual Other. 277 punished with ‘the nastiest kind of aggression’ (102). Consequently, the council supervises such areas, sending clones and other political envoys to them to cultivate peace and order. Yet, as Helen Merrick summarizes, ‘the difficulties of implementing the Code in regions such as Africa and the Amazon suggest that to enforce a (first world) global solution or Utopian ideal on other societies and races is still a colonial and imperialist act’.783 When Jussie’s partner, Elissa, is killed in Ulan Bator, one of the clones, Anni, reports that although the ‘disturbance’ was contained with ‘minimal force,’ the rebels had ‘dug up’ ‘old words like Imperialism’ during their protest (85). Even if the goal is peace, this is still an attempt to control foreign nations and it is still experienced as oppression. Undermining the aims of ‘the Code,’ the world of Solution Three, as LeFanu observes, appears to be ‘a well-intentioned utopia’ that has become ‘a dystopia through the denial of difference’.784 Exemplified by the council’s refusal to give the professorials proper ‘thinking conditions,’ post-war policies are rooted in a self-destructive logic. Miryam’s fear that solution three may be eliminating genes with ‘values hidden in them’ epitomises this destruction (47, 138). As Miller asserts, the novel connects biological and cultural diversity by advocating biodiversity in ways that warn against ‘socio-cultural homogeneity’.785 This, as Susan Squier observes, looks back critically on fascism and the eugenic ideas propelling it in the 1930s.786 However, as I have started to demonstrate, Mitchison also underscores the continuation of this homogenizing modernity in the 1970s Cold War era through her exploration of sensory and emotional restriction. With this foundation 783 Helen Merrick, ‘A thought Experiment: Solution Three, by Naomi Mitchison’ in Xeno Fiction: More Best of Science Fiction, A Review of Speculative Fiction ed. by Damien Broderick and Van Iken (US: Wildside Press, 2013) p.66. 784 Lefanu, p.163. 785 Miller, < https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/06/different-strokes-smokes-for-different-folks-naomi-mitchisons-solution-three/ >, accessed 08/09/2021. 786 Susan M. Squier, ‘Afterword’ in Solution Three (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1995) p.163. The novel’s title is possibly a reference to “The Final Solution.” 278 established, I now turn to the novel’s extrasensory content to examine the technological aspects of Mitchison’s contemporary critique and its historical investments. Extrasensory control and computers In Solution Three, the suppressive and implicitly aggressive strategies that the council use to implement the Code are aligned with the mental touch and glaring eye of hypnosis. The conditioning process known as the “strengthening,” which exposes the clones to the traumatic experiences of ‘Her’ and ‘Him,’ seems to involve hypnosis because the clones respond in an identical, evasive way when it is subsequently mentioned. After one clone, Bobbi, simply states, ‘it’s over’ in response to Ric’s questioning on the subject, Ric wonders why ‘they all say that’ (77). Since the clones do not have identical thoughts on other subjects and are able to discuss other violent events, this predictable response, lacking variation, suggests motor automatism. Described by F.W.H Myers as ‘messages written’ or ‘words uttered without intention,’ motor automatism explained the general behaviours and communications of those believed to be under hypnosis, enacted ‘without the initiation, and generally without the concurrence, of conscious thought’.787 Early cultural depictions of hypnosis often present the hypnotist figure in villainous terms, as a kind of puppet-master. The first and perhaps most infamous literary example of such a figure is Svengali in George du Maurier’s serialised Victorian gothic novel, Trilby (1884). In the modernist period, as Stefan Andriopoulos demonstrates, this trope became increasingly prominent in cinema, which, according to film 787 <https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/frederic-wh-myers#Telepathy_Automatic_Writing_Hypnotism>, accessed 08/09/2021. 279 theorists such as Pasi Valiaho, can itself be perceived as ‘a hypnotic medium’ capable of leaving audiences ‘spellbound’.788 Robert Wiene’s expressionist masterpiece, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), for example, is ‘centered on a showman and hypnotist who forces a somnambulist to submit to his will’ and ‘commit several murders’.789 Informed by the nineteenth-century medical debate concerning crime and hypnosis, contributed to by Hippolyte Bernheim, Jean Martin Charcot, Hugo Munsterburg and Boris Sidis, who argued ‘that certain techniques could produce a state of hypnotic suggestibility likened to somnambulism,’ Dr Caligari is one of many modernist films to use hypnosis in ways that place possession at the centre of modernity’s cultural history.790 Whilst also seeming to revise the dystopia of Huxley’s Brave New World (and therefore its titular Shakespearean allusion) in feminist contexts, Mitchison invokes this tradition in Solution Three.791 Although law-makers rather than law-breakers, the government who oversee hypnotic processes and surveillance become affiliated, at times, with the sinister hypnotist figure in modernist culture. Another process that illuminates this is ‘the persuasion’ (89). Following the violence that results in Elissa’s death, we see this process in action when the council negotiate ‘over the video screens’ with their eastern counterparts (89). At first, as readers, we understand this communication as a debate during which the participants find ‘the 788 Stefan Andriopoulos, Possessed: hypnotic crimes, corporate fiction, and the invention of cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Blackman, p.71. 789 Andriopoulos, p.92. 790 Blackman, p.89. Other hypnotic crime films of this era include The Criminal Hypnotist (1909, dir. D. W. Griffith), Svengali (1914, dir. Jacob Fleck) – the film adaption of Trilby, Spellbound (1916, dir. Harry Harvey), Die Augen der Mumie (The eyes of the mummy [1918, dir. Ernst Lubitsch]), Hypnose (Hypnosis [1919]), and Sklaven fremden Willens (Slaves of a foreign will [1920]) (Andriopoulos, p.92). After visiting France four times between 1885 and 1887 to observe Charcot’s demonstrations of hypnosis, Myers became convinced that the phenomenon would be a powerful tool for experimental psychology and studies of the supernatural. Edmund Gurney was with him on two of these occasions (Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalities and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) pp.171-82). 791 In Huxley’s Brave New World, hostile, propagandic hypnosis appears in the form of “hypnopaedia” – a process of thought manipulation that occurs during sleep. Mitchison was friends with Huxley and would have been aware of his novel; her references to Shakespeare in Solution Three, as mentioned in my thesis’ introduction, might be understood as her own feminist re-working of both Shakespeare himself and Huxley’s use of him. 280 arguments…often coming back to almost the same point’ (89). However, this idea is defamiliarized when the narrative goes on to state that: a few of the Council found themselves with other thoughts coming in but knew this must not happen. Patience and concentration were essential. To let nothing else invade the mind while the persuasion was taking place (89). During this repetitive process, Jussie realises that she must ‘not allow herself’ to think of Elissa because ‘in this context, it would have been interference’ (87). Taking on psychical associations, the persuasion seems to require collective cognitive focus and visual contact. Since Jussie is so attentive to what she can and can’t ‘imagine,’ it also appears to involve the projection of mental images (87). The persuasion gestures not only to the modernist connection between hypnosis and cinema, but towards a dual extrasensory form that Myers theorised as telepathic hypnosis in 1886.792 Given that the council are endeavouring to persuade the negotiators to adhere more closely to the Code, this combination of mind-reading and suggestion, like Myers’ initial vision of it, is presented as a path to moral and social progress.793 Yet, the imperialistic context to this interaction reiterates a sinister undercurrent. This is not an evenly matched debate, but a display of what the council perceives as their right to unilaterally impose conformity on the foreign Other; it is a hypnotic, figuratively tactile process that indicates affinity with the “imperial male gaze”.794 Cohering with cultural portrayals of hypnosis and telepathy in the context of the First and Second World Wars, according to Blackman, Solution Three, like MOAS, presents ‘fears and anxieties…about being governed by ‘foreign powers’ via the extrasensory.795 Mitchison 792 Frederic Myers, ‘On telepathic hypnotism, and its relation to other forms of hypnotic suggestion,’ PSPR, 4 (1886). 793 It deceptively appears utopian like the telepathy in MOAS. 794 See chapters one and two for my theorisation and discussion of the “imperial male gaze” and its relationship to visual supremacy in social-sensory hierarchies. 795 Blackman, p.10. 281 also continues to stress subtle threats enshrined in the regimes of her predominantly western audience; like the strengthening, the invasive, hypnotic contact presented by the persuasion is used on a national level too. It is the ‘propaganda’ that Miryam suspects society is predicated on (134). In the novel’s opening pages, the narrator explains that ‘persuasion was…an expert business…applied both subliminally and overtly through the many media’ (7). The subliminal nature of such messaging points to hypnotic suggestion. Reflecting the need for clone mum volunteers, women are the primary targets of these methods. Jussie contemplates that it is ‘essential’ to ‘get at the females’ and later puts this into practice when she intervenes in Lilac’s mounting objection to the strengthening (23). Having recognised the ‘cruelty’ of the process, Lilac attempts to prevent her clone, ‘Ninety,’ from being exposed to it, only to consequently find herself being questioned and hypnotically manipulated by Jussie (62). Knowing Lilac has lied about Ninety’s progress to keep him for longer than allowed, Jussie approaches her in the garden and asks why she wants Ninety ‘to miss being one of the future’ (94). As she accepts the cannabis offered to her, Lilac realises that this is ‘the kind of tricking thing’ councillors always say (94). Nevertheless, as Jussie rambles about the prestige of ‘sheltering Him and Her’ in the body and then returning ‘the loan,’ Lilac becomes aware that she is: being lulled, not by the cannabis which barely affected her, but by the words, the overtones, all she had agreed on so joyfully and been made happy by in the first months of her pregnancy. She began to mutter about it, unwilling to explain and yet knowing she must. And Jussie listened (94). 282 As Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou notes, Lilac is ‘quickly and easily benumbed with the help of aggression dispellers’.796 Considering Lilac’s subsequent romantic and professional involvement with Jussie, Miller expands on this to conclude that: ‘stroking and smoking, and the offer of a job by Jussie…make Lilac forget her Ninety’.797 Notably, neither critic elaborates on the hypnotic nature or impact of Jussie’s lulling words. More so than any other factor, these force Lilac back into a conforming mindset whilst affirming Jussie’s affiliation, at least in this moment, with the ‘tricking’ and powerful hypnotist figure (94). The fact that Lilac begins muttering against her will by the end of Jussie’s monologue is another example of motor automatism. Like telepathy in MOAS, these implicit manifestations of hypnosis warn against the threat of misinformation, especially during wartime, from domestic and foreign sources.798 While reiterating the particularly detrimental impact these had on marginalised groups within powerful nations, Mitchison’s use of the extrasensory again indicates continuity between how threat is imagined in this era and the early twentieth century. In addition to Solution Three, texts such as Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate (1959) and Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972), returned to the ideas of dangerous and criminal hypnosis in modernist literature and film. The Cold War years also saw the revival of criminal hypnotist Dr Mabuse – a character originally created by German novelist Norbert Jacques and made famous in the modernist period by two Fritz Lang films, Dr Mabuse the Gambler (1922) and The Testament 796 Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, ‘“None of Woman Born”: Colonizing the Womb from Frankenstein’s Mother to Naomi Mitchison’s Clone Mums,’ in Biotechnological and Medical Themes in Science Fiction, ed. by Domna Pastourmatzi (Thessaloniki, Greece: University Studio Press, 2002), p.215. 797 Miller, < https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/06/different-strokes-smokes-for-different-folks-naomi-mitchisons-solution-three/ >, accessed 08/09/2021. 798 Thus, similar examples of semantic distortion, as indicators of propagandic manipulation, emerge in both texts. As in MOAS, ‘interference’ is one such example, becoming an understated catch-all term for unprofessional or disloyal conduct used to deter political dissent such as when Jussie reminds herself not to let her thoughts stray to Elissa when the persuasion takes place. Furthermore, familiar words such as ‘persuasion’ and ‘strengthening’ are made unfamiliar in their hypnotic usage; they conceal, euphemistically, more sinister processes. Like Jussie’s words, they are lulling because they generate a false sense of security. Even the idea of ‘caring’ is used in this way. When Jussie acknowledges that ‘deep caring alters people,’ for instance, and that deviants must be cared for ‘even more’ than most, the concept of care is aligned with manipulation (57). 283 of Dr Mabuse (1933). In 1960, the character reappeared in The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960), also directed by Lang.799 Like telepathy in MOAS, this gestures towards the weaponization of hypnosis during the Cold War. It, too, was investigated by both the Soviets and the west as potentially both a threatening and helpful espionage tool.800 Mitchison highlights this along with the Cold War’s covert nature and its continuation of past aggressions when Lilac considers how despite knowing the violent world of Her and Him is over, it feels like ‘the same thing,’ even the ‘police state,’ is ‘still happening, but in a different way’ (95). The computers aid the Council’s hypnotic policies and even have their own extrasensory ‘foreseeing’ powers (89, 89, 85).801 Relied upon for ‘essential statistics’ and connected to the video-screens used for the persuasion, the computers emphasise western power, particularly in their connection with the extrasensory. Solution Three’s portrayal of the extrasensory therefore draws attention to the militarization of computer technology during the Cold War conflict. This had been accelerating since the 1950s. From the Korean War onwards, the US had used computers in the air force and navy to track enemy shells, test missiles, improve naval gun accuracy and even fly aircraft without pilots.802 The Soviet Union also sought to use computer technology in these ways but were ‘at least four years behind the Free World in the speed of operation of input/output equipment and at least three years behind in 799 Mitchison is perhaps subverting and revising the fact that the “Doctor” figure is often the criminal hypnotist (as in Mabuse and Caligari) by making the academics in her text the most obvious victims of Solution Three’s hypnotised society. I cannot find any evidence to confirm whether Mitchison watched these films. Unfortunately, I have not been able to explore Mitchison’s archives yet but this is something I would like to check when I do so in future. 800 See Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis (New York: Little Brown, 2017); and https://www.wired.com/2010/12/cia-hypnosis/. For how scholars were thinking about extrasensory weaponization in relation to the Cold War as it unfolded on both sides see Martin Ebon, Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion? (NYC: McGraw-Hill, 1983). 801 It is not clear whether this is meant literally or figuratively, but the language heightens the computers’ sense of power and, if figurative, exemplifies the characters’ veneration of their abilities. 802 Frank Cain, ‘Computers and the Cold War: United States Restrictions on the Export of Computers to the Soviet Union and Communist China,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 4:1 (2005), p.135. 284 the total storage size and average access time of data handling’ when the 1960s commenced.803 This gap was exacerbated in 1974 – just one year after Solution Three’s publication – when the US intensified an existing ‘embargo on the export to the east of all electronic computers’ to maintain ‘strategic advantage’.804 In Mitchison’s novel, the division presented between western mega-cities and Ulan Bator – named after Outer Mongolia’s capital city, which was allied with the Soviet Union during the Cold War – indicates this context. So does Miryam’s acknowledgement that living spaces in Ulan Bator are the ‘Moscow-type’ (69). The USSR’s technological lag is specifically highlighted when Mitchison writes that ‘collaborating with computers was a matter of practice’ that those in the east ‘had not had’ (89). Since the council use the computers to store memories and remove “undesirable” human emotions, these machines are aligned not just with hypnotic process, but its sensorially and emotionally suppressive effects. In one scene, Ric assures Stig he will ‘feed in’ his ‘worry to a constructed programme’ on his ‘highly sensitized’ computer (55). He is thankful, he articulates later, that the computers can ‘take away the passion that hinders us’ (115). While in one sense Ric’s relief seems reminiscent of therapeutic hypnosis, the fact he feels ‘unworthy’ of his computer, despite being its creator, suggests he is ashamed of his emotions (111). Given that he similarly feels ‘unworthy’ of Bobbi, a clone whom he has an unrequited attraction to, this shame goes beyond regretting his disdain for women (108). Ric seems to wish that he himself was more machine-like. The repeated use of ‘unworthy’ not only suggests that the computer has an elite status, paralleling the clones, but that such perceived elitism is rooted in the mechanical. The clones, as engineered subjects, are viewed in similarly machine-like terms – exemplified by motor automatism and the clones’ dehumanising identification numbers, 803 ‘Memorandum from United States Delegation Concerning Embargo of Electronic Computers (Analog and Digital)’, 20 November 1959, quoted in Cain, p.136. 804 Cain, p.137. Such embargoes on technology exports to the USSR were in place from 1949-1994. However, the restriction specifically on computers was reviewed and intensified in 1974. See ‘National Security Decision Memorandum,’ March 14 1974, < https://irp.fas.org/offdocs/nsdm-nixon/nsdm_247.pdf>, accessed 12/08/23. 285 which are only replaced with names after conditioning. Linking hypnotism and its suppressions, the computers indicate that modernity itself in Solution Three, is a mechanized and mechanizing, hypnotic force. Failing to recognise that he is already becoming more mechanical, Ric is being absorbed by this force; he is both compliant to and an advocate for elite and eugenic homogeneity. This weakens the affiliation between the council and the criminal, hypnotist figure.805 Ric, as a councillor, is a puppet too. Like the explorers in MOAS, the council, even in their own elite status, are under a propagandic spell, symbolised by extrasensory touch. While the clone mums, as Lilac acknowledges, are ‘being fed into a machine, just like people used to be,’ the councillors as the architects of this hypnotic, social machine, are also being devoured by it (32). The similarity between Lilac’s gustatory comment and Ric’s compulsion to ‘feed’ his emotions to the machine exemplifies this. So does the council’s intention to relinquish power to the clones and computers: this oppressive, modern hypnosis disempowers those in authority as well as the marginalised in its mechanical approach to bodily and emotional experience (55). In this way, Mitchison presents a Cold War version of what Danius refers to as modernism’s technologically-mediated crisis of identity.806 As Danius argues of modernists and DeMaagd of female modernists, Mitchison engages with the sensory and technology to highlight the dehumanising impact of modernity’s oppressive rationale. Anticipating Mignolo’s theorisation of modernity’s ‘darker side’ and reviving modernist uses of hypnosis to explore the ‘problem of personality,’ her work reiterates Simmel’s early twentieth-century concerns about the sensory numbing and emotional detachment that might result from too much contact between 805 The ambiguity surrounding whether the council are behaving morally or not may reflect Mitchison’s own ambivalence over Mass Observation during the Second World War. She was an observer during this surveillance scheme, and her jottings became Among You Taking Notes (1985). See Megan Faragher, ‘Snoop-women with Notebooks: Naomi Mitchison, Mass Observation, and the Gender of Domestic Intelligence,’<https://scalar.usc.edu/works/the-space-between-literature-and-culture-1914-1945/vol13_2017_faragher>, published 2017, accessed July 2023. 806 Danius, p.1. 286 the human sensorium and modern technology.807 Like Woolf’s comments about the “licking eye” in relation to cinema, Mitchison’s portrayal of hypnosis connects such mechanised, sensory bombardment to invasive and numbing forms of both visual and tactile technological output.808 By gesturing towards the downfall of the powerful within this context, Mitchison evokes Woolf’s sensory vision and revision of the cave, as discussed in my thesis’ introduction. For Mitchison, as for Woolf, her emphasis on modernity’s suppression of sensation and affect is not a criticism of technological advancement, but of a progress for progress’ sake mentality, as spurred on by the ideologies of imperial and capitalist patriarchy. Such an approach, Mitchison warns, devalues human bodies and abilities. Potentially accelerating the displacement of humans by machines in various labour contexts and characterised by an unwavering and uncritical praise for what Elissa declares is ‘lovely, lovely technology!’, it indicates another seemingly utopian idea that sets up a destructive, self-subordinating path (15). The competitive Cold War militarisation of the computer, Mitchison shows, encapsulates the contemporary relevance of this concern. By depicting a ‘sensitized’ computer that eats human emotion, she even attaches this idea to what Elizabeth Wilson identifies as the increasing focus on machine affecticity in Artificial Intelligence (AI) development during this period (55). Such efforts to humanize computers, as also suggested by Mitchison’s references to their supposed ‘collaborating’ abilities, contribute to notions of a subjugated and replaceable human subject in the context she critiques (89).809 Like Hubert Dreyfus, who distinguished humans from computers by celebrating emotional capacity and adaptability during the 1970s, she stresses 807 As Nidesh Lawtoo observes, hypnosis was linked to mimesis in the context of modernism’s identity crisis. Nidesh Lawtoo, The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious (Michigan: MS Press, 2013). For further explanation of the Mignolo and Simmel references, see my thesis’ introduction. 808 The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is discussed by Woolf in ‘The Cinema,’ heightening the hypnotic link between Woolf and Mitchison. Mitchison’s portrayal of hypnosis also highlights mechanical, oppressive manifestations of the epistemological contiguity between “grasping” and “looking.” This contiguity is discussed in sensory studies, as my introduction notes, by scholars such as Classen (The Book of Touch, p.5). See my second chapter for discussion of Woolf and visual culture technologies including the “licking eye” in ‘The Cinema’ (1926). 809 Elizabeth Wilson, Affect and Artificial Intelligence (US: University of Washington Press, 2010). 287 the importance of recognising and developing uniquely human abilities.810 As I explore next, this enables Mitchison to present a wider commentary on social conformity and the importance of the arts. Social hypnosis and the power of the arts Gabriel Tarde, an early twentieth-century sociologist, uses hypnotic suggestion as an analogy for social life.811 Building upon Émile Durkheim’s claim that society ‘must enter into us and become organized within us,’ Tarde argues that ‘the social aggregate functions as a hypnotic force’.812 Social conformity, he suggests, is a form of possession in the modern age. Whilst still implying potential threat, Tarde’s theory points to another commonplace extrasensory idea: that hypnotism is only effective if the person being hypnotised is open to suggestion. Tarde implies that individuals often embrace dominant social influences to maintain a sense of belonging or relevance. In presenting modernity as a hypnotic force, Solution Three resonates with Tarde’s theory and the idea of willingness embedded within it. Most of the population are open to the government’s hypnotic policies because they believe they are necessary and moral. When doubts concerning this morality creep in for Lilac, she is easily placated by Jussie because she welcomes her assurances. In the previous section, I argued that Mitchison’s hypnotic depiction of modernity – as propelled by a warmongering socio-political climate – reflects fears that machines will replace and devalue human labour. This is simultaneously a warning about how, through widespread conformity to trends and norms, technologies and political policies may take on their own power, becoming forces with potentially detrimental impacts beyond human 810 Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence, (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). 811 Tarde’s The Laws of Imitation (1890) demonstrates his awareness of Bernheim’s work on hypnosis as well as the relationships between hypnosis, crime, and somnambulism. 812 Andriopoulos, p.6. 288 intent or control.813 Stressing the importance of debate in preventing such consequences within a democracy, political apathy becomes a potent example of such unintended consequence in Solution Three. Much to the government’s confusion, although the council building is open to everyone, the gallery is always empty and few people ‘listen to newscasts’ or ‘attend council meetings’ (141). Solution three and the population’s mostly unquestioning conformity to it, has unintentionally depleted political engagement and original thinking. As in MOAS, however, these dystopian circumstances are not yet beyond repair. It is clear through Lilac’s questioning and the council’s recognition of apathy as a problem, that solution three’s hypnotic influence is not absolute or irreversible. Ric’s passions, though unwanted, show that the emotional suppression encouraged by the code isn’t completely effective. Jussie therefore struggles ‘not to look tenderly’ at Miryam’s non-clone children (45). The council leader, Mutumba, even contemplates how she ‘had secretly cried for her clone’ after separation (36). These cracks in the system have widened significantly by the text’s end. Following several breakthroughs in Miryam’s research that leave the reader feeling ‘confident that the food problems can be solved,’ Jussie acknowledges the advantages of a wider gene pool.814 She realises that clones could be produced ‘not just from Him and Her, but from those who had proved themselves’ in other ways including ‘people like Miryam and Carlo’ (155). Mutumba similarly re-evaluates the popu-policy when Anni confides that she is a “deviant,” heterosexual clone. Recognising that the clones will not necessarily remain perfect replicas of one another – that they are not, in fact, machines – Mutumba not only considers the ‘scientific implications’ of inter-sex relationships and natural reproduction amongst clones, but wonders whether she herself has been ‘too deeply conditioned into the idea of meiosis as sin’ (123). Later, anticipating the return of ‘spectators in the gallery,’ Mutumba perceives that people are 813 This is relevant to today’s discussions around AI too. 814 Murray in Mitchison, p.viii. 289 ‘wanting to think fresh’ (157, 115).815 When Jussie speaks to Miryam in the novel’s closing scenes, the positive repercussions of this are already showing. Miryam and Carlo are given a larger living space and are assured their children will be seen not as ‘surplus population,’ but ‘valuable’ (159). In addition, Miryam accepts Jussie’s offer of a position on the new garden committee – a project devoted to creating ‘a thoroughly good environment’ for everyone (160). Importantly, these new and improved solutions do not come from the clones or the computers. Rather, emphasising a correlation between diversity and creativity, they originate with non-cloned humans, especially those who engage with the arts and humanities. Lilac’s lover, Gisela, inadvertently reveals Lilac’s engagement with the arts and attaches this to her protest when she tells her, disapprovingly, that she has been ‘reading too many…old books’ (34). Similarly, Stig’s historical research prompts the realisation that total suppression of anger is unnecessary because Him and Her ‘must have been angry’ to work as tirelessly as they did (52). The arts and humanities are presented as a stimulating antidote to mechanical and hypnotic modernity; as similarly suggested by Woolf’s cave and Woolf’s advocation of more creative approaches to film in ‘The Cinema’ (1926), they enable characters to transcend the homogenizing social machine.816 Most obviously, this is emphasised when we learn that the professorials not only ‘tended to like literature,’ but are ‘less open to persuasion’ in their ‘curious tradition of opposition’ (24). Artistic preferences differentiate these characters from the mechanically-produced (and traumatically benumbed) clones and computers. Indeed, Bobbi is unable to recognise that the ‘music-poem’ Ric writes for him is a declaration of romantic love (82). This appears to confirm Lilac’s worry that the strengthening will prevent Ninety from becoming an artist or ‘a great composer’ (63). Perhaps, then, Lilac’s insights also 815She demonstrates, as Murray puts it, that this post-apocalyptic society still ‘wills to move forward…for the greater good’ (Murray in Mitchison, p.xii). 816 See the beginning of my introduction for a sensory discussion of Woolf’s cave in Three Guineas and how this praises the arts. Similarly, see Chapter Two for comments on ‘The Cinema’ and Woolf’s emphasis on the need for greater artistry in film. 290 contribute to Jussie’s change of heart regarding “deviants.” Suggesting that the fresh thought recognised by Mutumba is a new and improved influence – a social hypnosis with more positive symbolism and effects – Lilac perhaps influences Jussie as much as Jussie attempts to influence Lilac. Supporting Dreyfus’ work in these ways, Mitchison’s novel celebrates humanity’s creative potential and art’s expressive power, specifically as a quality that is unmatched by machines. Reiterating this is the fact that the computers fail several times. Lacing Elissa’s notion of ‘lovely technology!’ with irony, the computers do not foresee the violent circumstances that result in her death (15). When one of the specimen boxes being sent to Carlo from Ulan Bator is left behind due to a computer error, the expedition members are frustrated by their device, which ‘insists the programme has been completed’ (132). As the narrative unfolds, many councillors admit they are ‘disappointed in the computers’ (115). One, Andrei, even encourages his colleagues to see them as ‘only an extension of our brains,’ not a superior power (115). Tellingly, it is also during this discussion that the novel not only directly compares the computer and the book, but self-consciously highlights its own attempt to convey something original and important. When Ric recalls that the wheat problem ‘was foreseen earlier…in the second half of the twentieth century’ and ‘there was even…a novel written about it,’ but not, Stig adds, ‘by a computer,’ Mitchison describes the text that we, her audience, are reading (115). In Solution Three, she stresses, she has attempted to provide her own warning regarding environmental damage, the threat of war and population levels. Combining her literary skill and scientific knowledge, Mitchison suggests that investment in the arts and humanities as well as sciences will stimulate the original and ontological thinking that is needed to tackle current and future problems ethically – an interdisciplinary position she also presents in ‘What the Human Race is Up To’ (1962) and her editorial contributions to Realist, a journal of scientific humanism. Dedicated to James Watson, with whom the idea for Solution Three was conceived during 291 discussions about biology, the novel, which even refers to the important genetic work of ‘Watson and Mitchison,’ is a self-acknowledged product of literary and scientific imagination (17).817 Looking Back and Moving On through Memoirs of a Spacewoman Contradictory Mitchison As Rob Hardy summarises, ‘the word that appears again and again in essays about Naomi Mitchison’ (née Haldane) is “contradictions”.818 Marking Mitchison’s one hundredth birthday in 1997, Maroula Jannou writes that ‘Mitchison embodies a mixture of extraordinary and potent contradictions’.819 She is similarly described as a “mass of contradictions” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.820 Mitchison’s fascination with the possibilities of both science and the supernatural is often cited as one such contradiction.821 According to Douglas Gifford, this combination can leave readers with a ‘feeling that there are two Mitchisons: one intensely organised and practical…and another lingering fascinated over the survival of actual Evil and the supernatural’.822 Both sides took root during Mitchison’s upbringing. Moira Burgess has shown that the supernatural elements of her work can be traced back to her childhood belief in fairies and ghosts as well as the presence of Celtic folklore in stories passed 817 Squier, p.162. 818 Rob Hardy, ‘Naomi Mitchison: Peaceable Transgressor,’ New England Review, 36:1 (2015) p.51. 819 Ibid. 820 Ibid. 821 As Hardy observes, she retrospectively acknowledges this duality herself in the second chapter of her memoir, Small Talk: Memories of an Edwardian Childhood (1973) which is titled, “The Real and Not Real.” Hardy, ‘Real and Not Real: Naomi Mitchison’s Philosophy of the Historical Novel,’ Readings: A Journal for Scholars and Readers, 1:2 (2015) p.2. 822 Douglas Gifford quoted by Moira Burgess, ‘Naomi Mitchison and the Supernatural,’ The Bottle Imp, 19 (2016), <https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/06/naomi-mitchison-and-the-supernatural/>, accessed 08/09/2021. Gifford makes these comments specifically in relation to The Bull Calves (BC, 1947) – a fascinating novel set-in eighteenth-century Scotland that blends tales of witchcraft and superstition with domestic abuse and political rebellion. 292 down through her Scottish and Irish ancestry.823 These beliefs were particularly encouraged by Scottish professor, writer and critic, Andrew Lang – a family friend who collected fairy stories and encouraged the young Naomi Haldane to look for the creatures in gardens and woodland.824 This informed her numerous fairy-tales for children and historical novels such as The Corn King and The Spring Queen (1931) and The Bull Calves (1947).825 Powerful depictions of the witch – a figure Mitchison loved to align herself with – are significant in these texts.826 A more disturbing legacy of the supernatural in her childhood emerges in the ghostly apparitions depicted in We Have Been Warned (1935). As Calder writes, Mitchison believed that her gothic childhood home near Perthshire was haunted and blamed this for the night terrors and ‘appearances’ that plagued her throughout her life.827 Mitchison was scientifically-minded. Her father, J.S. Haldane was a physician and physiologist whose specialist knowledge contributed to the creation of the first gas mask used in World War One.828 Her elder brother, J.B.S Haldane became a biologist who made major contributions to genetics and mathematics.829 Two of her sons, Avrion and Murdoch similarly pursued careers in zoology while another, Denis, became a bacteriologist.830 Through JBS Mitchison befriended many scientists and science-fiction writers including Olaf Stapledon, the Huxley family and James Watson, whose co-authored work on DNA with Francis Crick, The Double Helix, was both dedicated to and edited by Mitchison.831 Mitchison’s own 823 Burgess, <https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/06/naomi-mitchison-and-the-supernatural/>, accessed 08/09/2021. 824 Burgess, <https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/06/naomi-mitchison-and-the-supernatural/>, accessed 08/09/2021. 825 Later, he even asked her to participate ‘when he conducted a viva with a student who had written a thesis on fairy tales’ (Jenni Calder, The Burning Glass: The Life of Naomi Mitchison (Scotland: Sandstone Press, 2019) p.12). 826 Burgess, <https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/06/naomi-mitchison-and-the-supernatural/>, accessed 08/09/2021. 827 Calder, p.9. 828 Calder, pp.57-58. 829 Calder, p.17. 830 Calder, pp.94-97. 831 Calder pp.284-86. 293 understanding of the biological sciences was sophisticated.832 At eighteen years old, her first publication was a paper on Mendelian genetics, co-authored with JBS and based on extensive experiments involving their pet guinea pigs.833 Her references to mitosis, meiosis, cloning, genetic engineering and cytology in her three science fiction novels highlight this knowledge.834 More specifically, her depiction of an empathetic, scientific communication in MOAS reflects her own approach to scientific observation. In the guinea pig experiments, for instance, her notes are more attentive to ‘the whole pattern of guinea pig likes and dislikes’ than JBS’ more objective jottings.835 Like Mary, she is concerned with creature subjectivity as well as objective fact. Similarly, like Mary who describes having ‘tried hallucinogens’ and volunteers for grafting experiments, Mitchison often became an experimental guinea pig herself (10).836 She experimented with mescaline under medical supervision in the 1960s and regularly volunteered ‘for contraceptive research in her association with the birth control movement’.837 In telepathy, Mitchison found a subject that amalgamated her scientific and supernatural interests.838 Lang was ‘wholly convinced’ of its possibility and perhaps discussed it with her before Rhine’s work on ESP gained attention.839 She even briefly researched ‘group-mindedness or group communication’ herself in the 1930s with Gerald Heard.840 Anticipating 832 In the second volume of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade, Doris Lessing – a close friend of Mitchison whose own science fiction (including Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) which clearly alludes to MOAS) was inspired by her work – recalls an incident in which she was ordered to take Watson for a walk while they were both staying with the Mitchisons because Naomi was frustrated by his taciturn nature (Calder, pp.284-86). 833 Calder, p.38. This reiterates her interdisciplinary advocations in ‘What the Human Race is Up To,’ Realist journal and Solution Three as explained in the previous section of this chapter. 834 The third, Not By Bread Alone (1983), returns to the issue of global food shortages explored in Solution Three. 835 Hall, p.7. Such care and attention to subjectivity, as McFarlane notes, is informed by Mitchison’s nursing background too; it highlights an interest in ‘the limitations and possibilities of different bodies’ as well as ‘the human connection’ that is ‘found through giving medical attention’ (McFarlane, pp.291-2). 836 Naomi Mitchison, Memoirs of A Spacewoman (Glasgow: Kennedy & Boyd, 2011) p.10. 837Hall, p.7. 838 See Chapter Five’s discussion of telepathy’s SPR origins. 839 Luckhurst, p.165. 840 Calder, p.97. Together they created the Engineer’s Study Group. 294 the utopian side of the telepathic content in MOAS, Mitchison believed that advances in this subject could lead to breakthroughs in ‘universal consciousness’.841 Via the extrasensory, MOAS became Mitchison’s first fictional outlet for her apparently contradictory interests; her narrative treatment of the concept embodies paradox not only in the socio-political ways discussed in the previous chapter, but in personal, biographical, terms too. These terms include but also go beyond science and the occult. Mapped onto the novel’s contrastingly healing and invasive depictions of telepathic touch, Mary’s association both with maternal instinct and resistance to it, mirrors Mitchison’s perceived conformity to and subversion of traditional gender roles. She married at eighteen years old and had seven children, but also challenged the conventional wife and mother role by balancing this life with writing, activism, travelling (without her children) and what became in the 1920s, an open marriage.842 Likewise, Mary’s association with both colonial and anti-colonial attitudes is indicative of Mitchison’s conflicted relationship with British history and its institutions. Mitchison’s mother, Louisa Kathleen Trotter, was a relentless promotor of the British Empire, class hierarchy and traditional gender roles.843 While her father was more liberal, both were part of the British intellectual elite of Oxford University and ensured their children were educated at the Dragon School.844 As Donna Haraway observes, a ‘rich, imperialist, intellectual culture’ was Mitchison’s ‘birth right’.845 Instinctually a feminist, socialist and Scottish nationalist, Mitchison struggled with this identity; she felt both connected and disconnected from Britain. While she therefore threw herself into British politics, alongside her husband, Dick, she also sought out new communities beyond Britain, particularly in Africa; she was committed to transforming the system she was raised in, but also seemed to want to escape it altogether. Far from simply reflecting these 841 Ibid. 842 Calder, p.108. 843 Calder, p.19. 844 Calder, p.27. 845 Donna Haraway, ‘Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms’ in Alaimo and Hekman, p.180. 295 contexts, MOAS’ first-person narration suggests that Mitchison’s engagement with telepathic contradiction is a conscious, critical reflection on her own multitudes. Although Mitchison is not synonymous with Mary, the novel serves as much as a memoir of the author herself, as it does of her narrator. As touched upon in the previous chapter, Mitchison’s utopian portrayals of telepathy reflect socio-political progress for women and her own contributions to this. These included extensive committee work and campaigning for a variety of London birth control clinics, predominantly established by Marie Stopes and her supporters, in the 1920s and ‘30s.846 Mitchison continues to advocate this cause and women’s right to sexual pleasure in her depiction of Mary’s free and varied relationships as well as Terran access to abortion, which is briefly referenced when she states that ‘unwanted fertilisation’ is ‘easily dealt with’ (62). More broadly, Mitchison’s utopian portrayal of extrasensory communication reflects on her political activism thus far and her socialist values. These are set out in her 1938 book The Moral Basis of Politics, which argues that creating a more equitable society requires empathy and imagination. Exemplified by Mitchison’s anti-imperialist stance in MOAS, these ideals motivated her pre-civil rights support for people of colour. In 1935, Mitchison and her friend, Zita Baker, journeyed to the United States to support sharecroppers in Alabama who were protesting against the exploitative and racist system in place.847 Mitchison addressed one demonstration organised by the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and sang with protestors, writing afterwards to Dick that it was ‘damned nice being on their side’.848 Yet, in highlighting the subtle colonialism and elitism inherent in Mary’s extrasensory endeavours, Mitchison also reflects on her own imperial guilt concerning racial identity in MOAS. This, too, perhaps looks back to the 846 Calder, p.127. 847 Calder, p.180-182. Mitchison was appalled by the poverty of Black and white sharecroppers alike, describing Amerca as a ‘sinister and terrible country.’ 848 Calder, p.182. 296 Alabama visit after which Mitchison was shocked and guilt-ridden to learn that the Black leader who introduced her to the crowd was later attacked by furious whites for “daring” to rest his hand on her shoulder.849 Similarly, Mary’s repressed sense of guilt over leaving her children to travel not only indicates Mitchison’s conflicted feelings about motherhood, but reflects on the death of her eldest son, Geoffrey, from meningitis in 1927. Absent during the nine-year old’s illness, Mitchison was subsequently wracked with guilt and suffered ‘depressions’ for several years afterwards.850 This painful experience was made worse by the rift that it created between Mitchison and her brother who, together with his first wife, partly blamed Mitchison for the death because, they claimed, she did not devote enough time to her children.851 As the contradictions surrounding telepathy in MOAS suggest, this tragedy and its aftermath underscored the difficulty of Mitchison’s lifelong quest to discover how ‘intelligent and truly feminist women’ could ‘live as women’ with time ‘to be tender and aware of both lovers and children’ and still have the freedom ‘to do their own work’.852 By illuminating Mitchison’s personal reflections in these ways, the contradictory and multifaceted nature of extrasensory perception exemplifies the novel’s generic subversion. This subversion, Moody notes, concerns the blurring not only of utopia and dystopia, but science fiction, life-writing and even historical fiction. 853 As Maher asserts, it is as accurate to refer to Mitchison’s first sci-fi narrative as speculative fiction or a Bildungsroman.854 Inseparable from and further highlighting this generic blurring, especially regarding memoir, the extrasensory 849 Ibid. 850 Calder, p.113. 851 Also making this difficult was Aldous Huxley’s subsequent novel about a young boy who dies while his mother is absent. Mitchison was ‘hurt and horrified’ by the portrayal (Calder, p.113). 852 Hardy, New England Review, p.44. 853 Nickianne Moody, ‘Maeve and Guinevere: Women’s Fantasy Writing in the Science Fiction Market Place’ in Where No Man Has Gone Before: Essays on Women and Science Fiction (Oxford: Routledge, 2012) ed. by Lucie Armitt, pp.186-204. 854 Maher, p.2146. As a bildungsroman, she argues, the novel overturns the genre’s ‘traditional focus on youth’ and male heroes while also exploring tensions between ‘the recollecting self and the becoming self in life-writing.’ 297 constitutes a connection between MOAS and not just Mitchison’s previous socio-political campaigns, but her previous literary work too. Several critics have highlighted such connections without reference to the sensory. As Sassi notes, the themes of globalism, the “other,” ethics and governance that are shared by Mitchison’s three “science fiction” novels are akin to those ‘developed in her historical novels and political writings’.855 Likewise, Calder observes, the characters in her historical and future fiction are ‘intended as vehicles for comment on the issues in her own time’.856 For Nick Hubble, MOAS represents a continuation of Mitchison’s contributions to modernism.857 The novel, particularly in its generic experimentation, he argues, has an affinity with James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.858 Consideration of such retrospective connections through the extrasensory, reveals that Mitchison is evaluating this literary past and her contributions to it in laudatory and critical terms. These are intertwined with the personal reflections I have outlined. As a concept that looks back to the SPR and forward to new communicative possibilities within a text that generically reiterates and complements consideration of both past and future, telepathy in MOAS also articulates Mitchison’s literary and socio-political plans for the future, providing a bridge between the eras of her life and work. Telepathy puts her works in touch with one another and the literary past. The boundary-breaking expansions of the extrasensory epitomise the particularly vast span and radical intent of this reach. To conclude the chapter, I now 855 Carla Sassi, ‘The Cosmic (Cosmo)Polis in Naomi Mitchison’s Science Fiction Novels in Scotland as Science Fiction ed. by Caroline McCracken-Flesher (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011) p.87. The ‘ideal of a just society,’ Sassi argues, ‘is consistently traceable in all her work’ and the particular influence of Plato’s Republic on this, which she read at the age of fifteen, can be detected in MOAS and her earlier novels. p.87. 856 Calder, ‘Naomi Mitchison: Traveller and Storyteller,’ The Bottle Imp, 19 (2016) <https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/06/naomi-mitchison-traveller-and-storyteller/>, accessed 08/09/2021. Although set during the Gallic Wars, for instance, The Conquered (1923) is a meditation on The Irish Civil War of the early 1920s. 857 Nick Hubble, ‘Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia’ in Utopianism, modernism, and literature in the Twentieth Century ed. by Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) p.75. 858 Hubble, p.85. Like these, he demonstrates, MOAS presents recognition ‘derived after passing through wrongness and thinning’ as an ‘end in itself’’; it captures ‘the moment of affirmation that allows the self to go on.’ 298 demonstrate this in more detail whilst arguing that MOAS is a revision of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando – a modernist connection not yet acknowledged. Revising Orlando and future planning When Orlando transforms from male to female in Woolf’s 1928 mock-biography, she emerges from a ‘trance’ that has lasted several weeks.859 During this period she displays ‘no sign of life’ and is impervious to waking, defying ‘science’ and ‘ingenuity’ (80). This plot device, an integral part of Woolf’s interplay between fantasy and realism, protects the novel from censors in its show of whimsy.860 Reiterating Woolf’s interest in psychic phenomena, it also alludes to the extrasensory. Since psychic processes, particularly hypnosis, are often associated with trance-like states, Orlando’s transformation into a queer, female subject, is aided by the extrasensory and seems to embrace the potentially therapeutic and liberating ideas surrounding hypnosis for the SPR.861 Centralising the extrasensory and shifting from the Oriental space of Orlando’s transition to genuinely “alien” settings where sex-changing Martians are encountered, MOAS pays homage to and expands this transformative moment and the feminist, intersensory vision it subsequently engenders.862 Mitchison’s sensory and geographical expansion of Orlando’s narrative focus, embodies this revisionary connection. So does the distinction that Mary makes between ‘clock years’ and subjective time while describing the ‘time blackouts’ of space travel (24, 12). This moment appears to directly respond to Woolf’s assertion in Orlando that there is an ‘extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind’ that ‘deserves fuller investigation’ (59). Like Woolf, Mitchison subverts life-writing conventions to construct a new female protagonist who transcends time, space and 859 Woolf, Orlando (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) p.80. 860 This is discussed in my first two chapters on Woolf. 861 Blackman, p.34. 862 See Chapter One on Orlando’s concluding revelatory scenes. 299 contemporary gender norms. Both characters embark on literal and personal journeys, conveyed via the episodic, and concluding in revelatory moments of introspection. As mentioned in Chapter Five, both authors employ particularly erotic, sensory language to construct these new female identities and to challenge imperialistic patriarchy. Like Naylor, too, Woolf and Mitchison are striving to get in touch with what Audre Lorde theorises as the power of the erotic for women.863 Further evidencing the parity of feminist, socialist thinking between Woolf and Mitchison are the remarkable similarities between Woolf’s Three Guineas and Mitchison’s The Moral Basis of Politics, both published in 1938.864 Mirroring Woolf’s praise for the outsider, Mitchison writes that social change ‘can only be imagined by those who can manage to see outside themselves…who can shift the focus and hold it through an act of imagination’.865 For Mitchison, such imagination, as stimulated by literature and thus matching Woolf’s sensory emphasis on the arts in her vision of the cave, is ‘the basis of moral action in the real world’ because it enables the Other to be seen, as Lesley Hall summarises, not as ‘something alien to be feared and attacked, but rather to be encountered with interest, communicated with, understood—even loved’.866 In the 1960s, Mitchison updates this vision to reflect and celebrate contemporary progress for women, and without being subject to the same censorship, is more sexually explicit. While Woolf’s need to simultaneously conceal and reveal queerness via the sensory in Orlando is paralleled by the utopia-dystopia symbolism surrounding telepathy in MOAS, Mitchison also mocks this past literary regulation, particularly through the sexual and yet non-sexual descriptions of Mary’s relationship with Vly. 863 My thesis’ introduction argues that all my selected authors recover what Audre Lorde calls the erotic via their sensory aesthetics. 864 This comes in addition to the similarities I have already noted between ideas in Three Guineas, ‘The Cinema’ and Solution Three. Reinforcing their socio-political kinship further, Mitchison even wrote Woolf a laudatory letter about Three Guineas. 865 Mitchison quoted by Hardy, Readings: A Journal for Scholars and Readers, p.5. 866 Hall, p.6. 300 MOAS’ first-person, female narrator epitomises this progressive change too. In Mitchison’s text, the extrasensory and its powerful connection to the erotic is not something Mary needs to locate; it is already ingrained in society, at least in terms of how it is experienced by the Terran explorers. Unlike Orlando, she narrates her own story. She begins the text as an empowered woman who can travel freely while Orlando must construct this identity over time, liberating herself from the biographer’s impositions and the hegemony he represents. While Woolf uses references to ‘future telegraph wires’ to subtly communicate Orlando’s queer, female body, Mary communicates her own sexual desires and autonomy explicitly – a difference that recalls how the SPR viewed telepathy as the next radical step in communications following electrical innovations (O, 139).867 Picking up from where Woolf left off, Mitchison looks back on the important contributions that female modernists, herself included, made in advancing women's rights. Like them, she expresses the need for more action in future. In her non-fiction 1979 memoir, You May Well Ask, she seems to be specifically reflecting on MOAS’ feminist utopia when she explains she had been ‘fighting for more freedom, for a whole generation of women … who, [she] dreamed, would be able to have children by several chosen fathers, uncensured’.868 Like Naylor, Mitchison looks back to the early twentieth century to locate inspiring women artists (her literary mothers) and to build upon their works in ways that advocate further feminist reforms.869 For both Naylor and Mitchison, the pursuit of racial equity was a key driving force. In this sense, MOAS can also be considered a critical revision of Woolf’s feminist time-traveling work, Orlando. In its inclusion of people of colour as both desirable and authoritative figures, MOAS challenges the way that Woolf draws on foreign and racial otherness to bolster her 867 Thurschwell, ‘The Erotics of Telepathy: The British SPR’s experiments in telepathy’ in Howes (2009) p.192. 868 Mitchison, You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1979) p.73. 869 As my analysis in the previous section implies, Mitchison’s retrospective glance at the early twentieth century and modernism is clear in Solution Three’s engagement with hypnosis and further links with Woolf too. 301 criticism of patriarchy and to describe queerness in covert, exoticized terms. This is perhaps most apparent in MOAS’ first chapter wherein Mary describes her attraction to T’o M’Kasi. T’o, Mary explains, is ‘an outstandingly beautiful person’ with fingers that ‘were the colour of a well-cooked crisp biscuit’ and ‘the delicious springy hair of his father’s ethnic group’ (12). She imagines feeling his fingers with her ‘teeth and tongue’ and longs to touch his hair, which when he allows her to do so, tingles against her ‘digital nerves as no flaccid blond hair does’ (13). For Mary, T’o’s Black body and ‘different hair tension,’ as emphasised by Mitchison’s use of sensual, gustatory language, is a source of sexual arousal that exceeds her attraction to ‘flaccid blond’ Caucasians (13). This appears to be a revision of Orlando’s opening scene in which Woolf’s protagonist swipes at the shrunken head of a Moor with his sword. Both scenes are anti-imperial, but in bringing the Moor figure back to life, and replacing the violent attitude towards him with one of desire and admiration, Mitchison suggests that she intends to give the racial Other more thought and narrative longevity than Woolf. Unlike Woolf’s protagonist, Mary does not view the racial Other as an ‘enemy’ but someone she can forge new, intimate and lasting connections with (11). The passage is not free from an exoticisation of Blackness. Mary’s reference to ‘a well-cooked crisp biscuit’ could be perceived in the same objectifying terms as the ‘coconut’ hair and ‘old football’ skin that Woolf’s text mentions (MOAS, 12; O, 11). However, T’o not only gains more subjectivity as he appears multiple times in the narrative, but even seems to challenge the problematic elements of Mary’s attitude when he explains that he doesn’t want their daughter to have what Mary calls ‘one of those deliciously polysyllabic African names’ (138). The suggestion, though Mary does not express this herself, is that T’o is resisting Mary’s stereotypical inclinations. He is reclaiming authority over the narrative of his own ancestry. Thus, in the revisionary scene that introduces him, Mitchison moves away from Orlando’s concern with the violent actions of white ‘forefathers’ in Africa by instead mentioning T’o’s 302 father.870 This indicates Mitchison’s attempt to think through and perhaps quell her own imperial guilt – to enact a self-revision of sorts – as well as a critique of colonialism’s entanglement with the literary past. Re-crafting her sense of identity and her plans for the future, this endeavour – her attempt to ‘undo some of the harm the whites have done’ as she states in Return to the Fairy Hill (1966) – had become particularly important to Mitchison while writing MOAS because it was during this time that she herself became enthralled by Africa.871 Dominating the last four decades of her life and work, this fascination was initiated by her friendship with Linchwe, a paramount chief of the Bakgatla – ‘a people spread from northern South Africa to the southern part of the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland,’ which later became Botswana.872 Mitchison met Linchwe in 1960 when he visited Scotland as part of a British Council scheme.873 She hosted him and others at her Campbelltown home and they quickly became friends.874 Before returning to Botswana, Linchwe invited Mitchison to visit him in Mochudi, and in the autumn of 1962, aged sixty-five, she made her first of many journeys there.875 In Africa, she found a world where her communal values and her interest in tales of magic were as well-received as in rural Scotland. Whilst there she built dams, sunk boreholes and piped water during times of ravaging drought.876 She helped set up a library.877 She campaigned for a new secondary school and a museum, and educated children on nutrition and contraception.878 Some 870 In Solution Three, adding to the links I have already highlighted between Solution Three and Woolf’s writing, Mitchison seems to extend this particular revision of Woolf. The satirical approach to sexuality in this novel, as we have seen, simultaneously illuminates racial injustice in considered, intentional ways. Contrastingly, as Chapter One shows, the racial politics surrounding queerness in Orlando, is primarily used to indicate same-sex relationships and/or gender inequality. 871 Mitchison, Return to the Fairy Hill (London: Heinemann, 1966) p.76. 872 Calder, p.292. 873 Ibid. 874 Calder, p.293. 875 Calder, p.294. 876 Calder, ‘Professional Boat Rocker: Naomi Mitchison and Africa,’ The Bottle Imp, 23 (2018) https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2018/07/professional-boat-rocker-naomi-mitchison-and-africa/, accessed 08/09/2021. 877 Ibid. 878 Ibid. 303 critics have consequently placed her in the tradition of the enlightened female missionary. 879 Yet, the way that Mitchison integrated herself with the tribe and protested for them, complicates this colonialist image. She was an avid anti-apartheid campaigner and on one occasion, after storming out of a Mafeking hotel that had an anti-Black policy, she drew attention as such by insisting that Linchwe sit with her on a park bench labelled ‘whites only’.880 Mitchison’s ‘ability to utilise the rational without eliminating the irrational was a striking asset in her relations with the Bakgatla,’ and later they officially bestowed her with the title, ‘Mother-of-the-tribe’.881 Becoming a ‘perniciously interfering and provocative’ troublemaker in the eyes of the British establishment, she was subsequently present both when Linchwe was fully installed as chief and when Bechuanaland gained its independence.882 These experiences were poured into her later works of fiction and non-fiction including: When We Become Men (1965), Return to the Fairy Hill (1966), African Heroes (1968), Images of Africa (1980), ‘Science in Botswana,’ ‘Tribal Values in Botswana,’ and Mucking Around: Five Continents Over Fifty Years (1981). Suggesting both missionary and tribeswoman, these texts underscore Mitchison’s perceived duality concerning race and imperialism. The various naïve mistakes and misjudgements she made in Africa, together with some of her comments on the continent and its peoples, attest to this duality too. Denying her own privilege and erasing African difference, she once wrote that she ‘wasn’t really a white any longer’ and had ‘learnt to slip into an African skin, to think and feel as an African’.883 Yet, Mitchison’s fascination with Africa can never be separated from the gaze of the privileged outsider; her need to repeatedly put her awe into 879 Ibid. 880 Ibid. 881 Calder, p.3. 882 Calder, ,https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2018/07/professional-boat-rocker-naomi-mitchison-and-africa/, accessed 08/09/2021. 883 Calder, <https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2018/07/professional-boat-rocker-naomi-mitchison-and-africa>/, accessed 08/09/2021. This recalls the idea of telepathic touch in MOAS as that which causes one’s body and mind to merge with that of another. 304 words, as Calder writes, is undeniably a mark of her distance and difference – a feature of her work that is sometimes akin with imperial aspects of Vita Sackville-West’s travel writing.884 In a particularly memorable incident during the Bechuanaland independence ceremony, Mitchison’s act of tearing down the British flag was misjudged. Hurling the flag at the feet of British officials whilst roaring out the words of Lady Macbeth – ‘Stand not upon the order of your going/But go at once’ – Mitchison attempted to demonstrate her rejection of British imperial ideology as both a member of the tribe and a Scot in this moment.885 As Helen Lloyd points out, it would have been more apt ‘for the flag to be lowered by a Botswanan’ and, I add, without the intrusion of Shakespeare, whose presence in this moment stands in contrast to the more thoughtful, racially-sensitive revision that Mitchison achieves in her texts both through and beyond Shakespearean allusion.886 While Mitchison was certainly keen to undo some of the damage of colonialism, her interest in Africa was also motivated by a desire to associate herself with a foreign cause distinct from her brother’s investment in India. There is an element of sibling rivalry here and some self-interest too in terms of the inspiration and new communal identity that Botswana offered her. Importantly, though, Mitchison’s approach to race and non-European cultures is more engaged and sensitive than Woolf’s or Sackville-West’s. In ‘What Community Development is Not,’ Mitchison asserts that westerners need to stop ‘mucking about’ in other countries, and allow them to develop as they choose.887 In her own work, she strives to do the same. She went to Botswana because she was invited. She carried out local projects because she was asked to assist. She respected Linchwe as chief and saw herself only as a supporting figure in his attempts to combine traditional tribal government with democracy. Though her comment about 884 Ibid. See Chapter Two for my discussion of Sackville-West’s travel narratives. 885 Helen Lloyd, ‘Adventure to the Adventurous: Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Narrative ‘Mucking Around,’’ The Bottle Imp, 19 (2016), < https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/06/adventure-to-the-adventurous-naomi-mitchisons-travel-narrative-mucking-around/>, accessed 08/09/2021. 886 Ibid. 887 Mitchison, ‘What Community Development is Not,’ Community Development Journal, 2:5 (1967) 4-8. 305 losing her whiteness is misjudged, more often than not, she demonstrates awareness of her dual-identity. In African Heroes, she contemplates: ‘I have obligations and loyalties to my title [as mother to the tribe], which may sometimes, in some ways, conflict with my loyalties as a British citizen’.888 She also recognises that her affiliations with both Britain and Botswana might confuse others. While visiting JBS in India, for instance, Mitchison realises it must have been ‘muddling’ for his colleagues to hear her talking as ‘a member of a tribe and as one of the Raj’.889 Such self-awareness and evaluation complements Mitchison’s willingness not only to admit mistakes, but to realise that these are often bound up with her privileged position. While seeming to recognise the British flag incident as an error in retrospect, she observes in relation to the same flag-lowering process during the Ghanaian independence ceremony that ‘until people have freedom, they cannot even make their own mistakes’.890 Mitchison knows that she does not and cannot have all the answers. However, by exploring her own contradictions and naiveties as well as complex ideas around colonialism via the extrasensory in MOAS, I suggest that she acquires the confidence to proceed with her Africa work, knowing that she may make mistakes, but that this is a necessary part of participating in social change. She knows that ‘we cannot just go blind for the good; we have to zigzag there through a series of dilemmas and choices’.891 In zig-zagging through Mitchison’s extensive life and work – a task that, as Calder notes, may leave readers ‘in need of a lie-down’ – this part of the chapter has attempted to demonstrate that the extrasensory in MOAS and its revisionary basis can provide a point of navigation between the early and later years of her career, and a metaphor for its various, often-contrasting influences.892 Representing 888 Mitchison, African Heroes (London: The Bodley Head, 1968) p.7. Likewise, in Return to the Fairy Hill, she writes of the ‘horror and guilt’ felt ‘at the thought of what might have been done to my people here, by my people there’ (Mitchison, Return to the Fairy Hill (London: Heinemann, 1966) pp.111-112). 889 Lloyd, < https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/06/adventure-to-the-adventurous-naomi-mitchisons-travel-narrative-mucking-around/>, accessed 08/09/2021. 890 Ibid. 891 McCracken-Flesher, p.66. 892 Calder, p.xii. 306 a cohesive approach to her work that transcends genre boundaries and adheres to what she advocates in her Solution Three foreword, this extrasensory analysis suggests that, although multifaceted, Mitchison can be thought of in complex, yet holistic terms, rather than simply or solely as an elusive “mass of contradictions.” Her texts, like Naylor’s, communicate with each other. Exploring the contradictions of the extrasensory and acknowledging their particularly haptic affiliations uncovers these communications in new and insightful ways. I now go on to conclude my thesis, cementing its broader authorial connections, partly through further consideration of this extrasensory culmination. 307 Conclusion This thesis set out to explore how twentieth-century women writers engage with the senses to critique, resist and revise hegemonic manifestations of modernity and their detrimental impacts on women’s lives and literary influence. It examines sensory aesthetics in selected novels by Virginia Woolf, Gloria Naylor, and Naomi Mitchison, arguing that these authors employ the sensory in ways that recover women’s bodies and experiences from suppressive discourses. My introduction lays the groundwork for this exploration, crafting a nuanced framework that places feminist modernist studies in conversation with sensory studies. Drawing on feminist theories of revision, women’s writing, and Audre Lorde’s notion of the erotic as an often-suppressed source of power for women, my thesis takes up feminist modernist studies’ efforts to expand the literary canon. I adopt an intersectional approach, establishing new connections between well-known and neglected works. I also build on the assertions of theorists such as Kate Aughterson and Deborah Philips to highlight the importance of moving beyond conventional notions of modernism when exploring radical twentieth-century works by women. Concurrently, I emphasise my intention to contribute to the similarly expansive and recuperative goals of sensory studies. This theoretical lens provides an apt and valuable approach to the three main questions I pose: do women writers engage with the senses in revisionary ways more broadly and, if so, how? What does the sensory reveal about twentieth-century modernity and how it is historicised in relation to women’s lives? And what relationships exist between radical women’s writing, modernity and the haptic? As I explore in this conclusion, my method demonstrates that Woolf, Naylor, and Mitchison do engage with the senses in revisionary ways, suggesting, together with my additional attention to Sackville-West and Bonner, that this is a consistent feature in twentieth-century women’s writing. This, in turn, affirms that the sensory, always bound to the social, is significant in constructing how women’s lives are discussed and understood in histories of modernity. 308 Regarding the third question, my approach highlights the importance of touch and haptic experience within such histories because sensory studies scholarship understands all sensory processes to be haptic in their inseparability from contact. Even when the haptic is not explicitly depicted, it remains embedded in sensory language and concepts. It is also ingrained in the language pertaining to oppression and suppression utilized by feminists such as Lorde, and key theorists of modernity, such as Mignolo; there are gestures towards the haptic notion of pressure in metaphorical terms within these narratives, and therefore in how women writers press back against them. Yet, as my introduction explains, my interest in the haptic is secondary to my interest in the intersensory. Considerations of touch and the haptic provide important insights into understanding the intersensory as a critical approach to feminist sensory aesthetics, but the relationship between the haptic and intersensory is not explicitly explored within my thesis’ chapters. Instead, it emerges implicitly in moments that connect wider sensory analysis to literal and figurative examples of touch, including communication and emotional experience. Originally, I had hoped to say more about haptic intersensoriality, and its relevance to notions of reaching beyond the page (which are regularly touched upon in my chapters) by attuning my overall methodology to feminist archival praxis and the haptics of materialist research. However, with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, in-person archival visits became unfeasible, and consequently, a consistent focus on the archive could not be effectively integrated. More work remains to be done on this subject in the future, but my thesis provides a starting point for it. Indeed, my thinking around the haptic and its relevance, particularly as an adjective, to concepts of intersensoriality, sensory aesthetics and feminist revision, has proven helpful in articulating thematic connections between my authors and the theoretical fields I bring together. 309 My readings effectuate my intention not only to contribute to the revisionary, expansive aims of both feminist modernist studies and sensory studies, but to demonstrate the potential for mutual enrichment between these two fields. I show that feminist modernist studies and associated theories of the body, writing and revision, present new avenues for exploring sensory studies’ socio-historical dimensions, particularly in relation to race and gender. Applying this idea to radical, twentieth-century women writers expands the scope of sensory studies’ existing work within literary studies and demonstrates that discursive methods can be equally valuable in sensory studies’ recuperative pursuits. I also illustrate that sensory studies can support and enhance expansive, and revisionary feminist modernist studies work. Sensory studies’ emphasis on the constructed nature of the senses, particularly in research on race, gender and the post-Enlightenment intensification of social-sensory hierarchy, points to hitherto unrecognised, yet radical socio-political meanings, embedded within the sensory aesthetics of texts that concern the lives and bodies of the marginalised. By incorporating socio-historical sensory studies scholarship, my chapters unearth such meanings in my selected texts. My first two chapters explore links between post-Enlightenment social-sensory hierarchies and pseudoscientific discourses of bodily observation. I show that Woolf’s 1920s challenge to patriarchal imperialism via recovery of the queer, female body and female artist in Orlando, depends upon a historical dismantling of visual supremacy. My third chapter begins by situating Naylor’s interrogation of raced and gendered notions of sound in relation to sensory histories of racism. Focusing on The Women of Brewster Place, such sensory history, I show, brings new historical context to existing work on sound, race, and gender, and allows us to better understand Naylor’s post-civil rights critique of the post-war moment and its violent suppressions of Black women’s voices and bodies in both the Jim Crow south and America’s urban north. Her work gestures towards the enduring impact of social-sensory hierarchies and related stereotypes, particularly concerning the “noise” of Black and female voices. 310 This argument continues in Chapter Four, focusing on Naylor’s sonic and musical response to sexual harassment and policing in Bailey’s Cafe. This chapter uses fewer overt references to sensory studies, aiming instead to extend the ideas from Chapter Three to Naylor’s later texts and archives. The Naylor chapters particularly illustrate that extensive scholarship beyond sensory studies on race and gender can enhance sensory studies’ intersectionality.893 My chapters on Mitchison use sensory studies’ research on the extrasensory to illuminate a complex critique of sexism, racism, and homophobia in Memoirs of a Spacewoman and Solution Three, as linked to contemporary Cold War strategies and similar dominant structures in the twentieth century’s early decades. Together, these readings evidence that historical sensory studies provides a helpful platform from which to identify radical writerly connections across the twentieth century. They indicate that while radical women writers may use the sensory to respond to different forms of oppressive modernity, these modernities are all characterised by social-sensory hegemonies that stem from the post-Enlightenment and invoke similar aesthetic resistance strategies.894 Like sensory studies scholars, Woolf, Naylor and Mitchison not only recover the Other via sensory aesthetics but challenge a wider and enduringly oppressive social-sensory regime, acknowledging both its historical origins and contemporary manifestations. Illustrating that sensory studies can be used to identify revisionary aspects of radical women’s writing, this transformative process itself is 893 Indeed, one of the main aims within the Naylor chapters was to highlight how race and sound theory, especially that by feminists and Black feminists, can bring more attention to gender within race-based sensory studies. Though sensory studies scholarship examines race and gender, it often does not consider them together in intersecting ways. The Naylor chapters highlight that Carson’s theory of gender and sound; and the work of Lordi, Carby and Fulton on Black female sound can be brought into sensory studies’ discussions of race. Carson’s consideration of how gendered sound stereotypes date back to Aristotle particularly coheres with the histories of social-sensory hierarchies that are traced by sensory studies scholars. In highlighting the raced oral/literary binary in Walter Ong’s work, critics such as Lordi, Stoever and Moten can also bring new, important insights to sensory studies’ critique of Ong’s work in relation to “great divide” theory, which I mention in my introductory chapter. 894 My introductory chapter and Woolf chapters established this sensory studies context explicitly, so that the chapters on Naylor and Mitchison could consider its ongoing impact without needing to reiterate the overarching theories in detail. As my introduction explains, oppressive ideas of modernity are often discussed in conjunction with Cartesian body/mind dualisms by thinkers such as Heidegger, Rancière and Mignolo as well as many feminist theorists and scholars of modernism. 311 revisionary – an idea that underpins my readings, even when revision itself is not the explicit analytical focus. It illuminates continuities of both oppression and resistance, attending to a duality that Naylor’s works, I argue, particularly advocate in their own approach to history. Elucidating these continuities and connections, the historical sensory studies frame I draw upon proves its conduciveness to intersectional analyses of race and gender as well as projects that consider texts by Black and white women alongside one another. Sensory studies’ parallel considerations of raced and gendered hegemony emerge in all three authors’ depictions of modernity. Centralising Black women’s experiences and voices, Naylor’s work, however, makes it particularly possible to explore this complex intersection. Naylor’s novels also present a valuable touchstone when identifying the different race issues presented by Woolf and Mitchison. As my sixth chapter argues, both Woolf and Mitchison present anti-imperial stances in their feminisms, but Mitchison comes closer than Woolf, particularly in revising Orlando, to presenting the more fleshed out, empowering portrayals of Black subjects that Naylor’s writing advocates and constructs. Though there are still issues of exoticisation and imperial influence in Mitchison’s work, Woolf’s sensory aesthetics perpetuate more of the erasure and appropriation that Naylor’s revision of both Shakespearean and Biblical narratives overturns. These comparative points on race particularly emphasise the aptness of sensory history to both exploring and moving beyond modernism’s conventional boundaries. Naylor’s sensory aesthetics pay homage to some aspects of Woolf’s feminism and Black female modernists including Marita Bonner. Naylor also embraces jazz and blues, often associated with modernism, and its early twentieth century roots. Similarly, Mitchison embraces some of Woolf’s ideas and modernist interest in the extrasensory. Yet, whilst demonstrating that aesthetic features including revision and textual experiment are not confined to the classic modernist period, both Naylor and Mitchison highlight and detach themselves from racially problematic aspects of modernism. Mitchison 312 revises Woolf’s Orlando primarily on these grounds. Naylor’s work draws attention to the longevity of jazz and blues, and its history of appropriation within modernism, while celebrating the separate revisionary methods of Black female singers in both the early twentieth century and post-civil rights era. Her sensory, aesthetic parallels with Bonner illuminate the critically neglected status of Black female figures in and around the modernist movement. By embarking on more diverse projects, constructing unconventional authorial groupings that transcend traditional literary categories, supported in this case by sensory studies as well as feminist and Black feminist theories, my project suggests that we can construct a more complex understanding of radical and revisionary women’s writing traditions. A confluence of voices not only gives voice to people of colour and their experiences but directs more informed attention to both the flaws and strengths in white women’s portrayals of race. This can equip white feminists with the potential to become more effective allies, attentive to and able to confront racism as well as sexism with increased confidence. In addition to historical dimensions of sensory studies, this thesis draws attention to other sensory studies terms and concepts that can be equally valuable in feminist modernist studies and wider studies of radical women’s writing. As my introduction establishes, the notion of intersensoriality enables a new, complex approach to sensory aesthetics, helping to identify paradox as a consistent defining feature. Acknowledging that intersensory prose can be used to present social division and equity through portrayals of sensory fragmentation and sensory unity, I argue that the critique and resistance of hegemony depends on both. Taking note of this duality and the multiplicity of sensory symbolism itself helps to destabilise hegemony; it emphasises the fragile, malleable nature of hegemonic constructs. In the Woolf chapters, I explore how the intersensory dismantles visual hegemony by aligning Woolf’s construction of a new female subject with new intersensory vision that emerges from paradoxical combinations of absence and presence, and disorientation and orientation. In the 313 sections on Naylor and Mitchison, an intersensory approach is similarly employed to consider radical depictions of both social-sensory divisions and cohesion. In the Naylor chapters, this discussion focuses on sonic hegemony while in the Mitchison chapters, it considers the extrasensory as an avenue for exploring division and resistant solidarity in relation to touch. Sensory studies work on touch and its own intersensory properties further enhances my analyses and their connections. Informed by the tactile dimensions of all senses, I frame the critique and resistance of each text as a distinction between violent/dangerous and desirable/healing touch. In the Woolf chapters, I consider ideas of visual contact while in the Naylor chapters, touch is connected to sound. In the Mitchison chapters, the extrasensory is discussed as a form of tactility. Complementing existing feminist and modernist theory on touch, sensory studies’ work on the haptic highlights and connects sensory aspects of narrative content that might otherwise be overlooked in literary approaches to the body. Its consideration of communication as a haptic sense has been particularly influential in this respect and has consistently generated discussions of resistant emotional touch.895 I show that each writer advocates a sensitive or empathetic form of communication. In the Woolf chapters, sensitivity is integral to Orlando’s revelatory communication with her multiple selves. For Naylor, empathetic communication is the empowering basis of Black community, especially relationships between Black women. Finally, for Mitchison, empathy and sympathy are integral to the communication she advocates between different social groups and in socio-political policy. Communication, as an empowering and healing sensory process that creates connection without erasing difference runs through my selected texts and the haptic concerns of this thesis. This radical connection between the sensory and emotion, I conclude here, is what aligns all 895 As my introductory chapter mentions, both Howes and Classen have suggested that communication itself is a sense in their efforts to expand limited western models of the sensorium. It is haptic because it relies on contact in figurative and sometimes physical ways. 314 my selected texts with Lorde’s notion of the erotic since she distinguishes this from the pornographic in its incorporation of feeling in addition to sensing. By embracing touch metaphors, I suggest that my selected texts perform as well as depict a recovery of the Other. In my thesis’ introduction, I consider how the episodic structures of my selected texts reflect the resistant forms of touch and communication they explore, challenging social homogeneity in their affiliation with multifaceted identities and communities. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s comments on generic subversion and affect, I posit that the episodic exemplifies the affective properties of sensory language. This illuminates efforts to move ideas beyond the page, to get in touch with readers and other texts in potentially radical, sensorially and emotionally rejuvenating ways.896 The lack of closure in each text similarly highlights this potential and emphasises the unfinished nature of the authors’ own feminist projects and of feminist recovery more generally. Woolf’s Orlando looks at the unfinished space of her protagonist’s life. The Women of Brewster Place, Bailey’s Cafe, Memoirs of a Spacewoman and Solution Three each conclude without bearing witness to the radical possibilities they begin to construct. Picking up from where these open endings leave off, my project attempts to continue the radical, communicative work of my selected authors. I, too, construct a new community in putting these texts and authors in touch across time and space while placing Naylor symbolically at its structural centre. As my introduction states, the chapters operate in pairs, communicating with one another, so that the theory in the first half of each pairing can inform more biographical readings in the second. In the Woolf chapters, this enables an analysis of literary and epistolary communication between Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, highlighting a photographic connecting thread of sensory memory within Orlando as well as between Woolf’s and Sackville-West’s works. In relation to Naylor and Mitchison, this structure generates a more holistic discussion of their writing careers. Orality 896 Creating new discursive communities, as my Naylor chapters express. 315 in Naylor’s works takes on haptic properties, I show, connecting stories and characters both between and within her works. I illustrate that a similar connecting strand can be figured in relation to Mitchison’s writing via the extrasensory. Articulating this structure in the same touch-oriented terms that are influenced by sensory studies and contained within my analysis, I locate my recuperative and revisionary aims in a reclamation of touch from its traditionally “low” status as the sense most often aligned with Blackness and femininity. It is as part of this, anticipating further work on praxis, that I describe feminist revision itself as a haptic process – a manifestation of the healing contact my readings examine. Concurrently, my project highlights metaphorical congruity between feminist revision and communicative notions of the intersensory and extrasensory. In their dismantling and transcendence of traditional social-sensory hierarchies, these concepts cohere with expansive efforts in feminist modernist studies to connect with Other subjects and geographies. Intersensorial approaches challenge social inequities in ways that mirror intersectional feminisms. Similarly, by assigning sensory status to communication and the extrasensory, sensory studies expands beyond the conventional western sensorium in ways that mirror feminist efforts to locate new ontologies for marginalised subjects.897 For this reason, in metaphorical terms, my selected texts’ interactions with non-western places and peoples, though varied in their sensitivity to racial difference, align with the extrasensory.898 So do their attempts to reach out beyond textual confines. The connections these grasp for and illuminate correspond with the existence of an extrasensory touch that exceeds ordinary sensory and spatio-temporal boundaries, much like the feminist erotics of telepathy presented by Mitchison. 897 At the end of Chapter Two, I also briefly discuss memory as a sense in relation to the haptic and photographic communications of Woolf and Sackville-West. 898 Orlando includes visions of Turkey that communicate with Sackville-West’s travels in Persia. Brewster Place includes a trip through time that connects Mattie and Ciel to women in Senegal among other locations. Bailey’s Cafe includes scenes that take place in Ethiopia and Japan. Both Memoirs of a Spacewoman and Solution Three look to Soviet Russia as well as Mitchison’s engagement with Africa. 316 The expansive communicative theme that my chapters trace in their journey towards the extrasensory performs a similar expansion of boundaries as my own revisionary work unfolds. In the Woolf chapters, I highlight Orlando’s attention to connections and communications within the self before extending this to Woolf’s connection with Sackville-West. In the first Naylor chapter, I consider wider connections, particularly between women, within the African American community. My reading of Bailey’s Cafe gestures towards the expansion of this idea in its creation of a new community, including men, women and the Ethiopian Mariam in addition to African Americans.899 Mitchison’s texts, complementing her narrative inclusion of the extrasensory, engage more overtly with international connections: MOAS does so by depicting intergalactic relations while Solution Three presents efforts to implement global solutions to the consequences of war. This expanding communicative thread, culminating in texts that centralise considerations of Earth’s future, epitomises the expansive communicative project of feminist revision itself and its own movement into the future. This is not to say that Mitchison’s work is the pinnacle of the thesis, but rather, complementing the structural points I have already made, that the ideas of expansion and diversity within sensory studies’ treatment of the sensorium, together with feminist theory, allows for new ways of structuring responses to literary work. Indeed, this structure concurrently opposes the linear narratives of progress associated with modernity’s oppressive rationale. In moving towards the extrasensory and future settings within the texts themselves, I circulate back in time from the publication of Naylor’s works and back towards Woolf at the end of Chapter Six. Like the texts I analyse, my project in structure as well as content emphasises the ongoing need for new feminist work and recovery. My thesis and the theoretical foundation I establish opens many possibilities for this. As already alluded to, and as particularly evidenced 899 Although not discussed in this thesis, Bailey’s Cafe also includes a Russian, Jewish character named Gabe, who owns a pawn shop next to the café. 317 by my Naylor chapters, my research paves the way for a sensory approach to the feminist and Black feminist archive, through which the relevance of the intersensory can be explored in relation to recovery praxis as well as theory, in literal and figurative haptic terms. Addressing the aesthetic limitations of this thesis, future projects might additionally analyse the episodic (and/or other forms of textual experimentation) in relation to sensory aesthetics and archival fragments in ways that go beyond the initial frame presented by my introduction. Since my thesis incorporates biographical details throughout and considers life-writing in relation to both Woolf and Mitchison, future work might focus more specifically on subversions of this genre. Naylor’s own semi-fictional autobiography, 1996 (2004), would be a valuable contribution to such a study. Similarly, the authorial scope of my project could be extended to include more texts by Black women and other women of colour as well as twenty-first century authors. Perhaps expanding on my comments concerning artificial intelligence in Chapter Six and tackling other aspects of contemporary activism and culture including social media, this would make it possible to further emphasise and explore the implications of intersensory thinking for feminist politics and writing today. Building on my considerations of photography, cinema and jazz and blues, a project examining sensory aesthetics across different mediums would also be fruitful. There are multiple possibilities for extending the project into disability studies, digital studies, archival studies and through a more comprehensive engagement with queer theory. I hope to explore some of these avenues myself and encourage other scholars to do so too. The sensory is a potent conduit for exploring women’s writing, modernity, and bodily experience. In attending to its power more rigorously, I suggest, we can reshape the literary landscapes of the twentieth century in important, new ways, and improve our capacity for participating in radical change beyond as well as on the page. 318 Thesis Bibliography Literary Texts Bonner, Marita, Frye Street and Environs, ed. by Joyce Occomy Stricklin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987). 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Dunn, Leslie C., and Nancy A Jones, Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 359 Duran, Jane, Towards a Feminist Epistemology (Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1991). Ehrick, Christine, ‘Vocal Gender and the Gendered Soundscape: At the Intersection of Gender Studies and Sound Studies,’ <https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/02/02/vocal-gender-and-the-gendered-soundscape-at-the-intersection-of-gender-studies-and-sound-studies/>, published 02/02/2015, accessed 28/07/2020. ----------, Radio and the Gendered Soundscape: Women and Broadcasting in Argentina and Uruguay, 1930-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Felski, Rita, The Gender of Modernity (US: Harvard University Press, 1995). Fischer, Clara and Luna Dolezal, New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment (London: Springer International, 2018). Gilman, Sander, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (USA: Cornell University, 1985). Grosz, Elizabeth, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Haley, Sarah, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (USA: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Haraway, Donna, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Harrison, Daphne Duval, ‘Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues: Blues from the Black Women’s Perspective’ in Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (US: Rutgers University Press, 1990) pp.63 - 111. Hartman, Saidiya, Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (USA: New York, 2019). ----------, Saidiya, ‘Venus in Two Acts,’ Small Axe, vol. 12, no.2, (2008) 1-14. Hekman, Susan J., Gender and Knowledge: Elements of a Postmodern Feminism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990). hooks, bell, Ain’t I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism (New York: Routledge, 2014). ----------, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (New York: Routledge, 2014). 360 ----------, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist Thinking Black (Oxford: Routledge, 2014). ----------, Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2013). ----------, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 2014). Irigaray, Luce, ‘This Sex Which is Not One’ in This Sex Which is Not One (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985) pp.23-33. Kaufman, Joyce P. and Kristen P. Williams, Women, Gender Equality and Post-Conflict Transformation: Lessons Learned, Implications for the Future, (Oxford: Routledge, 2019). Kheshti, Roshanak, Modernity's Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (New York: NYU Press, 2015). ----------, ‘Sound Studies,’ Feminist Media Studies, 4:2 (2018) 179-184. Kristeva, Julia, Revolution in Poetic Language (US: Columbia University Press, 1984). ----------, Desire in Language; A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1980). ----------, ‘Women’s Time,’ Signs, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1981) 13-35. Lakoff, Robin Talmoch, Language and Woman's Place: Text and Commentaries (Oxford: OUP, 2004). Laville, Helen, ‘Gender and Women's Rights in the Cold War’ in The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War ed. by Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Lorde, Audre, ‘The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ in Sister Outsider (London: Penguin, 2019) pp.43-50. Lloyd, Genevieve, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). McDowell, Linda, Working Lives: Gender, Migration and Employment in Britain, 1945-2007 (London: Wiley, 2013). 361 McKittrick, Katherine, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (US: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Morton, Nelle, ‘Beloved Image’ in The Journey is Home (Boston: Beacon Press, 1977) pp.122-146. Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen, Vol. 16 (1975) 6-18. Nash, Jennifer C., Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). Rippon, Gina, The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain (London: Penguin, 2020). Rose, Gillian, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity, 1993). Rouse-Amett, Mario et. al, ‘The Influence of Social Institutions on African American Women's Sexual Values and Attitudes,’ Journal of Feminist Family Therapy, 17:2 (2006) 1-15. Silverman, Kaja, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Smith, Shawn Michelle, At the Edge of Sight (USA: Duke University Press, 2013). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ <http://abahlali.org/files/Can_the_subaltern_speak.pdf>, published 1988, accessed 5/5/20. Further Historical Contexts Appignanesi, Lisa, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present (London: Hachette, 2011). Aratani, Lauren, ‘CIA file on Russian experiments released – but you knew that, didn’t you?’ <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/27/russian-esp-experiments-cia-memo>, published 27/01/2021, accessed 26/04/2021. 362 Bickford, Susan, The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict and Citizenship (US: Cornell University Press, 2018). Brooke, Stephen, Sexual Politics: Family Planning, and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day (Oxford: OUP, 2011). Cain, Frank, ‘Computers and the Cold War: United States Restrictions on the Export of Computers to the Soviet Union and Communist China,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 4:1 (2005), 131-147. Castillo, Greg, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Crawford, Kate, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2001). Duke University Libraries, ‘Parapsychology Laboratory records, 1893-1984,’ <https://archives.lib.duke.edu/catalog/paralab>, accessed 26/04/2021. Dumančić, Marko, ‘Spectrums of Oppression: Gender and Sexuality during the Cold War,’ Journal of Cold War Studies, 16:3 (2014) 190-204. Ebon, Martin, Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion? (NYC: McGraw-Hill, 1983). Fabian, Ann, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). Föllmer, Moritz, Culture in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Fox, Jo, ‘Women in World War One propaganda,’ The British Library, <www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/women-in-world-war-one-propaganda>, published 2014, accessed 27/11/22. Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978). Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Doubleday, 2016). Jacobsen, Annie, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis (New York: Little Brown, 2017). 363 Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (California: University of California Press, 1993). Johnson, David K, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Koonz, Claudia, The Nazi Conscience (US: Harvard University Press, 2003). MacEwan, Martin, Housing, Race and Law: The British Experience (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002). Muehlenbeck, Philip E., Gender, Sexuality and the Cold War: A Global Perspective (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2017). Nordau, Max, Degeneration (1892), (Germany: Outlook Vertag, 2018). Oppenheim, Janet, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Pitt Rivers Museum, ‘Human remains in the Pitt Rivers Museum,’ <https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/human-remains-pitt-rivers-museum>, accessed 28/10/2022. Plummer, Brenda Gayle, ‘Race and the Cold War’ in The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War ed. by Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Regulska, Joanna and Bonnie G. Smith, Women and Gender in Postwar Europe: From Cold War to European Union (Oxford: Routledge, 2012). Rogers-Cooper, Justin, ‘Rethinking Cold War Culture: Gender, Domesticity, and Labor on the Global Home Front,’ International Labor and Working Class History, 87 (2015) 235-249. Storrs, Landon R.Y., The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013). 364 Further Cultural, Aesthetic, and Philosophical Contexts Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory (1970), (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage Books, 2000). ----------, ‘Listening’ in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays of Music, Art and Representation (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985) pp.245-256. Brennan, Teresa, The Transmission of Affect (US: Cornell University Press, 2004). Brown, Elspeth H. and Thy Phu, Feeling Photography (London: Duke University Press, 2014). Clegg, Brian, Extra Sensory: The Science and Pseudoscience of Telepathy and Other Powers of the Mind (London: St. Martins, 2013). Derrida, Jacques, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985). Dreyfus, Hubert L., What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence, (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). Ellenbogen, Josh, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton, and Marey (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). Fine, Gail, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Plato, 2nd edn (Oxford: OUP, 2019). Goodale, Greg, Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age (US: University of Illinois Press, 2011). Gunning, Tom, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). Hacking, Ian, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalities and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time ed. by Edward Robinson (London: HarperCollins, 2008). 365 ----------, ‘Nietzsches Wort 'Gott ist tot' (1943) translated as ‘The Word of Nietzsche: God Is Dead,’ in Holzwege, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Hejinian, Lyn, The Language of Enquiry (California: University of California Press, 2000). Ihde, Don, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007). Karpf, Anne, The Human Voice: How This Extraordinary Instrument Reveals Essential Clues About Who We Are (USA: Bloomsbury, 2006). Konar, Amit, Emotion Recognition: A Pattern Analysis Approach (London: Wiley, 2015). Luckhurst, Roger, The Invention of Telepathy 1870-1901 (Oxford: OUP, 2002). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1962). Ngai, Sianne, Ugly Feelings (US: Harvard University Press, 2007). North, Michael, Camera Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Olin, Margaret, Touching Photographs (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012). Plato, The Republic (circa 380 BCE) ed. by Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 2007). Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Sedgwick, Eve, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (US: Duke University Press, 2003). Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Sontag, Susan, On Photography (London: Penguin, 2008). 366 Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind, 236 (1950) 233-60; Computers and Thought ed. by E.A. Feigenbaum and J. Feldman (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963). Turkle, Sherry, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985). Wilson, Elizabeth, Affect and Artificial Intelligence (US: University of Washington Press, 2010). Archival Documents The Gloria Naylor Archive, Letter to Mimi Perrin, April 21 1993, Box 12, folder 10. ----------, Handwritten Notes on Bailey’s Cafe,’ Undated, Box 30, folder 13. ----------, ‘Handwritten notes on Bailey’s Cafe,’ Undated, Box 30, Folder 17. ----------, Handwritten Notes on Bailey’s Cafe,’ Undated, Box 30, folder 2. ----------, Illustration of Duke Ellington on cardboard, Undated, Box 30, folder 17. ----------, Early Bailey’s Cafe draft, Undated, Box 30, folder 21. ----------, Pop Song Annotations, Date unknown, Box 30, folder 16. ----------, Johnston Jukebox Classics, ‘Wurlitzer 1015 flier,’ December 1989, Box 30, folder 13. ----------, James Barron, ‘Golden Oldies: Jukeboxes Are Big Again,’ February 23 1989, Box 30, Folder 13. ----------, Bailey’s Cafe script, 1992, Box 26, folder 28. ---------- Bailey’s Cafe script, 1993, Box 26, folder 28. ----------, Bailey’s Cafe script, 1994, Box 28, folder 13. ----------, ‘Rare Pictures of N.Y. Ethiopian Hebrews Go on Exhibition,’ December 8 1990, Box 30, folder 11. 367 ----------, Zora Neale Hurston ‘Story in Harlem Slang,’ 1942, Box 30, Folder 11. ----------, ‘Founder of Jewish Cult has Promised to Rise in 60 Days,’ 1931, Box 30, Folder 11. ----------, Paul W. Tappan, Delinquent Girls in Court, 1947, Box 30, folder, 8. ----------, Michael Baizerman et. al, ‘“An Old, Young Friend”, Adolescent Prostitution,’ 1979, Box 30, Folder 16. ----------, Bernard Cohen, Deviant Street Networks, 1980, box 30, folder 16. ----------, Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, extracts from Really the Blues, 1972, Box 30, folder 17. ----------, Mark Evans, ‘Jazz: Made in America,’ American Visions, August 1987, Box 30, folder 17. ----------, Mark Evans, ‘Jazz: Made in America: Part Two,’ American Visions, October 1987, Box 30, folder 17. ----------, Maria Leach, ‘Glossary’ in Cast the First Stone by Chester Himes,1952, Box 30, Folder 13, pp.303-307. ----------, The Gloria Naylor Archive, “Other Places” Exhibition Playlist, <https://wordpress.lehigh.edu/naylorarchive/archive-highlights/other-places-exhibition-playlist>, accessed 11/07/23. ----------, Lyrics to Nina Simone’s ‘Just Like a Woman,’ Box 30, Folder 13. ----------, Barbara Sherman Heyl, The Madam as Entrepreneur, 1978, Box 30, Folder 16. ----------, Lyrics to ‘Tell Him I’m a Child of God,’ Box 30, Folder 21. ----------, The Women of Brewster Place teleplay draft, Box 1, Folder 13. ----------, Siobhan Flynn, Parchman research notes, July 7 1998, Box 44, Folder 6. ----------, David M. Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, Box 44, Folder 7. 368 ----------, Parchman full draft, 1998, Box 44. Folder 5. ----------, Parchman scenes, 1998, Box 44. Folder 6. ----------, Parchman treatment, 1998, Box 44. Folder 6. ----------, Naylor archive, Letter from Jeffrey Levine, Box 44 Folder 6. ----------, Jailhouse Blues! (1987) transcript, Box 44, Folder 6. |
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