A Queer Orientation: The Sexual Geographies of Modernism 1913-1939. Sean Richardson A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Nottingham Trent University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2019 1 Copyright Statement. This work is the intellectual property of the author. You may copy up to 5% of this work for private study, or personal, non-commercial research.
Any re-use of the information contained within this document should be fully referenced, quoting the author, title, university, degree level and pagination. Queries or requests for any other use, or if a more substantial copy is required, should be directed in the owner(s) of the Intellectual Property Rights. For Katie, my favourite scream. Etymologically, the word ‘thank’ shares its roots with the Indo-European ‘tong-’, to ‘think’ and ‘feel’.
When we give thanks today, we may consider the actions or words of others, but I find that tracing this root is generative—it allows me to consider who has helped me think through this thesis, as much as who has helped me feel my way. First, I must thank my supervisors, Andrew Thacker and Catherine Clay. Primarily, of course, my supervisory team has helped me to think: I thank them for pushing me as a reader, a critic and a writer, while giving me the space to work on other projects that have shored me up in myriad ways. And yet Andrew and Cathy have also allowed me to feel—they have given me the space to try, test, write and rewrite.
I thank them for that, too. In particular, I am grateful to Andrew for the seemingly innocuous, passing, harmless questions which lead to weeks of deep thinking, research and pathfinding. Similarly, I thank Cathy for her sharp, honest and attentive criticism, as well as the elliptical humming sound that signals either you are on to something or that you should take a different route entirely. That hum has truly steered me through this thesis.
Second, I must thank my family: my mum, dad, nan, grandad and brother. Without their generosity, their time, their words and their actions, I would not be who I am. Truly, thought and feeling are inseparable when it comes to family. Included within this thesis is every hour spent helping me with my homework, every assurance that I was able to achieve, every trip to the Natural History Museum (even though you got us banned for life, mum), every hope that Conor and I would be able to dream without limits and every concession you made so that we could thrive.
This thesis is as much your belief as it is my writing. Third, I must thank my friends: Doug, Jamie, Maya, Sarah, Sam, Helen, Katie, Danny, Dandie, Elle, Jonny, Chloe. For feeling with me, when it is joyful and when it hurts. For thinking with me, when others refuse to.
For putting up with my endless talk about astrology. For your politics. For having the same unbridled enthusiasm for Charli XCX. For allowing me to feel self-assured and confident, even in our ridiculous use of the word ‘squad’.
For telling me when I am misguided. For being queer. For taking action. For Bethnal Green at 3am.
For our time living together. For having no choice but to stan. For being bold enough to award ourselves. For Hugo in a cold river on a hot day.
For telling me I can dance. For knowing an endless roster of references. For showing me I am enough. Fourth, I must thank Richard.
No, this is not a dedication, but it is an acknowledgement. And what—after all—could be more socialist than that? You have (as any Leo would) asked me to dedicate something to you, but I know, should the time come, you will deny me the opportunity (just as you would turn down an award from the state). And this is because you are utterly selfless, compassionate and kind. The world, for you, is communal and that is the gift you have most readily offered me.
It is you who has allowed me to think and feel clearly, who has been my greatest champion and who has most heartily encouraged my seemingly endless talk about astrology and rootless love for Julia Roberts. Really, thank you so much for listening to me talk about Julia Roberts. Historicising the geography of sexuality within the milieu of literary modernism, the subject of this thesis is the relationship between queerness, space and place as mediated by modernist texts. Focusing on the work of E., Katharine Burdekin and Christopher Isherwood, the thesis aims to examine the impact that the taxonomizing of sexual orientations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has on the textual geographies of modernist literature.
Though the relationship between modernism, space and place has been well mined by critics, scholarship has yet to produce a sustained inquiry into the imbrication of queer subjectivity and modernist geographies. The purpose of this thesis is, therefore, to make an interjection that offers a queer reading of the modernist relationship with space and place. After beginning with a theoretical unpacking of the generative term ‘sexual orientation’, Chapter One engages with the queer inheritance of the Oscar Wilde trial and its shaping effect on Forster’s Maurice (1971), widely recognised as one of the first homosexual novels. Following this, Chapter Two turns inwards to examine the relationship between psychoanalysis and the queer subject in H.’s short stories ‘Kora and Ka’ (1934) and ‘Mira-Mare’ (1934), works which straddle the analysis that the poet undertook with Sigmund Freud in 1933.
Akin to this, Chapter Three examines the relationship between Burdekin and Havelock Ellis, positioning that the novels Proud Man (1934) and Swastika Night (1937) fold together sexuality and space through eugenic thinking. Finally, Chapter Four traces the ends of queer modernist geographies in Isherwood’s early novels All the Conspirators (1928), Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). Tempering the discourse of sexology and psychoanalysis with a critical theory approach, these chapters offer an account of the rich and diverse ways that the pluralistic categorisation of queerness shapes textual geographies in the 1913-1939 period. Forster and the House | 47-84 4.
and the Sea | 85-131 5. Public Bodies: Katharine Burdekin and Utopia | 131-171 6. Kept at Bay: Christopher Isherwood and the Island | 172-211 7. New Horizons: The Ends of Queer Modernist Geographies | 212-228 8.
Bibliography | 229-257 5 what are you doing now / where did you eat your / lunch and were there / lots of anchovies it / is difficult to think / of you without me in — Frank O’Hara, ‘Morning’ (1952) And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no one to watch, no penalties attached—it was this last fact which was our undoing, for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom. I suppose this was why I asked her to marry me: to give myself something to be moored to. Perhaps this was why, in Spain, she decided that she wanted to marry me. But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts.
— James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956) In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. — Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (1966) Wait, they don't love you like I love you / Maps. — The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever to Tell (2003) So here's the part where you make a choice: What if you could have that power now? In every generation, one slayer is born because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made up that rule. They were powerful men.
This woman is more powerful than all of them combined. So I say we change the rule. I say my power should be our power. — Buffy Summers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2003) I got this feeling in my body, in my body tonight / And when we leavin' my body is your party tonight.
— Kim Petras, Clarity (2019) 6 Introduction. I shall at this point introduce two technical terms. Let us call the person from whom sexual attraction proceeds the sexual object and the act towards which the instinct tends the sexual aim. Scientifically sifted observation, then, shows that numerous deviations occur in respect of both of these—the sexual object and the sexual aim.1 — Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905).
What does it mean for sexuality to be lived as oriented? What difference does it make what or who we are oriented toward in the very direction of our desire? If orientation is a matter of how we reside in space, then sexual orientation might also be a matter of residence, of how we inhabit spaces, and who or what we inhabit spaces with.2 — Sara Ahmed, ‘Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology’ (2006). For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been. It is all half lights and profound shadows like those serpentine caves where one goes with a candle peering up and down, not knowing where one is stepping.3 — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929). Queerness runs like a bright purple vein across the skin of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
On first reading one may overlook this vein, curled as it is around the body of the text. Yet on revisiting Woolf’s slim volume the vein becomes unmissable: as distinctive as a birthmark, as necessary as an eye. Woolf’s queer vein carries lifeblood that helps expose the pressure points of women’s writing as a means of unsettling the easy confluence of text and gender. So too does this tubing connect outwards, criss-crossing with the arteries and capillaries of other texts: the lesbian kiss of Mrs Dalloway (1925), the transgender narrative of Orlando: A Biography (1928), the homosexual longing of The Waves (1931).
It is in A Room of One’s Own, however, that Woolf takes up a scalpel and cuts through to the heart of the issues with which this thesis is concerned. 1 Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Vintage 2001), VII (2001), pp. 2 Sara Ahmed, ‘Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 12.
3 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 7 Pulling Life’s Adventure by the fictitious Mary Carmichael from the stacks, the narrator of A Room of One’s Own skims the pages of a wholly modern novel, published, we are told, ‘in this very month’. Here, Woolf’s queer vein bulges with a sudden rush of blood: Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these—'Chloe liked Olivia…' Do not start. Do not blush.
Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.4 In discussing the relationship between Chloe and Olivia, Woolf foregrounds an intimate set of relations that exist between sexuality, geography and modernity. Let us imagine that, much like Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seton, Chloe’s liking of Olivia is suffused with something more than friendship. Let us imagine, as Woolf’s rhetorical devices and elliptical pause allow, that threaded through this liking is a desire to go beyond letter writing and tea drinking, that Chloe would like to touch Olivia, to feel the swelling of her skin beneath her palms, to trace the veins that run along her wrist and follow their passage under her sleeves.
If we allow ourselves to imagine this liking as a kind of desire, Woolf claims that we find ourselves in a ‘vast chamber where nobody has yet been’. Our urge to understand the sexual tension between two young women has led us to a new space.