Towards Ontologies of Becoming
Friendship in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Virginia
Woolf’s The Waves
Sarah Bertagnolli
Student Number: 3934187
Master Thesis
Comparative Gender Studies in Culture and Politics
Utrecht University
Submitted 8 November 2013
Supervisor: Dr. Kathrin Thiele
Second Reader: Dr. Babs Boter
MLA Citation Style
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Faculty of Arts
Department of Gender Studies
Muntstraat 2A
3512 EV Utrecht
+31 (0) 30 253 6154
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ABSTRACT
This thesis analyzes two early-twentieth century novels – Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
(1931) and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928). I work with and complexify the existing body
of criticism to explore how the relational aspect of subject formation depicted in these novels
may be read to challenge the ontological/epistemological certainty of the knowing subject
which has – with its accompanying dualisms (mind/body, male/female) – enjoyed discursive
authority in traditional Western philosophy. After establishing literary engagement as an
important entrance point for feminist theory, I explore possibilities for intra-relational
becomings suggested in the novels, drawing from Rosi Braidotti’s feminist nomadism,
intersectionality, and psychoanalysis. Rather than arguing for definitive statements about
what constitutes ‘woman’s identity,’ my reading does not simplify or (yet again) fix the
subject but complicates it in an effort to assert both the positive potential of difference and
the importance of accounting for our shared histories.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………. vii
INTRODUCTION: “Both/And Kind of Girl” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAPTER I: The Myth of the Autonomous Subject. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Towards Intra-Relational Becomings ………………..………………… 4
Intersectionality by Way of Nomadism ……………………………….. 9
CHAPTER II: Racial Politics and Belonging in Quicksand. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Situating Nella Larsen …………………………………………………...16
Racial Uplift and Female Subject Positions …………………………... 20
Belonging and Individuality: Helga’s (Competing?) Desires ………. 24
CHAPTER III: The Waves and the Creative Potential of Difference. . . . . . . . . 31
Woolf’s Modernist Experimentation …………………………………. ......32
“Making each other up:” The Creative Element of ‘Knowing’ an Other..35
The Individual as Assemblage……………………………………………...40
CONCLUSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………..48
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In these acknowledgments I take cues from Karen Barad, who does fantastic things like
putting “I” in quotations. I agree that “Lists simply cannot do justice to entanglements”
(Barad xi). This “thesis” isn’t something that “I” just figured out; it has dis-figured me,
changing me as much as I change it. And it has filled me with gratitude.
Many thanks to my supervisor Kathrin Thiele. It must take a strong vision to invest in a
student who insists on making things as difficult as possible for herself at every turn. Thank
you for taking me serious as ‘a young scholar’ when I didn’t; for teaching me not only to face
my particular challenges but to trust my strengths; and for inspiring me to take as much as I
possibly can from this learning experience. Furthermore, thanks to you and the entire Gender
Studies faculty at Utrecht University for serving as enduring reminders of the importance of
the work that I/we are doing as feminists in academia and the world.
To my friends and family in America, to whom my life and studies in the Netherlands must
seem a rather vague abstraction: our physical distance doesn’t make you any less present in
my life or these pages.
Thanks to my fellow students in the Gender Studies masters, whose friendships have
sustained me mentally/spiritually over the last year. Special thanks to my dear Eleni who has
been my confidant and ‘conspirator,’ who has always given me a springboard to explore
thoughts about feminism, life, and friendship.
Finally, thanks to my partner Robin, who has supported my every step in this journey; who
has graciously allowed me to monopolize our communal space for months with piles of open
books and endless scatterings of loose articles; who happily engages in diffraction
experiments, though puzzled as to its feminist relevance; who, greeted day after day by two
blood-shot eyes piercing out from under a mountain of cigarette ash and cookie crumbs (a
testament to hours of self-medication with nicotine and sugar), somehow dares to ask, eyes
bright with perpetual optimism, “How’s it going?”
Mountains of thanks to all of you.
Sarah Bertagnolli,
August - November 2013
Hilversum
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Who am I? … Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? … We are divided… Yet I cannot find
any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them.
(Virginia Woolf, The Waves)
So the relation between individuals is neither one of a shared experience of a shared world…
Instead, it is an interference between different dynamic processes that neither pole fully
grasps. The encounter with the other makes my world more strange and, hence, more intense,
not more comfortable or communal or better known (Stop trying to know me – you’ll destroy
everything.).
(James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition)
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INTRODUCTION
“Both/And Kind of Girl”
Rosemarie Buikema’s remark that literature can “embody a search, not so much for
the right answers as for a state of susceptibility to the right questions” neatly sums up my
approach to this thesis (“Crossing the Border of Identity Politics” 309, emphasis added). In
fact, it expresses my conviction of the importance not only of art and literature, but of
feminism at large at this moment in time. Yet, throughout my studies I have caught myself
time and again trying to formulate simple answers; it is difficult to unlearn the qualifications
associated with practices of representation, with knowledge production and much else. It is
difficult to learn how to be critical while also taking into account one’s own material and
discursive entanglements with precisely the phenomena you would challenge. It is difficult
because there are no easy answers. Feminist efforts to challenge inequalities of all kinds have
illustrated that reversals do not work; denying differences does not work; and attempts to
oppose one hierarchical system may end up reproducing it or other harmful discourses.
What recourse is there then for the feminist trying to account for the entanglements,
social structures and codes, legacies of sexism, racism, and imperialism which we have nonoptionally inherited; who is trying to, as Donna Haraway says, “live thickly in the present?”
(“Staying with the trouble”). There is, it seems, no escaping the paradox that sometimes the
very things I fight against are inextricably connected to aspects of my life that grant me my
own agency and priviledged position to ask such questions in the first place. My particular
engagement with this paradox encompasses two areas of feminist thought which have proved
very influential: on the one hand, my education in gender studies in America centered around
identity politics and anti-racist feminism; on the other hand, my studies in the Netherlands
have introduced me to a feminism grounded in continental philosophy (among much else).
Rather than seeing the relationship between these different areas of feminist thought as
antogonistic, I see it as complementary, with potential to inform one another in every space
of overlap and deviation.1
1
Cf. Rosi Braidotti, “Feminism in the Nineties” in Nomadic Subjects
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It is no longer useful for feminists to ‘pick sides;’ rather, we ask who has stakes in
presenting our options as either/or? As Haraway declares, “I’m a both/and kind of girl”
(“Staying with the trouble”). To engage in what Joan Scott calls “the politics of
undecidability” is to embrace the paradox (xi). One ‘tool’ I have found for doing so is
feminist nomadism as developed by feminist scholar Rosi Braidotti. In Nomadic Subjects:
Embodiment and Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, which serves as a primary
references in this thesis, Braidotti argues for a subjectivity which “expresses the desire for an
identity made of transitions, successive shifts, and coordinated changes, without and against
an essential unity” (22). Her project of nomadism is about gaining freedom from the either/or
logic that has led, for example, to discursive denial of differences. She puts forward the
nomad as a figure for a subject that makes no false claims to permanence or fixity. With the
nomad as a metaphor for my conceptual approach, I wish not to simplify or reduce identity,
but to complicate it. This begs a question facing the field of gender studies today: How
possible is the development of feminist theory or collective political action once we concede
that there is no ‘woman’s identity’ around which we can finally unproblematically unite? My
answer to this question, and what I argue in this thesis using two literary examples, is that
difference need not be a deterrent to friendship, solidarity, or feminist subject re-figurations.
Furthermore, if the increasingly interdisciplinary field of gender studies can be
gauged by developments in cultural criticism or if, in other words, feminist theory and
cultural criticism are constantly informing one another, what can a side-by-side reading of
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) offer at this
moment to the field of gender studies? Both novels have rich histories of feminist
engagements, from psychoanalysis, to queer theory, to the intersection of sexuality and race.
My goal is to work with and complexify this existing body of criticism using a lens of
feminist nomadism to explore how the relationships depicted in both novels inspire refigurations of what constitutes subject formation. Such a reading of these works suggests the
positive potential of understanding the multiplicities within ‘individual identities,’ which, I
argue, makes both novels testaments to the need for continued feminist engagements with
questions of ontology and epistemology.
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CHAPTER ONE
The Myth of the Autonomous Subject
It becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many.
– Virginia Woolf, The Waves
The central aim of this thesis is to investigate how a juxtaposed reading of The Waves
and Quicksand, with a focus on the relational nature of subject formation, supports the
project of feminist nomadism. In what follows I will first lay out my theoretical framework,
which focuses on the questions: why nomadic identities rather than fixed identities? Why
regard subject formation as an ongoing relational process rather than discreet and unitary?
Why is this significant to feminist theory? Next I will discuss my methodology which
includes considerations of intersectionality and psychoanalytical approaches to my readings
of both novels, as well as how I see these approaches tying in with nomadism. Furthermore
in this section I will justify my choice to employ literature – and these two novels in
particular (although I also engage with this question throughout the thesis) – as a vehicle of
support for feminist nomadism. This chapter will conclude with an outline of the remainder
of this thesis, meant as a reading-guide and overview of the general flow of thought I follow.
Specifically, I will explore how the relational aspect of subject formation depicted in
these novels may be read as a challenge to the ontological/epistemological certainty of the
sovereign, knowing subject.2 I understand feminist nomadism as an embodiment of this
development of thought – particularly regarding the ontological shift of focus from being to
becoming. But before explaining this shift in more detail, however, it is useful to first
elaborate on the problem of how traditional ontologies envision the autonomous subject.
2
I use the ‘autonomous,’ ‘sovereign,’ ‘knowing subject,’ and ‘moral agent’ interchangeably to refer to the
same Cartesian character ideal of the perfectly rational, self-composed, independent consciousness. When I
later speak of ‘identity’ it is also in reference to this logic – logic dictating that ‘I’ am a wholly separate,
bounded entity.
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Towards Intra-Relational Becomings
This thesis is about subject formation (i.e. what constitutes cultural/theoretical
constructions of human subject positions). For reasons which I will make clear, there are
feminist issues at stake in how the subject is envisioned in theoretical and cultural discourses.
In what follows I will discuss how some of these issues have informed the theoretical
framework of this thesis.
The autonomous knowing subject has enjoyed a certain authority within traditional
Western ontologies and epistemologies (respectively, the study of the nature of existence,
and the study of the nature of knowledge and knowledge production). The Cartesian cogito
has had perhaps the most profound influence on the philosophical primacy placed upon
reason and autonomy.3 The Cartesian depiction of human autonomy is that of an independent
entity, separate from and impervious to outside (or unconscious) influences. This logic of
autonomy – with its accompanying vision of a mind/body split – has informed not only
philosophical questions of epistemology, ethics, and morality, but also law, medicine, and
religion.4 Lorraine Code, in her feminist critique of autonomy-centered epistemologies
writes:
[Descartes’s] claim that knowledge seeking is an introspective activity of an
individual mind accords no relevance either to a knower’s embodiment or to his (or
her) intersubjective relations. . . Not only is the quest for certain knowledge an
independent one, undertaken separately by each rational being, but it is a journey of
reason alone, unassisted by the senses (5).
According to this view, anything other than what is considered rational thought is a
potential hindrance to – rather than a part of – one’s capacity for valid knowledge and
experience; embodied senses, affective relations, unconscious drives are all seen as entirely
other to that which constitutes the knowing subject. The concomitant fixing of the subject
position in a series of polarized dichotomies including body/mind, private/public,
nature/culture, feminine/masculine, passion/reason, etc. has resulted in the devaluing of the
senses, of affect, of relations, and of the myriad entanglements that constitute a ‘single’
3
René Descartes’s famous 17th-century proposition “cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), briefly, put
forward the argument that a self (an “I”) can be defined using reason alone (Discourse on the Method 27).
4
For a more detailed look at the impact of Descartes’s contribution as “the principle founding father of
modern philosophy,” see for example Roger Scruton’s A Short History of Modern Philosophy (26).
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‘identity.’ The significant point for feminist interventions here is that these imagined
dualistic constructions and their hierarchical orderings (masculine above feminine, culture
above nature, etc.) have had the effect of excluding women, people of color, and much else
from moral agency, knowledge production, or regard for basic equality: if sovereignty is
defined by the exercise of solitary reason alone, than any person or entity with a perceived
inferior capacity to reason independently is subject to the denial of their agency and, as Code
remarks, to “paternalistic control” (73). This is one of the primary reasons for feminist
engagement with figurations of the subject, as women have traditionally been associated with
the ‘less rational’ side of these dualisms (i.e. nature, the body, the private sphere, etc.).
Given this situation, it is of little surprise that feminist struggles have often invoked
the assertion that ‘we’ are just as autonomous, independent, and capable of reason as males.5
Yet, as feminist thought has evolved, this assertion has become problematized in several
ways. First, popular feminist claims for autonomy typically presume and privilege upperclass educated white women.6 This is problematic in that the voices and concerns of women
who differ from this implicit standard have often been ignored by feminist discourse. Even
more significantly for this thesis, the presumption of sameness – both between the sexes and
among women – as well as the contention that ‘identity’ occurs purely independently has
inspired a backlash in theory which aims to challenge the primacy of the autonomous
Cartesian subject in the first place. That is, feminist thinkers began to question why women
should strive to be considered as autonomous subjects under a logic that by definition
devalues or denies certain phenomena that play just as important a role in subject formation
as conscious rationality purportedly plays.
Luce Irigaray is one such major contributor to the development of feminist theories of
difference. In Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray challenged Freud’s and Lacan’s
psychoanalytical approaches to sexual difference. She argued that in Freud’s formulation of
sexual identity, difference does not technically exist since it is finally just “a derivation of the
problematics of sameness,” and that “‘differentiation’ into two sexes derives from the a priori
assumption of the same” (26). That is, a feminine subject has never existed, since the order of
signification always already situates the male as the universal One and the female as Other5
Cf. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women and John Stuart Mill & Harriet Taylor Mill,
Essays on Sex Equality.
6
Cf. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider and Maria Lugones & Elizabeth Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory for You!”
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to-the-One. In order for women to finally experience themselves outside of these structured
margins of male discourse, according to Irigaray, they must assert their differences. Without
going further into psychoanalysis or Irigaray’s seminal contributions to feminist thought, the
key point to take away here is the assertion of the positivity of sexual difference. For the
freeing of difference-in-itself from the assumption of difference-from-a-universal has
important implications for how subject formation is envisioned, which are manifest in Rosi
Braidotti’s feminist nomadism.
Informed by Irigaray, with respect to her opposition to phallogocentric discourse –
that is, the association of the masculine with rationality and universality – Braidotti seeks a
re-figuration of female subjectivity which does not pose it as merely a deviation from the
(male) norm. 7 As alluded to in my introduction, Braidotti’s nomad figure is an important
conceptual guide to my project as it illustrates the overlapping nature of embodiment, social
codes, and unconscious processes which all constitute each subject position. She draws upon
psychoanalysis (which stressed the significance of the unconscious) and Gilles Deleuze’s
concepts of affectivity and desire to emphasize “a non-binary model of interrelation or
intersubjectivity” (Braidotti, NS 114). Importantly, as “a subject in transit” (i.e. one that is
not statically tied to a single subject position), the nomad still remains rooted to her/his
physicality and inhereted histories.
Braidotti identifies three ‘levels’ of sexual difference which she employs to challenge
the notion of the autonomous knowing subject and to promote an ontology of becoming.8 As
a first ‘level’ of sexual difference she emphasizes “the recognition of a bond of commonality
among women … a strong point for feminist consciousness” (Braidotti, NS 163). However,
remembering that assumptions of sameness among women risk defaulting to essentialist
notions of a women’s identity, it is important, Braidotti continues, for feminists to also
acknowledge differences among women and to be wary of the role of power relations. As
such, in the ‘second level’ of sexual difference the signifier Woman, which is purportedly the
central point of commonality among all women, is, paradoxically, challenged in light of the
acknowledgement of women’s differences. According to Braidotti however, we need not
7
She also draws from Haraway’s practice of creating alternative subject figurations (i.e. the cyborg) (NS 24).
Braidotti clarifies that the three ‘levels’ (“difference between men and women,” “differences among
women,” and “differences within each woman”) are not intended as sequential categorical distinctions, “but
as an exercise in naming facets of a single complex phenomenon” (NS 151).
8
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solve this paradox; rather, feminists should continue to investigate the potential of Woman as
a point for political solidarity while at the same time understanding its limitations. “…
[Before] feminists relinquish the signifier woman we need to repossess it and to revisit its
multifaceted complexities, because these complexities define the one identity we share – as
female feminists” (NS 170). In other words, sexual difference ‘level two’ involves letting go
of essentialist assumptions of similarity between women while still recognizing where
women do share a common experience. In the coming chapters, some of the challenges
associated with this paradox – when political subjectivity contradicts one’s sense of
individual identity – are explored in the novels.
Keeping that in mind, Braidotti’s ‘third level’ of sexual difference problematizes even
further the notion of a bounded autonomous subject: just as there is no single fixed definition
for women as a collectivity, individual subjectivity is equally non-fixable. Thinking
through/with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming, Braidotti understands the embodied
structure of the subject not as given but as a constant process, “as pure flows of energy,
capable of multiple variations” (NS 165). In Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Braidotti
argues for a posthumanist vision of the subject composed of two powers: the discursive and
political (bios), and the non-human driving force that sustains all of life (zoe) (38). My aim in
this project is to explore how these discursive forces and life-driving forces coexist and intraact, without giving primacy to one or the other, to support a vision of the subject not as an
immutable, stable entity that simply ‘is,’ but as an unbounded, relational entity in a constant
process of ‘becoming.’ Such feminist ontologies of becoming aim at opening up a space of
possibility wherein the restrictions of ‘identity’ are replaced with the positive potential of
multiple intra-relations.
To emphasize this point, following Karen Barad’s example, I use the terms ‘intrarelate’ and ‘intra-act’ to emphasize the entangled nature of individual identity, rather than
evoking the image of separate, bounded entities ‘interacting.’ Barad draws across disciplines
such as quantum physics, philosophy of science, and feminist theory in her Agential Realism,
which emphasizes the relational quality of all phenomena and deeply challenges existing
notions of representation and observation. She writes: “Existence is not an individual affair.
Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part
of their entangled intra-relating” (ix). While Barad’s work is quite different than that of
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Deleuze or Braidotti – and, indeed, the respective philosophical projects of each of these
thinkers have unique significances and implications far beyond my particular engagement
here – they each challenge existing constructions of the subject, and it is in this regard that
their works greatly inform my theoretical approach to the two novels: The individual is not
an entity that from the start simply ‘is,’ and then interacts with other equally alreadycomplete others, as in the cogito; he/she is an assemblage, a convergence of phenomena that
are often outside of his/her conscious control. Importantly, this is not to deny an individual’s
agency or the singularity of his/her experience; nor to ignore the role of consciousness and
rationality. An individual can certainly think and act alone; but in the Deleuzian spirit, none
such activities –least of all thinking – occur independent of sensation, feelings, affect, etc.
In the coming chapters I will argue through the depictions of (intra-)relations within
the novels towards an ontology of becoming whose goal is to create new formulations of the
subject that allow room for relational influences, multiplicity, complexity, and contradiction
within individual identity. By focusing attention on the intra-relational nature of the subject,
the false dichotomy between autonomy and interdependence is challenged. As Code argues,
autonomy and interdependence “are neither oppositional nor mutually exclusive” (74).
Because the series of dichotomies employed to construct the Cartesian subject are so closely
interconnected, to challenge one is to challenge the entire logic, which is precisely one of the
central aims of nomadic ontologies of becoming.9 As Barad points out in her deconstruction
of the nature/culture binary: “And isn’t the undoing of an inherent nature-culture boundary a
useful tool, if not a prerequisite, for destabilizing sexism, racism, and homophobia and other
social ills that are propped up by this dualism and its derivatives?” (369).
9
This is not to suggest that only feminists working with feminist nomadism engage in challenging these
dualisms; on the contrary it is a project shared by a variety of theorists. To name but a few, Carol Gilligan’s In A
Different Voice aimed specifically to challenge imagined oppositions between ethics and morality on one hand
and affective relations and care for others on the other; Peta Bowden’s Caring: Gender-sensitive Ethic aims at
challenging the public/private binary; and Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto inspires refigurations of the complexities of nature-cultures (among much else).
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Intersectionality by Way of Nomadism
As established above, this thesis serves primarily as an affirmation of the positive
potential of nomadic, relational subject figurations and ontologies of becoming. I will
illustrate, by engaging two early twentieth-century novels – Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves – the need for continued feminist engagement with art and
literature to complicate the relationship between what we ‘know’ and what we can become.
First it is useful to clarify the extent to which literature is a useful tool for exploring
possibilities for feminist thought. In other words: why engage literature for this feminist
project? As a number of theorists have already demonstrated, literature matters to feminist
theory (Rich; Spivak; Barcan). Some of the major developments within feminist theory can
be traced by looking to feminist literary criticism which has focused attention on women’s
works that had been neglected or marginalized within the literary canon; illustrated the
significance of the lived experiences of women writers; and exposed the conditions (for
example sexism, racism, and heteronormativity) that had kept these works from gaining the
critical attention they merited. Adrienne Rich has called feminist literary engagement nothing
short of “an act of survival:”
A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all
as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine
ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of
naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name
– and therefore live – afresh (Rich 983).
Literary criticism has consistently contributed to the development of feminist theory
due in part to its increasing level of interdisciplinarity, drawing from critical race theory,
postcolonial theory, and queer theory. A fitting example is Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre.
Once celebrated (unproblematically) as a feminist novel, Jane Eyre has been forever changed
by Gayatri Spivak’s criticism, which ushered in a more comprehensive awareness on the part
of feminists and cultural critics of the white privilege and reproductions of imperialism
occurring in their fields.10 Rich, Spivak, and other feminist thinkers have illustrated the role
10
Spivak revealed the problem of regarding Jane Eyre as a positive feminist figure while ignoring the
treatment of the other woman, the ‘mad woman in the attic,’ Bertha Mason: “In this fictive England, [Bertha]
10 |
of literary engagement in complicating discourses of representation, sexuality, and myriad
subjects which inform feminist theory. They have helped develop a critical eye towards
anything that may be perceived as ‘given’ or taken for granted within cultural representations
such as those in literature. This is how I approach the two novels in a methodological sense,
informed additionally by Deleuze’s manner of engaging with literature, which Ronald Bogue
has characterized as “a thinking-alongside literary works, an engagement of philosophical
issues generated from and developed through encounters with literary texts” (2).11 Deleuze’s
occupation with literature rejects the notion that art represents reality; rather than reflecting
how the world ‘is,’ art expresses different possible worlds, unrecognizable experiences,
relationships of becoming. Kathrin Thiele writes, for example, that Deleuze’s reading of a
Michel Tournier novel “achieves in literary form what he himself [Deleuze] seeks in his
philosophical project: a re-writing of an ontology of Being – static, normative and ahistorical
– into an ontology characterized by necessary change, that is an ontology of becoming,
movement, and transformation” (60).12 Mine is a similar project: a ‘thinking-alongside’
literature to explore different lines of flight.
As I will show in the coming chapters, one of the ‘givens’ in both novels under
investigation is the central characters’ need to define themselves, as though the traditional
novel reflects man’s teleological journey to sovereign autonomy. Significantly, Woolf and
Larsen consistently undermine their characters’ longing for more stable subject positions by
revealing the influence of relationships which, I argue, better illustrates the complexities of
how the subject is constituted. How each character copes with this ‘crisis of the subject’
speaks to the real-life intellectual anxieties that modernity gave rise to and which still
unsettle contemporary discourse (as I will discuss more closely in Chapter three).
In a close reading which incorporates intersectionality (which I will discuss below)
and psychoanalysis, as well as considerations of some of the socio-cultural conditions in
which these works were produced, I will investigate the different ways that Larsen and
must play out her role, act out the transformation of her ‘self’ into that fictive Other, set fire to the house and
kill herself, so that Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction” (251).
11
Cf. also Daniel Smith’s introduction to Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical, which speaks to the links
between the creation of art, science, and philosophy: that “Neither activity has any privilege over the other. . .
[Rather, each] enters into relations of mutual resonance and exchange” (xii).
12
The original text to which Thiele refers is Deleuze’s ‘Michel Tournier and the World without Others,’ in The
Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia University Press. 1990.
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Woolf deal with relationships and identity. My aim is not to reach some definitive conclusion
about the significance or meaning of the novels, or to claim that one way of reading these
works is somehow superior to others. The aim is not to define or claim to represent the
entirety of ‘women’s literature,’ nor the oeuvres of Woolf or Larsen. Rather, I want to
position my particular reading of these novels as an exercise in / example of the nomadic,
entangled state of subjectivity and of scholarship. That is, this thesis has not taken shape in a
process whereby a presumably objective researcher holds a presumably self-contained and
other object at a distance, using a presumably neutral approach. In Modest Witness, Donna
Haraway confronts the problem that a researcher’s supposed position of neutrality (or more
accurately, their unexamined invisibility within their culture) grants his/her testimony and
knowledge “truth” status and credibility.13 Arguably all research is carried out in spaces of
overlap and contradiction. To account for this fact is one of the important components of the
feminist nomadic project.
One such potential space of contradiction in this project is my use of intersectional
analysis. Popularized in the late 1980s by Kimberle Crenshaw, intersectionality departed
from the habit of popular feminist theory of the time “to treat race and gender as mutually
exclusive categories of experience and analysis” (139).14 Crenshaw’s central thesis – that
Black women experience racism differently than Black men, and sexism differently than
white women – called further critical attention to what Audre Lorde had already referred to
as the “pretense to homogeneity of experience” within popular feminism (Lorde 339).
Feminist theorists began to question how sexuality, race, and nationality (to name just three)
factor into different women’s experiences. To analyze how race and gender ‘intersect,’ or
how sexuality and race ‘intersect,’ calls attention to the fact that gender is not the only (nor
the primary) concern for every woman. While intersectionality has significantly expanded
feminist theory, it is not without its debates. For example, even while it seeks to draw
attention to differences between women, intersectionality risks essentialism through
13
Haraway also dealt with questions of objectivity and epistemologies earlier in “Situated Knowledges,” where
she declared: “Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence
and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see” (583).
14
Crenshaw, a feminist theorist and legal scholar, analyzed a selection of anti-discrimination legal cases to
illustrate “. . . that Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse
because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the
interaction of race and gender” (140).
12 |
seemingly static definitions such as ‘Black women.’ We recall from the previous section that
signifiers like Woman are insufficient in representing women’s (and woman’s) diversity: I
have argued, with Braidotti, for the political necessity of keeping the signifier Woman while
also acknowledging the positivity of difference (NS 162). Although Braidotti’s model of
feminist nomadism focuses primarily on sexual difference (the reality of the lived differences
between sexed bodies – e.g. male and female), the foundation of this position is that
difference – in the broadest sense – does not inherently equate to any kind of hierarchical
ordering. Regardless of the diversity among women, the collective position as the “not-male”
within this power relation paradigm puts all women in the same boat, which is precisely why
the signifier Woman is very useful politically.
That said, my understanding of the feminist nomadic project entails accountability for
any influences, identifications, and signifiers – however contradicting or mutually-exclusive
they may appear to be – in examining what constitutes subject formation. As illustrated with
intersectionality, it would be insufficient to focus only on the role of gender. An investigation
of racial identifications alone would also not be sufficient to uncover, for example, the
complexities of Larsen’s critique of the restrictions facing Black women’s subjectivity in
Quicksand; likewise, without examining the intersection of class and nation in The Waves,
the influence of imagined community on subject formation might be missed. This is why
intersectionality is especially informative for my analysis.
Yet, combining an intersectional approach (whose very name evokes the image of
static entities inter-acting at a static point – e.g., Woman and Black) with feminist nomadism
(which fundamentally resists such static identifications except as political impetus) may seem
counterintuitive. As such, the two are politically very different.15 Thinking through
intersectionality with Nina Lykke, there are interesting possibilities for dealing with this
paradox. Adopting Barad’s notion of intra-action, Lykke transcends the notion of
intersectionality as a point where static entities overlap, in preference for an intra-active
process entailing “the interplay between non-bounded phenomena, which interpenetrate and
mutually transform each other while interplaying” (Lykke 208). Further, Lykke also invokes
15
Jasbir K. Puar, writing of the supposed political incompatibility of intersectionality and Deleuze’s concept of
assemblages, points out that the problem is the assumption that “representation, and its recognized subjects,
is the dominant, primary, or most efficacious platform of political intervention, while Deleuzian
nonrepresentational, non-subject-oriented politics is deemed impossible” (Puar 50).
| 13
Deleuze’s image of rhizomes – subterranean plant stems which include roots and shoots, and
which spread horizontally rather than vertically in various directions – to reformulate
intersectionality as an analytical practice which attends to “non-hierarchical connections
between heterogeneous and multiple phenomena touching each other in unexpected ways”
(211).16 The way that I understand and apply Lykke’s approach to intersectionality consists
of analyzing the various points in which categorizations such as gender and race intra-act
while also taking into account precisely the non-fixable nature both of the categorizations
themselves and their moments of overlap. Quicksand is particularly inviting for such an
analysis in that it reveals some of the contradictions within the very categorizations of gender
and race, without denying their significance.
My analysis of the two novels takes form as follows. Chapter Two includes a
contextualization of certain intersections in play in Quicksand, while also bringing to light
more rhizomatic lines of flight that consider unconscious factors such as desire and affect.
This chapter will therefore first establish some intersectional considerations of subject
formation in the novel; second, it will investigate the intra-relational quality of these
intersections. As we will see, the intersections of race, gender, and class do not always occur
at fixed points or produce the same effects; depending on Helga’s relations to others in a
given social milieu, the significance of these categorizations changes shape. This is precisely
the point I explore with Quicksand, which provides a fictional expression of the entangled
and relational quality of subject formation. Beginning with Quicksand establishes such a
foundation necessary to move on to The Waves.
While Chapter Two explores the degree to which subject formation occurs in a messy
entangled space composed of material structures of categorizations, one’s own willful
identifications, and one’s unconscious desires and affinities; it is in chapter three that I want
to illustrate in even more depth the insufficiency of ontological constructions of the subject
as a fixed, bounded, sovereign entity. In this chapter the discussion of The Waves will turn to
the notion of becoming proper. Woolf’s work is already celebrated by theorists of becoming
such as Braidotti and Deleuze & Guattari, perhaps owing to what Gilbert and Gubar describe
as “her intense attentiveness to – and empathy with – even the most radical otherness”
16
As a metaphor for analytical strategies, the rhizome evokes a more dynamic, inclusive engagement than a
taproot, which Lykke describes as “straight and predetermined,”“[stuck] to one theoretical territory” (211).
14 |
(“Virginia Woolf” 216). The Waves lends itself particularly well to a psychoanalytical
reading, which attends to the characters’ respective relationships with language, as well as
how their respective positions within the symbolic influence their friendships and identities.
My engagement with psychoanalysis – as with intersectionality – serves in part as a transition
device, a vehicle to move into a discussion of becoming.17
Like Virginia Woolf’s remark that “books continue each other,” in this thesis I see
both novels participating in a dialogue about the complexities of identity and relationships (A
Room of One's Own 59). Literature is not an unproblematic reflection or representation of
life; nor can it be entirely divorced from precisely the conditions which produced it. Neither
novel tells us how life ‘is;’ rather, each novel offers possible (and as I will illustrate, very
different) ways of experiencing subject positions, and therefore provides lines of flight from
traditional Western ontologies.
17
The turn toward psychoanalysis within feminist thought in the 1970s-80s incidentally marked the beginning
of the move towards sexual difference theories and feminist nomadism (Braidotti, NS 125).
| 15
CHAPTER TWO
Racial Politics and Belonging in Quicksand
What she felt was not so much resentment as a dull despair because she could not separate
individuals from the race. – Nella Larsen, Passing
Desire, alienation, and the psychological intricacies of racial identification are all
common themes in the works of Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen. This chapter
explores how Larsen’s novel Quicksand unites these themes with social critique to challenge
definitions of subjectivity and identity. Already the title – Quicksand – conveys a sense of
restriction; it is a metaphor for the protagonist’s inability to free herself from the social codes
associated with inscriptions of race, gender, and social class (which are always contingent
upon her surroundings, and which inevitably dictate her place in society). Returning to one
line of discussion from Chapter one, I want to recall that the single signifier Woman is
insufficient in representing women’s (and woman’s) diversity. I have argued, with Braidotti’s
nomadism, for the political necessity of retaining the signifier Woman while acknowledging
the positivity of difference (NS 162). I have also established my approach to the novels as
embracing both nomadism and intersectionality – a practical extension of Braidotti’s remark
that one’s political subjectivity (their “conscious and willful position”) sometimes contradicts
one’s sense of identity, constituted by “unconscious processes” like desire (NS 158).
Quicksand illustrates precisely this paradox, especially regarding how the intersection of
race, gender, and class influence the protagonist’s shifting alliances and relations to others
and to herself.
The primary interest in Quicksand for this project is twofold. First, the role of desire
in Quicksand speaks to the contradictions that accompany the search for belonging under the
very categorizations that separate individuals in hierarchical structures of race, class, gender,
and sexuality. Second, as I will illustrate, this desire for community challenges the logic of
the autonomous subject: I read the protagonist’s conflicting allegiances and shifting
16 |
identifications as an expression of a nomadic subject which is multiple, relational, and never
fixed in just one place.
Situating Nella Larsen
Larsen’s attention to racial politics in her work is often attributed to the details of her
personal life, and Quicksand is widely understood as autobiographical. In fact, the life of
Quicksand’s protagonist, Helga Crane, is so close to what is known of Larsen’s life that
critics often fill in gaps of Larsen’s life with details from the novel.18 Such a reading strategy
is not unproblematic as it amounts to an overly-simplified representation of the author. For
this project it is not important whether Quicksand was intended as autobiography or fiction.
It is nonetheless significant to examine some of the realities of Larsen’s life which may have
influenced her work. She was born to a working-class Danish immigrant mother and an AfroCaribbean father who disappeared when Larsen was a child. Her mother remarried to a
Scandinavian immigrant, and Larsen was raised in Chicago by her mother and her all-white
step-family. As such, she had few if any starting points to explore her relation to AfricanAmerican society.
According to biographer George Hutchinson, Larsen’s estrangement from her African
roots, combined with her family’s working-class status, hindered her sense of belonging in
African-American society throughout her life: in the upper echelons of these circles, higher
value was given to those who could trace their lineage to the American South; lacking such a
qualification, a biracial or immigrant African-American might gain acceptance if s/he was
highly educated or if his/her father enjoyed good standing in African-American society
(Hutchinson 20-31). It has been speculated that Larsen’s eventual inclusion into Harlem
social circles was due to her marriage to a successful African-American physicist, and that
she was always alienated from this society because of her white immigrant origins (Pinckney
28). Perhaps because of these rigid social codes – or Larsen’s internalization of these
pressures – she rarely discussed the details of her origins and became estranged from her
family in her adult life (Hutchinson 24).
18
This “biocritical strategy,” in Keguro Macharia words, allows for “psycho-social assessments of the now
sutured Larsen-Crane” (255).
| 17
Early twentieth-century America was not an easy place for African-Americans or
European immigrants. Globally, these years saw the rise of fascism and revolutionary
movements; nationally, they saw a period of isolationism and increasing distrust of
immigrants.19 The intersection of Larsen’s race, immigrant origins, and social class (and her
gender, discussed below), alienated her from both white society and African-American
society, a rootless and perpetually insecure reality that underlies all of her fiction.
Larsen’s first significant introduction to African-American society was at Fisk
University, an all-Black school in the South. There she experienced the geographic
inconsistencies of racial codes and the social consequences thereof. A Black northerner
described his experience entering the South during these years: “In the North, an ambitious
Negro bumps into the colour line unexpectedly . . . Yet he may go a week or a year,
sometimes, without meeting with any unusually humiliating experience. In the South he is
given immediately and unmistakably to understand that he must get definitely on his side of
the colour line, and stay there” (Hutchinson 53-54). Larsen may have had a similar
experience of confrontation with racial divide, exemplified at the school she attended, which
followed an ethos of ‘racial uplift.’ Championed by African-American intellectuals Booker
T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, racial uplift emphasized the leadership role of an
educated, elite Black minority whose task was to elevate the status of African-Americans.20
In the words of American history scholar Kevin K. Gaines, “to uplift the race” entailed
“highlighting their function as elites to reform the character and manage the behavior of the
black masses.” The aim, at least in part, was to mimic the educated white bourgeoisie and
thereby join American society as their equals.
In Chapter one I discussed some of the problems of minority groups employing those
same tools used to discriminate in the first place. Audre Lorde’s remark, “the master’s tools
will never dismantle the master’s house” speaks precisely to this problem.21 Black women
19
Exemplified by the case of Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, whose 1927 doubleexecution was widely believed to have been prompted by nothing more than their foreign status and labor
activism (Gilbert and Gubar, “Early Twentieth-Century Literature” 10).
20
See Jacqueline M. Moore, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift, for
differences in their approaches. Born a Southern slave, Washington advocated a gradual uplift working
together with whites. Du Bois (born free), departed from such “accommodationist” positions, advocating a
swifter end to racial segregation with a Black elite to educate other African-Americans (68).
21
Lorde wrote in Sister Outsider: “It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the
master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own
18 |
had a particular position within this model of racial uplift, perhaps granting them different
tools for criticism.22 For uplift morality not only perpetuated a classist hierarchy among
African-Americans; it was also blatantly “masculinist,” in Judith Butler’s words: “This moral
notion of ‘race’ . . . requires the idealization of bourgeois family life in which women retain
their place in the family. The institution of the family also protects black women from a
public exposure of sexuality that would be rendered vulnerable to a racist construction and
exploitation” (178). Butler is referring to the representation –well into the twentieth century –
of Black female sexuality as ‘primitive.’ To reveal one’s sexuality as a woman of color
risked association with a barrage of hyper-sexualized images, including the “Hottentot”
embodied by Sarah Bartmann.23 In short, Black female sexuality existed exclusively as part
of racist discourses that served to further ensconce people of color within the non-human,
non-rational half of the dualistic logic of the thinking subject. Given this state of affairs, it is
perhaps of little surprise that those dedicated to racial uplift in the early twentieth century
saw fit to stifle Black female sexuality, almost as a preventative measure. The place of Black
women within this model was that of the chaste wife and mother, expected to keep an orderly
home and to support their husbands and sons.24
Larsen’s dissatisfaction with this situation comes through with tragic clarity in her
second novel Passing (1929) but it is also, as we shall see in the what follows, evident in
Quicksand. Larsen seemed ambivalent about racial uplift: while she understood the political
imperative for ‘race loyalty,’ her eventual ‘outsider within’ status in African-American
society also made her wary of the primacy of race – and its accompanying “presumptions,
idealizations, and self-deceptions” – in one’s identification (Hutchinson 30). This seemingly
game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those
women who still define the master's house as their only source of support” (112).
22
Cf. Sandra Harding, “Feminist Standpoint Epistemology” and Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outside
Within;” Respectively they attend to the epistemological value of women’s, and Black women’s strangerstatus within the social order. The outsider within, owing to her “combination of nearness and remoteness,
concern and indifference,” to the dominant culture, can better view the machinery of oppression than those
identified unproblematically with the dominant culture or those entirely outside of it (Harding 124).
23
Rosemarie Buikema writes: “The label ‘Hottentot Venus’ was designed to capitalize on two important myths
qualifying the female subject: alien and deviant as well as physical, erotic and arousing” (“The Arena of
Imaginings” 74). Sarah Bartmann, born a slave in Dutch-ruled South Africa, was exhibited for entertainment in
Europe, her ‘exotic’ body scrutinized even after her death, her genitals put on display in Paris at the Musee de
l'homme. See also Jean Walton, “Re-placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse.”
24
By arguing that Black women were suppressed by racial uplift, I do not suggest that its advocates were sexist
per se. There is nuanced critical discussion about the women’s location in uplift. Cf. Hazel V. Carby, Race Men.
| 19
unresolvable paradox resembles the current problem in feminist theory of utilizing the
signifier Woman as a political subjectivity even while acknowledging the limitations thereof.
It is precisely Larsen’s self-conscious location within such a paradox that renders her writing
unsettling, thought-provoking, and of critical importance to feminist and anti-racist thought
today.
Additionally, it is important to also consider the time she spent residing in Denmark:
in her early childhood and again in her adolescence. She had to transition from the rigid
moral and social rules of racial uplift – which essentially aimed to mimic white bourgeois
society – to an altogether different culture in which precisely Larsen’s differences from the
white majority would be emphasized. In early twentieth-century Denmark, the main exposure
the general population had had to people or color was for purposes of entertainment (e.g.
traveling entertainers). It was owing to this limited view that Larsen, a racially marked child
in Denmark, was frequently solicited to entertain: later in life she spoke of how she grew to
hate music while in Denmark “because people always insisted that [as] a negro she must
sing” (Hutchinson 33). Larsen’s years in Denmark also informed her literary sensibility.
Although her work is often labeled as belonging to the “tragic mulatto” genre, it could be
argued that it is closer to the “problem play” most associated with Norwegian playwright
Henrik Ibsen: “In problem plays, the situation faced by the protagonist is put forward by the
author as a representative instance of a contemporary social problem” (Abrams and Harpham
287). The characters of the problem play struggle to break free from rigid yet insecure social
circumstances. Larsen was inspired by Anatole France and John Galsworthy, whose fiction
deals not with racial politics but rather with social class and human nature; and by Jens Peter
Jacobsen’s Fru Marie Grubbe (1876), which depicts the downfall of an upper-class Danish
woman unable to claim her own subjectivity (Hutchinson 225-226).
Larsen’s relations to race, gender, and class, as well as her lifelong juggling of
contradicting inter/intra-national racial politics, makes her depiction of a seemingly
impossible longing for a more fluid subject position a particularly salient line of flight to
explore alternative ways of becoming which allow such contradictions. Here I examine
Quicksand – not as a statement about the failure to complete a journey to subjecthood, but as
a statement about precisely the dangers of exclusionary categorizations and identifications –
20 |
with an eye for all of the above elements in an effort to support a feminist nomadic position
on subject formation.
Racial Uplift and Female Subject Positions
Turning now to the novel itself, the narrative in Quicksand centers on Helga Crane –
a woman in her early-20s born to an Afro-Caribbean father and Danish immigrant mother –
as she confronts the various manifestations of ‘the color line’ in an ongoing succession of
relocations in 1920s America (and Denmark). In Larsen’s words, what drives the story is “the
psychology of the scene,” i.e. its subtext (Hutchinson 226). The reader follows Helga through
various periods of alienation and suppressed desires, punctuated by sudden – almost manic –
impulses to remove herself and relocate in a vain search for “her people.”
It opens with a restless Helga contemplating her feelings of failure as a teacher at an
all-Black school in the South. In a sudden realization of her discontent, Helga abandons the
school as well as her fiancé James Vayle. Returning to Chicago and rejected by her deceased
mother’s family, Helga secures a temporary position accompanying a lecturer to New York,
where she finds herself in the society of Black Harlem.25 After a brief period of belonging,
she begins to resent her friends’ obsession with race politics as well as their anti-white
sentiments. Alienated, she decides to move to Copenhagen to be with her mother’s family.
However, in Copenhagen her differences are put on display; she is treated by her aunt and
uncle as an exotic object. She begins to miss Black society. Returning again to Harlem,
however, Helga is rejected by a man for whom her desire has haunted her for years.26 In her
despair, she stumbles into an improvised Black house of worship. In a moment of clarity, she
resolves that marriage will perhaps finally give her a sense of security. With shocking
swiftness, Helga marries a Reverend, moves to an all-Black religious community in the Deep
South, and has three children. Although she tries to make herself fit into the life she has
25
Harlem, a neighborhood in New York City, was the center of the African-American cultural movement in the
early twentieth century – the Harlem Renaissance. It was the place of residence and activities for many Black
writers, musicians, artists, and activists (Wall).
26
See Johanna M. Wagner, “(Be)Longing in Quicksand”, for an analysis of Helga’s relations to and desires for
men; she suggests that Helga’s desires are not necessarily sexual, but that there are more complicated
dynamics in play.
| 21
chosen, resentment towards her husband and the entire community slowly takes root. The
depression that follows the death of her fourth child prompts her decision to, again, run away.
However, her sense of responsibility to her children gives her pause and, before she can
reconcile the situation, she is once again pregnant. On this sober note – the story ends,
leaving readers only to imagine Helga’s future.
Each turning point in the narrative (each sudden relocation) is precipitated by Helga’s
growing dissatisfaction with her inability to connect with those around her. The fact that her
relations to others are often inextricably linked with her ambivalent racial identifications will
be discussed later in this chapter. First, it is crucial to understand how Helga’s experiences of
race cannot be divorced from her experiences of gender (and vice versa). As discussed in
Chapter one, it is not entirely unproblematic to begin an analysis by invoking the same
categorizations that I would challenge – i.e., in this case using an intersectional approach. I
emphasize once again here that, by using intersectionality, I do not wish to fix Black
women’s subjectivity (nor any subjectivity) based on such categorizations as race or gender;
rather, the intention is to support a vision of the subject that accounts for such entangled
relationships and the complexity that every subject position expresses. By attempting to
understand some of the implications of these intersections, ‘we’ feminists can begin “to work
through the multilayered structures of one’s embodied self” and, in turn, engender more
complex and inclusive ontologies and epistemologies (Braidotti NS 164).
As discussed in the previous section, the politics of Black women’s subjectivity was
particularly vulnerable during Larsen’s times. African-American women had been left out of
the popular feminist discourse of the time, most notably the women’s suffrage movement
(Hine, Brown and Terborg-Penn 637). Sojourner Truth famously drew attention to this fact in
her 1851 speech at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention.27 Nor was their emancipation as
woman particularly important within the anti-racist uplift discourse of the time, whose
approach to women was protective at best and paternalistic at worst. Uplift ideology tended
to be elitist but also, as already illustrated, restrictive for Black women. In Black Women
Novelists, Barbara Christian traces the images of Black women in the early twentieth century
–in popular discourse and in literature – to early colonial roots, noting for example that the
27
When male hecklers remarked that (white) women should not be allowed to vote as they could not even
step over puddles without male assistance, Truth responded: “Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over
mud-puddles. . . and ain’t I a woman?” Invalid source specified..
22 |
ideal of the white Southern lady could only be constructed in opposition to the predominant
images of Black women in that time, most notably the figures of the self-sacrificing mammy
and the overtly sexual mulatta. In white discourse Black female sexuality was constructed as
something mysterious, with the power to lure slave-owning males into indiscretions
(Christian 13). On the other hand racial uplift, in an attempt to move past such violent
associations with interracial sex, advocated an almost asexual vision of Black female
subjectivity. Keguro Macharia points out how images of Black women in Harlem
Renaissance literature often depict the ‘good Negro woman’ as having an apparent “distaste
for sex” (260). The consequences for women’s lived realities was the suppression of any and
all sexual desires (not only ‘interracial’ and homosexual, but also heterosexual desires), as
the expression of such desires risked comparison to the overly-sexualized image of Black
women in a violent legacy of racism and slavery.
Although since its reprinting in the 1980s feminist criticism of Quicksand has
addressed Larsen’s attack on the rigid patriarchal codes of Black female conduct, critics in
Larsen’s time seemed unaware of this level of her critique. For example, as Butler points out,
uplift advocate Du Bois himself praised Larsen’s female characters for escaping the trap of
“sexual exoticization,” while failing to recognize “that Larsen was struggling with the
conflict produced, on the one hand, by such exotic and racist renderings and, on the other
hand, by the moral injunctions typified by Du Bois” (Butler 178; my emphasis). It is precisely
by understanding this struggle, along with the susceptible position of literary figurations of
Black women, that one can see how Larsen illustrated the intersection of race and gender,
environment and relationships, to challenge the stability of characterizations associated with
race and gender.
There are several moments in the novel that exhibit this point. An often-cited scene
occurs when Helga, at a party in Harlem following her return from Denmark, encounters
James Vayle, her former fiancé she had abandoned in the novel’s opening. In their short
discussion James (who supports racial uplift) reveals two aspects of uplift which Larsen
critiques: first, his contempt for interracial mixing (“And I don’t like that sort of thing. In fact
I detest it. . . You know as well as I do, Helga, that it’s the colored girls these men come up
here to see”); and second, the moral imperative of perpetuating the race by smart pairings
between educated upper-class ‘Negroes’ (“Don’t you ever intend to marry, Helga? . . . Don’t
| 23
you see that if we – I mean people like us – don’t have children, the others will still have.”)
(424). In the company of African-Americans dedicated to uplift, Helga, as a Black woman,
is not an individual but a symbol of the race.28 As such, she bares at once the responsibility
for racial uplift, and the blame for its failure. Responding that she has no intention “to
contribute any to the cause,” Helga illustrates not only her disinterest in racial uplift at large,
but her resentment of the expectation that she should personally feel responsible for the
perpetuation of the race (424).
This is in stark contrast to her mentality in Denmark, where she began to feel
“homesick for Negroes” and “the irresistible ties of race” (418). Just prior to her
homesickness Helga, in Denmark, feels free of responsibility to race, free from the pressure
to represent African-Americans. Yet she finds that her racial markings signify something in
Denmark as well. In a characteristic psychological progression, Helga begins in Denmark
feeling the immediate relief of distancing herself from the racial politics that dictated
relations in her former residence, and an idealization of how much better things will be for
her now; yet eventually she is made aware that the color line exists in her new home as well,
albeit with different consequences. In Denmark Helga’s aunt, Fru Dahl, emphasizes how
“exotic” and “striking” Helga is (402). Dressed in bright, provocative clothing she is paraded
around as “a curiosity. . . at which people came and gazed” (405). She is made to embody
precisely the primitive stereotypes of race which she had determined, back in Harlem, to
escape. On the other hand, in Denmark she is also free from the rigid restrictions placed upon
Black women in uplift discourse (i.e. she is at least allowed her sexuality even if it is
overemphasized, and she feels free to associate with white men and women). After she
catches the eye of successful Danish artist Axel Olsen (who decides – without consulting
Helga – to paint her portrait), she is finally made aware of her own exploitation: she is
disgusted when Olsen’s portrait, which blatantly emphasizes Helga’s sensuality, is given
critical acclaim. She is uncomfortable with her differences being displayed and accented as
such.
This episode evokes familiar real-life examples of the exoticization of Black women
(e.g. the “Hottentot Venus” previously mentioned). As such, the Denmark chapter is a key
28
See Lutz, Yuval-Davis, and Phoenix, “Introduction” in Crossfires, for a discussion of women’s positioning as
symbols of nationalism – and race – in contemporary Europe, which is also salient here.
24 |
inclusion into the novel, which might otherwise be read as a critique of uplift ideology alone.
It illustrates precisely one of the problems uplift advocates attempted to prevent: the
exploitation of Black women by white men. In doing so it suggests Larsen’s paradoxical
appreciation for (or at least an understanding of the reasoning behind) the very restrictions on
Black women’s sexuality which she finds so suppressive. Helga’s irresolvable ambivalence
towards the only apparent political recourse available to her typifies a key point for this
project: every subject position encompasses multiple, contradicting influences; and
unexamined, unproblematized identifications risk denying these multiplicities and falling
back into dualistic subject positions which I have argued against, with Braidotti, in Chapter
one.
The goal of this section was to illustrate the complexities of the intersectional forces
of race, gender, and class that are present in Quicksand. I have shown how Helga’s
ambivalence can be read as lines a flight departing from static definitions of Black women’s
subjectivity. This is an important foundation to establish in order to now proceed to a more
in-depth discussion of desire and kinship that this novel suggests. Only by first understanding
the vulnerability of her location as a biracial American woman can Helga’s conflicting
desires and allegiances be investigated for all their nuance. In the remainder of this chapter I
turn my attention, through a lens of feminist nomadism, to Helga’s desire for kinship. That is,
while this section has dealt with the complex willful subject positions at the intersection of
gender, race, and class, I now move to “unconscious processes” like desire and affective
relations that further complicate and challenge traditional ontologies of the knowing subject
(Braidotti, NS 158).
Belonging and Individuality: Helga’s (Competing?) Desires
There is a palpable sense, throughout Quicksand, of the lived contradiction and
ambivalence of desiring kinship on one hand, but lamenting the hierarchical, exclusionary
construction of the racial politics that define such kinship on the other hand. Complicating
this process is the fact that Helga’s racial allegiance, as well as her sense of identity at large,
is constantly shifting and contingent upon her immediate surroundings and relationships.
| 25
Interestingly, Helga tends to identify most strongly with what is missing from her current
surroundings. That is, it is often only in the absence of a particular kinship system or social
circle that Helga feels her connection to it; when actually in a given environment, she often
feels alienated. This speaks to Braidotti’s remark that identity is both “relational, in that it
requires a bond to the ‘other,’” and “retrospective, in that it is fixed through memories and
recollections in a genealogical process” (NS 158); that is, Helga’s identity perpetually shifts
in response to the bonds she feels with others through her recollections of them. Alienated
from those in her direct environment, she idealizes the bonds she shares with those who are
apart.29
Literary feminist scholar Johanna M. Wagner attributes Helga’s sense of alienation in
human circles to her longing for a “queerer” kinship system than that of mere human
relations.30 Wagner argues:
Most often critics frame [Helga’s] longing through a heteronormative lens that
presumes a craving to belong within a kinship system, such as the conventional
community of the nuclear family. By extension, however, that simple positioning of
Helga within the kinship paradigm automatically associates her indescribable longing
with heterosexual sex (129).
Opposing such heteronormative analyses, Wagner suggests that Helga desires individuality
through her association with things (clothes, books, etc.), and that any desire she feels for
human relations are, in effect, for the material security that she feels she can gain through
such bonds.31 While indebted to Wagner for calling attention to the trap of heteronormativity
in analyses of Quicksand, I would argue that even if Helga is dissatisfied with the
heteronormative social order in which she finds herself, this does not equate to an aversion to
human relations. The fact that Helga appears more content when in solitude or, indeed, when
surrounded by beautiful material things, is not necessarily symptomatic of a lack of interest
to connect with others; rather, I argue that Helga disassociates with others in an attempt to
29
This line of thought reoccurs in the following chapter and discussion of imagined community in The Waves.
Wagner’s uses “queer” here to “assert inconsistencies or unpredictabilities within the character’s (or the
text’s) commitment to heteronormativity,” rather than to suggest any sexual practices per se (Wagner 130).
31
Wagner writes: “What Helga wants are the things that a high-status family can secure, like freedom to be an
individual, to be different” (134). While I do not disagree entirely with Wagner (in fact, this opens yet another
interesting paradox – Helga can only feel ‘individual’ by gaining security through belonging), I disagree with
her thesis that Helga’s longing for human connections is always purely instrumental.
30
26 |
avoid traversing the landmines of the superficial – and heteronormative – codes ascribed to
both race and gender (and, indeed, their intersection). In other words, while Helga perhaps
longs very much for human kinship, she too often finds personal interaction to be rife with
hypocrisies and exclusions. It is these conditions of human interaction –not human
interaction itself – that Helga tries to escape in her solitude and through her kinship with
objects. It seems she hates the signifier, not the signified; yet she is incapable of separating
one from the other.32 This paradox makes Quicksand fertile ground for engagement with one
of the important challenges facing contemporary feminism: our own accountability and
entanglement (as feminists) within the very symbolic system to which we are opposed.
Intentionally or not, Larsen’s depiction of Helga challenges readers and critics to embrace the
contradictions she embodies.
This is a familiar dynamic within the central friendship of Quicksand. When Helga
first comes to Harlem, her new friend Anne Grey’s membership in Black high society gives
Helga an easy (if short-lived) sense of belonging. Mrs. Hayes-Rore (the lecturer whom Helga
had accompanied from Chicago to New York) introduces Helga to Anne after instructing
Helga not to mention her mixed racial origins: “I wouldn’t mention that my people are white,
if I were you. Colored people won’t understand it” (386). Entering Harlem society on this lie
of omission, Helga feels “like a criminal;” yet her friendship with Anne eases Helga’s
passage into a society that estranges her from her white origins (389). However, Helga feels
increasingly alienated from Anne and her Harlem friends, who express anti-white sentiments.
And yet, even as Anne’s racism keeps Helga from a closer relationship with her, Helga
admits to “understanding Anne’s bitterness and hate, and even a little of its cause” (421).
Here lies the root of Helga’s discontent: her dividedness. Although clearly dissatisfied
by the tenuous bonds she forges with others, there is always the sense that she is denying her
desires for more fulfilling relationships out of fear for what she may have to give up. She
exists in a world where identifications necessarily entail disassociation with – even disavowal
of – other parts of herself. Furthermore, these processes of (dis-)identification happen
32
The relationship between ‘signified’ (meaning, discourse) and ‘signifier’ (codes, signs) is a central feature of
Lacanian psychoanalysis. In Écrits, Lacan discusses the signifier/signified relationship using an illustration of
two identical doors with the only difference being the respective sings “Ladies” and “Gentlemen” (416).
| 27
relationally.33 For it is only in the company of others, under the structures of social codes,
that Helga’s body becomes racially marked; and her body is signified differently in different
places, which in turn affects her relationships. Helga’s friendship with Anne offers an
example of this process. Hutchinson observes: “Anne’s status and self-regard depend as
much on racial segregation as on class stratification within the black community. . . Thus, the
‘sisterhood’ between the two women is powerfully challenged by their quite different
structural and psychological relationships to the color line” (231). I would suggest that the
tension between Helga and Anne lies not in the mere fact of these differences, but in the fact
that they never face these differences: Helga never reveals her white working-class origins.34
It is therefore the latency of the expression of difference in Quicksand that makes it seem an
almost menacing presence in the novel.
It thus seems that Helga’s own subjectivity occupies an entangled space including her
location at the (shifting) intersection of class, race, and gender; as well as others’ locations at
that intersection, and her relationships to those others. Her relocations symbolize her desire
for unmediated relationships, her internal search for subjecthood, for an identity that is not
constituted by race or gender alone. In the entire novel there is but one moment of clarity in
which Helga feels “a sense of belonging to herself alone and not to a race” (Larsen 400). This
occurs in a moment of transition, while en route to Denmark after making the impulsive
decision to leave Harlem. These moments of sudden flight are often marked by Helga’s
fleeting conviction that her next destination will provide her with human relationships that
are not dictated by race. But she never manages to find such relationships; for, as Code
remarks: “there are no unmediated relationships. Like the subjects who make them,
relationships are located, and mediated by the structures of their location” (94).
The link between rootedness, movement, place, and (racial) identity is important
here.35 When Helga proclaims to have no “social background,” she refers to her lack of
familial links to the Deep South – the privileged location of African-American identity in
33
Philosophers have long engaged with the question: does human interaction foster self-discovery or does it
necessarily involve deceptions and false sincerities? (Cf. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions; Friedrich
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil). For Helga, the latter seems to be the case.
34
This calls to mind Yuval-Davis’s “transversal politics,” which stresses how facing differences among women
can serve precisely to cultivate unity and solidarity ("Women, Ethnicity and Empowerment ").
35
For interesting analyses of how race (and gender and sexuality) are constituted in/by place and space, see
Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006) or Linda Martín Alcoff’s Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the
Self (2006).
28 |
uplift ideology (Larsen 367). As Christian points out, Black women, as symbols of the race,
were often depicted in Harlem literature using organic metaphors: closely identified with the
South, and with the soil itself, rooted to the land in a physical gesture of spiritual allegiance
to the race (56). ‘Rootless’ and nomadic, the figure of Helga challenges this formula.
Kinship, for her, entails more than race and/or place:
Strange that she had never truly valued this kinship until distance had shown her its
worth. How absurd she had been to think that another country, other people, would
liberate her from the ties which bound her forever to these mysterious, these terrible,
these fascinating, these lovable, dark hordes. Ties that were of the spirit. Ties not only
superficially entangled with mere outline of features or color of skin. Deeper. Much
deeper than either of these (Larsen 419).
This passage suggests Helga’s perception of something unknowable, unconscious, about
bonds of kinship. That is, what creates affinity between people is not something restrictive or
traceable (like geographic origins or appearance); rather, in what Macharia calls “a primal
mode of belonging,” Helga asserts a kinship that is “deeper,” more “mysterious” (270).
It is precisely her rootlessness and dividedness which gives Helga, like Hill Collin’s
‘outside-within,’ the vantage point to critique the superficial elements of racial
identification.36 Her affinity to African-Americans exists outside of popular racial stereotypes
and their accompanying codes. As such, it is a more inclusive kinship, without the same rigid
or superficial qualifications. In other words, I read Helga’s desire for human connections as a
simultaneous desire to be free from exclusionary identifications. As I have illustrated,
Helga’s subjectivity is intimately entangled with relationships within the material structures
of society. Her ambivalence towards the primacy of race in constituting her subjectivity is
painful only because her social circles and kinship systems do not allow space for such selfconscious contradictions. If Helga could build familial and social networks without also
having to deny pieces of her history and affinities (like her denial, in Harlem, of her white
origins), she might finally find peace.
In this analysis I have illustrated how Helga’s ambivalence, her desire for kinship,
and the intersection of gender, race, and class lend themselves to a reading of Quicksand that
illustrates one of the central goals of the feminist nomadic project (i.e. a refiguration of
36
Cf. footnote #22, earlier in this chapter
| 29
female becomings-subject). First, I have discussed the character of Helga as a desiring
subject rather than a fixed subject: she experiences multiple identifications, and craves (if
unconsciously) connections that incorporate the paradoxes of these multiple affinities. She is
unsatisfied by the limited subject positions she can access (for example, as an overlysexualized Other in Denmark, or as a barer of uplift morality in Harlem); as such Helga
exhibits the need for a subject position “not as yet another sovereign, hierarchical, and
exclusionary subject, but rather as a multiple, open-ended, inter-connected entity (Braidotti,
NS 150). Second, I have shown how social structures affect Helga’s enfleshed reality: the
possibility for realizing her own subjectivity is materially restricted by her perceived racial
markings. Finally, I have shown the contradiction between Helga’s longing for kinship and
her very willful positions on race and gender. For Helga’s downfall is that she tries to run
away from, or to solve, these contradictions. This is an interesting point for my project in that
contemporary feminist cultural interventions are about staying with the trouble, rather than
professing to solve it: As Donna Haraway writes in Companion Species:
None of this work is about finding sweet and nice – ‘feminine’ – worlds and
knowledges free of the ravages and productivities of power. Rather, feminist inquiry
is about understanding how things work, who is in action, what might be possible,
and how worldly actors might somehow be accountable to and love each other less
violently (7).
Feminist nomadism acknowledges the significance that social structures and signifiers have
on female subjectivity, while simultaneously opening up critical discourse to challenge these
same structures without denying their significance. It is therefore a more realistic vision of
the complexities ‘we’ (as feminists and cultural critics) must face today. As Braidotti writes,
nomadism “allows for internal contradictions,” making it useful for exploring more complex
becomings-subject (NS 38).
I have attempted throughout this chapter to emphasize how Helga’s racial
identifications and self-understanding depend precisely upon her social circles and kinship
systems. In doing so, it may appear that I have conflated Helga’s relationships themselves
with the racial politics that shape them; this has been deliberate to better illustrate Helga’s
inability to separate race from individuals/relationships. The objective, in other words, is to
30 |
illustrate how relationships constitute – and are constituted or mediated by – such material
structures as racial categorizations, making them an undeniably entangled assemblage.
Reading Quicksand through the lens of feminist nomadism, attuned to spaces of
contradiction and affective relationships, offers an intriguing line of flight from traditional
ontologies. By focusing on Helga’s shifting subject positions in a divisive and categorized
social order, this analysis thereby challenges a vision of the subject that is constructed along
the same continuum of oppositional, hierarchical differences. Larsen illustrates the
psychological destruction of trying to deny differences and desires in order to qualify for a
subjectivity based on fixed autonomy. This speaks very much to the feminist project of trying
to refigure the female subject outside of exclusionary and hierarchical discourse. The
following chapter will now further develop some themes explored in Quicksand with a
discussion of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, which attends more closely to the positive
potential of ontologies of becoming.
| 31
CHAPTER THREE
The Waves and the Creative Potential of Difference
I can assure you, if you’ll make me up, I’ll make you.
–Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West
Just two years after the publication of Quicksand in the United States, Virginia
Woolf’s highly experimental novel The Waves was published in England. Despite the many
differences between the two novels, what they share is their central characters’ attempts to
reconcile their desires for individuality with the multiplicities of their identities at a time
when popular anxieties were rising about man’s position in the world. As a central point in
this project, it is through their relationships with others that the characters in both novels
explore these tensions. However, unlike Quicksand, The Waves is more of an artistic
experiment than a social critique. That is, whereas the former explores the psychological
effects of multiple identifications constructed within a restrictive social environment, the
latter seems to almost eliminate social circumstances and actions in preference of entirely
internal meditations over the nature of identity and community. Furthermore, where
Quicksand explores the destructive consequences of denying differences, The Waves
illustrates the positive potential of embracing spaces of both difference and overlap in
relations: they create worlds and identities. Both novels express an uncertainty towards
autonomous identity which is very much in line with contemporary attempts at forming new
feminist subject figurations.
This chapter is an attempt to interpret The Waves with a focus on the interplay
between individual personality and community, or the intra-relational quality of subject
formation. This is a novel which attempts nothing less than to capture an essence of life itself
– it explores identity and friendship, but also loss, solitude, death, desire, perception, and
defiance. The form and style of the novel additionally express the paradigm shift of
modernism. While it is beyond the scope of this project to give an extensive investigation of
the various interpretations of The Waves – of the symbolism, imagery, metaphors, and style –
32 |
these elements will be discussed in passing as they lend themselves to an investigation of
subject formation, individuality, and community portrayed in the novel.
The following pages will thus attend to three central points. First, I discuss the roles
of modernism and personal relationships in Woolf’s life and writing of The Waves. Second, I
explore the relationship between novelist and character as a metaphor for friendship (i.e. how
the writer’s creation of fictional characters may help us understand the creative, sometimes
imaginary, elements in play in human relationships). Here psychoanalysis lends itself to
further complicating the intra-relational subject positions expressed in the novel. Third, I will
discuss the question of multiplicity of identity in The Waves by exploring its characters as an
assemblage. Here, with the help of intersectionality (particularly class and nation), I read the
character Percival as a symbol of the falling British empire and then extend the implications
to also have meaning for the collective identity of the group of friends. I argue that The
Waves offers a feminist nomadic model of becoming – an expression of relational subject
formation that challenges the primacy of the Cartesian ideal of autonomy and its
accompanying dualisms. It expresses the positivity of difference, the potential for selfdiscovery and affirmation of individuality through relationships with others, and the extent to
which individuality and difference are solitary or communal phenomena.
Woolf’s Modernist Experimentation
In his autobiography, Leonard Woolf named The Waves his wife’s best and “most
difficult” book; Woolf herself (and many critics) agreed (L. Woolf, Downhill All the Way:
An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1039 148). It is also decidedly unique, and as Woolf
scholar and critic James Naremore has suggested, “perhaps unlike anything else in fiction”
(152). The novel follows six childhood friends as they age and experience – both together
and apart – processes of personality formation and the loss of a seventh absent friend, the
elusive yet always peripherally present Percival. Specific details of the material conditions of
the characters’ lives or the actions that typically drive traditional narratives are nearly absent;
instead, what propels The Waves is the characters’ inner reflections over their individuality
| 33
and the effects of their friendships. This takes form in what Woolf calls “a series of dramatic
soliloquies” which are ‘spoken’ in turn by each of the six characters (A Writer's Diary 159).
The sustained use of the form “Rhoda said” or “Louis said” (my emphasis) cues the
reader to which character is now thinking and/or feeling (if not to what they are literally
saying).37 As it is quite unlikely that the characters are actually speaking these soliloquies out
loud, the style could also be compared to stream-of-consciousness. 38 There are long
soliloquies which narrate action and express the inner thoughts and emotions of the character,
such as this passage ‘spoken’ by Rhoda:
‘I shall edge behind them,’ said Rhoda, ‘as if I saw someone I know. But I know no
one. I shall twitch the curtain and look at the moon. Draughts of oblivion shall quench
my agitation. The door opens; the tiger leaps. The door opens; terror rushes in; terror
upon terror, pursuing me... (TW 61)
There are also passages in which the ‘voice’ jumps quickly from one character to another,
expressing various embodied experiences and fleeting perceptions of each character during
one shared moment, as in the opening passage:
‘I see a ring,’said Bernard,‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’
‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’said Susan,‘spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.’
‘I hear a sound,’ said Rhoda, ‘cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down.’ (TW 7)
Later in this chapter I will pose the shifting voice of the novel as a challenge to
visions of autonomous identity. First it is important to note that Woolf’s application of such a
fluid narration style is also an important contribution to – and product of – the modernist
movement of the early twentieth century. This period was, in W.H. Auden’s words, an “age
of anxiety” in which popular confidence in man’s authority over life and knowledge was
increasingly undercut but a number of technological and social developments: the
“apocalyptic enormity” of World War I had aroused feelings of doubt and fear (Gilbert and
37
The point of view – who is narrating – was one of Woolf’s main difficulties with this novel. She wrote to a
friend: “I think my difficulty is that I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot. . . And thus, though the
rhythmical is more natural to me than the narrative, it is completely opposed to the tradition of fiction and I
am casting about all the time for some rope to throw to the reader” (Nicolson, A Reflection of the Other
Person: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 204). See also James Naremore, The World Without a Self for an analysis
of point of view in The Waves.
38
In fiction, stream-of-consciousness (or ‘interior monologue’) is a style in which “the narrator records in
detail what passes through a character’s awareness,” including memories, feelings, and perceptions (Abrams
and Harpham 345). Examples of modernist-era stream-of-consciousness fiction include James Joyce’s Ulysses
(1922), works of Henry James (Portrait of a Lady, 1881) and Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time, 1913-27).
34 |
Gubar, “Early Twentieth-Century Literature” 6); the decline of the British empire fostered
serious reservations about British identity; the work of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler
added to intellectual anxieties by suggesting that subjectivity is not constituted by
consciousness alone, but that unconscious desires and external influences also play a role;
and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (1916) illustrated the complexity of the universe, further
undermining man’s assurance of being ‘masters of the universe.’39
These developments were manifested in the arts in very particular ways. Any
semblance of coherence or ordered logic was challenged in this period of deliberate, selfconscious artistic experimentation with form – one can imagine the art of Picasso and the
music of Stravinsky as non-literary examples. In terms of modernist literature, writers were
still concerned with the tradition of reflecting real life, as Eric Warner has commented, “but
the image of life reflected was now changeable and unsettling, eccentric and unique” (8).
Being a literary critic as well as co-owner of a private printing press, Woolf was afforded
easy access to the new written works being produced at the time. She certainly read Freud as
well as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Dorothy Richardson, whose collective development
of the stream-of-consciousness style is often referenced in critical discussions of The
Waves.40 Woolf’s diary entries reveal her ambivalence towards this new style: though
intrigued by Joyce’s and Richardson’s writing she found them too egocentric, too exclusive
of external or unconscious forces.41 On the other hand it was Proust’s fiction which “showed
the personality being liberated from time and space” and which Naremore suggests opened
the door for Woolf to go “even further until the personality itself becomes dissolved in total
communication with what is ‘out there’” (36).
Indeed, Woolf’s novels from Mrs. Dalloway (1925) to To the Lighthouse (1927), as
well as her polemic essays such as “Modern Fiction” (1919) show her increasing concern for
the development of a new form of fiction; a form which, as she emphasized in “Mr. Bennett
and Mrs. Brown,” did not claim to be “a complete and satisfactory presentment” of life, but
that recognized “the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure” (24). She was
39
See Ian Ettinger, “Relativity and Quantum Theory in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves” and Mary Ann Gillies,
“Virginia Woolf: Bergsonian Experiments in Representation and Consciousness” for discussions of Woolf’s
possible engagement with Einstein’s and Bergson’s respective theories of time and space.
40
Cf. Naremore and Lee
41
In her diary Woolf writes: “I suppose the danger is the damned egotistical self; which ruins Joyce and
Richardson to my mind” (23).
| 35
slowly conceptualizing her own style, finally realized in The Waves, in which the personal
experience of the individual is not represented through conscious thought processes alone.
That is, her work expresses the uncertainty of her times by complicating existing notions of
what constitutes subjectivity; and though her novels are very personal, they suggest an almost
mystical undercurrent which drives human lives. As Naremore observes, Woolf “begins with
the private self in order to escape from it or at least deny its primacy” (189).
So while other modernist writers were attempting to produce more ‘realistic’
representations of experience by focusing only on ‘the self,’ Woolf was engaged in a
different project for she understood experience to be, at least in part, beyond the individual’s
consciousness. In this sense, Woolf’s work is pertinent to feminist engagement with
questions of representation: long before feminists began to ask whether complete
representation is actually possible, Woolf was exploring this matter through her fiction and
essays. As I will now show, in the case of The Waves, friendship and community are the
means to understanding the (im)possibility of discreet, unitary identities.
“Making each other up:” The Creative Element of ‘Knowing’ an Other
Woolf was intimately aware of the extent to which her relationships influenced her
work. As a member of the Bloomsbury group – a circle of intellectuals, artists, and literary
critics in London – Woolf’s social connections combined work, play, and experimentation.
The common written voice of Bloomsbury was ironic, highly ‘civilized,’ and reason-driven.42
Yet the group’s collective valuing of reason and its spirit of intellectual elitism conflicted
with the largely affective ties between its members.43 Although she was shy, Woolf was
naturally social and came to rely heavily upon her Bloomsbury companions – particularly her
42
Regarding Woolf’s (and Bloomsbury’s) class-bias Hermione Lee remarks: “all of Virginia Woolf’s novels deal
– though not flatteringly or complacently – with a limited social milieu, and betray a lack of imaginative reach
over the classes outside her own experience” (170).
43
The closeness and variety of relationships (familial, marital, sexual) within the Bloomsbury Group is well
documented. While it is not my wish to focus on the nature of these relationships, it is important that
Bloomsbury was creating an experimental, non-nuclear mode of living in which siblings (Virginia, sister
Vanessa, brother Thoby), spouses (Virginia and Leonard; Vanessa and Clive Bell), and lovers worked,
socialized, and in some cases lived together, creating interesting (sometimes difficult) dynamics which in turn
influenced its members’ political and creative undertakings.
36 |
sister Vanessa Bell– for encouragement and critical responses to her work. In Warner’s
words Bloomsbury was, for Woolf, a “buffer from the world’s view” (13). Her diaries and
correspondence reveal the extent to which her relationships influenced her own creative
processes. Just after publication of The Waves, for example, Woolf wrote to her sister: “Oh
what a mercy that you should like that book! [...] I always feel I’m writing more for you than
for anybody” (Nicolson, A Reflection of the Other Person 390).
Thus on the one hand Woolf was highly influenced by the “witty and irreverent tone”
of Bloomsbury, as well as its valuing of reason and independence (Lee 11). On the other
hand, her extraordinary sensitivity and awareness of affect made her exceptionally mindful of
the influence of relationships, and of forces beyond consciousness and/or language alone. As
such, Woolf’s work often deals with the conflict between order and disorder, and between
individuality and shared experience. Developing her style even further, Woolf wanted The
Waves to be “an abstract mystical eyeless book,” in which any limitations of personality
would be avoided (V. Woolf, A Writer's Diary 137). Yet it is precisely through the character
Bernard – the writer of the six friends in the novel – that Woolf exposes the difficulty in
succeeding at (or sustaining) a complete state of ‘eyelessness.’44
This section explores Woolf’s self-conscious process of creating her fictional
characters as a clue to suggest the complex dynamics that occur when a person tries to know
an other: in as much as individuality can conflict with friendship, or can threaten the writer’s
attempt to create an ‘eyeless’ representation of experience, it is also, paradoxically, a result
(or condition) of both. One cannot know an other (a friend) – just as a writer cannot create a
character – without revealing pieces of him/herself. The epigraph at the beginning of this
chapter illustrates Woolf’s perception that the process of ‘creating’ friends – through
knowing and speaking of them – resembles the process in which a writer creates a
character.45 The implications for my project then are twofold: First, this comparison
addresses the relational quality of individual identity. Second, it suggests that there is a
certain degree of fiction involved in how individuals understand their own identities and
those of others. So, while a central point in my discussion of Quicksand was that
44
I do not see Woolf’s attempt at ‘eyelessness’ as an attempt at supposedly innocent objectivity or what
Haraway calls “the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere” (“Situated Knowledges” 581). On the
contrary Woolf expresses the ‘situated’ perspectives of each character.
45
Cf. Laurie F. Leach, “The Difficult Business of Intimacy: Friendship and Writing in Virginia Woolf’s The
Waves.”
| 37
relationships are always mediated by coded social structures such as gender, here I extend
this point by adding that relationships are also mediated by one’s own partial perspective (i.e.
what one ‘knows’ about others reveals just as much about the knower’s own location and
perspective).
This point is evident in Woolf’s sixth novel Orlando (1928) – which immediately
preceded and is in some ways continued by The Waves. With its gender-bending protagonist,
Orlando is a parodic/fantastic biography of Woolf’s friend Vita Sackville-West.46 Nigel
Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) has suggested that Woolf wrote Orlando for Sackville-West
as “a unique consolation for having been born a girl” (Portrait of a Marriage 214). Orlando
was Woolf’s attempt to ‘make up’ her friend, which, Suzanne Riatt speculates, both flattered
and confused Sackville-West:
[At] once recognizing, and yet feeling alienated from, one’s own body and one’s own
life... Sackville-West, consumed and transformed by Woolf’s identification with
her… feels immobilized, her own body nullified by the deceptive presence of another,
a textual body that purports to tell all the truth” (36-40).
Yet in spite of these dynamics, Sackville-West was fond of the novel.47 Recognizing the
differences between one another, as well as the contradictions between how they each saw
themselves and how they each saw the other opened a creative space between Woolf and
Sackville-West which, with Braidotti, I would like to name “a transversal block of
becoming;” that is, they created a space of self-conscious awareness of the enmeshed nature
of their respective situated presences and other external and/or unconscious forces
(“Intensive Genre” 54).
One focus in the novel is the illustration of the difficulties and shortcomings of
representations and identifications of others. This is felt most sharply in moments of
reuniting depicted in the novel, i.e. when the friends come together again, or when one friend
enters the presence of another. In these moments each character meditates over how his/her
sense of self shifts and bends in silent response to the others. As the writer in the group,
constantly “making phrases” to describe his friends, Bernard is particularly sensitive to the
46
Much has been written about Woolf’s relationship to Sackville-West. Though both were married (happily, it
seems) to men, the two are known to have had a sexual relationship for a short time, and there was likely a
lasting erotic element to their friendship (Raitt 2).
47
After reading Orlando, Sackville-West wrote to Woolf: “you have invented a new form of Narcissism, - I
confess - I am in love with Orlando” (DeSalvo and Leaska 288).
38 |
limits of representation: “To be contracted by another person into a single being – how
strange. . . I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple as our friends would have
us to meet their needs” (TW 52-53). All of the characters engage in an ongoing introspection
over the bodily and mental changes they experience in the presence of others. In a later
scene, for example, when the six friends are assembled for the first time since childhood,
their effects on one another are further explored: “‘We changed, we became unrecognizable,’
said Louis. ‘Exposed to all these different lights, what we had in us (for we are all so
different) came intermittently… to the surface… I was this, Neville that, Rhoda different
again, and Bernard too” (TW 73). In these moments, the characters not only ‘become
unrecognizable’ to one another, but also to themselves; the presence of another constricts
each of them into an identity. Moreover, these dynamics produce a love/hate relationship
between the friends.48 That the characters more or less accept this paradox (though often not
complacently), suggests the possibility of living with difference while acknowledging the
impact of the symbolic order which we all share. Nira Yuval-Davis’s elaboration of a
feminist ‘transversal politics’ – which entails united political activity through processes of
‘rooting’ to one’s partial identity while also ‘shifting’ in attempt to understand others – is, in
my view, a salient example and expression of the processes of intra-relational becomings
occurring between characters in The Waves in such moments (Yuval-Davis 193).
Chloe Taylor’s analysis of the Kristevan themes in The Waves lends a psychoanalytic
perspective which is useful here.49 Taylor suggests that the characters’ love/hate relationships
parallel their respective relationships to the symbolic – to language, signification, and power
– and to the semiotic – to the nonverbal, instinctive.50 If the semiotic is the field of affective
ties between the friends, then the symbolic is the space where they try to make sense of these
ties: Bernard for example needs the presence of others to feel inspired, yet he also feels
compelled to bring order to his relationships, to make coherent what is incoherent. While he
48
Louis observes, “… I hate the others, because it is for them that I do these antics, smoothing my hair,
concealing my accent” (TW 74); while Neville remarks, “Yet it is true, I do not want to hurt you; only to refresh
and furbish up my own belief in myself that failed at your entry” (123).
49
Julia Kristeva, a feminist psychoanalysis scholar and literary critic, adds a poststructuralist critique to
traditional psychoanalytical approaches (i.e. Freud and Lacan) to subject formation: rather than a fixed
subject, she saw the subject as a constant process (Cf. Noëlle McAfee, Julia Kristeva).
50
Revisiting Lacan’s psychoanalysis (Chapter two, footnote #29), the symbolic is the space of language,
communication, and laws that dictate society, acquired when a child recognizes its separateness from its
mother, and thus becomes an individual speaking subject. In Kristeva’s psychoanalysis, the semiotic is a field
of instinct, emotion, and rhythm; it lacks the structure and order of language and signification.
| 39
is aware that his perceptions, impulses, and desires finally elude the ordering of language, it
is precisely one such indescribable impulse – to communicate – which keeps him so
problematically entrenched within the symbolic. So while the falseness of language – that it
reduces or essentializes what is described – is a common theme throughout the novel, it is an
illusion with which each character (and Woolf herself) willingly engages: the characters need
language, as they need one another, to give them a sense of their very place in the world.
If the ordering of human relations exists within the realm of the symbolic, this also
includes categorizations of gender and race. From the discussion of relationships in
Quicksand, recall Helga’s sense of a ‘primal kinship,’ one that transcends classifications of
race, gender, and class. Thus both novels deal with human relationships as existing in the
space between the semiotic and the symbolic – between affective ties and the material
structures of social codes (including language and classifications of race). In fact this is the
main point of commonality I see between the novels. Kristeva suggests that women – who
are more typically excluded from the symbolic and identified with the semiotic – had better
occupy this ‘space between,’ a realm between “time and its ‘truth,’ identity and its loss,
history and the timeless, signless, extra-phenomenal things that produce it” (Kristeva 38).
Like Hill Collins’s notion of Black women’s location as ‘outsiders within,’ this ‘space
between’ affords women a particular critical perspective while also giving them the power
and wherewithal to challenge the status quo. Significantly, such a location between semiotic
and symbolic further serves to challenge the dualisms (mind/body, male/female) that
traditionally support the autonomous subject, while still acknowledging how these
constructions materially signify worlds and code bodies. This again calls to mind Braidotti’s
figure of the nomad, and speaks very much to the goal of feminist nomadism I support in this
thesis.
In any case, Helga’s ambivanence towards social constructions of race and The
Waves characters’ ambivalence towards language and signicifaction have important
implications for their relationships. To the extent that human relationships are always
mediated (by language and categorizations like gender), each character must face, with every
encounter, his/her ambivalence towards the symbolic. In The Waves each character deals
with this tension in individual ways, but the combined effect suggests that one cannot live
happily entirely within the symbolic or the semiotic: the earthly and maternal Susan, who
40 |
distrusts language, finally grows weary of “natural happiness” , “sick of the body,” while
Bernard, lover of elaborate phrases, often wishes for a purer mode of communication, a
“little language such as lovers use” (TW 110; 137). Taken together, the characters’
ambivalence towards language and towards the illusions of their individual and collective
identities can be read as a statement about the degree of fiction and imagination that
composes both individual identity and community. The characters of The Waves need
language as they need their relationships to give order to an otherwise incoherent world. Selfconsciously combining her work and personal relationships (e.g. her creation of Orlando)
granted Woolf a keen awareness of how valuable – and also how partial – one’s knowledge
of another can be. The combination of all six characters into one sensibility (explored in the
following) suggests the potential for living with these tensions, within this ‘space between.’
The Individual as Assemblage
Virginia Woolf was clearly attuned to the relational quality of individual identity and
to the degree of fiction involved in constructing individual identity. In The Waves Woolf’s
interest in exploring individuality as a process rather than as a given entity that already ‘is,’
takes the form of a group of seven friends in constant flux between moments of union and
moments of isolation. Moments of union bear a sense of inseparability of the characters, the
impossibility of distinguishing one from another. Although there are endless possibilities for
interpreting this flux (between individual and community, order and disorder), my reading
suggests that there is no priority between these presumably oppositional dualisms; in fact, the
opposition of individual and community does not exist as such in the novel, at least not
simply – throughout the novel, the reader shifts from viewing the characters as members of a
circle of friends to viewing them as facets of one ‘single’ individual personality, a block of
becoming. Even after the final pages it is not entirely clear whether the characters are
decidedly a single entity, or indeed seven individuals. We can easily conclude from Woolf’s
correspondence and diary entries what her intention was: “Odd that they (The Times) should
praise my characters when I meant to have none” (A Writer's Diary 175). Read either way,
| 41
however, Woolf’s fluid characters challenge the simplistic, oppositional logic of either
individual or community.
In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari praise English writers such as Woolf
for their ability to “establish a logic of the AND” (28). The ‘AND-ness’ of The Waves then is
the possibility for the characters to be both separate and inseparable. This final section is a
thinking-alongside this possibility suggested by the novel, this complex vision of relational
subject formation, the multiplicity of the individual (for example the bios/zoe elaborated by
Braidotti). The previous sections and the discussion of Quicksand were intended to establish
how both novels examine individual subjectivity as a process that closely linked to
relationships, and how relationships themselves can be mediated by social structures such as
the intersection of race and gender; thereby I have positioned both novels as challenges to the
Cartesian logic which imposes the absolute autonomy of the knowing subject. What follows
continues this same line of thought but delves into deeper territory by exploring how The
Waves expresses these interconnected phenomena as multiplicities within the subject.
An interesting point to launch this discussion is the possibility that the seven friends
in The Waves express seven facets of Woolf herself. Warner suggests for example that Rhoda
reflects Woolf’s own shyness and inability to function in certain social moments; Bernard
may reflect Woolf the writer; and Susan, Woolf’s ambivalence toward motherhood (Warner
83). However, to read the characters as such too literally would be to miss the point; as I
established in Chapter one I do not read either novel as a direct representation of reality.
Rather, what makes the possibility that the characters may reflect pieces of one single person
(i.e. Woolf) an interesting entrance point is that it challenges the reader to imagine the
individual as a multiplicity, the ‘one’ as many, as an assemblage of several others. As
Braidotti writes: “the thinking subject is not the expression of in-depth interiority, nor is it the
enactment of transcendental models of reflexive consciousness. It is a collective assemblage,
a relay-point for a web of complex relations that displace the centrality of ego-indexed
notions of identity” (“Intensive Genre” 46).
Another interesting entrance point for viewing the group as an assemblage is an
intersectional analysis of the character Percival. Not forgetting the limited class view
expressed by Woolf’s oeuvre, Percival can be read as a criticism precisely of white, male,
imperial power which was, as discussed earlier in this chapter, declining during the interwar
42 |
years in which Woolf wrote The Waves. Percival is the only figure who never ‘speaks’ in the
novel; his character is only inferred from the six friends’ references and recollections, which
paint an ambivalent picture of an arrogant and privileged boy who becomes a colonial
administrator and dies young in India. Similar to Helga’s retrospective bonding with those far
away from her, the six friends wonder throughout the novel how Percival’s absence affects
their lives and friendships; each character recognizes Percival’s centrality to their group, how
he gave them a sense of solidarity and order that is now missing. Christie Purifoy compares
the friends’ melancholy over the loss of Percival to the British population’s melancholy over
their disintegrating empire, “a community that has lost the story of itself” (36). She poses
that, while Woolf may have been a critic of empire, she nonetheless recognized its role in
creating solidarity. This community-creating power, in my reading, is linked very closely to
the political applicability of the signifier Woman; and the fall of empire is linked to the crisis
of the subject. British identity, constructed around the intersection of class, empire, and
gender (embodied by Percival in The Waves), was being recognized for its impermanence
and fallibility, inciting doubt in the very stability of individual subject positions defined
against this construction. Thus, as an assemblage, the friends define themselves against
Percival’s discursive powers and, as such, become dislocated at Percival’s loss.
Regardless of who or what each character in The Waves purportedly ‘represents,’ they
certainly share a common voice. Although the point of view constantly flows from one
character to another, they all express a similar style, employing equally introspective thought
processes, sometimes even appearing to finish one another’s thoughts. They also rely on
shared images and symbols, many of which are also shared with passages in the ‘interchapters’ or interludes which, from the point of view of an omniscient narrator or what
Braidotti calls “a seemingly absent minded floating attention or fluid sensibility,” describes
earth, sea, and sky throughout the progression of a day’s passage from sunrise to sunset
(“Intensive Genre” 46). These interludes serve in part to move the story of the seven friends
through time. The first interlude, for example, describes a shoreline and a garden at sunrise
and leads into a scene of the friends as young children playing. As the novel moves forward
the interludes describe, in phases, how the landscapes and the elements they encompass
(birds, worms, rocks, waves, etc.) change from being indistinguishable (“The sun had not yet
risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky.”) to being very separate and even
| 43
antagonistic (“The sun, risen. . . bared its face and looked straight over the waves. . .
Whatever the light touched became dowered with a fanatical existence. . . Everything was
without shadow.”)(TW 7; 64). In the meantime the characters grow older and also more
distinct. Yet as the interludes proceed to the landscape at sunset, the characters likewise
begin again to blur into one another (“The sun was sinking. . . The land was so distant that no
shining roof or glittering window could be any longer seen.”)(TW 119).
The images of a changing landscape throughout a single day therefore reflect not only
the passage of time in a human life but also a human becoming-‘de-subjectivized,’ or
dislocated from the traditional space of the autonomous subject position. Carl Woodring has
observed that the uniform style employed by all of the characters draws attention to “the
deliberate effort which is required to separate a character from the ‘multiple relationship’ in
which he or she is entangled” (28). Even in moments when the characters appear separate,
their referral to one another and their summoning of similar images are signposts for the
reader to imagine their shared – almost mystical – consciousness. This furthermore speaks to
the inter-connected nature of their relationships. For example, as Taylor points out, Jinny is
closely associated, through ongoing imagery, with the sky (air, wind, birds); Susan, with the
earth (soil, wet burrowing creatures); and Rhoda, with the sea and all that it encompasses
(68).51 While the interludes describe the sometimes antagonistic relationships occurring
between these different natural phenomena (e.g. the birds who peck at the earth in search of
food), the characters call upon this same imagery when describing their friendships. These
moments, in which the characters seem to embody natural phenomena existing in symbiotic,
co-evolving relationships, suggest a vision of the group of friends as also existing in a
symbiotic co-evolving assemblage that may not always be pretty, but that each entity
nonetheless needs to survive.52 In these moments of becoming, the assemblage that is the
group of friends acquires a new, independent ontological status altogether different from the
old Cartesian vision of the unitary thinking subject.
Once understood as an integral part of the world, of relational processes of
differential becomings rather than as a privileged and detached observer thereof, the subject
becomes de-subjectivized, imperceptible; for it becomes no longer important to fix or define
51
In Taylor’s analysis, she goes on to couple Jinny (and sky) with the masculine symbolic order, Susan (and
earth) with the feminine semiotic, and Rhoda (and sea) as occupying a space in between.
52
Cf. Deleuze and Guattari’s example of the symbiotic unit, or becoming, of the wasp and orchid (11).
44 |
the separate entities comprising an assemblage, but rather to try to comprehend their
relations to one another, their co-constitution and co-evolution.53 The group of friends
together are an assemblage, greater than (or at least different from) the sum of its individual
parts. Going even further, and drawing from Braidotti’s ‘third level’ of sexual difference, I
relate this acknowledgement of the group-as-one to one-as-multiple.54 In this chapter I have
discussed Woolf’s awareness of the outside forces and affective relations that influence her
sense of identity; Deleuze and Guattari, also referring to Woolf, pose the question: “is the
multiplicity that fascinates us already related to a multiplicity dwelling within us?” (264). If
we recall earlier in this chapter that an individual can only know an other precisely through
him/herself, can it not also be possible that human relationships act as intra-active
embodiments of one’s own ‘multiplicity dwelling within?’
Bernard, for example, does not exist as such outside of the stories he creates and
shares with the others; he is therefore an assemblage, a multiplicity comprised of his friends
and their stories. He presents a paradox which is crucial to my reading of The Waves. On one
hand, he desires communication and story-telling; making phrases is his effort to express
definitively his individuality. On the other hand, he cannot make phrases without the
presence and influence of others, which thereby undermines his attempt to represent his
autonomy through such stories. In the end, Raitt observes, Bernard finds that “stories are
always linked to other stories; they can never guarantee the distinctness of the individual. . .
It is only in the unmediated expression of a primal demand that the self can be sure it exists”
(Raitt 154). The paradox then is that Bernard feels a ‘primal demand’ to tell stories which, by
definition, rely precisely on the medium of language and relationships, as discussed in the
previous section. Yet he does not solve this paradox; he finally accepts that he is both bios
and zoe, that he occupies a space between the symbolic and semiotic. This is precisely a
subject position that I argue for throughout this thesis.
At the novel’s close, an elderly Bernard tells the story of his life in a manner of
‘summing up’ to an anonymous listener:
53
Cf. Haraway’s analysis, in Companion Species, of the co-evolution of humans and dogs, which she poses as a
figuration for inter-subjective “co-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the
relating, and the relating is never done once and for all” (12).
54
Recall that this ‘level’ of sexual difference acknowledges the “differences within each woman” (NS 151).
| 45
Our friends, how seldom visited, how little known. . . and yet, when I. . . try to break
off . . . what I call ‘my life,’ it is not one life that I look back upon; I am not one
person; I am many people; I do not know altogether who I am – Jinny, Susan,
Neville, Rhoda, or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs. . . . For this is not
one life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis,
Susan, Jinny, or Rhoda – so strange is the contact of one with another (TW 160-61).
In these final triumphant pages, a defiant Bernard asserts at once his will to live and his will
to tell stories, even acknowledging the entangled character of his life and stories with those
of the others; even doubting his identity as closed and discreet, and doubting the material
existence of his friends. Although the loss of ego accompanying Bernard’s union with his
friends suggests ‘a sort of death,’ (the loss of self), he asserts his desire to live, to defy death.
As stressed throughout this chapter, moments of union between the friends often carry a
sense of loss of individuality. I read these moments as a temporary embrace of the nonhuman life forces joining them (zoe), and a fading of the discursive forces (bios), which may
be experienced as a ‘death of the subject.’ And indeed, the final moment of the novel
suggests Bernard’s imminent death. Yet I read Woolf’s treatment of Bernard’s death as a
reinforcement of life’s will to go on. With Braidotti, I argue for the positive potential of such
moments. 55 As Naremore writes, Bernard comes to realize “that these very oscillations are
part of some ‘eternal renewal’ and that his habitual struggle against the enemy [death, but
also disintegration of personality] is futile but noble” (Naremore 188). I would go even a step
further to suggest that Bernard’s ‘struggle’ – his desire to live and communicate – is what
finally marks his individual subjectivity not as a knowing subject but as a desiring subject in
constant re-construction through multiple, intra-relational becomings.
55
Braidotti writes: “But life will go on, as zoe always does; so much so that the injunction is not the classical
‘give me life (bios) or give me death’, but rather ‘give me life (zoe) and hence give me death’ (Transpositions
259).
46 |
CONCLUSION
The idea for this thesis was conceived, in part, from my repeated encounters – both in
and out of academia – with the kind of either/or logic that is never capable of accounting for
the true complexities and entanglements we are living with today. Coming as I do from a
country with a two-party political system, I am all too familiar with the insufficiencies of
either/or discourses (which, as I write this, are in question more than ever in the aftermath of
the government shutdown). Moving to the Netherlands has at once caused me to feel more
bonded to and yet more critical of my country and the cultural, historical, social phenomena I
have inherited. Perhaps this is why Rosi Braidotti’s figure of the nomad resonated so easily
for me: it responds to a problem I have suspected for a long time, although I only recently
gained the critical eye to identify it, and the language to express it. As Braidotti observes, the
capitalist state of ‘Western society’ today is that of a “pseudo nomadism (NS 6):” money,
goods, ideas, even people are fluid, migratory, hybrid; yet the subject is still discursively
handled in terms of the same tired dualisms which neatly reproduce the hierarchical
machines of racism, sexism, homophobia, and humanism. In this thesis I make my
contribution to the ever-growing movement against either/or thinking, and towards new
‘both/and’ ontologies.
In Chapter one I laid out my theoretical and methodological approaches to this
project. I presented the problem of traditional ontological visions of the subject and explained
that feminist engagement with this problem seeks to disrupt its accompanying hierarchical
dualisms – such as mind/body and nature/culture – and to thereby engender more inclusive
feminist discourses, less violent practices of representation, partial perspectives, and less
restrictive figurations of the subject. Using both intersectionality and feminist nomadism was
an exercise in taking account for both the discursive and material forces that influence
relationships and individual subject positions. Drawing from Crenshaw, Lykke, and Puar, I
positioned my engagement with intersectionality not as a claim for fixed, intersectional
subject positions; on the contrary, I use it as a tool to explore differences and contradictions.
Furthermore, I supported the continued feminist engagement with literature and established
my reading of the novels as a “thinking-alongside” in order to pursue theoretical lines of
flight.
| 47
In Chapter two I analyzed Larsen’s Quicksand, first providing a socio-cultural
background of the author – with particular attention to early twentieth-century politics of
racial uplift and Black women’s location as ‘outsiders-within.’ This chapter established the
relational quality of subject formation by illustrating Helga’s shifting identifications, always
reliant on her surroundings. I posed Helga as an expression of the paradox of a political
subjectivity that contradicts one’s sense of individuality: the only subject positions available
to Helga are disproportionately dependent upon racial categorizations that by definition deny
her differences. With Braidotti’s second ‘level’ of sexual difference, I link this contradiction
to contemporary feminist usage of the signifier Woman while still recognizing differences
among women.
In Chapter three, I discussed Woolf’s The Waves, beginning with a description of the
social and cultural anxieties that marked the beginning of the crisis of modernity and the
death of the subject, as expressed in modernist art and literature. I posed Woolf’s fantastical
biography of Vita Sackville-West – Orlando – to establish a metaphor that friends create one
another just as a writer creates a character. While Chapter two elaborated the complexities of
shifting and contradicting subject positions, my analysis of The Waves takes another step,
with Braidotti’s third ‘level’ of sexual difference, which recognizes the multiplicities within a
single subject position. I explored the possibilities for reading the group of friends as an
assemblage, a block of becoming in which it is no longer important to define who each
character ‘is,’ but rather to understand how they relate. Bernard illustrates the key paradox to
this project, for he eventually realizes the folly of searching for ‘true’ representations or fixed
identities; but he nevertheless embraces that such practices are part of our discursive realities.
Although the two novels deal quite differently with friendship (it is an explicit theme
in The Waves, while it lays latent in Quicksand), both explore the centrifugal pull of others
and the inextricable connectedness of our symbiotic realities. As feminist, interdisciplinary
engagement with new ontologies continues, visions of our entangled realities will continue to
broaden until, hopefully, the need will no longer exist to define oneself under the limited
logic of either/or.
48 |
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