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- W2595763114 abstract "In D. H. Lawrence's 1920 novel Women in Love, amidst the louder narrative of heterosexual pairings and homosocial yearnings, a strange image appears. The male characters, congregating in Julius Halliday's flat, an otherwise ordinary London sitting-room, confront a jarring representation of a racialized or body: several Negro statues, wood-carvings from West Africa, strange and disturbing. (1) One statue in particular depicts a woman giving birth and looking tortured, her black, slick body appearing almost like the foetus of a human being, her strange, transfixed, rudimentary face [...] conveying the suggestion of the extreme of physical sensation, beyond the limits of mental consciousness. (2) Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin are torn when they consider this statue. Gerald asks if the statue is obscene (to which Halliday responds he has never defined the obscene), while Birkin remembers it much later in the novel, musing that it has become one of his soul's intimates, the grotesque body representing thousands of years of purely sensual, purely unspiritual knowledge. (3) The tortured female body of this statue exists in the novel as a cipher. Bearing more meaning than it can bear (while also bearing a child in the mix), the statue is laden with subsumed narratives of cultural, heteronormative, religious, racial, and sexual tension, all of which exist subterraneously in the novel and surface in the guise of the black, othered, female birth-giving body. I begin with this textual moment in Lawrence because it is a succinct representation of the primary argument of this article: that many traditionally Euro-modernist texts appearing between the years 1890 and 1950, including those by Jean Rhys, are highly engaged in issues of reproductive power(lessness) at the intersection of race, class, and cultural belonging or displacement. I seek to illustrate the significance of reproduction in the Euro-modernist movement and to suggest that reproduction itself be reconsidered as a fundamental tenet of the movement. In his book Modernism, Technology, and the Body, for example, Tim Armstrong argues that [i]n the modern period, the body is re-energized, re-formed, subject to modes of production, representation, and commodification. (4) Armstrong explains how early twentieth-century scientific and technological forays into the sexualized and reproducing body--including sex-change operations and attempts to construct artificial wombs--speak to the modernist desire to mechanize, control, and commodify the body and its offspring, to it new as texts were being made new. A further claim of this article is that to be a foreigner or a racial in many modernist novels fundamentally echoes the condition of pregnancy. While I do not intend to make large generalizations, I do want to emphasize the importance of the motif occurring in Euro-modernist texts: to be pregnant is also to be an outsider, and this outsider often contains deep inflections of othered racial and economic statuses. (5) For example, in Olive Moore's novel Spleen (1930), the condition of pregnancy is fraught with the condition of exile and outsiderness as pregnant and middle-class Ruth struggles to find her place in her husband's restrictive upper-class family estate. And in We Have Been Warned (1935) by Naomi Mitchison, the main character finds herself pregnant while simultaneously alienated in a dizzying political landscape imbued with socioeconomic fissures, both conditions collapsing on each other in a deluge of decentering. To succinctly illustrate my claim that pregnancy and the outsider status resonate with each other and that they resonate with the traditional tenets of the modernist movement as well, I will focus my argument here on only two novels by Jean Rhys--Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). In these works, the conditions of otherness and of pregnancy are virtually synonymous with each other, as both yield extreme changeability, dismantling of self, ostracization, fragmentation, and outsiderness. …" @default.
- W2595763114 created "2017-03-23" @default.
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- W2595763114 date "2015-06-22" @default.
- W2595763114 modified "2023-09-27" @default.
- W2595763114 title "Birth Giving, the Body, and the Racialized Other in Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight" @default.
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