Modernist temporalities: deathlike lives and lively deaths in Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and Elizabeth Bowen

Abstract

This thesis takes as its case studies Mrs Dalloway's Septimus Smith, who conceives of himself as the living dead, No More Parades' O'Nine Morgan, who, in a grotesque post-death animation, refuses to settle, and The Last September's Gerald Lesworth, who is persistently figured as the future dead. Through these figures, this study counters assumptions of death in these texts as final, conclusive, or a locus for revelation or omniscient truth. It asserts the importance of porosity between life and death to experimentation in modernist fiction. The deathlike living and lively dead in these texts introduce unsettling perspectives situated in a future which is assured because it is death, but impossible because death does not necessarily signify an end. These impossible perspectives dislocate expectations of linear temporality and produce a radical uncertainty in the present. Building on recent modernist futurity studies and Freud's theory of halted mourning in 'Mourning and Melancholia', this project argues that the multiplicity, stagnation or negation of the present through these future perspectives are partially occasioned by the notion of war as unending or ever-present. As authoritative perspective in these texts is deteriorated, my thesis argues that this deterioration seeps through into other forms of ostensibly authoritative representation including memorialization and commemoration, mapping, identity, literary types, writing, and even words themselves. As perspective upon these categories is exposed as an impossibility, doubt is cast over them as prima facie certain. Finally, this thesis argues that what Jacqueline Rose (2004) frames as 'relations between presence and absence which should' - but do not - 'hold between the living and the dead' are paradigmatic of the form of these texts. While periodization is not the main focus of this work, my study formulates an approach for reading these texts which pushes against realism and modernist experimentation as mutually exclusive categories. My analysis of Mrs Dalloway situates liminality between life and death as fundamental to Woolf's concerns with temporality and representation in this text and her experimentation with form. Building on this analysis, my thesis then foregrounds liminality of form as integral to reading No More Parades and The Last September in particular, questioning how critical categorizations of these texts as exclusively realist or definitively experimental constrict or foreclose readings of them. This thesis refutes readings of Ford as exclusively 'modernist' or not 'modernist' and frequently gendered approaches to Bowen's work which read it as limited by the sentimental as antithetical to experimentation or, more recently, vice versa.

Date of Award	31 Dec 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Daniela Caselli (Supervisor) & Robert Spencer (Supervisor)