People, Objects, and Anxiety in Thirties British Fiction

239 Pages·2013·1.24 MB·English

Loyola University Chicago
Loyola eCommons
Dissertations Theses and Dissertations
2012
The Things That Remain: People, Objects, and
Anxiety in Thirties British Fiction
Emily O'Keefe
Loyola University Chicago
Recommended Citation
O'Keefe, Emily, "The Things That Remain: People, Objects, and Anxiety in Thirties British Fiction" (2012).Dissertations.Paper 374.
http://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/374
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Copyright © 2012 Emily O'keefe
LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO

THE THINGS THAT REMAIN:
PEOPLE, OBJECTS, AND ANXIETY IN THIRTIES BRITISH FICTION

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO
THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

PROGRAM IN ENGLISH

BY
EMILY O‘KEEFE
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
AUGUST 2012
Copyright by Emily O‘Keefe, 2012
All rights reserved.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to Joyce Wexler, who initially inspired me to look beyond symbolism
to find new ways of engaging with material things in texts. Her perceptive readings of
several versions of these chapters guided and encouraged me. To Pamela Caughie, who
urged me to consider new and fascinating questions about theory and periodization along
the way, and who was always ready to offer practical guidance. To David Chinitz, whose
thorough and detailed comments helped me to find just the right words to frame my
argument.
A Teaching Scholars Fellowship and an Advanced Doctoral Fellowship from
Loyola University Chicago helped me greatly in bringing this project to completion.
Thank you to my professors in the English department, and thank you especially to my
friends and colleagues in the graduate program, many of whom offered me feedback and
support on this project.
Thanks and love to my parents, Pat and Cass O‘Keefe, whose lifelong advocacy
for education and literacy has motivated my work and studies. To my sister, Molly
O‘Keefe, whose visits and phone calls relieved the tension and kept me working on.
Finally, I could never have done this without Adam Davenport, my love, my best friend,
and my strongest supporter.

iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS v

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION: THINGS AND THE THIRTIES 1
Defining Things, Objects, and Persons 6
Things, Objects, Persons in the Thirties 13

CHAPTER TWO: KITSCHY THINGS AND SYNTHETIC BODIES IN
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD‘S THE BERLIN STORIES 23
Kitsch: ―Unnecessarily Solid, Abnormally Heavy, and Dangerously Sharp‖ 27
―Bizarre Remnants of Statuary‖: Things and Politics 47
Doing Business with a Corpse 57

CHAPTER THREE: TREES WALKING: BODIES AS THINGS AND
THINGS WITH BODIES IN JEAN RHYS‘S FICTION 70
Humanlike Things and Thinglike People 75
Film Minds and False Arms in the Interwar City 88
―Wear Me, Give Me Life, and I Will Do My Damnedest for You!‖ 97
Conclusion: Things and Otherness in the Thirties City 113

CHAPTER FOUR: EVELYN WAUGH‘S ―DUBIOUS CLUTTER‖
OF PEOPLE AND THINGS 117
Waugh‘s ―Promiscuous Collections‖ 122
Things and People on the Move 132
Are People ―Just‖ Things? 144

CHAPTER FIVE: TOYING WITH THINGS: THINGS, GENRE, AND
GENERATIONS IN ELIZABETH BOWEN‘S INTERWAR NOVELS 164
Toys, Children, and Creativity 172
Adolescents, Lost in the Grand Estate 183
Death, the Future, and ―Imperturbable Things‖ 194
Coda: Bowen and World War II 207

BIBLIOGRAPHY 214

VITA 231

iv
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Christopher Isherwood

CK Christopher and His Kind

GB Goodbye to Berlin

LS Lions and Shadows

MNCT Mr. Norris Changes Trains

PV Prater Violet

Jean Rhys

ALMM After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

GMM Good Morning, Midnight

LB The Left Bank and Other Stories

VD Voyage in the Dark

Evelyn Waugh

BM Black Mischief

CS The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh

DF Decline and Fall

EAR Essays, Articles, and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh

HD A Handful of Dust

L The Letters of Evelyn Waugh

VB Vile Bodies

v
Elizabeth Bowen

B The Bazaar and Other Stories

BC Bowen’s Court

DH The Death of the Heart

HP The House in Paris

MT The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen

TLS The Last September

PPT People, Places, Things

TN To the North
vi
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION: THINGS AND THE THIRTIES
In Nancy Mitford‘s Wigs on the Green (1935), the courting Jasper Aspect and
Poppy St-Julien discuss the advent of political ideologies such as Nazism and
Communism in Europe. Wigs on the Green is a comic novel—albeit one that focuses on
the rise of fascism in Britain, with an underlying awareness of the dangers it presented—
but the exchange includes some of the dark rhetoric that was becoming common in the
thirties.
―I am inclined to think that the Western civilization we know needs
putting out of its agony as soon as possible. It is old and tired, the dark ages are
practically upon us anyhow, and I should prefer that they march in with trumpet
and flag than that they should creep upon us to the tap of the typewriter. I am at
heart, I suppose, a Nihilist.‖
―I don‘t know what that is,‖ said Poppy.
―No! But then you are a girl with a very limited outlook, aren‘t you?‖
―I‘m not.‖
―Oh! yes, you are. Like most women you only care about personalities,
things don‘t interest you.‖
―That‘s simply not true. I‘m fearfully interested in things—I absolutely
long for a sable coat.‖ (98–99)

Jasper‘s millenarian invocations of the death of Western civilization and the coming of
the dark ages were echoed by many from all over the political spectrum in interwar
Britain. The scars of the First World War were still visible, and the late twenties and
thirties saw the publication of several memoirs of that conflict (including Robert Graves‘s
Goodbye to All That, published in 1929, and Vera Brittain‘s Testament of Youth, which
1
2
came out in 1933). Despite the lingering awareness of the horrors of that war and the
resulting efforts of many people to promote peace, commentators throughout the
thirties—even very early in the decade—thought that another war was inevitable. In Keep
the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell‘s novel from the year after Wigs on the Green,
Gordon Comstock thinks of ―the great death-wish of the modern world…Enemy
aeroplanes flying over London, the deep threatening hum of the propellers, the shattering
thunder of the bombs‖ (24). The historian G. N. Clark mused, in 1932, that the
―commonest phrases we hear used about civilization at the present time all relate to the
possibility, or even the prospect, of its being destroyed‖ (qtd. in Overy 15).
Like Mitford‘s Jasper Aspect, many reacted to the bleak outlook of the times by
affiliating themselves with a political or religious ideology, even an extreme one. Young
writers such as Orwell, W. H. Auden, and Naomi Mitchison were eager to make their
political positions a major part of their writing—a tendency that Virginia Woolf,
speaking for a slightly older generation, criticized in her essay ―The Leaning Tower.‖
Several other figures, including Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, went through
religious conversions in the late twenties or early thirties.1 Yet Poppy‘s flippant response
to Jasper‘s references to political ideologies—to focus on things, like coats—was, as I
will argue, also a common (and not always flippant) response to the atmosphere of dread
and tumult.
While Mitford presents Poppy‘s longing for a sable coat comically, numerous
British novels of the thirties feature people who respond to the growing political and

1 See Peter McDonald‘s essay ―Believing in the Thirties‖ for more examples of the
importance of belief in a political or religious ideology during the 1930s.
3
social uncertainty of the times by focusing on material things that seem solid, permanent,
and far removed from the realm of human affairs. This dissertation analyzes the appeal of
things in interwar British literature (and particularly in the literature of those thirties
writers often referred to as ―late modernists‖—a term I will discuss shortly). In exploring
these thirties writers‘ attraction to the material world, I draw on the recent ―turn toward
things‖ in literary criticism and some other academic disciplines. Like others who have
analyzed thoughts about things in various time periods, cultures, and literary genres, I
attempt to capture thirties British writers‘ complex fascination with material things.
Therefore, I show that despite this frequent appeal to the material world as a place of
stability and comfort, many of these writers also recognized conflicting aspects of things,
knowing (and fearing) that even seemingly impenetrable things could change as the
world was changing around them. Yet although furnishings such as tables and chairs
could warp, decay, become lost, or perish in the bombs of war, their ultimate remoteness
from human society made them appealing and seemingly safe from the traumatic political
and cultural changes that seemed to be on their way.
This focus on writers‘ representations of things marks a significant departure from
existing criticism of thirties British fiction, which centers most frequently on the writers‘
and characters‘ ideological commitments. Samuel Hynes‘s landmark The Auden
Generation (1979) noted the ―moral commitment and discipline‖ of a generation for
whom ―writing became a mode of action‖ (13). More recent approaches to the work of
the thirties writers echo and expand on this contention. Chris Hopkins, in his English
Fiction in the 1930s: Language, Genre, History (2006), notes that much writing of the