Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
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Mourning, Modernism,
Postmodernism
Tammy Clewell
© Tammy Clewell 2009
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work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2009 by
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Contents
Acknowledgments
vii
Introduction: Rethinking Loss; Remapping the Novel
1
Part I Inceptions
1 Woolf and the Great War
Female grief becomes feminist grievance in Jacob’s Room
Mourning art in To the Lighthouse
25
27
39
2
56
58
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
Bereavement and commodity culture in As I Lay Dying
Historicizing trauma, traumatizing history, and
Requiem for a Nun
74
Part II Legacies
3
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited
Gothic ruins and English remains in A Handful of Dust
Consolation and heritage in Brideshead Revisited
93
96
112
4
The Sexual Politics of Mourning
Grief, the closet, and Donoghue’s Hood
Desire and the lost object in Winterson’s
Written on the Body
129
131
145
Notes
158
Index
181
v
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Acknowledgments
I could not have written this book without the many teachers, colleagues, and friends who provided assistance and encouragement
along the way. First, I wish to thank R. M. Berry for his guidance
of my dissertation, which was the basis for Mourning, Modernism,
Postmodernism. His classes in modernist literature were inspirational
and his integrity as a person and scholar has offered me a model
of academic professionalism. Brian Baer, Claire Culleton, Barry
Faulk, Greg Forter, S. E. Gontarski, W. T. Lhamon, Patricia Rae, Linda
Saladin-Adams, and Philip Tew offered valuable insights and criticisms at various stages of this project. I would also like to express
my appreciation to Paula Kennedy, my editor, for her support and
kindness, and to Steven Hall and Peter Andrews. Three anonymous
readers at Palgrave Macmillan offered insightful criticism and I am
grateful for their assistance.
My colleagues at Kent State University have been remarkably supportive, particularly Mark Bracher, Ron Corthell, and Ray Craig. I
recognize as well Vera Camden and Susanna Fein for their encouragement of my work. My deepest gratitude goes to Kevin Floyd and
Florence Dore, colleagues who have enlivened my thinking and
enriched my life. I thank Florence, especially, for her persistent
encouragement and exceptionally perceptive criticism of the introduction. Only she knows how essential her support has been in seeing me through the ending.
A section of the Introduction appeared, in much different form,
as “Mourning beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss,”
in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52, no. 1 (2004):
43–67. An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared in Modern Fiction Studies
50, no. 1 (2004): 197–223. I am grateful to The Division of Research
and Graduate Studies at Kent State University for a 2003 Research
Appointment, which enabled me to complete a portion of the book.
David Farnan lived with the writing of most of this book for a good
long time. I thank him, among other things, for the rooms of my
own in New York, Tallahassee, Kent, and Cleveland where the reading, thinking, and writing got done. I dedicate this book to him.
vii
viii
Acknowledgments
I am fortunate to have a family whose support has sustained me
during the writing of this book. My gratitude goes to Helga Jones,
my mother, for having stopped a while back asking about the book’s
progress and to Robert Clewell, my father, for never neglecting to
inquire when the book might be finished. In addition to my parents,
Doug, Ruth, Donna, and Julie have brought love, laughter, and joy
to my life. Finally, I thank David Bennett for providing the sense of
a beginning.
Introduction: Rethinking Loss;
Remapping the Novel
Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of
mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute.
(Sigmund Freud, Letter to Binswanger)
It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and
with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether
revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just
that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those
others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet
there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not
yet born.
(Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx)
In the opening decades of the twentieth century, novelists on both
sides of the Atlantic found themselves at a loss. While earlier writers had surely broken from past traditions, they faced a new kind
of problem. Heirs to a cultural past they refused to inherit or decisively mourn, writers as disparate as Virginia Woolf and William
Faulkner thus construed history itself as in some sense impossible.
These novelists recognized the need to mourn a range of cataclysmic
social events, including the slaughter of war, modernization of culture, and the disappearance of God and tradition. They also understood, however, the impossibility of this mourning, finding its terms
utterly outmoded. While they felt compelled to write about modernity’s losses, these writers participated in the critique of Victorian
1
2
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
mourning practices widely reported in the mainstream press.1 They
ridiculed the social rituals of nineteenth- century grief as dubious
expressions of sentimentality, ostentatious displays of wealth, and
sources of financial anxiety and working- class hardship. Mourning,
Modernism, Postmodernism demonstrates that the dissolution of the
very customs of bereavement reflected a fundamentally new way of
thinking about loss, one that generated, crucially, the unique aestheticism of the modernist novel. Modernist aesthetics, as I show,
engages an innovative conception of mourning; it not only reflects
a shift in emphasis from the communal to the psychic dimensions
of grief, but also spurns consolation and the conventional aim of
closure. In so doing, the aesthetic practices of this experimental fiction established a politically progressive politics of mourning for
the culture of modernity. The modernist novel, as we shall also see,
defined the terms of a new mourning practice for later writers, terms
whose democratizing aims would be challenged and rejected in the
late-modernist fiction of Evelyn Waugh but ultimately reanimated
and extended in the postmodern novels of Emma Donoghue and
Jeanette Winterson, novels that succeed, like their modernist precursors, in representing the open- ended aspects of loss to promote new
forms of identity and social change.
Inaugurated in the modernist fiction of Woolf and Faulkner, the
conception of mourning as an interminable rather than finishable
labor resulted from a steadfast rejection of all symbolic forms of
consolation: religious, philosophical, and cultural sources of meaning that promised to neutralize bereaved sadness and bring mourning to an end. We have tended to think, however, that while the
modernist novel shores up the instabilities of inherited meaning, it
also constitutes a renewal of consolation for the modern age. Leo
Bersani, for one, has claimed that modernist writers represent the
formal unity of their own fictional inventions as a source of consolation for loss, the only consolation, in fact, they perceive to be available in a world where epistemological certainty and social stability
have disappeared.2 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism challenges
the view of the modernist novel as an aesthetic form of consolation,
and thus intervenes, as I discuss below, in recent scholarly debates
about modernism, consolation, and the cultural politics of mourning. In what follows, I argue the idea of formal unity that has come
to define modernist aesthetics, a unity that has been used to impugn
Introduction
3
modernism as an autonomous, nostalgic, and elitist literary practice,
actually collapses around an internal resistance to consolation. This
collapse, as my study shows, does not yield a conservative fixation
on the past but a politically progressive revision of what it means
to mourn, a revision I term “ongoing mourning” and articulate as
sustained rather than severed attachments to loss. Moreover, because
we have understood postmodern fiction as dismantling the purely
aesthetic tendency of modernism, I identify an abiding structural
continuity, while also attending to divergences, in the relationship
between the modernist and postmodernist narration of loss.
Ibhab Hassan, Andreas Huyssen, and Patricia Waugh, to cite the
most influential critics on the question of postmodernism’s challenge to modernist aesthetics, contend that, while postmodern literature sustains modernism’s skepticism toward transcendence,
it abandons the redemptive properties and elitist tendencies of
modernist form by submitting its own fictional constructs to the
operations of critical scrutiny, self-reflexivity, and indeterminancy.3
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism, in contrast, argues that a significant strand of postmodern fiction is constituted by a misread aspect
of modernism; postmodern writers jettison the same sort of transcendent consolation in literary form that their modernist forebears
did. In a manner similar to Woolf and Faulkner, postmodern writers
including Emma Donoghue and Jeanette Winterson represent the
ongoing mourning of loss by adamantly refusing consolation, which
has taken a variety of forms in the twentieth century: the conception
of death as the great social leveler, the religious doctrine of the soul’s
immortality, the idea of nature as a cycle of decline and rebirth, and,
perhaps most significantly, the notion of literature as an aestheticization of loss. Similar to their modernist precursors, in fact, postmodern writers exhibit hostility toward consolation and its therapeutic
imperative to finish the work of mourning. Postmodernist writers
reanimate modernism’s refusal of consolation—including the anesthetizing potential of the aesthetic—by demonstrating how consolatory paradigms express a bourgeois ideology: one that both reinforces
a capitalist status quo and facilitates the forgetting of lost others and
lost histories by insisting on closure. They show, as did the modernists before them, how the resistance to completed mourning makes
loss available for what David Eng and David Kazanjian describe as
alternative meanings of the past and alternative identifications in the
4
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
present.4 The postmodern writers in my study discover in their modernist forebears a more vital relationship to loss, as well as a politics
and ethics of mourning, in the refusal of consolation and the obligation not to heal but to sustain bereaved memory for the work of
establishing new constellations for identity and culture.
Bersani’s account of modernism is indebted, of course, to JeanFrançois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition. Since the publication
of this seminal work, we have tended to evaluate modernism as an
aestheticization of loss, a literary practice whose nostalgia tethers it
to the very discourses, traditions, and beliefs that it describes as lost.
In distinguishing the aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism, Lyotard argued that the former betrays its own representation
of psychic, linguistic, and social fragmentation by imposing a unified and pleasing form on the ruptures of modern life. He claimed
that both modernists and postmodernists create texts that give
expression to “the unpresentable,” by which he means the undefinable gaps and unpredictable openings of future social possibilities
once the totalizing master narratives of emancipation, including the
Enlightenment story of the triumph of rationality and the Marxist
account of working- class liberation, have been dismantled as fictional constructs rather than objective truths about the world.5 But
if both modernism and postmodernism present the unpresentable, if
they similarly erode the legitimacy of discourse, what distinguishes
the two, according to Lyotard, is an aesthetic of nostalgia belonging
exclusively to modernist literature. As he argued in an often- cited
and influential passage,
modernist aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as
the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable
consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for
solace and pleasure. (81)
Far from a literature of cultural opposition, modernism, on this
score, reveals a nostalgic inability to abandon epistemological foundations and transcendental securities fully. Postmodernism, by
contrast, invalidates “the nostalgia for the unattainable” insofar as
it “denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste
which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for
Introduction
5
the unattainable” (81). The postmodern novel, according to Lyotard,
destabilizes all discourse, including its own fictional constructs, so
that it can “invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be
presented,” invent, that is, radically new social possibilities for the
future (81).
Lyotard conceives of the postmodern not as a historical successor
to modernism but a rewriting of it from within, and while Mourning,
Modernism, Postmodernism also seeks to blur the lines of demarcation
that have too rigidly separated the two, I argue that Lyotard’s theory both depends on yet misconstrues the question of mourning.6
Modernist aesthetics, he claims, constitutes a melancholy discourse;
it fails to mourn the metanarratives of emancipation successfully.
Lyotard locates this failed mourning in the formal consistency of
modernist aesthetics, which he regards as a replacement for lost
truth, transcendence, and certainty, a replacement, in his view, that
links modernism to a regressive status quo. Postmodernism, conversely, successfully mourns the loss of metanarrative by dislocating
its own aestheticizing impulses from within; the auto-referentiality
of the postmodern text, Lyotard maintains, is not melancholic in the
sense of pointing backwards but affirmative insofar as it gestures,
more radically than in modernism, toward future possibilities that
emerge when that last bastion of metanarrative pretense—the pleasurable consistency of literary form—has been delegitimated. And
yet, in making postmodernism and what he calls its “stronger sense
of the unpresentable” dependent on the successful mourning of
metanarrative, Lyotard’s theory forecloses the possibility of understanding sustained attachments to loss as anything other than a retrograde move: a socially conservative gesture.7 We might note as well
that he conceives of the unpresentable in postmodernism as a radical
liberation of the aesthetic from history and the institutional practices that would otherwise circumscribe it. Such a conception, it is
important to understand, bars postmodern literature from the representation of any discernable social aspiration or definable vision for
culture.8 If Lyotard’s theory fails to grasp the significance of modernism’s deliberate challenge to the consolatory closure of mourning,
it also appears incapable of accounting for the recent strain of postmodern fiction my book analyzes, a strain that not only addresses
quintessentially modernist questions of narrative, memory, and
duration, but also employs a thoroughly auto-referential mode of
6
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
writing without invalidating the novel’s capacity to promote affirmative social content. In these novels, as we shall see, experiences
of loss are shown to be resistant to the kind of working through and
completed mourning that Lyotard holds up as the hallmark of postmodernism. Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism, as my readings
clarify, argues the so- called failure to mourn in modernism, a failure
that has been construed by certain theorists of postmodernism as a
reflection of its conservatism, actually promoted gender, racial, and
class diversity in the opening decades of the century, as well as provided postmodern writers with the terms for a contemporary leftist
critique and socially progressive literary practice.
How, we need to ask, do the modernist novels of Woolf and
Faulkner establish the impossibility of a position beyond mourning and thus free us from a politically nostalgic aestheticism? How
does Waugh’s late-modernist work, which promulgates a renewal of
consolation for the loss of history’s hegemonies, provide us with an
indispensable counterexample that clarifies how completed mourning creates a fixed and stable narrative of the past, a narrative that is
closed to alternative meanings and supports old-style bourgeois hierarchies? How, finally, does the renewal of ongoing mourning in a
strain of postmodern fiction reflect a structural continuity between
modernism and postmodernism that has not yet been appreciated,
as well as shift our understanding of postmodernist aesthetics from
the purely auto-referential and toward the political? In responding
to these questions, Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism pursues two
paths of inquiry. “Inceptions,” Part I of the book, argues that Woolf
and Faulkner reinvent mourning by rejecting consolation and advocating sustained rather than severed attachments to loss; this reinvention, moreover, is embedded in the aesthetic forms, as well as
thematic content, of their modernist novels. In this part, I show how
Woolf’s representation of loss articulates itself around the question
of gender, Faulkner’s around class and race. Far from creating a satisfying aesthetic, both writers, as my chapters discuss, render the
lost object in terms of what Woolf called “invisible presences.”9 This
oxymoronic coupling gives expression to a duality in the modernist
conception of loss, a conception that apprehends both the absolute
disappearance of the object and the enduring personal traces and
social legacies that loss manages to leave behind. I address how the
apparent consistency of modernist form collapses around an excess
Introduction
7
attributed to the lost object, an excess that resists consolation and
cannot be expressed or contained within the novel’s formal structure.
My chapters establish how Woolf and Faulkner represent the persistent attachment to the lost object not as a debilitating form of melancholia, but as a creative and productive engagement with the past
that has important social consequences for the future. These writers
reveal how new significations of gender, class, and race emerge in the
ongoing mourning of loss and critical encounter with history.
“Legacies,” the book’s second part, examines two distinct cultural moments—late modernism and postmodernism—to make the
argument that a refusal of consolatory closure in the later part of
the twentieth century establishes a politics and ethics of mourning
that promotes cultural diversity. The section begins with the latemodernist novels of Waugh and interprets these texts as a counterexample of the productive possibilities of modernist mourning. In
opposing the modernist reinvention of mourning, Waugh’s novels,
I argue, culminate in a renewal of consolation, particularly a religious form of consolation, to staunch the disintegration of tradition,
thwart the decline of upper- class privilege, and reject the democratizing forces that emerged in the aftermath of the Great War. His
work raises issues of individual and collective loss in relation to the
declining tradition of the country house, a tradition, as my chapter discusses, that is based upon rigid class hierarchies at home and
imperial authority abroad. In advocating a renewal of religious faith
that might console for the loss of the country house tradition and
bring the work of mourning this loss to an end, Waugh’s novels make
abundantly clear how consolation and completed mourning serve a
bourgeois social order, one that unmistakably aligns itself with history’s old privileges.
Waugh’s return to a concept of consolatory mourning does not simply serve as a counter- example to the productive possibilities of modernist narrations of loss. Rather, his work clarifies a certain risk entailed
in any cultural politics grounded in an experience of bereavement.
Loss always leaves behind a realm of remains; these remains, when
animated by a politics of mourning, are made available for ever-new
textual interpretations and the work of social change. As David Eng
and David Kazanjian have pointed out, “This attention to remains
generates a politics of mourning that might be active rather than reactive, prescient rather than nostalgic, abundant rather than lacking,
8
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
social rather than solipsistic, militant rather than reactionary.”10
“Might be” is the key phrase in their formulation, for the reactive
and reactionary trajectory of Waugh’s fiction clarifies that loss may
just as easily serve conservative social aims. We would do well, then,
to take seriously the risk involved in any politics of mourning, a risk
that is particularly pertinent in the case of Waugh, where the consolatory animus of his fiction makes it difficult to disentangle his critique
of the excesses of the commercialization of culture from his ongoing identification with the nation’s most privileged class. We need to
understood how Waugh’s nostalgia operates, how this nostalgia for
the country house supports a tradition that Raymond Williams has
associated with the coerced labor of the working classes and Edward
Said with the financial exploitation of colonized nations.11 Only then
might Waugh’s blatantly seductive form of critical nostalgia—and the
conservative politics of consolatory mourning it generates—be fully
appreciated and reworked differently.
“Legacies” concludes with an examination of the postmodern
novels of Donoghue and Winterson, texts that renew the modernist
refusal of closure in the context of contemporary concerns about
sexuality. Like the modernist writers who precede them, these lesbian writers defy consolation and represent ongoing mourning
to advance a new kind of sexual politics; their novels address the
restrictive ways in which lesbian identity has been socially constructed, as well as critique stereotypical designations that have
come to distinguish homosexual and heterosexual concerns. Taken
as a whole, Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism departs from the
assumption that modernist aesthetics cannot be discounted as a
nostalgic discourse or elitist practice, and that the conservative nostalgia frequently ascribed to modernism is properly located in latemodernist fiction, though even here, as I show, this nostalgia takes
a surprisingly more complex and seductive form than we have as yet
understood. Neither can postmodern aesthetics, my study contends,
be reduced to a purely auto-referential function that would foreclose
the representation of an affirmative vision for culture. Mourning,
Modernism, Postmodernism demonstrates, instead, how the aestheticism of the modernist and postmodernist novel has generated a
practice of ongoing mourning that erupts with all the progressive
aspirations of the cultural politics of subjectivity in the twentieth
century.
Introduction
9
Scholars have recently reopened the question of mourning in
literary modernism, and because work in this field has not produced anything close to a critical consensus, one thing is clear:
disagreement abounds. Critics including Dominick LaCapra and
Alessia Ricciardi argue that modernist literature constitutes a successful working through of loss, though they disagree about its
significance. LaCapra, on the one hand, pitches the modernist
completion of mourning over and against what he sees as poststructuralism’s fetishizing of an absence that cannot be mourned.12 Ricciardi, on the other, regards modernism’s “ ‘cool’ or ironic
sense of alienation from the past” as a dismissal of the important,
albeit difficult, “emotional and ethical burden” of mourning.13
Other critics, such as Jahan Ramazani, Seth Moglan, and Patricia
Rae, view modernism as a repudiation of the concept of finishable mourning, but diverge in their assessment of this repudiation.
Ramazani, whose work has been foundational in the field of modernist mourning as well as a source of inspiration for Mourning,
Modernism, Postmodernism, identifies the rejection of consolation in
modern poetry as an expression of a progressive social critique; he
argues that “anticompensatory literary responses to intimate death,
whatever their political affiliations, do potentially valuable and
resistant work in the social sphere.”14 Moglan, conversely, defines
two strands of American modernism—“melancholic modernism”
and the “modernism of mourning”—and claims that melancholic
modernists, those writers who emphasized the impossibility of
finishable mourning, put forward fundamentally conservative
visions of culture; they resigned themselves to the loss of literature’s potential to promote significant social change. Melancholic
modernists, as Moglan argues, presented “the crisis of modernity as
an inexorable and mysterious trauma” and thereby “expressed the
anguish of modernity but evaded troubling political questions.”15
Rae’s 2007 collection Modernism and Mourning includes in a single volume this interpretative variance, with some scholars arguing
that modernism’s failure to mourn indicates political progressivism, others social conservatism. This variance prompts Rae, in her
“Introduction,” to suggest that we “assess the political significance
of rejecting, or failing to do, the work of mourning on a case-bycase basis, with a view to the nature of the thing being stubbornly
missed and lamented.”16
10 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism does not offer itself, then, as
the definitive word on modernist mourning, and how could it, given
that the very term modernism, at least since the emergence of the
“new modernist studies” in the early 1990s, has been redefined not
as a singularity but plurality of writing strategies that encompass various social, even global, agendas? Nor does the book intend to provide an exhaustive literary history of twentieth- century mourning.
What I do bring to critical debates about modernist mourning, however, is an account of how the aestheticism of high modernism—an
aestheticism celebrated in the New Criticism as an escape from the
political and critiqued by later theorists as a nostalgic, institutionalized, and elitist practice—generated a conception of ongoing mourning that challenged the contemporaneous status quo and provided
a vital resource for postmodern writers interested in combating the
sexual prejudice, the waning of affect, and ahistoricism characteristic of postmodern culture.17 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism not
only claims that ongoing mourning reveals a structural continuity
between the modernist and postmodernist novel; it also argues that
the ability of mourning to forge new constellations for psychic and
social life has best been served over the course of the twentieth century by the adamant refusal of consolation, as well as the resolve to
confront loss without the expectation of closure or the imposition of
fixed meanings. I depart from the assumption that at this early stage
in the twenty-first century we have accepted the protracted temporalities of individual mourning and derived inspiration from contemporary memorials devoid of consolation, evidenced best, perhaps, by
Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Peter Eisenman’s Memorial
to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and Michael Arad’s “Reflecting
Absence,” the winning design for the future National September 11
Memorial. If sustained mourning on the personal level has made us
aware of our continued indebtedness to lost others and lost ideals, as
difficult as the acknowledgment of this indebtedness can sometimes
be, the countermemorial movement, to use James E. Young’s term
for anti- consolatory memorializing practices, has emphasized our
irrefutable obligation to remember the human costs of public tragedies as we seek to redress the social conditions that produced them.18
Readers of Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism will discover in the
pages that follow, then, an account of the role that modernist and
postmodernist novels have played in forging an anti- consolatory
Introduction
11
practice of ongoing mourning that is at once thoroughly political
and deeply ethical.
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism aligns itself with a body of
modernist scholarship that Rita Felski has identified as “political
formalism,” a methodological approach that draws on psychoanalysis and poststructuralism to discern the social meanings embedded
in the aesthetic structures of a text.19 Over and against theories of
the novel informed by the work of Michel Foucault, theories that
have tended to reduce the aesthetic play of novelistic discourse to
insidious forms of social governance and normative instantiation,
my study offers a series of engaged readings intended to demonstrate how the aestheticism of modernist and postmodernist novels,
particularly the gaps, ellipses, and silences condensed in its forms,
frames the idea of the radical otherness of the lost other and the lost
past in ways that facilitate social critique and invite us to imagine
possibilities for productive change. The modernist and postmodernist novelists in my study consistently position their works against
what they articulate as dominant assumptions about grief and mainstream practices of mourning. In so doing, they articulate the intersection between aesthetics and politics, producing novels that resist
the doling out of consolation to promote gender, racial, class, and
sexual diversity in the twentieth- century culture of the West.
***
At roughly the same time modernist writers began to reject the idea
of severing attachments to loss, Freud came to theorize mourning,
as evidenced in my first epigraph, as a mental labor resistant to
consolation and closure.20 This theory cannot be found, however,
in “Mourning and Melancholia,” his best-known work on the subject of grieving.21 In this seminal 1917 essay, in fact, Freud removed
mourning from the funerary customs that began to disintegrate by
the close of the nineteenth century, but he also reformulated the
consolation these Victorian rituals had once furnished as an internal and psychic phenomenon. In contrast to melancholia, construed
as a pathological clinging to the object, Freud defined mourning,
whether for a person or abstract ideal, as an emotional labor through
which “the detachment of the libido is accomplished.”22 The work of
mourning, as he described, entails a kind of hyper-remembering, a
period of obsessive recollection during which the mourner magically
12
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
resuscitates the existence of the lost object in the space of the psyche.
By replacing an actual absence with an imaginary presence, the
mourner establishes a mental space to perform the emotionally difficult and protracted labor of severing attachments to loss. But mourners do not simply detach libido from the lost object. According to
Freud, they reinvest the freed libido in a new object, thereby accepting consolation in the form of a substitute for what has been lost
and bringing the work of mourning to a decisive and “spontaneous
end.” Governed by a logic of consolatory substitution, Freud’s early
account of mourning should be understood, then, not as a confrontation with the disappearance of a unique object but a process geared
toward restoring a certain economy of the subject, a subject that has
been fortified against any lasting disturbance or psychic transformation caused by the object’s departure.23 His theory not only belongs
to a longstanding epistemological and cultural tradition in which the
subject acquires legitimacy at the expense of the object’s uniqueness
and difference. It also reflects, as Martin Jay has addressed, one of
the utopian goals of the modernist period: the injunction to “make
it new” and leave the past completely behind.24
In The Ego and the Id (1923), however, a culminating moment in
his psychoanalysis of loss, Freud removes his mourning theory from
the strictures of consolatory closure.25 What Freud does, more specifically, is to revise the account of identification he put forth in
“Mourning and Melancholia”; identification had been defined as an
internalization of the lost object that resulted in a melancholic fixation on the lost object. Now, however, Freud concedes that he got it
wrong; he depathologizes identification, defining this internalizing
strategy as “the sole condition under which the id can give up its
objects,” as well as fundamental to the primary formation and subsequent development of the ego.26 By defining the ego “as a precipitate
of abandoned object- cathexes,” that is, a kind of embodied history of
lost attachments, Freud significantly revises our understanding of
what it means to mourn to loss (29). Mourning no longer entails
detaching from the object and installing a consoling substitute, as
it had in “Mourning and Melancholia.” Mourning, as The Ego and
the Id lays out, depends on creating a figure for the lost object and
taking this figure into the structure of one’s own identity in ways
that constitute, decenter, and transform the psyche. Freud’s revised
mourning theory jettisons the logic of consolatory substitution. By
Introduction
13
emphasizing the dynamics of internalization and the fundamental
irreplaceability of the lost object, it also redefines mourning as an
interminable labor, a process of sustaining and continuously refiguring our attachments to loss. Indeed, as Judith Butler has pointed out,
Freud’s late mourning theory insists on the impossibility of completed mourning; it demonstrates that any final severance of the trace
of the lost other in the self would necessarily dissolve the ego.27
“Inceptions,” the book’s first part, takes Freud’s account of anticonsolatory and ongoing mourning as a starting point to examine
modernist narrations of loss. My readings of Woolf and Faulkner draw
on psychoanalytic paradigms to articulate how modernist representations of mourning employ interior monologue, stream of consciousness, and first-person narration, literary techniques that locate the
work of grief in the domain of the psyche, instead of socially shared
rituals. This is in no way to imply, however, that the modernist novel
propounds a notion of mourning as a purely private labor, a notion of
privatized grief understood as taking place in the hidden recesses of
a consciousness that is distanced from social concerns. Rather, these
writers situate their representations of internal grief dynamics in the
context of institutional practices and cultural pressures. In this regard,
their novels reveal that mourning did not disappear from the sphere
of the social in the opening decades of the century, as historians have
argued. Philippe Ariès, for one, has claimed that technological development, secularization, and the hospitalization of dying resulted in
the removal of death and disappearance of mourning from all forms
of early twentieth-century social exchange.28 Mourning, Modernism,
Postmodernism, in contrast, demonstrates that mourning did not vanish from cultural life with the decline of Victorian funerary practices but reemerged in social discourse, particularly the discourse
of the novel. Woolf and Faulkner, as my chapters detail, did more
than represent mourning as a psychic phenomenon at a time when
nineteenth-century communal rituals were disintegrating; they recognized, more fundamentally, that their novels might step in and
provide a kind of shared mourning practice—a literary mourning
practice—for a culture bereft of viable expressions of grief. Both writers, in fact, regarded modernist fiction as uniquely equipped to engage
vexed experiences of individual and cultural loss. Woolf went so far
as to claim that the term “elegy” might capture the preoccupations
of her writing more accurately than the generic designation “novel”
14
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
and Faulkner, in one of the most often-cited lines in his fiction—
“Between grief and nothing I will take grief”—highlighted the persistence of bereaved memory as a motivating impulse of his fiction.29
Their modernist novels filled a void in the culture of modernity, as
my study addresses, by creating a social space and shared language for
grief, a literary mourning discourse that negotiates, significantly, the
intersection between the exigencies of public life and the seemingly
private zones of bereaved consciousness.
Since the opening decades of the twentieth century, it has become
increasingly more urgent to consider how mourning might establish
shared forms of cultural memory and foster the aims of social justice. In the work of Jacques Derrida, particularly in Specters of Marx, a
study of the “spectral” status of Marxism in a post-communist world,
mourning has emerged as a way to address contemporary forms of
oppression, violence, and marginalization within global capitalism
and the consumerism of postmodern culture.30 Unlike Lyotard, who
regards postmodernism’s successful mourning of the metanarratives
of emancipation as a positive move beyond the strangleholds of history, Derrida views sustained remembrance and the ongoing mourning of loss as a condition for politically progressive forms of social
life. In a fashion similar to his notion of sustained mourning on the
personal level, he offers an account of cultural loss that hinges on a
notion of spectrality, which he defines as
something that one does not know ... not out of ignorance, but
because this non- object, this being-there of an absent or departed
one no longer belongs to knowledge.31
By situating loss within a complex economy of knowing and notknowing, Derrida pitches our capacity to be haunted by the past
against the flattening of history, complacencies of the present, and
detached ironies of postmodernity.32 History is not understood, then,
as a recollection of singular events governed by a one- directional
temporality, a conception, as Derrida argues, that has prompted historians including Francis Fukuyama to argue that the emergence of
liberal democracy and capitalism around the globe marks the triumphant end of the long historical struggle for social progress and justice.
Rather, as Derrida contends, history issues from a belated construction where bereaved memory and the spectral traces of past suffering
Introduction
15
have the potential to disrupt any pretense to an homogenous social
totality and disclose ongoing forms of social injustice. By endorsing the impossibility of fully working through cultural loss, Derrida
appeals to us, as my second epigraph suggests, to imagine how ongoing mourning might reanimate the promise of emancipation that
postmodernity is said to have buried and decisively mourned.33
“Legacies,” the book’s second part, takes its conceptual bearings
from Derrida’s work to address how postmodern novels represent new
possibilities for collective mourning in a culture where consumerism
and mass media have increasingly come to mediate the grieving of
loss. In stark contrast to the rejection of the emancipatory potential of ongoing mourning that I detail in Waugh’s late-modernist fiction, the postmodern novels of Donoghue and Winterson employ
auto-referential modes of writing that do not simply highlight their
own embeddedness in commodity culture; these texts also suggest
how the marketplace has regulated the cultural emergence of the
postmodern lesbian subject, a marketplace that caters to mainstream
and countercultural consumers not simply by fostering but also by
delimiting the possibilities for sexual identity. In seeking to contest
the homogenization of homosexual and heterosexual identities,
these writers refuse to subsume the political project of emancipation
to the parameters of cultural consumption. Donoghue, on the one
hand, forges a personal mode of bereaved memory at odds with a lesbian commodity aesthetic and Winterson, on the other, challenges
our ability to distinguish the loss of homosexual and heterosexual
love by addressing how consumer culture has reduced both to the
metonymies of desire. The postmodern narration of loss, as formulated by these writers, reinvigorates mourning for the contemporary
period by renewing the modernist rejection of consolation and closure. But these postmodern novels, as Chapter 4 discusses, also move
beyond the modernist emphasis on the psychic, interior, and individual aspects of grief. Both texts seek to foster a shared cultural
memory of loss within consumer pop culture, one that is responsive
to the notion of sexual identity as culturally constructed as well as
to individual difference.
***
The chapters that follow have been designed to unfold on several levels. Most obviously, they follow a historical chronology that begins
16
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
in the 1920s with Woolf and ends in the 1990s with Winterson.
Within this historical sweep, a literary history emerges: this book
moves from an examination of modernist, late modernist, and postmodernist fiction. But Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism is by
no means intended as an exhaustive history of Western mourning
and memorializing practices in the twentieth century. Rather, this
book offers a focused study of the narrative preoccupations and aesthetic forms of some of the most experimental fiction of the century,
a study that takes its cue from psychoanalytic and poststructural
theories of loss and mourning, self and other, language and culture. More encompassing than even the theoretical underpinnings
that inform this project, however, is the unifying argument that
resounds in each of its chapters: a progressive politics of mourning, a
politics that advances new social constellations for grief expression,
new forms of modern subjectivity, and new collective forms of social
life, has best been served by an adamant refusal of consolation by
which the memory of loss is kept open for new significations. In an
effort to provide evidence for this argument, Mourning, Modernism,
Postmodernism not only addresses the relationship between consolation refused and the progressive social visions of Woolf, Faulkner,
Donoghue, and Winterson; my book also seeks to instruct by negative
example, discussing how the renewal of consolation in Waugh’s writing works in tandem with its fundamentally conservative cultural
goals. In contradistinction to his late-modernist fiction, the modernist and postmodernist novels I examine in what follows consistently
redefine the objects to be grieved and redefine the bereaved subjects
who perform the grieving; these myriad encounters with loss stage
and restage mourning to advance the emancipatory aspirations and
progressive aims of the politics of twentieth-century culture.
My first chapter, on Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse,
argues that the Great War galvanized Woolf’s effort to represent the
psychic dynamics of grief and rethink the construction of cultural
memory for the modern age. Jacob’s Room, Woolf’s third published
novel but first thoroughly modernist text, provides a starting point
to illustrate how a radical experiment in novelistic form establishes
a new representation of mourning. The novel’s refusal to console for
the wartime death of its protagonist, as I discuss, arises in stark contrast to the consolatory animus that drove widespread public efforts
to memorialize soldiers killed on the battlefield; at the very same
Introduction
17
time, the text critiques the erosion of social gains women made during the war years when surviving combatants returned home after
the war. This resistance to consolation, a resistance I also address in
relation to book reviews Woolf published on war-related subjects,
seeks to transform private female grief into public feminist grievance, demonstrating how Woolf’s postwar mourning practice works
in relation to her feminist vision of modernity. The chapter draws
on the work of Derrida, as well as of Nicolas Abraham and Maria
Torok, to discuss how the absence left after Jacob Flanders’s battlefield death demands to be interpreted, even as it resists the imposition of meanings. In the very process of narrating loss, Woolf’s novel
frames the idea of the radical otherness of the lost other as both an
ethical response to wartime death and an appeal for gender reform
in the years following the Armistice.
My reading of To the Lighthouse moves on to a consideration of
Woolf’s attempt to redefine maternal mourning in the light of the
war years. In contrast to a body of scholarship that has interpreted
her feminist challenge to the patriarchal war machine largely in isolation from the formal complexities of her writing, I consider Woolf’s
politics as inseparable from her aesthetic practice. The section begins
by tracing her novel’s rejection of Victorian mourning, a rejection
that was motivated by the gendering of loss in the nineteenth century. In this context I discuss The Mausoleum Book, an elegiac narrative written by Woolf’s father on the occasion of his wife’s death,
a text that Woolf critiqued in her nonfiction and challenged in To
the Lighthouse as overtly consolatory and idealistic. Woolf distances
mourning from the imperative of consolation in the famous “Time
Passes” section of the novel, as well as in Lily Briscoe’s effort to create an elegiac tribute to the lost mother figure. In arguing for the
need to evaluate Woolf’s work not as an exception to but exemplar
of a modernist aesthetic practice, I discuss how the painting, like the
novel itself, articulates ceaseless mourning and the ongoing reinterpretation of loss as a vital component of the work of culture.
Chapter 2, on As I Lay Dying and Requiem for a Nun, situates
Faulkner’s narration of loss within the context of the modernization
of American life, attending to the ways an increasingly commercialized culture denies the fact of death and the relevance of the historical past. As I Lay Dying, Faulkner’s story of a family’s journey to bury
the lost mother, might be read as a record of lost intimacy, a nostalgic
18 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
longing for a time prior to hospitalization of dying and the rise of
the modern funeral industry. However, as I argue, Faulkner’s black
comedy, his “burlesque of all bereavement,” satirizes the depiction of
a sick woman dying comfortably in her home and her family’s journey to bury her. In tracing the disintegration of a collapsing funerary
tradition, the novel demonstrates how mourning reemerges in the
context of commodity culture; it critiques, specifically, the family’s
attempt to fill the absence created by Addie’s death with an array of
mass-produced consumer goods. Faulkner’s text, I claim, dismantles
the logic by which a commodity might substitute and compensate
for a lack. The novel discovers, significantly, an anti- consolatory
mourning practice not in any character who affects a distance from
commercial culture but in those who accept their embeddedness
within it, locating within the spaces and fault lines of modernity a
performance of mourning that refuses to circulate within an economy of profit and material gain.
Requiem for a Nun, the focus of the chapter’s second section, constitutes Faulkner’s effort to remove the construction of personal and
cultural memory from the established victors of Southern society
and history. I argue the experimental form of the text—part drama,
part narrative—employs the fractured temporality characteristic of
trauma. In drawing on Cathy Caruth’s influential theory of trauma
and in reading the text as articulating a set of concerns that more
recent trauma theorists have only begun to address, I show how
the text’s traumatic structure manages to uncover a spectral history, a collective mode of memory devoted to the unrecorded suffering of women, blacks, and American Indians. Faulkner’s work
calls into question the distinction between the private and public,
the individual and social; it juxtaposes the story of the traumatic
repetitions that continue to unsettle Temple Drake eight years after
her gruesome rape with an account of her Southern hometown and
the history of racial exclusions and ethnic violence incurred during its founding nearly a century earlier. Faulkner’s text advances
a mode of mourning individual and cultural loss that I contrast to
the work of Dominick LaCapra and Gillian Rose, critics who both
have recently advocated a return to the concept of successful or
finishable mourning. If Faulkner’s text conveys a healthy skepticism about the very institutions in which trauma gets a hearing, it
also represents mourning as a labor I call “ongoing convalescence,”
Introduction
19
a form of anti- consolatory and sustained grieving that seeks to
promote new social constellations so that the replaying of traumatic effects and injurious histories might be shorn of their deadly
consequences.
The desire to escape the democratizing trajectories of modernist
mourning is the focus in Chapter 3, where I attend to Waugh’s A
Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited. Waugh’s late-modernist fiction develops an aesthetics of decay that is bent on transforming a
critical form of nostalgia for the past into a socially regressive politics
of mourning. Waugh’s work provides a counterexample to the progressive tendencies of the modernist refusal of consolation and closure; his fiction clarifies, crucially, that experiences of grief may
spawn conservative agendas as easily as they might promote emancipatory aspirations and radical social change. In A Handful of Dust,
Waugh mourns the collapsing tradition of the British country house
and the declining authority of the nation’s imperial power. I draw
on a number of literary critics of empire, including Ian Baucom and
Simon Gikandi, to suggest that while the notorious irony of the text
leaves unscathed neither those who support tradition nor characters
who endorse the modern, Waugh’s text still yields an unambiguous
form of mourning for a particular version of the national past. The
novel’s mourning, I argue, fosters a sense of English identity that is
aligned with upper- class privilege by representing this national form
of belonging, curiously, as already lost.
While continuing to investigate the complexity of Waugh’s nostalgic imagination, a nostalgia that does not seek to restore what
has been lost as much as clear a conservative path for the future, the
chapter’s analysis of Brideshead Revisited attends to the novel’s efforts
to end mourning and bury the cultural legacies of two world wars by
advocating a religious form of consolation. Waugh’s text shores up a
host of losses experienced by Charles Ryder, the first-person narrator. Like the modernist narrations of loss I examine, Waugh’s novel
critiques the logic of bereaved substitution, the logic by which Ryder
replaces one loss in a series of losses with a new object. Unlike the
work of Woolf and Faulkner, however, this critique follows an itinerary that looks backward instead of forward. Waugh’s text dismantles
a metonymic chain of bereaved substitutions in order to show that
all such substitutions are nothing other than a substitute for God. As
Ryder comes to accept what he regards as the unfailing and infallible
20
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
love of the divine, the novel’s sacralization of loss offers itself as a
resolution to the mourning of a centuries- old tradition of English
cultural life; it is intended to provide stable meaning in a world characterized by “the advance of Hooper,” Waugh’s metaphor for the rise
of what he sees as the dulled sensibilities of the middle classes. The
chapter concludes with a discussion of the way Waugh’s novel represents the country house in a prescient language, one that managed to ensure a place for these architectural “white elephants” in an
emergent narrative of national heritage.
The final chapter examines the renewal of the main strictures of
modernist mourning in Donoghue’s Hood and Winterson’s Written
on the Body. Like the modernist narration of loss, these postmodern novels, written in the first-person, emphasize the interior and
psychic aspects of mourning, while they demonstrate how the most
seemingly private forms of grief have relevance for fostering collective forms of social life. These novels renew modernist mourning
for the contemporary period by eroticizing loss and endowing the
performance of grief with new meanings about sexual identity. I
draw on Judith Butler’s analysis of “gay melancholia” to address how
the novels of Donoghue and Winterson promote shared mourning
rituals, but my chapter discusses as well how these texts represent
communal identifications and grief practices as creating a restrictive set of essentializing expectations about the constitution of lesbian subjectivity. Hood, perhaps the least-known novel in my study,
offers a fascinating account of how the representation of lesbian
grief counters the single most popular understanding of mourning
in contemporary culture, the “Five Stages of Grief,” at the same time
as it also contests countercultural grief rituals established out of lesbian exclusion. In waging these assaults, the novel produces a complex assessment of the socially mandated silence of the closet and
the alternative restrictions that follow from coming out and submitting to the policing eye of both heterosexual and homosexual cultural expectations. In framing my discussion of these complexities
with the work of Michael Moon and Wendy Brown, I demonstrate
how Donoghue navigates the exigencies of the private and public to
represent new possibilities for the performance of lesbian mourning,
subjectivity, and collective identifications.
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism concludes with Written on
the Body, a speculative novel that asks us to imagine sexual identity
Introduction
21
without the need to distinguish between either homosexuality or
heterosexuality; this imagination, I assert, provides an occasion to
address the devaluation of mourning in the work of Jacques Lacan.
Freud’s account of mourning, as we have seen, involves the loss of
an actual object located in a particular time and place; Lacan’s revision of Freud, however, transforms this historically specific loss into
a constitutive lack, a transcendent principle in the formation of the
subject that reduces mourning to the metonymies of desire. I read
Winterson’s novel as connecting these two discourses; the text tells
the story of a deliberately unnamed and ungendered narrator who
responds to the fatal disease of a married female lover by leaving her
to the better care that “I” believes her husband can provide. In so
doing, the text charts a path through which loss comes to be understood as lack, and the narrator, who writes an extended prose elegy
to the absent beloved, marshals all the defenses of a narcissistic subject whose own desire for the other is sustained by nothing other
than the lack of the object. I employ Georgio Agamben’s discussion
of Renaissance melancholia to elucidate the narrator’s mourning
for an unattainable object that was actually never lost in the first
place. Even as the novel exploits the possibilities for social change
that follow from staging the loss of the object, it also dismantles
the endless substitutions of desire. Winterson’s postmodern narration of loss performs a work of grief that challenges the assigning of
lesbian concerns to the margins of culture and testifies to the continued importance of ongoing mourning as vital to our shared forms
of social life.
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Part I
Inceptions
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1
Woolf and the Great War
That is one of the aspects of death which is left out when
people talk of the message sorrow: they never mention its
unbecoming side: its legacy of bitterness, bad temper, ill
adjustment.
(Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past”)
The elegiac dimension of Woolf’s writing was already identified
in the first book-length study of her work, when Winifred Holtby
called To the Lighthouse a “ghost story” aimed at burying the phantom of the dead mother.1 But numerous critics did not take up the
challenge of reading Woolf’s work as a narrative form of mourning
until the posthumous publication of her diary, letters, and memoirs,
which began in the 1970s. Based on these autobiographical writings, early evaluations reflected a remarkably uniform view; they
defined Woolf’s life and writing as an unfortunate case of pathological grief.2 Just as biographers attributed Woolf’s recurring mental breakdowns and suicide to her failure to mourn the loss of her
mother, half-sister, and brother, literary critics argued that Woolf’s
experience of unresolved grief marred her fictional achievements.
Mark Spilka, in the only monograph to date focused exclusively on
mourning in Woolf’s work, suggested that her “lifelong inability
to love ... seems to have been peculiarly intertwined with her lifelong inability to grieve”; he argued her novels reveal “an emotional
vacancy beneath their surface brilliance.”3 Even Elaine Showalter,
one of the most widely recognized feminist literary critics, claimed
to have found the “real” Woolf not in her fiction but in the story of
25
26 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
her disordered bereavement. In Showalter’s estimation, Woolf’s concern with “a female tradition” proved to be “stifling to her development” and “a betrayal of her literary genius,” because “by the end of
her life she had gone back full circle, back to the melancholy, guiltridden, suicidal women ... whom she had studied and pitied.”4
This project of reading Woolf’s fiction as a case history of neurotic grief has now come to an end. Through a process of critical
reevaluation that began in the 1980s, biographers and literary critics have convincingly demonstrated that Woolf’s challenge to conventional mourning constitutes a positive achievement.5 Woolf does
defy the orthodox assumption, still reigning in some circles today,
that healthy mourning comes to a decisive end when the bereaved
have detached emotional bonds from the lost object and accepted
some form of consolation for the loss. But far from the pathology it
was once taken to be, this defiance allows Woolf to redefine mourning as an ongoing experience, an endless process that enables the
living to separate from the dead but without completely severing
attachments. What has been less widely appreciated, however, and
will thus constitute the focus in what follows, is the way Woolf’s
rearticulation of mourning as an anti- consolatory and endless activity was stimulated by the cataclysmic traumas of the Great War of
1914–18. Vincent Sherry, among other critics, has made us acutely
aware of the profound impact the war had on the development of
Woolf’s modernist style; what is central to her modernism, I would
argue, is an innovative model of mourning that steadfastly refused
to “work through” the legacy of wartime loss.6 Indeed, some of the
most disconsolate images in her fiction—the empty pair of shoes
that Betty Flanders holds up after her son’s battlefield death in Jacob’s
Room and the summer home ravished by the passing of time and the
devastation of the war in To the Lighthouse—testify to Woolf’s effort
to rearticulate mourning in light of the war years. Mourning emerges
in these novels, I shall show, as a personal and social labor based on
sustained rather than severed attachments to loss.
With Woolf’s conception of ongoing mourning in mind, I intend
in this chapter to explore how her novels resist consolation, as well
as show how this resistence emerges as a specifically gendered assault
on conventional mourning. Consolatory beliefs during and immediately following the Great War assumed a variety of symbolic forms;
those of particular interest to Woolf include religious immortality,
Woolf and the Great War
27
individual heroism, soldierly self-sacrifice for the national cause, and
the redemptive power of art. In Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse,
Woolf does not simply reject these forms of consolation as dubious
ideologies that evade the social causes that led to the war; her work
demonstrates, more specifically, how consolatory beliefs threatened
to perpetuate in the years following 1918 the kind of prewar values
that placed male combatants on the battlefield and devalued women’s
social roles during the period.7 The female narrator in Jacob’s Room
and the female artist in To the Lighthouse, as I discuss in what follows, struggle to wrest mourning from the sphere of social regulation,
from the public rituals and communally shared values that sought to
declare the legacy of the war healed, finished, and resolved. Woolf’s
female characters articulate, then, a decidedly feminist refusal to
accept consolation and finish the work of mourning as the only adequate response to death and wartime destruction.
Female grief becomes feminist grievance
in Jacob’s Room
Jacob’s Room, Woolf’s third novel, has frequently been read as a modernist critique of wartime idealism, the belief in God, king, and
country that led the generation of 1914 to its tragic end. Less attention has been paid, however, to the fact that writing about the war
prompted Woolf to break with the conventions of realism that characterize her first two novels. Consider the way Jacob’s Room emerges
as Woolf’s first thoroughly modernist novel by raising the death of
its eponymous protagonist to the level of a complex formal principle.
Admittedly, the narrative’s modernist structure is easily overlooked,
especially for first-time readers who seem to follow a realist account
of Jacob’s maturation from youth to manhood. It is not until the
novel’s close, when Betty Flanders displays her son’s shoes, that we
learn definitively that he enlisted and was killed in battle. However,
the novel’s opening scene already presents Jacob as an absent figure,
a boy on the beach whose missing presence forces the painter Charles
Steele to complete his landscape with a mournful dab of black paint.
Framed between these two images of loss, Woolf’s modernist text
thus assumes an elegiac form. In fact, the proleptic structure of the
narrative, its repeated anticipation of Jacob’s wartime death in the
telling of his life’s story, as well as the way Jacob’s surname alludes
28
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
to John McCrae’s well-known war poem “In Flanders Fields,” serves
as a constant reminder that “the present seems like an elegy for past
youth and past summers” (168). In elegizing Jacob as a missing presence from the start, Woolf refuses to allow even the novel that commemorates her protagonist’s life to compensate for his death. The
shock of his death, for reasons that will become clear, must be experienced without tempering or cure.
Why did Woolf believe that writing about the war needed to foster a new awareness of death, one that stressed its absolute finality? Why did she insist on engaging the reader in an experience
of wrenching and unalloyed grief? Why, finally, did she employ a
modernist aesthetic, one that emphasizes the internal workings of
her narrator’s consciousness, to articulate a new mode of mourning?
Woolf’s novel responds to these questions by demonstrating how
the inherited mourning rituals no longer adequately mediated the
complexities of loss; conventional death ceremonies offered forms of
consolation that Woolf rejected on intellectual and social grounds.
Jacob’s Room appeared at a time when public mourning rituals had
already shed much of their Victorian extravagance, but its pages offer
a virtual catalog of traditional death observances: tombstones, burial
customs, epitaphs, requiems, elegies, and monuments. This cataloging enables Woolf’s narrator to parody those vestiges of belief that
continued to allow the shared customs of mourning to offer consolation. The narrator, a decidedly skeptical consciousness, includes
the religious rebirth of the dead in God and the secular tendency to
shroud the dead in bogus praise among the consolatory paradigms
of an outworn tradition. The former fails to register death’s finality
by promising the immortality of the soul; the latter, in turn, serves
to legitimate social values that do not honestly portray the dead, a
point the narrator makes when remarking that the tombstone for
Betty Flanders’s husband falsely describes him as a “Merchant of this
city” in order to set an “example for the boys” (16).
In her critique of graveyard pieties, Woolf undoubtedly recognizes
the validity that mourning has for analyzing culture; she focuses
special attention on the way that death rituals operate in the maintenance of class divisions.8 Woolf’s narrator observes Mrs. Lidgett,
a working- class woman whose very name suggests her singular
wish to “get” a proper “lid” for her coffin. In her brief appearance
in the novel, Mrs. Lidgett, “[t]ired with scrubbing the steps of the
Woolf and the Great War
29
Prudential Society’s office,” repeatedly visits St. Paul’s Cathedral,
burial place of royalty and statesmen (65). She frequently admires an
ornate tomb where a duke has been buried, and “never fails to greet
the little angels opposite, as she passes out, wishing the like on her
own tomb” (65–6). Mrs. Lidgett’s longing for a grave replete with the
kind of expensive marble statuary typical of the upper-class burial
does not escape the narrator’s biting sarcasm. And for good reason,
since the Victorian working classes sought in death a level of affluence they had not enjoyed in life. As David Cannadine has pointed
out, over one-quarter of the £24 million deposited in banks by the
working class in 1843 represented savings for funerals.9 As a corollary to the lavish funeral, the elaborate accouterments of Victorian
mourning included everything from formal garments, jewelry, blackbordered stationery, special tea sets, and even somberly decorated ear
trumpets for the hearing impaired. The expense entailed in adopting the conventions of grief prompted many late nineteenth- and
early twentieth- century commentators to argue that social protocols
served as sources of financial anxiety and commercial exploitation,
rather than ritual supports for the dying and their loved ones.10 In a
cultural climate where death practices cannot be severed from financial concerns, Woolf’s narrator identifies St. Paul’s “ghosts of white
marble” as part of the symbolic machinery supporting conventional
social “order” and “discipline” (65).11 The Lidgett scene insists that
death, when viewed as a consoling promise of deferred reward,
reflects a conservative ideology that perpetuates material hardship
in this life by offering compensation in the next.
In promoting a new consciousness of death, Jacob’s Room does more
than criticize the tenacious persistence of consolatory mourning rituals; the novel responds critically to what Philippe Ariès has addressed
as the dying of death and decline of mourning in the twentieth century. In The Hour of Our Death, a widely influential study, Ariès argues
that the rise of technology and the secularization of society caused
death to lose its traditional meaning: death ceased to be understood
as a spiritual transition to final judgement and immortality. The erosion of public mourning rituals, he claims, followed this reduction of
death to insignificance. The mourning of death, as Ariès contends,
no longer played a meaningful role in social life when it came to be
understood as a purely private, psychic, and subjective phenomenon.
Like Ariès, Woolf seeks to revitalize the significance of death for the
30 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
culture of modernity, but she in no way shares either his disparaging
view of the disappearance of social mourning rituals or his nostalgic longing to return to the past, the nostalgia that prompts Ariès to
claim, “This life in which death was removed to a prudent distance
seems less loving of things and people than the life in which death
was the center.”12 Far from lamenting the decline of public ceremonies, Woolf’s novel actively seeks to distance narrator and characters
alike from shared mourning conventions; the text invites a turning
inward into the recesses of consciousness in order to remove death
observances from social regulation and confront loss in new ways.
Characters who fail in this task are singled out for special ridicule.
In the same passage where her narrator chastises Mrs. Lidgett’s longing for death’s “sweet melodies,” a London merchant is rebuked for
banishing all thoughts of mortality from his interior life. The old
merchant finally visits St. Paul’s, but sees the cathedral as little more
than “a gloomy old place” and hastens away with “no time now” (66).
The pace of modern life as well as the demands of an increasingly
profit- driven culture are suggested as causes for the merchant’s lack
of interest in meditating among the tombs. Nevertheless, the narrator is as critical of his willful avoidance of mortality, his avoidance of
any thought of his own inevitable self-loss, as of Mrs. Lidgett’s investment in inherited funerary traditions. Consequently, Woolf’s novel
navigates through these opposing attitudes about death, through the
Scylla of private evasion and the Charybdis of traditional communal
practice, in order to articulate a new relationship to death and a new
practice of mourning.
Woolf’s critique of consolatory death practices, while certainly
influenced by class and commercial concerns, was primarily generated by her view of the Great War, both the social causes that
propelled Britain into the catastrophic violence and the failure of
her society to effect any significant social change, particularly in
the arena of gender reform, in the aftermath of the protracted fighting. In diagnosing the factors that led to the war, her novel clearly
defines the traditions of consolation as complicitous in the production of wartime loss. The text demonstrates how the beliefs that
promised to offer consolation in the wake of battlefield death were
the very same beliefs that led to the war’s outbreak and legitimation. Britons were fighting, after all, to preserve a national way of
life symbolized by an investment in God, King, and country; they
Woolf and the Great War
31
turned to these same symbolic resources to find consolation in the
wake of the devastation. Jacob’s Room, however, jettisons all such
consolatory paradigms. Woolf’s novel, in fact, offers no faith in religious immortality, no endorsement of funerary traditions, no praise
of individual sacrifice for the national cause, no celebration of male
comradery, no aesthetic smoothing over of the war’s human costs of
any kind. Woolf rejected the dominant consolatory practices of the
day—whether in the form of ceremony, faith, patriotism, or art—not
only because they evaded the political realities of the war, including
its human costs, but also because traditional forms of consolation
sustained a host of prewar social values that were especially burdensome to women. Rather than console, her novel demonstrates, then,
how prewar constructions of masculinity and femininity, constructions left largely unchanged after the war, prepared the way for
intolerable loss.
Given her interest in promoting postwar gender reform, Woolf’s
narrator offers a resolutely anti-heroic account of Jacob, repeatedly
criticizing the protagonist for patriarchal beliefs and relentlessly
chastising him for misogynist behavior. Indeed, any effort to comprehend why Jacob provokes such intense scorn must begin with an
account of the novel’s narrator. In Woolf’s later novels, the narrative perspective often merges with that of her characters, establishing what critics beginning with Erich Auerbach have defined as the
completely expressive, ubiquitous, and androgynous mind narrating Woolf’s fiction.13 In Jacob’s Room, however, Woolf constructs an
intrusive narrator, a narrative persona readers cannot help but confront. We definitively know, for instance, that “ten years’ seniority
and a difference of sex” distinguish the narrator from Jacob (94).
Woolf defines the narrator, therefore, as older and more experienced,
as a female for whom the consoling beliefs in religion, patriotism, or
heroism would have flown in the face of her feminist challenge to
the masculine status quo. Woolf’s narrator refuses, in other words,
to idealize the war dead. Such idealizations, she understood, directly
or indirectly endorse prewar values, the very values that empowered
men and disempowered women. By the time Woolf addressed the
subject of the Great War in her 1922 novel, the wartime social gains
women made in factories, hospitals, and government had all but disappeared.14 Woolf returned 16 years later, when the threat of the
Second World War loomed large, to the problem of postwar gender
32 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
inequality in Three Guineas; she criticized patriarchal power for having directed women “back to their homes.”15 In refusing to lavish
unadulterated praise on her protagonist, Woolf’s prosaic elegy positions us to see Jacob as her feminist narrator does, as an embodiment
of patriarchal attitudes that led to a war many believed at the outset
would end all wars but came to regard, by its end, as having been
fought without real purpose.
Early evidence of Woolf’s determination to write a critical and
aggressive rather than idealistic account of the Great War can be
found in the book reviews she wrote on war-related subjects during
the period. In her 1917 review of E. M. Spearing’s From Cambridge to
Camiers under the Red Cross, a memoir in which Spearing recounts leaving her Cambridge research post and working in France as a nurse,
Woolf praises Spearing for her realistic portrayal: “she by no means
shares the sentimental illusions about wounded soldiers and the
effects of war on the character which she found rife in England on
her return.”16 Woolf commends Spearing for describing soldiers not
as self-sacrificing heroes but as “ ‘very ordinary people, with an unfortunate weakness for getting drunk, and an inability to say “No” to a
pretty girl’ ” (113). While Spearing’s refusal to sentimentalize the subject of the war elicited Woolf’s praise, Edward Marsh’s The Collected
Poems of Rupert Brooke: With a Memoir prompted her hostile 1918
review.17 Marsh’s collection, according to Woolf, censured Brooke’s
critical views about the war and exploited his death for the purposes
of national solidarity. Woolf had already addressed this false “canonization” in an essay written one year earlier, after Brooke, while serving in the Navy, died of pneumonia: “To the loss of him [Brooke] his
friends have had to add the peculiar irony of his canonisation and any
one who helps us to remember that volatile, irreverent, and extremely
vivacious spirit before the romantic public took possession of his fame
has a right to our gratitude.”18 To describe Brooke as an “irreverent”
observer of the war, Woolf insists on including what Marsh omits; she
offers an account of Brooke’s writing that emphasizes both its critical
edge and latent signs of further development. Had Brooke lived, Woolf
conjectures, he would have perfected “the modern point of view—a
subtle analytic poetry, or prose perhaps, full of intellect, and full of
his keen unsentimental curiosity” (281). Rather than idealizing those
who fought, Woolf’s book reviews frame the question of the war as an
occasion for cultural critique and an appeal for social change.
Woolf and the Great War
33
Woolf’s conception of mourning wartime loss, it is important to
understand, is inseparable from her social aspirations for the future,
aspirations that her novel suggests are best served by expressions of
bereaved criticism, rather than the idealized idioms of grief. In this
context, the novel’s display of hostility toward a soldier killed on the
battlefield reflects Woolf’s gendered vision of modernity. Jacob’s Room,
more specifically, counters the traditional role of mourner as submissive and passive, a role that placed particularly stringent demands on
women, who were not only obliged to carry out the restrictive sartorial codes and social isolation of grieving to a much greater extent
than their male counterparts, but who were also expected to adhere
to the longstanding prohibition against speaking badly of the dead.19
In an illuminating passage in “A Sketch of the Past” that serves as my
epigraph, Woolf rails against this social silencing of bereaved anger.
Her autobiographical essay criticizes the traditional practice of withholding hostile criticism toward the deceased, the social silencing, as
she puts it, of a “legacy of bitterness” the dead may leave behind.20
Rather than endorse collective rituals that console by idealizing the
dead, Woolf’s narrator retreats inward; she shifts the emphasis from
the public and shared aspects of mourning to stress the psychic,
internal, and subjective dimensions of grief. In this retreat from the
outside to the inside, the narrator discovers a bereaved consciousness
that knows no separation between the grief occasioned by Jacob’s
death and the anger she feels about his status as an elite young man
in a culture that accords privilege to men, while withholding it from
women. Woolf’s narrator, in turn, gives voice to this anger in the
form of her narrative, managing to express female grief in a way
that refuses to silence feminist grievance. In so doing, the narrator
seeks to render the world suitable for human habitation; she seeks to
mourn the protagonist while imagining a different future not only
for herself and other females, but also for males like Jacob.
The aggressive attacks on her male protagonist, clearly a strategic maneuver to combat gender constructs, begin early in the text.
The narrator exposes the young Jacob’s cruelty by creating sympathy
for a crab he carries home from the beach and leaves to die. This
criticism of thoughtless male brutality intensifies when the narrator
follows Jacob to Cambridge, where he commences study in 1906.
Jacob may well be an exceptional young man at odds with mainstream society, an intellectual especially sensitive to the nuances of
34
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
Greek and Elizabethan literature. It should come as no surprise, however, that Woolf’s female narrator sees the university he attends as
a bastion of paternalism, and notices that Jacob’s scholarly remarks
were often “dull” and “unintelligible” (73). The library Jacob amasses
also reflects his belief in male superiority, for he owned the work of
only one woman, Jane Austen, and even then “in deference, perhaps, to some one else’s standard” (39). Most importantly, the narrator exposes Jacob as a flagrant misogynist. The reproach emerges in
an often- cited passage where Jacob criticizes female attendance at a
church service in King’s College Chapel. He remarks the absurdity of
“bringing a dog into church” and draws a comparison between the
canine and the feminine. In the same way “a dog destroys the service,” Jacob claims, “[s]o do these women,” who are “as ugly as sin”
(33). In more subtle form, Jacob’s misogyny informs the romantic
liaisons he makes after college when working as a London lawyer.
The narrator sharply criticizes him for taking up with Florinda, a
love interest whose willingness to have sex blinds him to her “horribly brainless” character (80). Finally, toward the novel’s end, the
narrator ridicules Jacob for falling in love with Sandra Wentworth
Williams, a married woman given over to the kind of romantic musings that led the generation of 1914 to willingly and even enthusiastically sacrifice life for the British cause (141).
In her feminist challenge to the social and psychological traditions of consolation, Woolf also critiques a familiar elegiac theme:
the cataloging and passing on of the deceased’s material possessions.
Cultural traditions, as the narrator understands, continue from one
generation to the next through legal, social, and discursive structures of inheritance; it is not simply the possessions of the dead that
are bestowed, but also the social meanings attached to these possessions. Because the inheritance of property and wealth participates in
the continuation of a cultural legacy, Woolf’s narrator contests the
seamless continuity of English tradition and advances the work of
gender reform by setting up the novel as a bulwark against a structure of inheritance she defines as blatantly patriarchal. Despite his
rebellious temperament, Jacob has reaped the benefits of his gender and class, acquiring status in a society he appears to disdain.
As the narrator sees him, Jacob appears “satisfied” and “masterly,”
because “the sound of the clock conveyed to him (it may be) a sense
of old buildings and time; and himself the inheritor” (45). When she
Woolf and the Great War
35
surveys the contents of Jacob’s room, the narrator finds, among other
things, a collection of coat of arms, upper-class calling cards, books
of Greek philosophy, and an essay entitled “Does History Consist in
the Biographies of Great Men?” (39). These items function as metaphors for Jacob, figurative substitutes that not only seem identical
to this elite young man but also remain after his death. However,
Jacob’s possessions are not easily handed down, at least from the
viewpoint of Woolf’s narrator, who sees his things as the lingering
artifacts of male privilege. Because the narrator views Jacob’s belongings as part of a legacy created by men and for men, she blocks their
transmission and contests the motif of elegiac inheritance. No longer
guaranteeing an elite young man’s enduring presence among the living, the personal effects in Jacob’s room become the empty and lifeless signifiers of his absence. Nothing is passed on in Woolf’s novel,
nothing except for an articulation of the gender constructs that both
licensed Jacob’s sense of masculine entitlement and conspired to
place him on the battlefield.
While Woolf was certainly not alone, either at home or abroad,
in refusing to cushion the blows of wartime loss, her novel clearly
emerged at a time when a consolatory animus drove public and private displays of mourning. Such is the insight offered by Jay Winter,
whose influential study evaluates mourning practices in the years
following the Armistice as traditional in emphasis and consoling in
effect.21 In a direct challenge to Paul Fussell’s well-known claim that
the war ushered in a modernist sense of irony in Western cultural
expression, Winter argues that countless literary texts, memorials,
films, and art works produced in the interwar years sought to furnish
consolatory meaning in the aftermath of the devastation; these commemorative practices indicate that “the Great War reinforced romantic values” rather than fostered modernist sensibilities.22 Imperial
progress, patriotic honor, heaven’s reward, and heroic service thus
find expression in the predominant type of consolatory art in the
period. Amassing significant evidence to argue that the overwhelming majority of writers, artists, and memorial makers drew on classical, religious, and romantic traditions to commemorate wartime
loss, Winter not only asserts that “traditional modes of seeing the
war” were far more prevalent in the interwar period than “modern
ones” (5); he also argues that while modernist art like Woolf’s conveyed the anger and disillusionment felt by soldiers and their loved
36 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
ones, only traditional artistic responses to the war “provided a way
of remembering which enabled the bereaved to live with their losses,
and perhaps to leave them behind” (5).
Winter’s conclusion strikes me as less than entirely adequate
because he pays virtually no attention to the dynamics of grief; he
treats mourning, as Susan Kingsley Kent has pointed out, as a selfevident category that requires no definition, let alone analysis.23
Winter, in fact, uncritically adopts the conventional understanding
of mourning as a work to be engaged in and finished as quickly as is
humanly possible; his study also regards the prevalence of consolatory mourning art in the period as evidence of a culture that did neutralize the painful experience of the war and work through wartime
loss. But there is ample reason to assume that consolatory mourning
practices actually failed to console, that they did not bring mourning to an end. How else, for instance, are we to understand the widespread compulsion to memorialize the war dead that continued long
after 1918 if not as a reflection of the persistence of bereaved sadness and ongoing work of mourning? In a culture where virtually
everyone was related to or knew someone who was killed in the war,
even an arsenal of consolatory beliefs appears to have been incapable
of severing attachments to loss and relegating the mourning of the
dead to the finished work of the past. Read in this context, Woolf’s
resistance to consolation cannot be simply discounted as a modernist
expression of melancholy and anger; her novel, we might say, offers
a vanguard awareness of the need for a mourning practice devoid of
consoling figuration and the very expectation of strict closure.
The gender politics of postwar bereavement, as we have seen,
prompts the narrator’s aggressive criticism toward Jacob; however,
this feminist grievance does not exhaust Woolf’s articulation of
mourning. Indeed, as I now want to suggest, a deeply ethical component inheres in the novel’s representation of grief, an ethics of
mourning that derives from Woolf’s representation of the exteriority
of the lost other with respect to any signifying system, including
the very novel in which Jacob figures. Jacques Derrida’s account of
the ethics of mourning provides an important theoretical framework to elucidate this dimension of Woolf’s work. In “By Force of
Mourning,” Derrida addresses a work of mourning that “would have
to fail in order to succeed,” and claims that while this failure “is
always promised, it will never be assured.”24 His emphasis on the
Woolf and the Great War
37
potential for grief work to fail emerges in response to psychoanalytic
theories of loss. In the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,
to cite a recent example, mourning has been used to explain the
formation of subjectivity, the means by which the infant separates
from the mother, acquires language, and accepts linguistic mastery
as an adequate compensation for the loss.25 Derrida argues that such
psychoanalytic accounts of mourning perpetuate the main assumptions of the philosophy of the subject; they reduce the lost other to
an object for the mourner.26 In the conventional sense, mourning
allows the lost other to be recovered in the language of the symbolic
so that the subject can avoid admitting that something of the self
has been lost with the other’s departure. Conversely, Derrida shows
how what he calls “impossible” mourning, an ongoing relation to
loss that forgoes consolation and recovery, clarifies a fundamental
decentering of self. He defines the “being-in-us” of the lost other
as an absolute excess, a kind of exteriority belonging to the other
that resides in a space neither properly inside nor strictly outside the
psyche. By locating an otherness that resists the subject’s attempt
to constitute or reconsolidate a sense of strongly bounded identity,
ongoing mourning succeeds in revealing “an essential anachrony in
our being exposed to the other” (160). This anachronism indicates
an outside that shatters any illusion of strict identity, and relates us
“to the law of what does not return or come back,” that is, to the
other’s singularity and to our own mortality (164). For Derrida, then,
the acknowledgment of another’s death entails an acknowledgment
of our own death, the mortality we embody as a condition of life. Far
from a narcissistic practice, this acknowledgment names the condition for our ethical orientation in the world, the very condition, as
Derrida puts it, of “hospitality, love or friendship” (160).
In a similar fashion, Woolf’s novel insists on the difference between
the lost other and the mourner’s memory of the lost other, showing how the bereaved narrator refuses to accept her own signifying
authority as adequate compensation for Jacob’s loss. At the novel’s
most self- critical point, in fact, Woolf’s narrator calls attention to
the inscrutable and unknowable aspects of the one she mourns. She
articulates the difference between the lost other and her memory of
the lost other, the difference, that is, between Jacob and her capacity
to pin down his life’s story. Far from a full and adequate account of
her protagonist’s life, the story the narrator does finally tell is about
38
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
her refusal to accept her own signifying authority as adequate compensation for Jacob’s loss. No fewer than 15 times does the narrator deflate the interpretations she herself imposes on Jacob, calling
attention to the subjective and perhaps even narcissistic quality of
her narrative:
Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting
opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a
whole—they see all sorts of things—they see themselves ... (30–1)
It seems then that men and women are equally at fault. It seems
that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our
fellow- creatures is utterly unknown. (71)
For many of Woolf’s contemporaries, the rendering of Jacob’s character as an impenetrable entity reflected serious flaws in the novels, indicating the narrator’s unreliability and Woolf’s own intrusive
authorial theorizing. More recent critics, however, understand the
narrator’s self- defeating remarks as an integral part of Woolf’s modernist break with the conventions of Edwardian realism. According to
William Handley, Woolf’s rejection of omniscience preserves her protagonist’s subjecthood and opposes the “war’s treatment of human
beings as objects” (111). For Alex Zwerdling, Woolf highlights the
inscrutable features of Jacob to portray “the sense of someone who
remains a permanently unknown quantity,” her way of pronouncing
the devastating human cost of the war.27 In addition to the political
relevance these critics insightfully suggest, the novel’s fundamental
conflict, the conflict between telling Jacob’s life story and representing the impossibility of doing so, may be understood as engaging the
ethical imperative of mourning. The narrator’s willingness to deflate
and ultimately abandon her own projections and conceptualizations
of Jacob functions as a powerful critique of the desire to master loss
through the order of representation. Woolf’s narrator never forgets,
and never allows her readers to forget, the radical heterogeneity of
the character she mourns.
What we know with certainty about Jacob amounts to this: he
never survived the war to return to his room. To the extent that the
novel is structured around a lost object that resists narration, it recalls
us to irrecoverable loss; the modernist aesthetic that Woolf employs
Woolf and the Great War
39
represents Jacob as a character who exists in excess of any narrative
that presumes to tell his story.28 This ethical recognition of an other
who exceeds any constituted sense in the mourner invalidates the
conventional terms with which mourning has been understood. To
grieve the death of a soldier, Woolf suggests, is not only to embark on
a process that can never be complete; it also entails a reinterpretation
of the past that does not neglect gender concerns for the future.29 At
the novel’s conclusion Mrs. Flanders asks what she should do with
her dead son’s shoes, a question that demands a response, even as
it exceeds our capacity to answer conclusively. The narrator brings
her story to an end by rallying us around the anguish of a mother’s
inconsolable grief. To mourn Jacob, then, is to acknowledge the missing presence he has become. And, to sustain attachments to this loss
establishes the possibility for a critical relationship to the past, to a
war-torn past, as Woolf rightly recognized, that threatened to return
and repeat the catastrophic violence of a war intended to end war.
Even as overt references to the Great War came to occupy less and
less space in the novels that follow Jacob’s Room, Woolf consistently
demonstrates how the legacy of the war forever altered her view of
the resources available to the elegiac writer, resources that she insists
must be emptied of consolatory content to pose interpretative challenges for the present.30
Mourning art in To the Lighthouse
Woolf wrote To the Lighthouse, as she claimed, to come to terms
with the lingering difficulties posed by the death of her mother,
Julia Stephen, who died in 1895 when Woolf was 13. In composing the manuscript, Woolf drew on her reading of her father’s The
Mausoleum Book, a text that Leslie Stephen dedicated to his wife and
began writing two weeks after she died.31 Stephen’s elegiac narrative,
as I address below, establishes the parameters of a Victorian performance of grief and the gendering of nineteenth- century loss, both of
which Woolf criticizes and revises in To the Lighthouse. Stephen’s text
draws on a traditional elegiac structure, one that enables him to confront the death, idealize the deceased, create a consoling substitute
for the lost object, and move beyond the loss. Woolf did not simply
reject her father’s idealization of Julia as an instance of patriarchal
ideology, an endorsement of the ideals of female marital virtue and
40 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
maternal self-sacrifice that precluded roles for women outside the
sphere of the domestic, including Woolf’s own aspirations as a writer.32 She also recognized that the legacy of the Great War invalidated
the redemptive animus of her father’s elegiac writing. The brutal
experience of mechanized destruction, as her novel conveys, gave
rise to a trenchant skepticism regarding any consoling or redeeming
sensibility. As I discuss in what follows, To the Lighthouse responds
to both her father’s elegiac practice and the inhumane slaughter of
modern warfare by continuing Woolf’s decidedly feminist rejection
of the conventional tropes, forms, and practices of grief in the years
following 1918.
The Mausoleum Book reflects the assumptions of a Victorian elegist
for whom God has died. As an ardent agnostic, Stephen rejects religious consolation for loss; he does not depict his wife as transcending death in a divine afterlife. However, he does represent Julia as a
marital and maternal ideal, an object of transcendent perfection that
takes the place God once occupied. Such is the argument made by
Alan Bell, whose “Introduction” to the Mausoleum Book opens with
an insight asserted in the form of a question: “in spite of his determined agnosticism, could there perhaps have been some hankering after the consolations which the discarded religion might have
offered?”.33 Indeed there was, since Stephen clearly renews the tropes
of conventional religiosity in order to portray a saintly wife whom
he continues to worship beyond the grave. He equates Julia’s perfection with her beauty, a splendor compared to that of “the Sistine
Madonna” (31). Julia embodied “the complete reconciliation and
fulfillment of all conditions of female beauty,” since “her outward
form” was the “fitting symbol and embodiment” of her “inward
beauty” (32, 33). Stephen advances this quasi-religious sentiment by
borrowing from Wordsworth, where feminine beauty reveals “something of angelic light” (32). “To see her as she was,” writes Stephen
in unmistakably religious terms, “is to me to feel all that is holy ... in
human affection” (32). His elegiac writing figures Julia as a “beloved
angel” who unmistakably reanimates lost heavenly transcendence.
Grief frequently gives rise to a sense of regret on the mourner’s
part, regret for both unfulfilled aspirations and misdeeds. At its
most extreme, bereaved regret can take the form of heightened selfpunishment. Echoing Freud’s claim that mourners often reproach
themselves for causing the death of a loved one,34 Stephen accuses
Woolf and the Great War
41
himself for his wife’s passing, believing the excessive demands he
placed on Julia taxed her emotional strength and produced a “weakness of heart” that hastened her death at the age of 49 (96). These
demands, he acknowledges, stemmed from the fragility of his own
ego. Although he saw himself as a “man of not inconsiderable literary ability,” Stephen laments the limitation of his intellectual
achievements (92, 93). He attributes his “failure” to having “scattered” himself too much with “journalism and dictionary making”
(93). To compensate for allegedly being consigned to the “footnotes”
of “the history of English thought,” he often appealed to his wife
for pity and flattery (93). If he idealized Julia, Stephen also expected
her to fulfill his immense need for attention and praise. By his own
admission Stephen’s assessment of his work was more a posture than
an honest evaluation. As he puts it, “I used ... to profess a rather exaggerated self- depreciation in order to extort some of her delicious
compliments” (93). Because Julia realized he was merely “fishing for
a compliment,” Stephen lavishly praises her for never refusing the
sympathy he craved (93).
The Mausoleum Book demonstrates the extent to which Stephen
subscribes to the nineteenth- century gendering of grief. Funerary
artifacts, conduct literature, and literary texts of the period define
mourning primarily as women’s work; females were viewed as emotional rather than intellectual beings, constitutionally predisposed
to experience grief and attend to the bereaved sadness of their male
counterparts. Evaluated in this light, it is not surprising to find that
Stephen expected to receive sympathy and special attention from
other women, particularly his daughters (143). After Julia’s death
Stephen turned to his children, especially his stepdaughter Stella
Duckworth, for consolation: “My George and Gerald have helped
me too; but in grief like mine a woman can do more, and a woman
[Stella] who reminds me at every turn of her darling mother can give
me all the comfort of which I am susceptible” (58). Stephen’s perception that “a woman can do more” in administering to the bereaved
must be interpreted in the context of the sexual politics of Victorian
mourning. In expecting his stepdaughter to attend to his pain, he
views women as the nurturers and caretakers of men. Stephen’s perception reflects, therefore, an economy of bereaved sympathy that
reinforces female subservience in the patriarchal household. The
social norms of mourning permit him to assign a double-burden of
42
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
loss to a woman, compelling his stepdaughter to embody the grief
she may have experienced after her mother’s passing, as well as alleviate his own.
The Victorian gendering of grief is at the center of The Mausoleum
Book in another way as well; social protocols meant that male mourners like Stephen had to risk the charge of feminization when publically expressing their grief. In keeping with the social designation of
mourning as a female duty, women through the nineteenth century
were also viewed as being more susceptible than men to debilitating
forms of bereaved depression. Seen as emotionally weak and unable
to temper bereavement, women were frequently deemed to be excessive mourners. From Milton to Yeats, for instance, male elegists frequently portray immoderate and uncontrollable grief as belonging
to women. Lest they open men to the charge of effeminate grief,
male elegists describe their own mourning, as well as the grief of
other males, as a stage that could be worked through expeditiously
and overcome decisively. Read in this context, The Mausoleum Book
conveys Stephen’s anxiety about expressing intense grief and entering a territory that had been gendered female.35 In a passage that
makes abundantly clear his unease about declaring the extremity of
his pain, he compares his earlier experience of bereavement to that of
his late wife; Stephen recalls that he and Julia had been attracted to
each other because of their “likeness in sorrow,” Julia having lost her
first husband in 1870 and Stephen his first wife in 1875. Proposing
marriage to Julia in 1877, Stephen explains that she rejected his offer
for a full year because she believed her prolonged mourning for her
first husband and recurring bouts of depression would compromise
any second marriage. In raising the issue of their experiences of
spousal death, Stephen establishes a clear opposition between male
and female grief. In his words, “Julia ... had been numbed and petrified by her grief: womanlike she had accepted sorrow, a life of sorrow,
or let me say a life clouded by sorrow, as her permanent portion”
(47). Conversely, in grieving his first wife’s death, Stephen declares,
“my sorrow, deep and genuine as it was, had not, so to speak, injured
me organically” (47). While he admits being “plunged into melancholy,” Stephen insists that he “resented ... the thought of a complete
abandonment of hope” (47). The use of the word “resented,” certainly
a strong choice, may be interpreted as conveying the apprehension
with which Stephen expresses extreme sadness. Stephen manages to
Woolf and the Great War
43
distance himself, however, from any accusation of feminized grief;
he attributes resolving his bereavement to his masculinity, claiming
that it was “somewhere, deep down” in his “nature” that he found
the strength “to carry on a struggle against the dominion of grief”
(47). Writing The Mausoleum Book, it is crucial to recognize, did allow
Stephen to express emotions associated with femininity and contest
the image of the unemotional male; even so, however, he still subscribes to the gendered protocols of Victorian mourning by describing himself as the manly victor in the battle against grief.
The Mausoleum Book asserts the masculinity of its formal lament
by insisting that grief can be neutralized and bereavement brought
to an end. Like other male writers in the elegiac tradition, Stephen
ends his narrative by translating grief into consolation. He ends his
mourning, that is, by redirecting emotional ties away from his late
wife and reinvesting in the text that he himself has written. The recompense that Stephen derives from The Mausoleum Book, it is interesting to remark, echoes the gendering of loss analyzed by Juliana
Schiesari. Unlike the quotidian terms with which women’s mourning has been culturally understood, male writers from Petrarch to
Lacan, Schiesari argues, have been able to reclaim personal loss as
social gain, the gain that derives from the public acknowledgment of
the writer’s own sensitive and inspired genius.36 Stephen looks forward to exactly this type of cultural recognition when he aspires to
having his manuscript published. To return to the issue of his intellectual legacy, Stephen declares that the “achievement” of Julia’s life
surpasses the contributions of even “the best thinkers,” who become
“superfluous” after a short time (95). But the declaration smacks
of disingenuousness, as Stephen goes on to claim the even greater
achievement of “spreading” Julia’s influence to others, “making one
little fragment of the race happier and better and aware of a nobler
ideal” (96). We might conclude, then, that Julia has departed from her
husband’s life only to reemerge in The Mausoleum Book as Stephen’s
own elaboration of human perfection, his own representation of a
“nobler ideal.” The lost other has been replaced, it appears, by a consoling textual artifact, one that purports to outlast and in some sense
even outdo the one it mourns. Admittedly, Stephen rebels against
the conventional elegiac salve according to which the dead live on
in the timeless tomes of literature and memoir; he claims his books,
including The Mausoleum Book, would “become obsolete in a brief
44
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time” (96). But again, his writing gives the lie to his own claim, as
Stephen goes on to encourage his children to publish the text after
his death. He claims that without access to The Mausoleum Book, no
one, including his close friend F. W. Maitland, would be able to write
an adequate biography of his own life (4). Stephen’s wish to have his
elegiac narrative published, it seems fair to say, constitutes the final
claim he stakes to being ranked among what he calls “the very few
great names” of his day (96).
In “Reminiscences,” Woolf criticizes her father’s writing as wholly
self-serving, exposing Stephen’s self-interrogations as a thinly disguised appeal for personal salvation, for “something approaching a
final absolution.”37 Rather than converting personal loss into her own
artistic gain, Woolf refuses to assimilate her mother’s death to an idealized abstraction.38 The mother Woolf lost was not only an “angel,”
but also a “most vivid” person, a maternal presence no formulation
of words can recover. Woolf returns again and again to her central
grievance regarding her father’s elegy, namely, that the “sincere, but
conventional phrases” he used to memorialize Julia “could not honestly be referred to the dead.”39 Railing against Stephen’s sacralization
of his wife and countering his propensity for encomium, Woolf contends that her father “did unpardonable mischief by substituting for
the shape of a true and most vivid mother, nothing better than an
unlovable phantom.”40 Woolf understood a fundamental function of
the elegy: the transmission of the dead person’s legacy to the living.
Given that Stephen’s representation of Julia as a marital and maternal
ideal created an encumbering inheritance for the Stephen daughters,
Woolf withholds the unconditional praise characteristic of stock elegiac gestures; her essay directs a healthy form of hostility toward the
lost mother in order to selectively define what she will and will not
inherit. Because Julia placed her husband’s emotional needs before
her own, creating what her daughter calls a “legacy of dependence
on his side,”41 Woolf overtly criticizes her mother for believing that
“all men required an infinity of care” and making a “fetish” out of
Stephen’s well-being.42 By disrupting the pattern of elegiac inheritance, Woolf refuses both her mother’s sense of wifely duty and the
“terrible imposition” of her father’s idealized version of her.43
In To the Lighthouse, Woolf goes even further, addressing the question of maternal mourning in relation to the legacy of the Great War,
a legacy she viewed as having fundamentally altered the practice
Woolf and the Great War
45
of both social commemoration and individual mourning. Nowhere
does Woolf bring together the issue of maternal loss and wartime loss
more directly than in the “Time Passes” section, where she depicts
the destructive forces of both passing time and the war years on the
Ramsay summer home. Woolf, in this section, puts extreme pressure
on one of the central tropes of elegiac poetry: the pathetic fallacy.
An integral component of the genre’s compensatory machinery, the
pathetic fallacy personifies a natural world that mourns along with
the bereaved. Whether Spenser’s “medows mourne” or Milton’s “sanguine flower” is “inscribed with woe,” the pathetic fallacy assumes
a deep affinity between the human and the natural: it consoles by
promising the rebirth of the dead in a natural landscape governed
by a cycle of growth, maturation, decline, and regeneration. Woolf
was certainly not alone in her suspicious attitude toward the consoling power of the trope. The pathetic fallacy, in fact, undergoes a
heightened critique in the commemorative lyrics of the Great War,
as soldier-poets came to regard standard elegiac conventions as an
ineffectual means of confronting man-made destruction. To cite just
one example, Isaac Rosenberg’s “Dead Man’s Dump” challenges the
healing power derived from nature. The war poem begins by recalling a measure of consolation, the consolation found in knowing that
the “Earth has waited” for soldiers killed in battle, is now “Fretting
for their decay” and “has them at last.” But Rosenberg’s poem
undermines this consolation by concluding with an image of the
inhumane treatment of the dead during wartime. Voicing a serious
doubt about any sustained affinity between the human and earth,
the speaker asks a plaintive question: “Earth! Have they gone into
you?.”44 The possibility of the unburied body of a soldier disrupts the
consoling idea of a natural order where regeneration trumps decay, a
point Rosenberg’s poem makes to force the reader into a confrontation with the brutal realities of the Great War.
“Time Passes” similarly challenges the resources of the pathetic
fallacy, the salve that had long been used to make the experience
of death less painful. In repudiating the idea of a natural order that
mirrors a human one, Woolf’s writing goes so far as to identify the
projection of grief onto the landscape with the violence found on the
battlefields of Europe. “Time Passes” opens on one of the last nights
of the summer vacation of the Ramsays depicted in the novel’s first
section. Darkness descends on the house and “certain airs” already
46
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
“gave off an aimless gust of lamentation” (127), an early anticipation
of the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, Prue, and Andrew Ramsay that occur
during the family’s ten-year absence from the holiday home. Woolf’s
narrator begins by recalling the consolations offered by theological
and natural archetypes: “divine goodness had parted the curtain
and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave
falling; the boat rocking, which, did we deserve them, should be
ours always” (127–8). But in keeping with the critical function of
modernism, the narrator confronts the disappearance of both God
and the sympathetic responsiveness of the natural world. Indeed,
when Mrs. Ramsay dies, the search for meaning and solace yields
next to nothing: “no image with semblance of serving and divine
promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and
making the world reflect the compass of the soul” (128). While registering both a profound emptiness and at least an ongoing hope for
future fulfillment, Woolf’s narrator moves on to produce an insightful account of how the painful extremity of loss gives the pathetic
fallacy a powerful and nearly irresistible allure.
Woolf attributes the personification of natural forces to a basic
human longing, a longing for kinship with a world capable of overcoming death’s finality and providing closure to mourning. The
speaker understands, that is, the immense attraction to a conception
of nature that grants compensatory meaning to human loss: “it was
impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flower,
tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare
(but if questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules” (132). When Prue dies from a complicated
pregnancy, the narrator remarks the return of pathetic fallacy, a confirmation of nature’s sympathy for human bereavement:
the spring with her bees humming and gnats dancing threw her
cloak about her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and among
passing shadows and flights of small rain seemed to have taken
upon her a knowledge of the sorrows of mankind. (132)
In response to the terrible thought of the death of mother and
unborn child, the trope buffers the anguish of loss; it permits
the consoling idea that nature participates in human grief and
places the dead within an endless cycle of rebirth promised by the
Woolf and the Great War
47
inevitable coming of spring. But even here the trope’s compensatory power is beleaguered at best, since Woolf’s narrator begins
to short- circuit an empathetic nature by making spring, the very
season of rebirth, assume the wintry desolation of bereavement.
In response to the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay and Prue, the pathetic
fallacy lives on, ironically, by virtue of the tentative and questioning
attitude with which Woolf’s narrator raises it; however, the trope
disappears irretrievably as a result of an exploding shell that sends
Andrew Ramsay and other soldiers fighting the Great War to an early
grave:
Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete
what he began? With equal complacence she saw his misery,
his meanness, and his torture. That dream, of sharing, completing, of finding in solitude on the beach an answer, was then
but a reflection in a mirror, and the mirror itself was but the
surface glassiness which forms in quiescence when the nobler
powers sleep beneath? Impatient, despairing yet loth to go (for
beauty offers her lures, has her consolations), to pace the beach
was impossible; contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was
broken. (134)
The importance of this key passage resides in the way Woolf links
the war’s destruction of human life to the shattering of an age- old
affinity between the human and the natural. As noncombatants
walk the beach and search for meaning in the face of wartime loss,
Woolf’s narrator insists that “comfortable conclusions” and “sublime
reflections” (134) are no longer possible, a lost transcendence also
echoed in Robert Graves’s “Recalling War,” a poem that links the
“foundering of sublimities” to the Great War.45 The beauty of the
landscape, so long a source of healing in traditional elegiac verse, is
now emptied of compensatory potential and suspiciously regarded
for what Woolf calls its “lures” and “consolations.” The passage,
however, suggests more than a rupture in the human relationship to
nature. In associating Andrew’s death with the complete dissolution
of the pathetic fallacy, Woolf establishes an identification between
the practice of personification and the practice of war. The passage
identifies the human projection of grief onto the natural landscape
as a form of male mastery, the same display of male mastery that
48
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
Woolf diagnosed in Three Guineas as a primary source of the brutal
and protracted fighting of the war (108).
The centrality of Woolf’s feminist critique of the patriarchal war
machine has long been recognized. Most critics who address this
issue, myself included, see the text’s critique of masculine attitudes
and male dominance as central to her account of the war. Nancy
Topping Bazin and Jane Hamovit Lauter have observed that Woolf
uses war imagery in describing men in the Ramsay circle in order to
connect “domestic and public politics within a patriarchy”; this relationship indicates “how sexism and its concomitant behavior can
provide a foundation for either heroism (which can be admirable)
or fascism (which is deplorable).”46 But it is not enough to argue, as
Bazin and Lauter do, that “Woolf integrates the concept of nature as
destroyer and men as destroyer” (20). To address Woolf’s assault on
the pathetic fallacy exclusively in terms of her feminist critique of
the male ego is not wrong as much as incomplete: such accounts tend
to focus on textual themes rather than formal structures, overlooking the impact the war had on the development of Woolf’s modernist aesthetics. “Time Passes” undoubtedly reflects Woolf’s feminist
perspective; however, the section also engages what James Haule has
addressed as Woolf’s specifically artistic response to the legacy of the
war. In his study of the early holograph and typescript versions of To
the Lighthouse, Haule demonstrates that Woolf eliminated numerous
identifications between the war and masculine aggression; she also
revised her characterization of Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast by continuing to grant but significantly reducing the ability of these workingclass women to reanimate the human project after the destructive
experience of the war. In Haule’s provocative thesis, Woolf opted
against a direct account of the war’s patriarchal source “not because
it was unpopular or because she lacked courage but because it was
not the ‘history’ she wanted to write and, however appealing, it was
not art.”47 That Woolf labored through extensive textual revisions
indicates “her enormous faith in art” as an important and distinctive
way of expressing the war’s impact on human character and social
life (178).
Woolf’s dismantling of the pathetic fallacy, it strikes me with
some force, evidences her fundamental interest in redefining the
resources of elegiac writing in light of the war years. If the abiding
question raised in To the Lighthouse concerns the kind of mourning
Woolf and the Great War
49
practice that is possible after the Great War, Woolf’s response could
not be more directly demonstrated: art must be stripped of consoling
social paradigms and redemptive literary tropes in order to confront
the politics of manufactured death soberly. Scornful of elevated sentiment, Woolf uses her writing to proclaim that art can no longer
responsibly serve the purposes of transcendence, consolation, and
redemption. It is for this reason, I argue, that “Time Passes” details a
house ravished by nature, a house where birds nest inside, rain rots
the roof, and thistles break through floor tiles. By highlighting “the
insensibility of nature” (138), Woolf strips the pathetic fallacy of all
consolatory effects, insisting that when art neutralizes the anguish
of loss, it obscures the very conditions that produce destructive violence. Woolf’s critique of consolation is reiterated in her treatment
of Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Blast, characters who may succeed in salvaging the summer home from the total destruction of nature and
time, but who never forget that the returning Ramsays and friends
would “find it changed” (139). Instead of depicting an unchanged
place that reassures the mourners of their own temporal continuity, the surviving Ramsay circle returns to a house fundamentally
altered by the war years, a house that Woolf represents in poetic
language to call attention to those characters who can no longer
return.
The conception of mourning that Woolf forges in relation to
the war assumes a wider relevance, as she describes the resistance
to consolation in relation to the loss of a mother figure. Having
resisted the allure of the pathetic fallacy in “Time Passes,” the novel’s third section demonstrates how her artist, Lily Briscoe, retreats
inward and discovers in the contents of a bereaved consciousness
the need to resist her own attraction to art’s consolatory power. In
attempting to complete her painting, a post-impressionist rendering
of Mrs. Ramsay and her son James begun a decade earlier, Lily considers that she still has not experienced the “great revelation” (161);
she has failed to resolve the aesthetic dilemma that brought her
painting to a standstill. However, the wartime violence that claimed
Andrew’s life, along with the premature deaths of Mrs. Ramsay
and Prue, have made Lily acutely aware that any present solution
depends on distancing herself from the compensatory imagination
of both conventional mourning and commemorative art. When she
returns to her canvas, Lily imagines and scrutinizes a consoling
50 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
image of Mrs. Ramsay, an image of a flower- crowned woman moving across fields with a lover:
For days after she [Lily] had heard of her [Mrs. Ramsay’s] death she
had seen her thus, putting her wreath to her forehead and going
unquestioningly with her companion, a shade across the fields.
The sight, the phrase, had its power to console ... But always something—it might be a face, a voice, a paper boy crying Standard,
News—thrust through, snubbed her, waked her, required and got
in the end an effort of attention, so that the vision must be perpetually remade. (181)
The potential for the image to “console” Woolf’s artist is held out
even more distinctly to the reader, who may hear echoes of the epiphanic revelation experienced by Mrs. Ramsay ten years earlier.
Looking up from her knitting and seeing the third stroke from the
lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to sense “her own eyes meeting
her own eyes,” an intimation of unmediated selfhood that revealed
“a triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this
rest, this eternity” (63). This moment of being, as these revelatory
flashes typically reserved for Woolf’s female characters have come to
be called, gives rise to a spectral scene that concludes Mrs. Ramsay’s
illumination: “There rose ... from the lake of one’s being, a mist, a
bride to meet her lover” (64). But for Lily, the image of woman and
lover, however poignant, cannot be elevated to the level of transcendent truth, much less rendered on her canvas. She recognizes that a
world exterior to consciousness, a world of others and politics, has
rendered her attraction to a romanticized form of consolation impossible to sustain. By maintaining a resistance to her own desire for
consolation and the forgetting associated with closure, Lily is able to
acknowledge that both her mourning and her mourning art must be
“perpetually remade.” Rather than view her painting as an adequate
representation of Mrs. Ramsay, Lily sees her art as an ongoing interpretation of loss, one that can never be complete.
In Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism Pamela Caughie pursues a
productive line of inquiry about Woolf’s failed artists by evaluating
her fiction in terms of postmodern theories of language. Caughie
does not categorize Woolf as a postmodernist, for she “resist[s] generalizing from reading Woolf’s work in terms of postmodernism to
Woolf and the Great War
51
concluding that she is postmodernist.”48 Rather, Caughie uses postmodern concepts to challenge the adequacy of modernist paradigms
to explain Woolf’s writing. She argues that Woolf’s antithetical relation to modernism is particularly evident in her characterization of
painters, writers, and dramatists. Woolf’s artists not only draw attention to the failure of their own artistic creations; they also reject, in
Caughie’s analysis, an array of modernist positions, particularly the
assumptions “that the artist is a special and self-sufficient individual,
that the artwork is original and autonomous, and that art is a means
of providing order or revealing truth” (29). The emphasis Caughie
places on aesthetic issues that are raised and assessed rather than
resolved by Woolf’s fictional artists has informed my understanding
of the resistance to formal consolation in To the Lighthouse. However,
Caughie’s “refusal to choose” (197) any classification for Woolf’s
work strikes me as limited; her study, we might say, perpetuates the
nearly monolithic view of modernist aesthetics as a kind of secular
substitute for religion, a representation, in her words, of “aesthetic
harmony or unity out of the flux of experience” (31). Rather than
claim that modernist conceptions of language and narrative cannot
account for Woolf’s writing, I read To the Lighthouse as a means of
articulating Woolf’s own formulation of modernist aesthetics, a writing strategy characterized by the rejection of formal unity and the
refusal to allow art to console in a world that has been fragmented
by personal and social loss.
Having ransacked her culture’s healing rhetoric, the religious and
patriotic discourses that urged survivors to substitute ennobled memory for wartime loss in Jacob’s Room, Woolf turns her mourning lens
more fully on her own medium, using To the Lighthouse to scrutinize
the propensity of literature to serve the consolatory aim of closure. In
making the production of Lily Briscoe’s painting emblematic of the
production of the novel, and by interrupting both with the rupturing
effects of the Great War, Woolf grounds a practice of anti-consolatory
mourning on the very failure of her artist to derive recompense from
the work of art. Just as Lily refuses to regard her painting as an aesthetic substitute for the absent Mrs. Ramsay, Woolf’s modernist text
distances the reader from the consoling and recuperative function of
literature itself. Consider how Lily questions the practice of redemptive art when she stirs her paints and looks to Augustus Carmichael, a
friend of the Ramsays whose poetry was well received after the war. She
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Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
imagines how Mr. Carmichael would respond to the traumatic losses
wrought by time and the war: “That would have been his answer, presumably—how ‘you’ and ‘I’ and ‘she’ pass and vanish; nothing stays,
all changes, but not words, not paint” (179). Mr. Carmichael, at least
as far as Lily surmises, endorses a theory of the aesthetic where the
dead live on in the timeless memorials of elegiac art. He invests literature, that is, with a transcendent capacity usually associated with religion, a view of art that becomes a substitute for both the loss of God
and the loss of socially performed mourning rituals. Literature, as he
sees it, steps in and fills the vacated space of the sacred and of ritual
mourning in the postwar years, replacing outworn social ceremonies
with the aesthetic ceremonies of elegiac art.
Woolf both raises and evaluates this compensatory aesthetic,
giving the lie to the assumption that art transcends the determinants of history and politics. Her repeated citation of a line from
Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” a poem where artistic
memory serves as an immortal replacement for human life, bears
out this point. Tennyson memorializes those who died during the
Crimean War battle at Balaclava when an offensive into enemy lines
resulted in the death of more than one-third of a cavalry of 637 men.
“When can their glory fade?” Tennyson’s speaker asks.49 The answer
is implied: their heroic achievement will not be forgotten so long
as the poem itself stands as a timeless testament to the noble deed.
Woolf’s text, in contrast, deflates the ascendancy of poetic memory; it identifies Crimean War leaders who “blundered” in ordering
the suicidal charge with Mr. Ramsay, the patriarchal “leader of the
doomed expedition” whose failure to achieve lasting distinction as a
philosopher causes him to appeal to his wife for sympathy (36). This
redemptive aesthetic, it is interesting to note, is sustained even by
a poet as critical of the Great War as Graves. In “When I’m Killed,”
Graves imagines achieving immortality not in God or nature but in
a literary artifact. The speaker defines the poem itself as the place
of his burial, a literary site of memory that he opposes to the military cemetery: “You’ll find me buried, living- dead / In these verses
that you’ve read.”50 In line with Carmichael’s theory and Tennyson’s
poem, Graves’s self- elegy offers consolation to both writer and
reader, the consolation furnished by substituting the immortal literary text for a mortal soldier who may not survive the war. It is this
redemptive aesthetic that establishes the terms Lily both questions
Woolf and the Great War
53
and resists in her effort to complete her “tribute” to Mrs. Ramsay.
When she returns to her painting after the decade hiatus, Lily places
her easel “not too close to Mr. Carmichael, but close enough for his
protection” (147). Woolf’s artist seeks, in other words, to perpetuate
the public significance enjoyed by Carmichael’s poetics, at the same
time she determines to disentangle her painting from the notion of
commemorative form as a permanent replacement for human life.
Woolf’s artist has good reason for rejecting the notion of art as a
realm of timeless perfection. Such a notion, in fact, overlooks the
gender politics involved in canonizing those works that have been
designated as the most significant and lasting artifacts of tradition.
Woolf already addressed this point in A Room of One’s Own, a text
that Tillie Olsen has read as an elegy for all the women artists absolutely forgotten by history and lost to tradition.51 If Woolf criticizes
the construction of a canon that has neglected women, she also turns
this critique into an enabling condition. In Lily’s case, the awareness
of the historical silencing of the lost traditions of women’s art, along
with an awareness of the irrecoverable loss of Mrs. Ramsay, informs
the aesthetic principle that enables her to complete her painting.
Woolf’s artist shifts the focus from the art work to her own creative
process, from the “actual picture” to “what it attempted.” She considers that her painting might “be hung in attics” or “rolled up and
flung under a sofa” (179); this consideration enables her to wrest her
mourning art from public expectations. In this regard, Woolf focuses
on Lily’s creative process, a process of bereaved inspiration that
begins by recalling Mrs. Ramsay in both loving and aggressive ways.
In the course of working on her canvas, Lily not only praises the lost
matriarch’s power to gather others into a meaningful collective, she
also criticizes Mrs. Ramsay’s inability to see women beyond their role
as wives, a form of mournful aggression Woolf’s artist deploys as a
means of selectively determining the contents of her maternal inheritance. For Lily, however, even this emphasis on her own bereaved
consciousness elicits suspicion, for the focus on Lily’s grief “sounded
even to herself, too boastful” (179). Woolf’s text moves on, then, to
dissolve her artist’s desire to recover the lost Mrs. Ramsay in the portrait initially intended to immortalize her. This dissolution finally
enables Lily to see her painting, as we might see Woolf’s novel,
through the “tears” and “pain” of mourning, through a perspective
clarified by ongoing grief that registers the futility of any aesthetic
54
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
effort to console for the loss. By sustaining rather than overcoming
grief, Lily demonstrates how the very wish to recover the lost object
might be placed in the service of creating an anti- consolatory and
anti-redemptive work of art.
The final brush stroke down the center of Lily’s canvas has often
been read as constituting the novel’s aesthetic wholeness, as the culmination of Woolf’s attempt, in the words of James Naremore, “to
attain an absolute unity with the world.”52 Woolf certainly engages
this search for an essence beyond appearance, for a concept of the
stasis of being beyond the flux of becoming. Indeed, the painting’s
completion suggests both the resolution and fusion of the novel’s
main thematic concerns: Lily has her vision, Mr. Ramsay completes
his quest for self-knowledge, and James resolves his oedipal struggle,
even as his sister Cam highlights the rapidity with which he abandons his fight against paternal “tyranny.” However, as I have sought
to demonstrate throughout, a certain critical self-consciousness
inheres in Woolf’s modernist depiction of art as an aesthetic remedy for the painful experience of loss. In fact, her text does not ultimately reward but critiques nostalgic longing for lost immediacy by
employing Lily’s canvas to articulate a new relationship between
past and present. The issue of relations, it is important to recall, had
been fundamental to Lily’s painting from the start. In attempting to
venerate mother and child in abstract form, Lily questioned “how to
connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left” (82–3).
When her final “vision” prompts her to draw a line at the painting’s
center, Lily divides her canvas in two parts, a division that recalls
the way “Time Passes” separates the novel’s own pre-war and postwar sections. At once a thematic and structural feature, this division
highlights Lily’s awareness that past and present cannot be seamlessly joined together; the latter cannot fully absorb the former. Put
differently, the painting’s central line distinguishes a time characterized by Mrs. Ramsay’s presence and another by her absence, a time
before and after the war, inviting us to read Lily’s final gesture as a
sign of the impossibility of fully assimilating the past to a redeemed
present. That Lily conveys both absence and presence in the space
of a single canvas does not suggest the attainment of a mythic unity
typically associated with modernist aesthetics, but rather the fundamental importance she places on a relation to the past that allows
the loss of Mrs. Ramsay and pre-war cultural values to continue to
Woolf and the Great War
55
inform present understanding.53 Without such an understanding
Lily runs the risk, as do we, of endorsing a narcissistic absorption in
the self, as well as the cultural amnesia that results from declaring
the past fixed, digested, and closed. In recasting the issue of aesthetic
wholeness as a question of relations, Woolf’s artist succeeds, then,
in granting the present a mournful awareness of losses suffered in
the passing of time, of losses that must be endured, interpreted, and
ceaselessly mourned.
In her fiction on war and mourning, Woolf dramatizes the endurance of grief to demonstrate that emotional bonds to the lost other
have not been severed, that wounds have not healed. In similar
fashion, her novels refuse to fully digest and be done with the past.
Only by preserving the intractable otherness of the lost other and
the historical past, only by adapting art to an articulation of what
Woolf called “invisible presences,” can the possibility for an anticonsolatory mourning practice be fully realized.54 Woolf’s resistance to healing is important to our understanding of her modernist
mourning project, for she asks us to live grief in such a way, to borrow Kathleen Woodward’s suggestive formulation, “that one is still
in mourning but no longer exclusively devoted to mourning.”55 With
the final brush stroke down the center of her canvas, Woolf’s artist
shows us why we need to perpetually remake our grief and perpetually remake our mourning art. Woolf teaches us, finally, that refusing
consolation and sustaining grief makes loss available for new interpretations of gender and new identifications with feminist aims.
2
Economies of Loss in
Faulkner’s Fiction
Grief, like few things else, is a private affair.
(William Styron, “As He Lay Dead, a Bitter Grief”)
The short story “Beyond” illustrates the way Faulkner represents
unresolved grief not as a melancholic disorder but as a condition
of subjectivity that has positive, even ethical, significance. Written
around 1930, the story raises the alluring attraction of the afterlife,
a transcendental realm where an unnamed judge might be reunited
with his only child, a boy who fell to his death from a pony 18 years
earlier. But the old judge, who dies at the narrative’s opening and
posthumously narrates the tale, maintains his stance as a supreme
rationalist; he refuses to believe that his son lives on in heaven.
In rejecting the idea of religious immortality, the judge does not
resign himself to existential nothingness.1 Rather, he regards the
finality of death and persistence of grief as a uniquely meaningful
experience. Given the absence of any certainty about the rebirth of
the dead in God, he affirms nearly two decades spent in mourning,
insisting that sustained grief expresses his enduring connection to
his lost son:
You see, if I could believe that I shall see and touch him again, I
shall not have lost him. And if I have not lost him, I shall never
have had a son. Because I am I through bereavement and because
of it. I do not know what I was nor what I shall be. But because of
death, I know that I am. And that is all of immortality of which
intellect is capable and flesh should desire. Anything else is for
56
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
57
peasants, clods, who could never have loved a son well enough to
have lost him.2
The judge offers ongoing grief as a gift to his son, a testament of
love that persists beyond the grave. But grieving in Faulkner’s story
reflects more than a loving homage to the dead; it entails a creative mode of living, a means of honoring the dead by attending to
one’s own mortality. When the judge founds his “I” in an experience of loss, he refuses to endorse a staunchly singular conception
of the ego. Rather, he gives voice to an understanding of identity
that is intersubjective and indebted to loss for its very constitution.
Consequently, the judge recognizes the presence of otherness in the
self, an intimation of his own mortality that has been made painfully
clear in the wake of a beloved son’s passing. His address to the reader
in a posthumous voice clarifies that acknowledging his son’s irreducible uniqueness, as well as his own mortal contingency, has led to a
performance of mourning understood as ongoing and unfinishable.
As the example of “Beyond” clarifies, Faulkner represents mourning not as a communal ritual bent on resolving grief but as a private
experience that manages to sustain attachments to loss. However,
while “Beyond” might be said to focus on the bereaved psyche at
the expense of the social order, two of Faulkner’s novels, As I Lay
Dying and Requiem for a Nun, demonstrate how a world outside the
self informs even the most seemingly private structures of bereaved
feeling. Both novels challenge the view of grief as a wholly private affair. 3 Given that Faulkner’s work dismantles the opposition
between the inside and outside, the psyche and social, it is ironic,
indeed, that his own death prompted William Styron, who covered Faulkner’s funeral for Life Magazine, to express one of the most
persistent modern assumptions about mourning; Styron defines
grief, as suggested in my epigraph, as a paradigmatic instance of
private experience.4 In contrast, Faulkner’s work offers an extended
consideration of the public determinants of loss. His texts define
consciousness, even one in mourning, as an embodiment of external norms. Faulkner’s writing, as I discuss in what follows, demonstrates how a certain interiorization of loss might be brought into
social discourse to challenge dominant currents, particularly the
increasing commercialization of modern life, within the culture of
modernity.
58 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
Although some two decades separate the publication of As I Lay
Dying and Requiem for a Nun, both texts evaluate how commodity culture seeks to deny the fact of death and the relevance of the past. By
the 1930s, when Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury already described
the growing unfamiliarity with death, at least among the Compson
children who were oblivious to the meaning of their grandmother’s
funeral, the place of the dead in American culture had dramatically
shifted. Dying no longer occurred at home but typically in the hospital; preparing the deceased for burial shifted from the responsibility of family members to an increasingly professionalized cadre
of funeral workers; the ascendency of the practice of embalming
masked the processes of bodily decomposition; and the expensive
and lavish funeral that declined in Britain during the same period
gained favor and came to characterize a uniquely American way of
death.5 Although the disappearance of death from the spheres of
everyday life occurred more slowly in rural areas and in the South in
general, Faulkner saw the writing on the wall.6 He conceived of As I
Lay Dying as a story about death where the laying of modern roads
brought modernity to a rural family farm; Requiem for a Nun, the
sequel Faulkner wrote in dramatic form to his sensational and bestselling novel, Sanctuary, similarly explores how the modernization of
social life impedes the ability to confront the traumas of the past for
both the individual and culture. These texts, I argue, question what
becomes of mourning and memory in a culture mediated by profitmaking impulses and institutions laden with historical privilege and
power. As mourning reemerges in the material and social constellations of modernity, Faulkner’s work pitches an interpretation of loss
against the culture of the commodity, a culture that banks on a certain indifference to death and history.
Bereavement and commodity culture
in As I Lay Dying
We have grown accustomed to using the word “grief” to designate
a private sorrow caused by the loss of a cherished other or ideal.
However, this meaning is clearly a modern one; the O.E.D. lists six
definitions before the entry that equates grief with the personal
anguish that follows a loss. In its older usages, “grief” denotes “a hurt,
harm, mischief or injury done or caused by another”; grief signifies
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
59
a “wrong or injury which is the subject of formal complaint.”7 This
signification of grief implies an experience of loss that is social in
nature; grief gives rise to a public declaration of grievance and an
expectation that the hardship will be redressed. Older designations
of “grief” thus establish a logic of substitution where some form of
material or symbolic gain offers compensation for the social injury.
This bookkeeping principle seems a far cry from the modern sense
of private “grief,” but the twentieth- century understanding of the
word is more structurally like its antecedents than might be initially
thought. The psychoanalysis of loss, as we have seen, has frequently
defined grief in terms of this structure of compensatory substitution,
whether the substitute constitutes a replacement object, as in Freud’s
early mourning theory, or the acquisition and masterful use of language, as in Abraham and Torok’s work. In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner
invokes this equation of grief with compensation; the text simultaneously explores and dismantles the myriad ways in which loss is
submitted to the logic of substitution. Faulkner’s novel, more specifically, demonstrates how commodity culture plays on this substitutive drive, a demonstration, as I argue, that seeks to shore up the
bankruptcy of this bereaved economy in order to provide an alternative meaning of loss.
Consider the novel’s second section, “Cora,” where a logic of substitution governs the effort to convert loss into compensatory gain.
In a chapter ostensibly unrelated to the novel’s central issue of
Addie’s death, Cora Tull tells a story of unbought cakes. Having convinced her husband to stock their chicken coup with an expensive
breed of good layers, Cora worries when many of the chickens fall
prey to possums and snakes. She accepts a job baking cakes for an
unnamed rich woman, planning to recoup the financial investment
and “increase the net value of the flock the equivalent of two head”
(7). The chickens lay well beyond what the Tulls commissioned to
sell, prompting Cora to imagine that the windfall negates the cost
of the eggs, as well as the flour and sugar that went into baking the
cakes. When the woman cancels her order, Cora cannot convert the
loss in monetary gain, but she uses the same compensatory logic to
imagine a more symbolic form of recompense. Cora raises the possibility of eating the cakes and hopes to persuade her husband that
this form of consumption offers adequate compensation: “I can tell
him that anybody is likely to make a miscue, but it’s not all of them
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Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
that can get out of it without loss, I can tell him. It’s not everybody
can eat their mistakes, I can tell him” (9). Although the loss of Cora’s
chickens cannot be recovered by selling the cakes, she desperately
tries to convince herself that nothing, in fact, has been lost; just
as the cakes substitute for the original loss of the chickens, eating
them might negate the lost opportunity for financial profit. What it
means, however, to eat a loss—to internalize a loss along the lines of
a Eucharist ritual of bodily ingestion—is a mourning practice based
on compensatory substitution that Faulkner challenges over the
course of the novel.8
The example of Vardaman, the youngest Bundren, defines this
substitutive drive as an effort to ward off the fragmentation of the
self in the wake of his mother’s death. As Addie’s youngest child,
Vardaman experiences his mother’s death as nothing less than a lifethreatening event, a shattering of self that threatens to dissolve his
own existence. Addie’s death generates in her young son an urgent
need to recover the lost maternal object, a recovery upon which his
own fragile sense of independent selfhood depends. When Vardaman
catches a fish from a nearby stream at roughly the same time as his
mother dies, the temporal proximity prompts him to conflate the
two: “My mother is a fish” (79). Consequently, he projects onto the
fish his thoughts about his mother’s identity after she has died:
It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity,
into an unrelated scattering of components—snuffings and
stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion
of a coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within
which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my
is. (63–4)
Despite his young age, Vardaman takes on some of Faulkner’s most
complex formulations about identity and loss. His interior monologue complicates the sense of both his mother’s identity and his
own as separate and discrete wholes; Vardaman calls this conventional conception of identity an “illusion.” He replaces it with an
understanding of the communal constitution of the self, suggesting that Addie’s identity is constituted by identifications with her
family, just as theirs are constituted by identifications with her.
But Vardaman, like his father and most of his siblings, betrays this
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
61
insight, seeking to sustain a self-sufficient identity that the loss of
Addie both necessitates and renders impossible. He seeks, in other
words, to resolve his crisis of loss in much the same way as did Cora,
through an imaginative ritual of Eucharistic eating where the fish
promises to compensate for the loss: “And tomorrow it will be cooked
and et and she will be him and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell and
there wont be anything in the box and so she can breathe” (63). An
economy of substitution governs Vardaman’s effort to detach emotional ties from the lost object. Because the fish has become a substitute for Addie, he imagines that eating it enables him to fully digest
and absorb the lost mother within the self.
Faulkner’s articulation of this substitutive logic extends to nearly
all of the Bundrens, including the eldest son Cash, whose grief takes
the literal form of a Trauerarbeit, the sense of mourning as an emotional labor or work. Cash brings his skills as a carpenter to the painstaking task of building his mother’s coffin, a work that already begins
while she lies dying within earshot of his sawing and hammering.9
Crafting the coffin offers Cash a means of divesting pain, “of sawing,”
as his sister Dewey Dell put its, “the long hot sad yellow days up into
planks and nailing them to something” (25). Cash’s bereaved artistry and meticulously unhurried labor—his insistence on matching
planks, beveling boards, and trimming out screw holes—bespeaks
his loving regard for his mother. However, like Vardaman’s fish, the
coffin obscures the event of loss; it emerges as a symbolic substitute
for the lost maternal object. In a suspiciously sober and unemotional
account of his work, he explains that beveling the wood makes the
coffin waterproof and strong enough to withstand the weight of the
body inside and earth outside. Cash’s well- crafted coffin, we might
say, seeks to ward off the anguish of imagining his mother’s bodily
decomposition. The act of constructing the coffin does not simply
attempt to neutralize the pain of grief, but raises the promise of compensation for Addie’s death, the compensation Cash derives from
substituting an object of his own craftsmanship for the lost mother.
If Vardaman and Cash display an unsullied love for their mother
that shapes their search to refind her in substitute objects, Jewel,
Addie’s third son, presents a much more ambivalent response to
her death. The heightened aggression of his grief may be attributed to his having been conceived during Addie’s adulterous affair.
Seeing her own infidelity as a source of both pride and shame, Addie
62 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
came to regard Jewel as her special but guilt-ridden gem. She always
“whipped” and “petted” him more intensely than her other children
(17). In Faulkner’s description, Jewel has clearly inherited the ambivalence of this relationship. Unlike his brothers, Jewel seeks a measure
of independence from the family and Bundren farm, secretly working to clear a neighbor’s field and buying a horse with his earnings,
a horse he pledges to feed from his own resources. Jewel responds to
Addie’s death by redirecting his complicated feelings onto his horse.
If Vardaman’s mother is a fish, then “Jewel’s mother is a horse” (95),
as his brother Darl says, an animal that not only stands in for the lost
mother but also becomes the surrogate object of Jewel’s ambivalence
for Addie, of his “cursing” and “caressing” (12). Because Jewel has
secured a symbolic replacement for the lost other, he resolves to lay
his mother to rest and ensure she receives a proper burial. More than
others in his family, Jewel regards conventional funerary customs as
an adequate means of severing attachments to loss. In fact, during
the harrowing journey to bury Addie among her kin in Jefferson,
he finds a pleasurable self-image reflected in his efforts to rescue his
mother’s coffin from the occurrences of flood and fire, ultimately
ensuring that she has been properly buried.
In Faulkner’s anatomy of a family’s grief, Dewey Dell experiences
loss in terms unique to her status as Addie’s only female child. If her
brothers accept external substitutes for the mother in order to reassure themselves of their own psychic integrity, Dewey Dell’s experience of loss follows a more complex trajectory; the substitute she
seeks resides in a certain relationship to her own body, a relationship
complicated by a pregnancy conceived out of wedlock that she wishes
to terminate. Dewey Dell has a difficult time confronting the loss,
attributing her inability to experience grief to her time- consuming
domestic chores and the thought of her mother’s own premature
departure. She describes her grief as suspended, as forestalled by the
kind of female duties and household responsibilities that may well
have contributed to Addie’s own early death: “I heard that my mother
is dead. I wish I had time to let her die. I wish I had time to wish I
had. It is because in the wild and outraged earth too soon too soon
too soon. It’s not that I wouldn’t and will not it’s that it is too soon
too soon too soon” (114). Dewey Dell’s own pregnancy informs her
experience of grief. Like her mother, she regards childbearing as “a
process of coming unalone” (62), where a sense of singular identity
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
63
gives way to a conception of the communal constitution of the self.
That Dewey Dells regards this process as “terrible” clearly registers
her anxiety about transgressing social conventions regarding childbearing outside the bounds of marriage. Her negative attitude about
pregnancy also contains something of her mother’s resentment of
motherhood in a culture where women do not control the means of
reproduction, the capacity to decide whether or not to bear children.
As Dewey Dell puts it, “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind
earth” (64). It is not surprising, then, that she seeks to resist any continued identification with the lost mother. Dewey Dell attempts to
sever her attachment to Addie by acquiring an abortifacient during
the funeral journey to terminate her pregnancy. We might understand her desire for an abortion, then, as an effort to substitute her
own childless body for the lost mother. In fact, the novel figures
the abortion Dewey Dell seeks less as a means of terminating an
unwanted pregnancy and more as a daughter’s resource for “killing
off” the maternal other, a strategy for restoring her sense of aloneness and refusing the mother in herself.
The economy of loss and compensatory substitution that governs
these psychic examples of mourning has led André Bleikasten to
interpret As I Lay Dying as an object lesson in healthy grieving, an
interpretation according to which the Bundrens eventually succeed
in learning how “to displace corpses and replace mothers.”10 But
there is more than ample reason, I would argue, to read Faulkner’s
modernist novel not as endorsing but collapsing this bereaved economy. In the cases thus far raised, Faulkner employs a narrative strategy of suspension and undoing, a strategy that resists any conception
of grieving aimed at compensatory substitution. Cora and her family,
for instance, are never shown eating the cakes; in fact, the narrative
shrouds the cakes in mystery, compelling the reader to assume that
Dewey Dell plans to sell them in the town, only to discover that the
cakes were never in her parcel. Similarly, Vardaman does not eat his
famed fish; quite the opposite, indeed, for his discovery that Cora
has finally cooked the fish during the funeral gathering prompts
Vardaman to flee the scene in desperate revolt. In Cash’s case, the
coffin, despite his fastidious labor, neither protects his mother’s body
from decay, as attested by gathering buzzards during the journey to
Jefferson, nor does it succeed in balancing properly. The coffin falls
into the river after neighbor women insist on laying Addie’s feet at
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the coffin’s head in order to accommodate the expanse of her wedding dress. Even Jewel cannot sustain ownership of his substitute
object; his father sells his horse and uses the money to replace their
team of drowned mules. In one of the most wrenching displays of
thwarted substitution, Dewey Dell finds quite the opposite of what
she seeks, not only acquiring placebos instead of an abortifacient
but also being tricked into a sexual act by the drugstore clerk. In
these moments of narrative undoing, Faulkner’s novel unmistakably
subverts the logic whereby substitution compensates for loss. The
Bundrens fail to maintain possession of the objects they seek as both
replacements for Addie and salves to heal themselves. Instead, these
objects begin to emerge as the markers of a loss that cannot be easily
laid to rest but must be ceaselessly remembered and mourned.
If Faulkner’s novel dismantles a psychic economy of loss based
on substitution, it also gives the lie to any illusion of strict privacy,
showing how a public economy of wealth and impoverishment interpellates the hidden recesses of the grieving self. Indeed, Faulkner
situates the very objects that threaten to substitute for loss—cakes,
fish, horse, coffin, abortifacient—within a social context motivated
by economic concerns. Cake baking for Cora begins as a profitmaking scheme; fishing for Vardaman may be an enjoyable pastime,
but it provides food that the financially-strapped Bundrens would
otherwise need to buy; horse ownership is possible for Jewel because
he sells his labor; and the termination of an unwanted pregnancy
requires Dewey Dell to obtain money from her sexual partner. The
mourning of loss, even in the most ostensibly private sphere of familial death, does not occur in a social vacuum. Mourning, as Faulkner’s
text insists, takes place and assumes specific forms within a capitalist
economy of financial exchange.
Admittedly, Cash’s coffin-making seems to resist the commodification of loss; it recalls the funerary customs of a by-gone age, of a
time prior to the rise of the modern funeral home and the embalmed
corpse laid out in an elaborate casket during an increasingly costly
funeral. By assigning the Bundrens the responsibility of overseeing
the rituals of death, Faulkner’s novel might be read as a nostalgic
record of lost intimacy, a ritual of caring for the dead within the
intimate domain of the family that disappeared when commercial
development and technological innovation spread to the funeral
industry.11 Faulkner himself, it is interesting to note, resisted the
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
65
commercialization of the funeral in his own life; he observed his
mother’s wishes, when she died in 1960, “for the quickest and cheapest funeral” to be held at home with “no flowers, and no fuss,” and
for her unembalmed body to be buried in a simple wooden coffin.
Faulkner also requested a similar simplicity in coffin and ceremony
when he died two years later.12 Moreover, as Faulkner’s novel clarifies,
this refusal of commercialized funerary practices takes place without
indulging nostalgia for the past. Even as the novel gives voice to
dying death rituals by describing Cash’s coffin, the family’s laying
out of Addie’s body, and the funeral journey to bury her, Faulkner
undercuts nostalgia for these familial customs. His black comedy,
his “monstrous burlesque of all bereavement” (78), describes the
unpleasant underbelly of what has come to be seen as this prior intimacy with death. The text highlights the holes in Addie’s face that
Vardaman inadvertently drills when creating air passages inside the
coffin, the stench of Addie’s unembalmed corpse as it decomposes,
and the dangerously infected broken leg that Cash suffers during the
journey. To the extent that these rituals are recalled in Faulkner’s
modernist text in broadly comedic fashion, his novel casts a critical
eye upon the present without succumbing to nostalgia for the outmoded customs of the past.
I have been discussing up to this point how Faulkner’s novel
articulates the public determinants of private grief, the financial
concerns that inform the psychic performance of mourning. As
Faulkner follows the family’s burial journey from the isolated rural
farm to the bustling town of Jefferson, his novel moves on to an
even more thorough consideration of the way loss emerges within
the new social constellations informed by commercial culture. The
narrative, in fact, repeatedly turns our attention to the commodities
that the Bundrens wish to buy in Jefferson. From the very outset
of the journey to bury Addie, family members view the trip in selfinterested ways, as their access to mass-produced consumer goods.
Vardaman longs for a toy train displayed in a Jefferson shop window;
Dewey Dell seeks her abortifacient; Cash wants a gramophone. But
it is the family patriarch, Anse, who epitomizes the reinscription of
private grief in a cultural sphere structured by the forces of commodification, a culture of commercialism and mass consumption that
modernist art like Faulkner’s, as Fredric Jameson has argued, both
describes and seeks to challenge.13 As Anse encounters Addie’s body
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lying in bed moments after she has died, one of his sons observes
how his father’s heartfelt grief quickly gives way to an irreverent display of consumer desire:
He touches the quilt as he saw Dewey Dell do, trying to smooth
it up to the chin, but disarranging it instead. He tries to smoothe
it again, clumsily, his hand awkward as a claw, smoothing at the
wrinkles which he made and which continue to emerge beneath
his hand with perverse ubiquity, so that at last he desists, his hand
falling to his side and stroking itself again, palm and back, on
his thigh. The sound of the saw snores steadily into the room. Pa
breathes with a quiet, rasping sound, mouthing the snuff against
his gums. “God’s will be done,” he says. “Now I can get them
teeth.” (52)
Faulkner’s description conflates an experience of personal loss and
consumer desire. The passage begins by depicting Anse’s genuine
regard for Addie. His wrenching and awkward efforts to properly
arrange his wife’s bed clothes convey the painful intensity of his
loss. And yet, in the same scene where he resolves to make good
on his promise to bury Addie among her Jefferson kin, Anse comes
to view the funeral trip as an opportunity to purchase dentures.
When evaluated in terms of a commodified economy of loss and
substitution, Anse’s mourning must be deemed successful. With
the money he extorts from his daughter, Anse buys his desired false
teeth, receiving a form of compensation for his wife’s death.
In the logic of the novel, however, compensatory substitution
emerges as an absurdity, a practice that is ridiculed and critiqued,
rather than upheld and celebrated. In a family where many seek
substitutes for the lost Addie, Anse goes well beyond merely acquiring dentures. He installs a more literal kind of replacement for what
he has lost; the novel concludes when he secures a new wife and
introduces her to his children: “Meet Mrs Bundren” (261). Far from
upholding this resolution to grief, the text’s conclusion should be
read as a cautionary tale about the substitutive economy that fuels
Anse’s mourning. With a new wife able to perform the domestic
labor necessary to life on a remote family farm and the new teeth
required to eat the food she prepares, Anse appears to have successfully brought his mourning to an end. But in Faulkner’s depiction,
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
67
he garners attention only as a negative example, as a case where
mourning has been fully resolved and terminated at the expense of
a more vital encounter with loss. Faulkner represents Anse as a rural
patriarch who exploits his children’s finances, as well as a character whose self-image as an independent farmer, one who would not
be beholden to others, clearly belies the amount of material assistance he receives from friends and neighbors. Seen in this light, the
burial of his wife emerges as a selfish test of personal strength, a sign
that he has been deemed worthy by a higher power of the tragic
and monumental task of confronting the death of one of his own.
The obstacles of raging river and burning barn may confirm Anse’s
self-perception as a distinguished subjectivity, a man who meets his
endurance test, as Job met his, with unwavering and righteous determination. But in holding up to ridicule Anse’s self-serving motivations, the novel insists that any mourning that finds its substitutes
is no mourning at all.
The critical function and oppositional politics of As I Lay Dying have
been addressed by J. T. Matthews who pays particular attention to
way the novel resists the social transformations wrought by an emergent modernity in the South. The text, as he puts it, “openly worries
that modernization will lead to greater misery” (85). Matthews reads
Faulkner’s text as both embedded in and resistant to the modernizing
forces of technology and commodification, noting how Addie’s death
functions as “a synecdoche for a whole set of disintegrative events,”
including the fall of the Southern gentility, the dissolution of white
male privilege, and the decline of the independent farm. He argues
that Faulkner’s novel reproduces the logic of marketplace by seeking
“to pass off replicas and substitutes as the real thing” (96); however,
it does so with a critical difference. The text calls attention to numerous “[s]lips, miscues, gaps, and hesitations,” moments of textual rupture that resist the powerful drive toward social reintegration. For all
Matthews’s insights, however, he pays scant attention to the way the
Bundrens mourn Addie’s death; in his account loss functions exclusively as a metaphor for social disintegration. Faulkner’s critique of
modernity, I submit, cannot be fully understood apart from the new
performance of mourning he represents. His novel’s effort to thwart
full absorption within commodity culture, as my reading demonstrates, rests on nothing less than an innovative, anti-consolatory,
and anti-substitutive model of mourning.
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While Bundren mourning, as we have seen thus far, engages private forms of grief that nevertheless reveal the mediation of modern
culture, Faulkner places unique emphasis on the character of Darl,
whose interiorization of loss emerges in opposition to the strictures
of modernity. The notion of radical privacy that Faulkner embodies
in Darl renders him a complex figure; he is portrayed as both clairvoyant and deranged, a visionary whose special insight sets him apart
from others and a mental patient in need of a cure. Darl’s refusal to
seek any substitute for the lost mother may be inspired, but it also
culminates at the novel’s end in his institutionalization in a Jefferson
asylum. Rather than discount him as a melancholic character, however, Faulkner invites us to focus special attention on Darl, giving
him 19 of the novel’s 58 monologues, by far the most of any single
character. In Faulkner’s portrayal, Darl’s refusal to conform to social
norms makes him a purveyor of truth, a hypersensitive character
who indicts social practices by exposing the impoverished resources
available for mourning. From the point of view of others, Darl seems
“queer,” a young man who elicits doubt about his sanity (145). His
refusal to adopt conventional standards of behavior offends the sense
of propriety important to others. Darl creates an unsettling presence,
however, not because he blurs the distinction between sanity and
insanity but since he compels others to see themselves in relation to
this boundary violation. As Tull observes,
I always say it aint never been what he done so much or said or
anything so much as how he looks at you. It’s like he had got into
the inside of you, someway. Like somehow you were looking at
yourself and your doings outen his eyes. (119)
Darl’s special capacity to expose the unacknowledged motivations
and unconscious desires of others defines him as the novel’s social
critic, a critic of the compensatory economy of his family’s mourning.14 The only Bundren who refuses to seek a substitute for Addie,
Darl’s critique invites the reader to imagine what mourning might
mean when removed from any compensatory drive.
Others regard the funeral journey as an occasion to buy teeth,
secure abortions, purchase trains, and acquire gramophones, but
Darl responds to his mother’s death in genuinely reflective terms,
as an occasion to acknowledge his own “authentically temporal
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
69
destiny,” to borrow Paul de Man’s term for this cultivated wakefulness to mortality.15 Faced with the flooding river the family must
cross to reach Jefferson, Darl raises one of the most enduringly
human responses to loss: the tendency to see grief reflected in the
natural world. The anthropomorphizing of nature emerges in Darl’s
perception of the flood-ravished earth; he views “a scene of immense
yet circumscribed desolation filled with the voice of the waste and
mournful water” (135). Seeing his own grief reflected in the river
raises the possibility of a reassuring sense of transcendence, an intimation of eternity granted by nature’s promise of cyclical renewal.
The uprooted trees and dislodged road, as Darl puts it, “leave in its
spectral tracing a monument to a still more profound desolation
than this above which we now sit, talking quietly of old security
and old trivial things” (136). In his philosophically oriented and literary minded reflections, Darl invokes the pathetic fallacy; he seeks
in the natural order a consciousness of eternity that might provide
an unassailable sense of security and meaning. However, his projection of grief onto the landscape ultimately yields an awareness of the
temporal predicament that conditions human life. As much as Darl
longs for an “old security” capable of surmounting death, furnishing immortality, and ending grief, so too does he come to abandon
the consoling thought that human life partakes of a natural cycle of
decay and regeneration. The final image with which he concludes,
that of the family’s drowned mules floating belly-up downstream,
confirms the natural order’s utter disregard for human endeavor and
the painful experience of loss. Tull may be right that Darl’s tenuous
hold on reality stems from the fact that he “just thinks by himself too
much” (68), but Darl’s recognition that nature offers no salve capable
of neutralizing grief produces an important response; it recalls him
to his own mortality.
One of the main claims that drives my analysis of mourning in
the modernist and postmodernist novel is that writers of formally
innovative fiction do not simply thematize bereavement in new
ways; changing conceptions of loss compel writers like Faulkner to
develop aesthetic structures that enact the performance of mourning loss their texts otherwise describe. In the case of As I Lay Dying,
the appearance of Addie’s monologue, which presumably occurs
after she has already died, frames the loss that generates the rest of
the novel. The centrality of this loss establishes a modernist aesthetic
70 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
that confounds the conventional boundaries between life and death,
presence and absence, loss and gain. Addie begins by raising an
adage her father frequently repeated: “the reason for living was to
get ready to stay dead a long time” (169). On the face of it, the lesson
here seems to be one of absolute forgetting, of living a life in such
a way that it will not haunt or even occupy the memory of others
once it has expired. But Faulkner complicates this meaning. Addie’s
story of her violent whippings of her students and her pregnancies
as an experience where her “aloneness had been violated and then
made whole again by the violation” (172) articulates a conception
of the self that is constituted by identifications partly composed of
unresolved grief, bodily ties to others that can be severed only at
the expense of dissolving the self. In the same way that lashing her
pupils compels them to regard her as having “marked” their “blood”
with her “own for ever and ever” (170), Addie’s identifications with
her children suggest a conception of identity based on intersubjective bodily ties. The “confusion of identity” that Addie expresses, as
Eric Sundquist has eloquently put it,
inverts the one expressed in the process of death, in which the
impossibility of conceiving of the self as a singular identity is
made paradoxically conspicuous in the sudden need to preserve
those connections that define the self even as they pass away.16
Addie invests this conception of the communal constitution of identity with a nearly spiritual significance: having children partakes of
an experience of eternity, a world without “beginning and ending”
(175). Just as her pregnancies prompt her to speak of attachments
that cannot be dissolved, Addie comes to understand the meaning of her father’s adage, even if “he could not have known what
he meant himself” (175). Since the mourning of loss that Faulkner
describes can never be finished, to “stay dead” means, quite paradoxically, to remain alive, to leave behind an enduring realm of
remains without fixed significance. Insofar as Addie herself functions as a kind of absent presence in the novel, her status invites
a continued devotion to the lost object. This devotion, borne in
and of mourning, has the effect of raising questions about selves
and worlds that cannot be easily answered but compel ongoing
interpretation.
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
71
Darl comes closest to replicating the insights posed by Addie’s
monologue, as he views his family’s mourning as little more than
thinly disguised attempts to avoid the enduring obligation her death
places on them. In his “emptied for sleep” speech, he imagines sleep
as an annihilation of self that reiterates the death inscribed in his
own living, an unconscious experience of the “is not” that conditions his “is,” his ability to say, “I am is” (76). The strange syntax
of his thoughts clarifies that acknowledging his mother’s death
requires him to acknowledge his own inevitable passing. Such an
acknowledgment of mortality, as the novel shows, has the potential
to dissolve the wish to master lost others and histories, a potential
denied by the emphasis that consumer culture places on ceaseless
consumption in the present. In contrast to his family’s compensatory mourning, their attempt to redress Addie’s death by acquiring
material goods, Darl emerges as the single mourner who regards
Addie as more than his possession, more than his lost object. In the
sounds that her decomposing body makes as gases are produced and
released, he hears Addie express her own need to “lay down her life”
(215), a need he prioritizes over the needs of her mourners. As Darl
struggles to disencumber Addie of a body she vacated days earlier, his
efforts bring a seriousness to what one character expresses in comic
fashion:
Because I got just as much respect for the dead as ere a man, but
you’ve got to respect the dead themselves, and a woman that’s
been dead in a box four days, the best way to respect her is to get
her into the ground as quick as you can. (116)
When Darl fails to prevent his family from recovering Addie’s coffin
from the raging river, he takes even more drastic steps to release her
from the possession of her mourners by setting fire to a barn where
the Bundrens spend a night during the journey. Darl respects Addie’s
otherness, an otherness that has been obscured by Jefferson’s commodified culture where signs advertise “the drug stores, the clothing
stores, the patent medicine and the garages and cafés” (226). That
Darl reads these signs as having only “an outward semblance of form
and purpose, but with no inference of motion, progress or retrograde”
suggests the extent to which Faulkner pitches Darl’s performance of
grief against the emergent culture of the commodity (227).
72 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
More than any other character in the text, Darl embodies a certain spirit of Faulkner’s modernism; he is represented as a character
whose response to the death of his mother promotes new ways of
relating to loss, new modes of being. However, as powerful an antidote to the commodification of loss as it may be, Darl’s mourning
ultimately takes the form of an aestheticized passivity. Darl’s position in the novel, like that of Faulkner’s alienated intellectuals, is
made possible only by establishing a radical distance from the world
and others. But, as Richard Moreland has perceptively noted, “The
disenchanted artistic or ironic social critic in Faulkner is never quite
allowed to leave—nor ever quite wants to leave—the social field of
the action.”17 In Darl’s case, his incessant taunting of both Jewel
and Dewey Dell reveals a character much more embroiled in the
world than he acknowledges. He chides his brother for symbolically
substituting his horse for Addie, at the same time he torments him
with the issue of his paternity: “ ‘Your mother was a horse, but who
was your father, Jewel?’ ” (212). Darl also realizes that Dewey Dell is
pregnant, verbally challenging the sincerity of her grief and charging his sister with pregnancy denial: “ ‘You want her to die so you
can get to town: is that it?’ She wouldn’t say what we both knew.
‘The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself,
you will know it is true: is that it?’ ” (40). The irony with which Darl
vents his verbal barbs may well be aimed at deflating the importance
his siblings place on the conventions of marriage and reproduction.
But his speech acts also reflect a character who remains powerless
to change anything, including the minds of his family and the way
they mourn.
In delimiting Darl’s potential to effect a world outside his own
consciousness, Faulkner deflates the idea of a wholly private realm,
the idea that any performance of grief can be radically liberated from
social determinants. Consequently, Faulkner embeds Darl in the
realm of the social. Despite the distance from conventional society
that Darl strives to maintain, his personal interests are at stake, even
if he attempts to ignore this fact. When Darl sets fire to Gillespie’s
barn in order to release Addie’s corpse and invest her remains with
a significance at odds with modernity, Dewey Dell takes the opportunity to silence her brother’s knowledge of her pregnancy; she discloses Darl’s arson to Gillespie. Narrative authority shifts to Cash,
who directs the reader’s understanding of events. Cash regards Darl’s
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
73
destruction of another man’s barn as a long overdue intervention to
lay Addie to rest, to cremate a body in an advanced state of decomposition. But Cash ultimately defends the family’s decision to declare
Darl insane and send him to an asylum rather than incur litigation
and the cost of restitution: “I can almost believe he done right in a
way. But I don’t reckon nothing excuses setting fire to a man’s barn
and endangering his stock and destroying his property” (233). By
siding with the laws of property against Darl, by rendering problematic the critical distance that Darl attempts to maintain in the exercise of his mourning, Faulkner’s text comes down against the merely
personal; it demonstrates how the social contract that ensures the
functioning of commodity culture also manages to circumscribe
even the most seemingly private zones of being.
Even as Faulkner retreats from the isolation and privacy implied
by Darl’s position, however, he does not simply abandon the kind
of mourning articulated by Addie’s son, a mourning practice, as
we have seen, that pitches a continued devotion to loss against an
uncontested acceptance of modernity. Toward this end, the novel
locates possibilities for sustained grief not outside culture but within
it, not in the practice of a social critic who effects a distance from
the world, but in those who accept their embeddedness in it. I have
already addressed how many of Addie’s children attempt but fail to
substitute the lost mother with the objects of commodity culture.
Instead of trains, abortions, and horses, what they do get is a sack of
bananas, a paltry substitute for the substitutes they seek. Even when
Cash acquires the gramophone that Anse’s new wife brings along, it
serves only to make him mindful of Darl’s absence from the scene.18
In keeping with modernism’s critical function, Faulkner’s text invests
these failures with productive possibility; the novel shows how a performance of mourning that fails to find its substitutes may generate
forms of selfhood and social life that Darl imagines privately but fails
to actualize publically. What Faulkner articulates, then, is how a personal experience of loss might pose a challenge to the culture of the
commodity. This is the point, it seems to me, of the novel’s elliptical
conclusion and description of the Bundren children as they prepare
to leave Jefferson and embark on the return trip home:
The wagon stands on the square, hitched, the mules motionless,
the reins wrapped about the seat-spring, the back of the wagon
74 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
toward the courthouse. It looks no different from a hundred other
wagons there; Jewel standing beside it and looking up the street
like any other man in town that day, yet there is something different, distinctive. There is about it that unmistakable air of definite
and imminent departure that trains have, perhaps due to the fact
that Dewey Dell and Vardaman on the seat and Cash on a pallet
in the wagon bed are eating bananas from a paper bag. ‘Is that
why you are laughing, Darl?’ (254)
In the very failure to secure substitutes for the lost Addie, a failure
that appears supremely ironic to Darl given his efforts to thwart
the substitutive logic of his family’s mourning, the Bundren children take on an air of distinction; they assume an appearance of
difference within a commodified culture that banks on the infinite
replaceability of others and objects, as well as the insatiable desire
for consumer goods. Despite themselves, Addie’s children depart
Jefferson with an experience of an economic order that grants its
privileges to some and withholds them from others. They leave town
in sight of their loss, a loss whose meaning refuses to circulate within
an economy of compensatory substitution. Between grief and the
commodity, we might conclude, Faulkner compels the Bundren children to take grief.
Historicizing trauma, traumatizing history, and
Requiem for a Nun
When delivering his 1950 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, Faulkner
raised a lament for literary production in the years following World
War II. The fear of nuclear annihilation in the Cold War period, he
claimed, prompted writers to ignore the past, concern themselves
solely with the present political climate, and believe in “defeats in
which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope.”19
This absorption in the social present resulted in what Faulkner saw
as a turning away from the literary preoccupation with “the human
spirit,” with the “compassion, and pity and sacrifice which have been
the glory of his [the writer’s] past” (120). Faulkner’s account of the
impoverishment of literature focused exclusively on the exigencies
of the political moment bears a striking similarity to Woolf’s discussion of women who limit their capacity as writers when they reduce
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
75
their fiction to expressions of female anger about gender inequality.20
As antithetical to real-world concerns as these expository chronicles sound, it ought to be observed that neither Woolf nor Faulkner
endorse an apolitical aesthetic practice. Rather, what they call for
are new ways of evaluating the present. Far from divorcing literature
from the problems of social reality, Faulkner, like Woolf, imputes
modernist writing with a mode of mournful memory that provides
an important framework for critical inquiry. Without the development of a literary model of remembrance, Faulkner warned that
postwar writing ran the risk of establishing a temporality of the perpetual present, a temporality that would be untethered from history
and incapable of reflective assessment. Of the writer who ignores the
personal and historical past, Faulkner wrote, “His griefs grieve on no
universal bones, leaving no scars” (120). Though we might object to
Faulkner’s invocation of universality here, what is interesting about
his formulation, as well as paradigmatic of his own modernist enterprise, is that an investment in the visible remains of loss constitutes
a productive response to the problem of postwar writing in the culture of modernity. By conceiving of literature as a mournful and
memorializing form that counters the tendency toward social amnesia, Faulkner arrived at a conclusion that may be optimistic but that
indulges no cultural nostalgia; he claimed that writers do not merely
offer a “record of man,” but can become “one of the props, the pillars
to help him endure and prevail” (120).
At first glance, such a conception of the past might appear counterintuitive, especially when evaluated in relation to the lawyer Gavin Stevens in Requiem for a Nun, who proclaims, “The past
is never dead. It’s not even past” (80). In the context of his utterance, Stevens suggests that traumas of the past have the power to
reduce the present to a repetitive replaying of the injuries. Faulkner
already articulated the devastating effects of traumatic repetition in
Absalom, Absalom!, where the sins of the fathers return to haunt the
sons. Similarly, Requiem for a Nun depicts the symptoms of trauma
that persist nearly a decade after the gruesome rape of Temple Drake.
However, Faulkner’s text, which was the first to follow his Nobel
Prize, does not impugn the past, as much as it discovers from within
the vexed temporary of trauma a personal and social history of loss,
a history of suffering that might otherwise remain untold. Traumatic
injuries suspend any pretense to linear time, as Freud pointed out,
76 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
when victims experience the past as if it were the present and relive
the event again and again in dreams, physical symptoms, and emotional dispositions.21 Such injuries point to a past event that may not
have been consciously perceived but that will not go away. Faulkner’s
strategy, as I explore here, is to exploit the resiliency of the past made
transparent in cases of traumatic injury; he represents the repetitive
effects of trauma as an occasion to uncover private spheres of internalized experience that have unacknowledged yet undeniable public
relevance.
When Sanctuary, the prequel to Requiem for a Nun, appeared in 1931,
public reception was polarized; some regarded the novel as a licentious account of deviant sexualities, while others admired the powerful rendering of the story. What is beyond dispute is that Sanctuary
was a strong selling and widely popular book. Noel Polk has raised
the suggestion that its popularity stems from the revisions Faulkner
made to the 1929 manuscript; the revised text eliminated many flashbacks of the characters and made for an “almost completely straightforward narrative, moving from its beginning to its conclusion with
economy and precision.”22 Unlike the textual difficulty characteristic of Faulkner’s typically modernist writing of the 1920s and 1930s,
Sanctuary follows a chronological narrative structure; it offers a linear and hence accessible account of Temple’s story.23 And yet, what
Polk overlooks is the way Faulkner also gives his female character
a different experience of time, one characterized by the fractured
sense of reality and cognition that Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub
have isolated as a major component of traumatic experience.24 The
two temporalities in the text occupy competing positions; Faulkner
employs these conflicting time schemes in order to show how official
time elides the traumatic nature of Temple’s experience and, in turn,
how her trauma manages to pose a challenge to the public meanings
and privileges of officialdom.25
Sanctuary represents the traumatic experiences that continue to
haunt Temple in Requiem for a Nun as a series of events so threatening that they disrupt the functioning of the psyche and suspend
the capacity for conscious perception; Temple’s trauma bars her from
conscious experience.26 Beginning when her escort Gowan Stevens
crashes his car near the Old Frenchman place, Temple becomes
removed from her own physical being. When she sees two shotguncarrying men from the Frenchman house approach the accident
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
77
scene, she starts to run without being able to register her bodily
actions mentally: “Still running her bones turned to water and she
fell flat on her face, still running” (38). Before ever stepping foot in
the Frenchman house, Temple has become detached from her own
experience. She fails to perceive the present situation fully, as when
she makes her way into the woods the next morning and detects a
man secretly watching her: “For an instant she stood and watched
herself run out of her body, out of one slipper” (91). To gain unimpeded access to Temple’s body, Popeye murders Tommy, another
bootlegger. When Temple hears the gunshot from a few feet away
as if it were “no louder than the striking of a match,” she experiences an “isolating” moment that henceforth reduces her future to
a repetitive replaying of this dimly perceived traumatic event (102).
In these scenes, Faulkner dramatizes a breach in consciousness, a
disruption of Temple’s normal capacity for observation and memory
that embeds his character’s traumatic experience in an epistemological economy of knowing and not knowing.
Critics have repeatedly commented on the strange silence with
which Sanctuary figures Temple’s rape by the impotent and corncobwielding Popeye.27 What exactly takes place in the bootlegger’s
den may be hinted at, but it is not directly represented. In a text so
explicitly preoccupied with sexual behaviors, what are we to make
of this elision? Why bar the reader from a fully transparent account
of the violation? Faulkner’s withholding of the description of the
rape, it seems to me, has the effect of directly engaging the reader
in the temporality of trauma. Just as Temple, who has been numbed
by the shocking occurrence of the car crash, her violated privacy,
and Tommy’s murder, undergoes rape as yet another violent assault
unavailable to consciousness, the reader is confronted with a hiatus in the text. Our own inability to read the rape scene implicates
us in the kind of eclipsing of conscious perception characteristic
of trauma. More crucially, this unreadability suggests the extent to
which our understanding of the violation will require an act of retrospective reconstruction, a historical account concerned less with
objective reality than subjective truth that will need to arise because
the immediacy of experience has not.
In some sense, however, the most “unreadable” event in Temple’s
story does not occur at the Frenchman place but during the six weeks
she spends in a Memphis brothel to which Popeye has brought her.
78
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
It is here, in fact, that Faulkner introduces a loss that crystallizes the
need for a new way of mourning, a performance of grief that he will
go on to articulate in Requiem for a Nun. The whorehouse segments
culminate in Temple’s experience of a decisive occasion for grief: the
death of Alabama Red. This is surely a curious kind of grief given the
fact that Popeye acted as a sort of pimp, bringing Red to her room,
compelling her compliance, and watching their sexual acts. When
Temple discovers that Popeye plans to kill his rival, she initially
appears impatient for the murderous deed to be finished: “She could
hear herself saying I hope it has. I hope it has” (37). But there is reason to assume that her involvement with Red had taken a form more
complicated than the forced violation initially arranged by Popeye.
Despite the elliptical description of the relationship between Temple
and Red, the narrative defines the thought of Red’s death as eliciting anguish on Temple’s part. As the narrator describes, “she was
overcome by a sense of bereavement and of physical desire” (37). In
raising a sexualized form of grief in this scene, a grief that cannot
be publically displayed, Faulkner reminds us that there are no social
rituals or conventionalized mourning practices able to accommodate
his character’s trauma and her complex experience of loss. The social
customs that regulate bereavement, organized as they are around the
dictates of propriety and restraint, offer no ceremonial outlets for
Temple to express what she has suffered. The subjective truth of her
experience exists, then, only in a psychic realm internal to the character, a point the text reiterates by demonstrating how social institutions have utterly silenced her perspective of the events. Ending
with the defeat of this 18-year- old female, Sanctuary describes how
the justice system fails Temple by convicting Popeye of a crime he
has not committed and how her father removes her from the local
scene by ushering her off on a European trip. To the extent that the
institutions of law and family have succeeded only in silencing the
traumatic experience of Temple Drake, they participate in consigning her future to a repetitive replaying of past injuries.
At the outset of Requiem for a Nun, the reader is lured into believing
that Temple has buried the past and made a fresh start; she is now
a 26-year- old mother of two young children and wife to the man
who escorted her to the Frenchman house. Her marital status enables
Temple to venture a bold claim; she declares “Temple Drake is dead”
and has been replaced by “Mrs. Gowan Stevens” (80). Faulkner’s
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
79
text casts suspicion on Temple’s declaration by placing her in an
apartment that emblematizes the attempt—and failure—of modernity to eclipse the past. The stage directions describe the Stevens
home as assuming the appearance of the modernized present; the
living room is “smart, modern, up-to- date” (46). However, the room
itself also recalls an earlier time: “the high ceilings, the cornices,
some of the furniture; it has the air of being in an old house, an
ante-bellum house” that has been converted into expensive apartments and “rented to young couples or families who can afford to
pay that much rent in order to live on the right street among other
young couples who belong to the right church and the country club”
(46). The stage setting of the Stevens’s home manages to crystallize
the complex issue Faulkner explores throughout the text: material
concerns have structured the culture of the modernity in ways that
obscure the relevance of the past, though the claims of this past will
not be decisively buried under the veneer of a modernized present.
Faulkner’s text demonstrates how Temple’s thoroughly modern
life has been structured as a substitute for confronting and mourning her past. Her present actions constitute a series of delayed
responses to her rape and experience in the brothel, responses that
repeat the past in various ways. Just as Gowan hopes to reclaim the
status of Southern gentleman by marrying the woman he abandoned at the bootlegger’s house, Temple seeks redemption by bearing children whose innocence she has pledged to protect. And yet,
at the center of her life remains a wound that continues to defy
healing. As in cases of trauma when victims repeatedly relive past
injuries, Temple relentlessly searches for people who compel her to
replay her traumatic past unconsciously. By hiring a black domestic
worker, Nancy Mannigoe, a recovered “dope-fiend whore,” she surrounds herself with a comforting presence of a reformed woman;
however, Nancy also brings Temple into daily contact with a memory of her earlier self, the former Sanctuary self she sought to bury
rather than confront. When Temple threatens to take her infant
daughter and run off with Pete, the brother of the murdered Red,
Nancy murders the child, seeking to save her from a life of abuse
and crime, the same life she and Temple have lived. In Faulkner’s
representation, the infanticide figures as a traumatic repetition
where the past comes crashing back into the present in ways that
can no longer be avoided.
80
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
Since the early 1990s, the study of trauma has centered on public events, including the Holocaust and modern wars, especially
the Vietnam War. Conversely, private experiences of sexual abuse
and domestic violence, while treated in terms of traumatic experience, have not exerted the same force upon the construction of
social memory as the publically shared cataclysms of the twentieth
century.28 It is in this context that the innovative form of Requiem
for a Nun—part narrative history, part play—should be evaluated.29
Indeed, on the level of form, Faulkner accords an equal measure of
value to remembering the traumas not just of communities but of
individuals like Temple who have suffered rape and abuse. The text
oscillates between three narrative accounts of Jefferson history and
three dramatic acts focused on Temple’s crisis. Far from a pointless
case of aesthetic experimentation,30 the juxtaposition of narrative
history and dramatic dialogue not only clarifies that Temple’s private
crisis has public significance but also demonstrates that Jefferson’s
history includes a set of violent acts and unacknowledged losses
suffered by groups of people because of their ethnicity, race, and
gender, losses that have been obscured by the historical record. In
Faulkner’s text, both the individual and community, then, are governed by a temporal logic of trauma. Just as Temple’s traumatic past
has taken hold of her present, this fictional Mississippi town appears
to be doomed to repeat its injurious history and inflict suffering on
the descendants of those who were marginalized at its founding. In
depicting a sense of inescapable doom that governs both character
and town, Faulkner’s text historicizes Temple’s trauma and articulates the traumatizing of southern history; in so doing, Requiem for
a Nun does not seeks to suture these wounds, but open them up for
fresh examination, compelling readers and audiences to reevaluate
the modern present in relation to a history of suffering that refuses
to go away.
The historical narrative that begins Act I, “The Courthouse (A
Name for the City),” defines the social wounds incurred at the
moment the town of Jefferson was established; the section tells the
story of the loss of “ancient monster iron padlock,” and its “transubstantiation into the Yoknapatawpha County courthouse” in the
mid-nineteenth century (9).31 The history of Jefferson’s founding
articulates how traumatic repetitions emerge when losses are covered
over and disowned. The lock, owned by Alexander Holston, a settler
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
81
who established the area as a Chickasaw trading post, originally
served a symbolic function; it emblematized “a gesture of salutation, of free men to free men, of civilization to civilization across not
just the three hundred miles of wilderness to Nashville, but the fifteen hundred to Washington” (11). When this symbol of individual
freedom and cultural diversity goes missing after being transported
to the poorly fortified jail, a number of proposals are raised to deal
with the loss and reimburse Holston for the lock. The first plan is to
pay Holston 15 dollars, but Jason Compson objects to the personal
expenditure. In response, Ratcliffe, another spokesmen, offers a “fair
and decent” proposal so that no one would “escape any just blame”
(19). He suggests that they write off the cost in an accounting ledger established in the early 1800s when the Chickasaws were forced
to sell land in exchange for credit to purchase goods. In Ratcliffe’s
proposal, the federal government stands the debtor, and Mohataha,
the Chickasaw matriarch, occupies the role of creditor in the name
of “her descendants and subjects and Negro slaves” (19). Interpreted
literally, the proposal smacks of deceit, for the Chickasaws would be
credited with the receipt of a lock that they did not possess. But read
symbolically, the ledger plan bespeaks an undeniable truth, given
the fact that the Native Americans clearly paid a hefty price for the
town’s establishment through the dispossession of their land and
later relocation to Oklahoma, as did black slaves through enforced
labor. Consequently, the significance of Ratcliffe’s plan cannot be
overestimated. As Richard Moreland has insightfully discussed, the
proposal succeeds in acknowledging a set of incommensurable losses
and gains incurred at the moment of Jefferson’s founding, the losses
suffered by Chickasaws, slaves, and their descendants, and the gains
enjoyed by the town’s white founders.32
Faulkner’s point in recounting this narrative is to show how the
official record manages to silence Jefferson’s history; it effaces the
story of those who have lost and those who have gained. Because
the social wounds involved in the town’s founding have not been
acknowledged, they usher in the belated temporality that characterizes so much of Faulkner’s fiction, the temporality of trauma. When
Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew, the postal carrier, claims that the lock
became the property of the federal government at the moment it was
transported to the jail in a U.S. mail bag, community leaders overturn Ratcliffe’s proposal, ditching the scheme to charge the loss to the
82 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
federal government in Mohataha’s name. They do not simply return
to the earlier plan of paying Holston themselves, but now go even
further by deciding to establish the town of Jefferson in the bargain,
an act they symbolically achieve by building a wooden courthouse
adjacent to the jail. By paying Holston themselves, Ratcliffe argues,
the founders commit a “fatal and irremediable error” (38) that provides “neither restoration to the ravaged nor emolument to the ravager, leaving in fact the whole race of man, as long as it endured,
forever and irrevocably fifteen dollars deficit, fifteen dollars in the
red” (32). From Ratcliffe’s perspective, the leaders have doomed both
themselves and the dispossessed to a futureless present in which the
injurious past will continue to reappear in ever-new and troubling
forms. The missed encounter with the reality of loss has not been
publically recognized, thus rendering the town’s history of traumatic
wounds unavailable for the work of restitution and mourning.
Faulkner’s conception of historical trauma, it should be noted,
implies that injuries suffered at a specific time assume a transgenerational quality. These historical injuries are shown to migrate across
generations to the modern descendants living in Jefferson, especially
Temple and Nancy. By situating trauma on a kind of transhistorical
plane, Faulkner’s work might be read as transforming historical loss
into structural lack, the kind of lack that critics including Dominick
LaCapra and Gillian Rose locate in poststructuralism and contest for
obscuring the identifiable object of loss and invalidating modes of
successful mourning able to heal.33 Faulkner’s modernism clearly
leaves itself vulnerable to such a charge. Even as his text makes us
cognizant of the historical antecedents of an absence that comes to
defy representation, it represents the transformation of a material
loss into an abstract lack, a constitutive lack in both private and public life that cannot be cured but only passed on and inherited. What
is important to understand, however, is that Faulkner’s work not only
deliberately rejects the viability of a complete working through of
loss; it also resists the recurring repetitions of traumatic injury that
LaCapra and Rose view as the only alternative to successful mourning. In place of the concepts of “healing” and “cure,” concepts that
imply a forgetting of the past and moving on in the name of progress,
I use the phrase “ongoing convalescence” to describe Faulkner’s representation of mourning. This convalescence, in the spheres of both
the private and public, acknowledges that the melancholic fixations
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
83
of history have not disappeared, that past wounds have not been
healed. In response, Faulkner’s text enacts a form of mourning dedicated to uncovering the stories of loss suffered by those who have
been unaccounted for in history. In tracing the way that historical
trauma is passed on to subsequent generations, the text offers a mode
of convalescence that allows these injurious histories to inform the
interpretation of the past and forge alternative sympathies with
those who have suffered.
The reverberating effects of historical trauma return in the present as the curtain rises in Scene 2 on the Yoknapatawpha County
Courthouse in 1951, where Nancy receives the death penalty for murdering Temple’s infant daughter. In figuring Nancy as a “nun” whose
impending death calls for a textual form of mourning, Requiem for
a Nun alerts us to the reoccurrence of a social wound that has not
been healed, one that repeats itself in the act of infanticide. The text
situates Nancy’s guilt within the context of an unappeased past,
offering a complex understanding of her crime. On the one hand,
Nancy stands rightfully accused of the murder, suggesting the extent
to which historical trauma cannot be easily laid to rest. On the other,
Nancy’s murderous act is represented as a rebellion against the culture of modernity and its abjecting of blacks and woman.34 That she
will be hanged for her criminal rebellion, for her attempt to save an
infant from the same violence she has suffered, reiterates the need
to construct a history not simply of political events but of individual
loss, a history that is not just taken in and remembered but reworked
differently and projected outward. Nancy’s death sentence has been
passed in the only Jefferson building to have been “exactly” restored
to its pre- Civil War status after wartime damage, the very same
courthouse, as we have seen, founded on a traumatic yet disavowed
history of loss. By placing Nancy in this setting, Faulkner’s text demonstrates that our institutionalized practice of justice, founded on
the sanctity of the rational individual, renders verdicts of judgement
with little regard for a history of suffering that has conditioned the
present. Faulkner’s extended critique of the Jefferson courthouse, the
seat of justice founded on an unjust history, brings to light the need
for a ritualized form of memory that conjoins the private and the
public, the need for a form of mourning that places the return of
traumatic effects within new social constellations and seeks to dissolve their deadly consequences.
84 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
Requiem for a Nun articulates this mourning, this ongoing convalescence, as an act of testifying and bearing witness to trauma. At
the same time, however, the text poses a challenge to early theories
of testimony by reminding us that testifying to trauma does not
occur in a social vacuum. 35 The scene of testimony at the play’s
center does not dramatize the willingness but the refusal to hear
trauma speak, the refusal of those onstage to bear witness to the
traumatic experience that Temple relates in a first-person account
of her past. Temple tells a story that in a certain sense defies telling
insofar as the traumatic events themselves were never consciously
experienced; she cannot adhere to the dictates of simple “truth,”
as one of her interlocutors commands (78). Rather, she can only
repeat the trauma again in the telling. Temple acknowledges the
extent to which testifying causes her to relive the past again; the
purpose of telling her story, as she puts it, is “to give Temple Drake
a good fair honest chance to suffer” (116). As a repetition of traumatic suffering, testimony requires the role of the listener, a person
or persons who provide a safe space for the telling. The role of bearing witness is a difficult one, as Cathy Caruth and other trauma
theorists have argued, because the teller’s traumatic reenactment
“contaminates” the listener; it is not an account of the shock but
the shock itself that is transmitted, thus transforming the witness
into a traumatized co-participant now responsible for safeguarding the truth of the event.36 What Faulkner represents, however, is
not the productive potential entailed in this difficult process but
the missed opportunity to hear trauma speak. He does not portray
Temple’s listeners as sensitive individuals already predisposed to
sharing the difficult experience of another’s suffering but characters whose self-interest compel them to impose their own economies of knowledge onto her account. In their positions of political
and legal power, these men reduce the meaning of her testimony to
conventional social categories of understanding.37 By highlighting
how the listeners onstage fail to hear Temple’s account apart from
their own power-laden frames of reference, Faulkner’s text articulates how the testimony of suffering might as easily spawn recalcitrant defenses of the status quo as imperatives to social change.
Acts of testimony are fraught with a kind of uncertainty that
trauma theorists have only begun to articulate, an uncertainty that
Faulkner’s text foregrounds in order to demonstrate that the public
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
85
response to traumatic testimony is as important, and in some sense
more, as the testimony itself.
The ability to bear witness to Temple’s testimony depends on the
capacity to see the present in the light of the past, to evaluate modernity in relation to the history that has conditioned it. When Temple
travels to the Mississippi capital to submit an account of her traumatic experience as a mitigating circumstance in Nancy’s crime, she
fails to save Nancy from execution; however, she does manage to
convey the silent territory of a private past. As she relates her memories, memories that never simply reveal the objective reality of the
trauma, Temple represents herself as a licentious woman responsible
for the loss of her sexual innocence, her rape, the murder of Red
and her child, and Nancy’s impending execution. However, Faulkner
locates our capacity to hear the special truth of her trauma not in
the words she says or what they ostensibly signify, but rather in a
kind of literary dimension that manages to convey more and more
clearly how her testimony functions as a critique of her culture.
What Faulkner’s text communicates, in fact, is Temple’s resistance
to a society that has withheld strong subject positions for women.
Without mother or sisters, Temple recalls growing up in a household headed by men, one where her father, a prominent judge, and
her brothers exerted authority over her actions. She tells her listeners that she broke college rules to meet Gowan on the devastating
night depicted in Sanctuary because she had been a “foolish virgin.”
Referring to a younger version of herself in the third person, Temple
explains: “She just had unbounded faith that her father and brothers
would know evil when they saw it, so all she had to do was, do the
one thing which she knew they would forbid her to do if they had
the chance” (118). Admittedly, Temple’s recollection of transgression seems to emerge as a means of verifying masculine authority
to adjudicate sexual norms. But what the account of her experience
succeeds in communicating is that the conventions regulating sexuality have not simply failed to protect her from Popeye; they placed
her at the scene of her violation in the first place. In this light, her
testimony may be interpreted as a challenge to the male policing
of female virtue, even while Temple’s own assessment of this challenge remains limited by her culture’s conventional economy of
knowledge: she cannot see herself as a chaste female so she must be
a deserving whore.
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Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
While Faulkner’s rendering of the testimony scene manages to disclose the hidden meanings of Temple’s story, it also demonstrates how
the powerful males who listen to her account assume the authority to
define the significance of her traumatic losses. When Temple raises
the issue that has troubled readers of Sanctuary, her failure to extricate herself from Popeye, she again represents herself as the perpetrator of her traumatic experience, while Stevens insists on figuring
her an innocent victim. Temple claims that she could have walked
away from the car accident and found transportation “to the nearest town or railroad station or even back to school or, for that matter, right on back home into my father’s or brothers’ hands” (121).38
But, she declares, “I choose the murderer—“ (121). Stevens imposes
his own meaning on her narrative by blaming the evil she has suffered on one man, rather than indicting the role that cultural values
have played in her tragedy. He informs the governor that Popeye was
a “psychopath,” little more than “a slightly deformed cockroach: a
hybrid, sexually incapable” (121). Stevens’s account accords with textual evidence, since Sanctuary goes so far as to disclose that Popeye
mutilated small animals as a child before bootlegging, raping, and
murdering as an adult.39 However, Temple’s testimony strains toward
a truth that moves beyond Popeye’s documented depravity or her
own culpability; it conveys a complex mode of female survival in
a brutal male order where Temple seized the opportunity to prey
upon Popeye’s impotence by using her sexual involvement with Red
as a weapon against her male captor. Stevens cannot hear Temple’s
insistence that she “choose the murderer” as a story that impugns
a masculine economy of knowledge, the very economy that grants
him privilege. Rather, he interprets Temple as innocent victim and
Popeye as evil victimizer, an interpretation that has a measure of
validity but nevertheless fails to hear Temple’s recollection of traumatic experiences as a plea for a new interpretation of the past.
The painful core of Temple’s testimony, the story of her involvement with Red, demonstrates how traumatic loss takes the regressive trajectory of a repetitive return. In testifying to her relationship
with Red, she speaks of a strong attachment that grew out of sexual
encounters arranged and watched by Popeye for his own visual pleasure: “I met the man, how doesn’t matter, and I fell what I called
in love with him” (127). Red was murdered on his way to their first
private meeting, a meeting Temple regarded as their opportunity to
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
87
purge the relationship of shame. Consequently, she blames herself
and not Popeye for Red’s death. “Oh yes.—Died, shot from a car while
he was slipping up the alley behind the house, to climb up the same
drainpipe I could have climbed down at any time” (132). Because
her love affair began as a spectator sport in a brothel, and because
she sees herself as directly responsible for Red’s death, Temple has
a difficult time confronting her loss. She does find in Nancy, “the
only animal in Jefferson that spoke Temple Drake’s language” (136),
a kind of priest in the “Catholic Church” who knew how to “listen” to her story of the love she “missed that other time” (134). But,
as her testimony suggests, the bereaved exchange took place in an
atmosphere of extreme secrecy, underscoring the need to disavow
her loss and assuming the dire consequences of traumatic reenactment. When Red’s brother Pete blackmails Temple with the sexually
titillating letters she wrote to her murdered lover, Temple’s response
to the blackmail scheme takes the form of the belated temporality
of trauma: “The letters turned up again of course,” she tells the governor and lawyer, “And of course, being Temple Drake, the first way
to buy them back that Temple Drake thought of, was to produce the
material for another set of them” (131). When she convinces Pete to
run off with her and her infant daughter, Temple unwittingly establishes the conditions whereby she relives Red’s death in both Nancy’s
killing of her child and Nancy’s subsequently impending execution.
In Faulkner’s text, the failure of the social order to credit the legitimacy of Temple’s loss—or provide a means to mourn it—ushers in a
terrible repetition of the past.
How can traumatic experience be dissolved of its deadly repetitions, how can it be placed within a practice of convalescence, if
trauma points to a past that evades conscious knowledge? How, in
other words, can we respond to a past that remains unknowable?
This is the central question the text poses and to which it responds;
Requiem for a Nun represents the extent to which trauma exceeds
knowledge, but it also transforms this limit into an alternative economy of knowing, an economy where the concept of unknowingness
is articulated and shared. To the extent that trauma points to a past
outside the contents of consciousness, it prompts Faulkner’s effort to
apprehend this violent history through its perplexing repetitions and
devastating returns. In the stories that give voice to these repetitive
recurrences, Faulkner finds clear indications of a spectral history, to
88 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
invoke Derrida’s concept, that has fallen outside the interests of official documentation and conventional historiography.40
Faulkner’s text constructs a spectral history to demonstrate how
the repetitions of past suffering can be made to yield different
consequences for the future. This is the lesson, as I take it, of the
Prologue to Act III, “The Jail (Nor Even Yet Quite Relinquish—),”
where Faulkner’s narrator describes a “stranger,” an “outlander” who
stumbles upon Jefferson, wants to know its history, and discovers
that forgotten pasts are as much a part of the town’s history as the
official knowledge preserved in “church registers and the courthouse
records” (184). The stranger makes his way to the local jail, the only
structure “in observation and memory ... older even than the town
itself” (183). What he finds there are the remains and reminders of
memories that have been largely obscured, histories that have been
all but erased. The barely visible writing and pictures underneath
layers of the whitewashed jail walls move the stranger to consider the
“passion and hope and endurance” of those who have been rendered
utterly silent by Jefferson history. Among those include American
Indians, blacks, and women, the socially marginalized imprisoned
for a variety of transgressions and deemed “significantless,” but who
rank in both the stranger’s view and Faulkner’s text as the “unvanquished” (184). In articulating the discontinuities and disruptions of
history, the prologue raises the knowledge of an unknowable past as
a challenge to the homogenization of a modern social moment that
banks on forgetting its injurious history.
By situating the traumas of Nancy and Temple within this alternative economy of knowing, Requiem for a Nun identifies ongoing convalescence as a process where grief is made public in ways that open
up history for alternative empathetic identifications. In the course
of her testimony, Temple certainly encourages us to identify with
Nancy, an “ex- dope-fiend nigger whore” (136), who deflates Steven’s
moral indignation when he discovers that she cannot name the
father of an unborn child she lost when one of her sexual partners
beat her: “If you backed your behind into a buzz-saw,” Nancy “impatiently” asks Stevens, “could you tell which tooth hit you first?”
(241). If Temple’s testimony offers a requiem for Nancy, a formal
lament that gives public voice to the suffering of another, Requiem
for a Nun performs a similar function for Temple, the “foolish virgin”
who ostensibly “chose the murderer,” by inviting our identification
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
89
with her. At the play’s end, Temple returns home with her husband,
whom the governor and lawyer have allowed to listen in on his wife’s
testimony secretly. The men reassert conventional forms of legality
and domesticity as adequate responses to trauma, but Temple understands that her husband’s apology does not restore her innocence.
She also understands the lawyer’s insistence on the simple truth
has not facilitated the telling of her story and the governor’s claim
that Nancy has sacrificed her “worthless life” does not comprehend
the social conditions that have rendered her life supposedly worthless in the first place. Faulkner’s text not only exposes the failure of
modernity’s institutions to hear trauma speak; it also establishes a
modernist literary practice where an alternative economy of knowing is animated for the political and ethical work of mourning. As
Temple’s testimony compels her to embark on a process of mourning that does not promise to end but that she herself understands
will continue “tomorrow and tomorrow” (243), Faulkner’s text places
audiences and readers in the role of witness, a role that holds open
the possibility that a return of injurious histories will yield a different economy of loss and a different future for both the individual
and community.
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Part II
Legacies
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3
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited
The great cultural decline of the twentieth century was first
evident in the graveyard.
(Evelyn Waugh, “Half in Love with Easeful Death”)
Waugh’s novels mourn the collapsing tradition of Englishness once
long- established social forms of life have begun to disintegrate. His
narratives set in the 1930s focus on the deterioration of physical
locations and places, as well as the dissolution of cultural practices
and inherited ideals.1 Waugh identifies the public school, sports
field, men’s club, and particularly the country house repeatedly at
the center of his fiction as epitomizing a uniquely English tradition;
he represents these places in various stages of decline and decay. The
country houses of the nation—and all they stand for—are literally
falling apart. The decaying homes of England’s aristocratic classes,
even while they continue to stand, signal what has already largely
passed into history: a national tradition where transcendental certainties secured linguistic meaning, Britannia ruled the waves, and
people knew their proper place in the social hierarchy. In representing the decaying country house as a synecdoche for an array of
fragmenting cultural experiences, Waugh’s fiction describes a multiplicity of literal and symbolic deaths, telling stories about the passing
of characters, dissolution of religious faith, decline of the aristocracy,
and collapsing authority of British imperialism. But his novels do not
simply describe the decline of the country house. They seek, more
fundamentally, to mourn the disintegration of a national tradition
and adjudicate the significance of this loss for the future.
93
94 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
Waugh’s effort to mourn the passing of the country house tradition hinges first and foremost on an aesthetics of decay. His writing,
in fact, focuses attention on the decay of English domestic architecture more than the structures themselves. Consider, for example,
Work Suspended, an unfinished novel of the late 1930s, where Waugh
introduces what I call a form of “critical” nostalgia for the country
house and distinguish from “sentimental” nostalgia. The narrator
John Plant gives expression to this critical nostalgia when he identifies “a specialized enthusiasm for domestic architecture,” especially
those eighteenth- century classical houses that have begun to deteriorate, as one of the “peculiarities” of his generation:
When the poetic mood was on us, we turned to buildings, and
gave them the place which our fathers accorded to Nature—to
almost any buildings, but particularly those in the classic tradition, and more particularly, in its decay. It was a kind of nostalgia
for the style of living which we emphatically rejected in practical
affairs.2
That Plant uses his inheritance to buy a country house, a place he
believes will shelter him from the transience and moral dissipation
of modern life, suggests that he imagines himself as a rightful heir to
an English tradition of rural life, one he regards as valuable. However,
he does not display any sentimental attachment to this artifact of
historical distinction; Plant distances his fixation on the country
estate from the conduct of everyday life. Even more to the point,
he reserves his highest esteem not for the well-preserved house, but
for one “in its decay.” Consequently, Waugh’s protagonist not only
invalidates any project bent on historical recovery, but also views the
living tradition of Englishness as a time that has essentially passed,
a tradition he has been born into at the irreversible moment of its
doom. If there is a species of nostalgia operating here, it does not
express the sentimental longing to redeem the present by restoring
the practices of the past. Instead, Plant displays a critical form of
nostalgia, or what Peter Kalliney has recently addressed as a nostalgic
longing for nostalgia itself.3 Rather than valuing a house that would
enable him to sustain the English tradition of country life, he values
a house that reiterates its loss; rather than fixating on a house that
would obscure the fading splendor of the English past, Plant fixates
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 95
on a house that highlights this decay. Plant cannot deny the impossibility of recovering the past. What he can do, much like Waugh himself, is regard the decay as a sign of his own temporal predicament,
his having entered the country house tradition at a stage he regards
as its fateful closure.4
Waugh’s fiction tells the tale of this closure by transforming
the familiar discourse of nostalgic sentimentality into a politics of
mourning, a politics that has the capacity to yield specific social
consequences. His representation of mourning, as I argue in what
follows, reflects a decidedly conservative vision of the future possibilities for subjectivity and culture. Waugh’s work does not merely
place characters among the disintegrating architecture of the nation
but invests special value in those privileged upper-middle- class figures who reject projects of restoration and recognize decay as an end
in itself. By distancing his work from a nostalgic fixation on the past
that threatens to lead to cultural stasis, Waugh redefines nostalgia for
the modern age; his work transforms nostalgia from a sentimental
disposition to a performance of mourning that makes the past newly
available for a culturally conservative politics. If a national tradition
that supported conventional Englishness cannot be recovered, it can
still be interpreted, reverenced, and mourned in ways that foster
sympathetic identifications in the present with those characters who
align themselves with history’s old hegemonies.
Mourning in Waugh’s work, it is important to understand, sustains
some of the strictures of the modernist tradition as exemplified by
Woolf and Faulkner. Waugh shares with these modernist writers a
critical view of modernity; his writing demonstrates how technological development and the increasing materialism of modern social
life have led to the disappearance of bodies, places, customs, and
beliefs. In line with the innovative model of mourning that I have
identified in a certain strain of modernist writing, Waugh as well
does not regard loss as a wholly negative state but a unique opportunity to assign creating meaning to the lingering remnants of a lost
tradition. His writing mourns lost characters, lost locations, and lost
traditions to generate a specific set of empathetic identifications and
social meanings. Crucial differences exist, however, between modernist narrations of loss and Waugh’s late-modernist novels. While
Woolf and Faulkner represent sustained grief and ongoing mourning to promote new social constellations for female characters, the
96
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
working classes, and African Americans, Waugh formulates bereavement to advance a conservative social agenda. A Handful of Dust and
Brideshead Revisited, as I discuss below, seek to instill a felt experience of bereavement for the irrecoverable loss of tradition.5 These
texts not only encourage readers to identify with those characters
who stand in for the victors of historical privilege, but also seek to
renew consolation, particularly a religious form of consolation, for
the loss of old social hegemonies. In promulgating a renewal of religious consolation for the modern age, Waugh’s novels demonstrate
how the closure of mourning and the resolution of grief serve a
bourgeois social order; his fiction establishes a consoling narrative
of historical loss with a meaning that is fixed, stable, and no longer
open to alternative interpretations. Despite Waugh’s complex use
of irony, his mode of parodic critique that extends to characters
who embody traditional as well as modern sensibilities, his novels
ultimately come down on the side of the latter- day incarnations of
history’s most privileged national figures. His texts attempt to elicit
bereaved sympathy for these characters by lingering at their decaying domestic haunts. The way these characters mourn for the fading
splendor of the English past—and the consolation they hold out to
the reader—clarifies how the work of grief might serve regressive
and reactive aims. The critical nostalgia in Waugh’s work, I argue,
produces a consolatory mourning discourse that functions as a bulwark against the rise of the modern middle class, as well as local and
global projects of emancipation.
Gothic ruins and English remains
in A Handful of Dust
A Handful of Dust does not simply explore the social status of the
country house and English identity at a moment of historical crisis; Waugh’s text represents a traditional notion of Englishness as
lost and describes the mourning of this loss as a mode of sustained
identification with it. The novel takes place in the 1930s, when the
country house tradition has already been dealt a decisive blow by
a number of factors: the changing social scene after the Great War,
the shift from landed to industrial wealth, and the introduction of
new tax laws.6 Tony Last, the novel’s main character, understands
the financial difficulty, perhaps even impossibility, of maintaining
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 97
his ancestral home, Hetton Abbey. While Tony employs 15 indoor
servants, along with gardeners, carpenters, a night watchman, and
other workers, he and his wife Brenda are forced to economize where
they can, traveling to London mid-week when train fares are cheaper,
deferring much-needed home improvements until death duties for
Tony’s father have been paid, and postponing trips abroad. Beyond
material constraints, Tony also realizes that the house itself “was
not altogether amenable to modern ideas of comfort” (13). Its heating and hot-water systems, in addition to a paucity of bathrooms,
appear wholly inadequate by twentieth- century standards. But from
its owner’s perspective, Hetton continues to function as a page in an
ongoing story of national and personal belonging. This is a story of
English identity that Tony values and plans to pass on to his only
child, John Andrew, by bequeathing the place to him.
Hetton Abbey manages to define the sense of Englishness that
Waugh’s protagonist has inherited and cherishes; he regards the
house and its contents as “things of tender memory and proud possession” (14). His personal collection of “eggs, butterflies, fossils,
[and] coins” (16) gathered as a boy on Hetton’s grounds suggests an
organic understanding of house and nation, an organicism that Vita
Sackville-West expressed when describing English country houses as
an “essential part of the country, not only in the country, but part
of it, a natural growth.”7 Tony similarly regards Hetton as part of a
natural order of things, largely ignoring the exploitative structure of
rural labor necessary to support it. He refuses to sell a house he can
barely afford to keep up even though he realizes, as one character
puts it, “There’s a lot in what these labour fellows say, you know. Big
houses are a thing of the past in England, I’m afraid” (206). Moreover,
Tony’s “framed picture of a dreadnought” serves to place this local
narrative of national identity within a global context (16). The image
of British naval authority, so crucial in the establishment of empire,
suggests the extent to which imperialism has contributed to building the structure Tony inhabits. House, contents, and all they imply
provide Waugh’s character with an English identity that has been
grounded on class division at home and imperial authority abroad.8
The privileged position he has been born into furnishes Tony with a
personal sense of Englishness, one he experiences as a “duty toward’s
[sic] one’s employees, and towards the place too” (19). The protagonist regards the country house tradition as a “definite part of English
98 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
life,” whose disappearance “would be a serious loss” to both himself
and the nation (19).
Multiple economic and social pressures threaten Tony’s position
as an old-style landowner; Waugh condenses these in the figure of
Mrs. Beaver, a type of character that flourishes in the early decades of
the twentieth century and reflects Waugh’s view of all that is wrong
with the culture of modernity. An interior decorator and commercial
developer, Mrs. Beaver profits during the financial crisis of the thirties by modernizing country homes and converting large London
houses into affordable apartments. She displays a functional view of
housing that Waugh already lampooned in his first novel Decline and
Fall, where the fictional Bauhaus architect Otto Silenus demolishes
a country house standing since the sixteenth century and builds a
“clean and square” domestic structure in its place. Silenus, we are
told, learned his profession from Le Corbusier, whose architectural
aesthetic Waugh roundly criticizes in both his fiction and nonfiction as coldly mechanistic.9 Silenus himself gives voice to Waugh’s
criticism when he defines the task of modern architecture as “the
elimination of the human element from the consideration of form,”
and goes on to claim, “[t]he only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men.”10 It is this
mechanized approach to architecture that Waugh attacks in his characterization of Mrs. Beaver. Driven by the sole consideration of profitability, Mrs. Beaver rents Tony’s wife Brenda one of her converted
London flats, a small place “to dress and telephone” (52) that comes
with “limitless hot water” and “space for a bed” (53). Mrs. Beaver
realizes the flat enables Brenda to carry on a secret affair with John
Beaver, Mrs. Beaver’s shallow and opportunistic son. For Waugh, the
conversion of London houses to apartments registers the moral emptiness of modernity; such living spaces offer a facile alternative to
country house life, a life that simply bores Brenda and prompts her
to seek apparent excitement in the city and an extramarital affair
with a man she hardly likes.
A Handful of Dust defines the threat to the country house tradition as a social disease that originates in the London metropolis. The
urban English are shown to be indifferent, even hostile, to all facets of rural life and Waugh draws on this anti-urban rhetoric in the
novel to offer a defense of the country house. When Brenda brings
Mrs. Beaver to Hetton, commissioning her to remodel the morning
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 99
room, an urban sensibility threatens rural space; the interior decorator declares the room “appalling” and admits that “the structure
does rather limit” the possibilities, but nevertheless claims to know
“exactly what Brenda wants” (106). Mrs. Beaver recommends covering the walls with “white chromium plating” (106). Waugh’s choice
of material fuels his critique of the urban assault on English country life. Expensive chrome paneling, associated with the fast-paced
modern world, underscores the financial motivation that informs
Mrs. Beaver’s ideas about houses and interiors.
As his novel conveys, Waugh categorically despises the materialism and architectural aesthetics of modern culture; however, he also
reserves a special kind of hostility for sentimental nostalgia and those
characters, like Tony Last, who display it. The protagonist’s surname
signifies a decaying tradition that cannot be passed on, but the character himself refuses to recognize the degree to which financial and
social pressures have rendered his country life a thing of the past.
Signs of decay abound at Hetton Abbey but, rather than see them
as a marker of the boundary that separates past from present, Tony
regards decay as a sign of the past’s survival in the modern world and
embarks on plans for restoration. Waugh’s narrator, in fact, figures
Tony’s fixation on his house as a substitute for reckoning with the
passing of the country house tradition and the emergent culture of
modernity responsible for it: “All over England people were waking
up, queasy and despondent. Tony lay for ten minutes very happily
planning the renovation of his ceiling” (16). Restoration of a plaster ceiling and its ornately painted decorations places Tony within
a familiar discourse of sentimental nostalgia; he takes shelter in the
decorative richness of the past as a means of avoiding the realities of
the modern present.
Waugh’s critique of this nostalgia demonstrates how the past that
Tony idealizes does not express the ideal his protagonist imagines.
Tony lives in a house built in the last half of the nineteenth century
when his Victorian ancestors rebuilt the original estate in the Gothic
Revival style. Waugh’s narrator gives voice to the opinion of many
in the period who signaled out Gothic Revivalism, of all the myriad styles of English domestic architecture, for ridicule and condemnation when remarking that Hetton, “formerly one of the notable
houses of the country, was entirely rebuilt in 1864 in the Gothic style
and is now devoid of interest” (13).11 Waugh’s novel expresses disdain
100 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
for a style that has been widely criticized as the reduction of medieval forms to an ostentatious display of ornament. If the nineteenthcentury Gothic took inspiration from a vernacular style of medieval
churches and castles, it did so in an imitative fashion that Waugh
regards as reducing architectural substance to little more than a
decorative facade. In this context, the narrator makes it a point to
mention that Tony’s cherished but deteriorating ceiling is not the
real thing, but an imitation of the real thing: “In order to make an
appearance of coffered wood, moulded slats had been nailed in a
chequer across the plaster” (13). The protagonist seeks to renovate
the ceiling’s decaying plaster to restore what was originally merely
the look of coffered wood. By representing Victorian Gothic architecture as itself a meaningless imitation of a genuinely admirable
past, Waugh’s work defines the nineteenth century, and the emergent secularization and materialism that characterizes the period, as
the beginning of the end of the country house tradition.
“English Gothic—I,” the novel’s second chapter, demonstrates
how Tony’s house draws inspiration from both the medieval church
and fortress, but empties the architectural categories of spirituality and nationalism of significance. An abbey originally stood on
the site that Hetton now occupies, suggesting that Tony’s Victorian
ancestors selected the Gothic style when rebuilding to establish a
connection between their privileged social status and medieval spirituality. But Hetton Abbey, like the Gothic Revival structures upon
which it is based, is represented in comic fashion; the house appears,
as it does to the novel’s journalist who visits and photographs it, as
an “amusing” example of an architectural effort to forge a spiritual
style of building that has gone grotesquely wrong.12 Waugh reiterates this empty spiritualism when depicting Tony’s churchgoing
as a ritual he practices out of mundane habit rather than religious
conviction. Just as the house embodies a false pretense to medieval piety, Hetton suggests the emptiness of its status as a symbol
of national strength. Hetton’s battlements and armorial stained
glass display signs of political power and family pride, yet Waugh’s
narrator remarks on the way that Gothic design no longer signifies
the national well-being of Tony and his family. “[T]he ecclesiastic
gloom of the great hall” and a bedroom fireplace “like a tomb of the
thirteenth century” suggest the degree to which the awe-inspiring
interiors and mighty fortifications of the castle have now come to
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 101
signify little more than a depressing and inhospitable space (14). In
keeping with the emphasis that Gothic Revivalism placed on medieval literary traditions, each of Hetton’s bedrooms has been decorated after a figure in Arthurian legend. But again, Waugh’s aim is to
expose the meaninglessness of this borrowing. For all Tony’s veneration of this tradition, the protagonist appears woefully incapable of
understanding its significance. Although his wife sleeps in a room
suggestively called Guinevere, Tony fails, for instance, to read the
obvious signs of Brenda’s infidelity. Tony may be “madly feudal,” as
Brenda claims, but his house gives merely the appearance and not
the substance of the venerable past.
A Handful of Dust is a corrosively ironic text, extending its critique
to both characters like Tony who embody the waning of tradition
and characters like Mrs. Beaver who represent the ascendency of
the modern. This corrosive irony constitutes the novel’s narrative
structure; in refusing to endorse either position, Waugh plays one off
against the other. The novel sets up an ironic exchange where tradition is raised to expose the vacuousness of the modern spirit and
modernity, in turn, is represented to convey the foolishness of clinging to the past. In this light, the novel defines the interwar years as a
cultural period poised between two wholly inadequate alternatives:
characters either give themselves over to the antiquated ways of the
past or the callous profitability of the modern. Nowhere is this simultaneous indictment of past and present more apparent than in the
aftermath of the death of Tony’s son, seven-year- old John Andrew,
who dies in a riding accident during his first fox hunt. The death
scene describes the way that Tony and Mrs. Rattery, a financially
independent and thoroughly modern American visiting Hetton,
respond to the fatal accident. In Waugh’s handling of the scene, neither the traditional male nor the modern female appears capable of
accommodating the passing of human life. The sheer lack of symbolic resources for the mourning of death emerges in the novel as a
measure of a nation in decline, a measure of a dying England.
The epigraph with which I began reflects the centrality that Waugh
places on funerary traditions; in claiming that Western decline “was
first evident in the graveyard,” he evaluates the impoverishment
of modern culture in relation to the erosion of death rituals and
mourning practices that began in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.13 Similarly, the novel’s death scene demonstrates
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that the funerary practices associated with the past have eroded and
modernity offers nothing to replace them. In Tony’s case, Waugh
raises Mrs. Rattery’s ability to directly confront the fatal accident in
order to expose the protagonist’s inability to face his son’s death. The
death of John Andrew, the only direct heir to Hetton, invites Tony
to recognize a temporal rupture that separates life and death, present and past. But it is a recognition fraught with difficulty, as Tony
struggles with time and attempts to resist its passing:
It’s less than four hours ago that it happened ... it’s odd to think
that this is the same day; that it’s only five hours ago they were
all here at the meet having drinks ... It was twenty eight minutes
past twelve when I heard. I looked at my watch ... it was ten to one
when they brought John in ... just over three hours ... it’s almost
incredible, isn’t it, everything becoming absolutely different, suddenly like that. (149–50)
Tony continues to resist the idea of passing time when he considers
the news reaching his wife, who has taken to spending most days in
London with her lover: “Think of it, all the time between now and
when it happened, before Brenda hears. It’s scarcely credible, is it?”
(150). These repeated claims of disbelief may well reveal an element
of traumatic incomprehension that testifies to the intensity of Tony’s
grief. However, what Waugh primarily discloses in Tony’s temporal
reveries is a character out of sync with the present, a character who
desperately longs to return to a time before the accident and before
the decline of the country house tradition.
Waugh’s narrative clearly upholds the way Mrs. Rattery confronts
the reality of John’s passing without hesitation or obfuscation; however, it also pitches the immense struggle Tony experiences in facing
the loss against the ease with which Mrs. Rattery assimilates death
to the vacuous rituals of contemporary life. Mrs. Rattery appears to
have little difficulty in acknowledging the reality of the accident; she
responds to Tony’s disbelief with brutal honesty: “It happened all
right” (147). Waugh’s novel, nevertheless, critiques her response to
the tragedy by highlighting the game of cards in which she indulges
while keeping Tony company until Brenda’s arrival. More than a mere
pastime, Mrs. Rattery’s game of solitaire emerges in the death scene
as a replacement for the lost meaning once furnished by religion,
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 103
philosophy, and history. As the narrator describes, “Mrs. Rattery sat
intent over her game, moving little groups of cards adroitly backward and forwards about the table like shuttles across a loom; under
her fingers order grew out of chaos; she established sequence and
precedence; the symbols before her became coherent, interrelated”
(150). This description of an activity that imparts “sequence” and
“precedence” on otherwise isolated symbols indicates that a card
game has taken over the function of a grand signifying system. It
is not religious faith, philosophical knowledge, or historical tradition but a game of cards that now discerns “order” from “chaos” and
establishes a coherent system of signification. What this card playing
scene reflects is Waugh’s view of an existential nothingness at the
core of modern life. Indeed, Mrs. Rattery never once offers condolences to her host; she appears capable of experiencing bereaved sadness only when her game culminates in failure: “[I]t had nearly come
to a solution that time, but for a six of diamonds out of place, and
a stubbornly congested patch at one corner, where nothing could
be made to move. ‘It’s a heartbreaking game,’ she said” (151). For
Waugh, the emotional life of the modern character does not emanate from an interior depth but from a flat and meaningless surface,
a superficiality reflected in the empty rituals of modernity.
The impoverishment of mourning customs in Waugh’s account of
a culture polarized between defunct traditions and modern meaninglessness ultimately takes the ridiculous form of a child’s game.
When Mrs. Rattery urges Tony to pass time in play, he suggests the
only card game he knows, Animal Snap. The two deal cards and make
animal noises to signal when they have achieved the game’s object,
securing a pair. Waugh highlights the absurdity of the scene when a
servant enters the room and later reports, “Sitting there clucking like
a ‘en ... and the little fellow lying dead upstairs” (154). The contemporary moment, the novel demonstrates, has nothing to offer in the
way of bereavement practices since tradition no longer makes sense
and modernity fails to provide positive replacements. With an irony
that exposes the failure of both characters to confront loss, the text
depicts a world utterly bereft of value, a world where private and public meaning has departed the national scene.
But this is surely not the last word on what the interwar period
signifies in Waugh’s novel. If it were, A Handful of Dust would constitute little more than a nihilistic message of utter futility; the novel
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would signify sheer meaninglessness insofar as the past is shown
to be irrecoverable and the present devoid of value. Contemporary
critics have read the novel largely in these terms, highlighting the
text’s pervasive irony, its apparent refusal to choose sides. George
McCartney, who seeks to recover Waugh’s work from reductive
readings of simple conservatism, acknowledges that while the novel
critiques the apparent superficiality of the culture of modernity, it
also represents the social developments of modern life to challenge
forms of nineteenth- century sentimentality.14 Michael Gorra, in
his account of the text’s critique of both past and present, argues
that the narrative “attempts to find the comforts of religion in secular form,” but fails in the effort. This failure culminates in the
novel’s expression of cultural meaninglessness and leads, in Gorra’s
estimation, to the overtly Catholic vision of Waugh’s later work.15
These critics have made us aware of the complex functioning of
the novel’s ironic structure, but what has not been appreciated is
the performance of mourning the novel manages to generate. In
chastising traditionalists who struggle to restore the architectural
achievements of history, as well as critiquing modernizers who
advocate a full-scale demolition of historical artifacts, A Handful
of Dust demonstrates how all characters refuse to recognize loss;
they view the past as either surviving in or as absolutely surpassed
by the present. By exposing this refusal, the novel’s ironic structure, I argue, seeks to establish a consciousness of loss, to imbue the
reader with a critical nostalgia for a centuries- old tradition depicted
in the process of disappearing. This nostalgia promises neither to
restore nor to ignore the past. What it does seek to establish is a
felt experience of bereavement that requires mourning. Indeed,
mourning for the loss of the country house tradition emerges by
the novel’s end as the only meaningful activity left to the English
subject. Waugh clearly values the country house tradition, a tradition, to repeat, where Englishness depends on a local system of
labor and global system of empire. It is a tradition, I have been
arguing, that Waugh’s narrative represents as irrecoverably diseased
and inevitably lost. The novel represents mourning not as thwarting the decline of tradition or ascendency of the modern but as
constituting the final chapter in a story of English identity. Waugh
represents Englishness, then, in what he imagines to be the only
way left: the act of mourning its passing.
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 105
Ian Baucom, in an important study, Out of Place, has argued that
literary writers from Ruskin to Conrad responded to the crisis that
imperialism posed to national identity by representing Englishness
as a community joined in grief.16 Colonial possessions abroad led to
confusion at home about what it meant to be English, a confusion
that prompted canonical writers to depict England as a nation in
the final throes of death. The frequency of this mournful imagination in the nation’s literature “suggests that in some strange way to
be English is, often, to be a member of a cult of the dead, or, at the
very least, a member of a cult of ruin” (175). Baucom concludes that
“England’s writers have insisted on this form of belonging, asserting
that if the nation is an imagined community, then the English nation
is a community in mourning” (176). Although Baucom makes no
mention of Waugh’s work, A Handful of Dust represents Englishness
in precisely these terms; the novel identifies one of the decisive factors involved in the demise of country house England as a crisis of
imperial authority. When Tony’s wife seeks a divorce settlement that
would require him to sell Hetton Abbey, Tony resolves to defend his
ownership of the estate and embarks on a trip to British Guinea and
the Brazilian jungle in search of a lost civilization, an ancient city
where a continuous tradition of spiritual and civic life is rumored to
have survived into the twentieth century. Colonial travel offers the
novel’s main character an imaginative means to renew his besieged
sense of English identity; however, Waugh’s handling of these scenes
exposes the futility, even the deadly consequences, of refusing to
acknowledge the inevitable passing of this national sense of belonging. In this context, the decaying estate at home and collapsing
imperial authority abroad both conspire in Waugh’s novel to tell the
same story: the death of English identity.
The identity of the English subject in the high imperial period
depended on a paradigm of Britain’s moral and intellectual superiority; it is a paradigm the novel shows to be utterly exhausted. Waugh
introduces this exhaustion early in the text when the Hetton vicar
delivers sermons he wrote years earlier in British India with imperialist references to life in the colonies. These references appear ridiculously out of context, though Tony and other parishioners express no
surprise when the vicar acknowledges “our Gracious Queen Empress,”
remembers “our dear ones far away” in England, and claims to be
“united with them across the dunes and mountains in our loyalty
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to the sovereign” (39). Waugh’s narrator lays heavy scorn on these
antiquated imperialist tracts to mark the end of this classic form of
the colonizing mission. The sections involving Mr. Messinger, Tony’s
guide in British Guinea and the Brazilian jungle, extend this account
of empire’s decline by showing how Western rationality can no longer
sustain the imperial adventure. To locate the ancient city, Messinger
attempts to persuade a group of Indians from the Macushi tribe to
lead the way through the unmapped jungle; he tries to convince
the leaders to postpone their sacred harvesting of the cassava crop
and traverse the terrain of the warring tribe, the Pie-wie. Messinger
reasons with the Macushi, offering them trade goods and appealing to what he regards as their own material interests. Perfume, jewelry, tools, and weapons are tantalizingly displayed to the Macushi.
When the goods fail to prompt the Macushi to guide the travelers,
Messinger offers what he believes they will find irresistible, windup tin mice. The Macushi, however, regard these self-propelled toys
as objects of mechanized horror. They flee the scene and abandon
the white men in the outback, indicating an unbridgeable gap that
separates their spiritual system from Western rationality. Waugh
emphasizes the exhaustion of the ideology of empire by showing
how Messinger dies as a consequence of his inability to exercise colonial mastery and how Tony finds himself gravely ill and alone in the
jungle with nothing to fall back on.
To suggest, as I have done, that the novel articulates the decline of
imperial authority is in no way to imply that the text constitutes a
repudiation of empire. Rather, Waugh’s aim is not to condemn the
history of British imperialism as much as depict this history as coming to an end.17 In representing this closure, the novel not only destabilizes certain imperialist assumptions but also reinscribes others.
This simultaneous dismantling and renewal of the colonialist mentality, according to Simon Gikandi, characterizes the work of British
modernist and late-modernist writers. Gikandi argues that writers
including Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene destabilize empire by
representing the colonial subject as “driven by a sense of decay and
decline,” while they also reinvigorate imperialist attitudes by depicting colonial space as “one of the few places in which this subject
can recode its world or even hallow a space in which it can contemplate itself.”18 Waugh’s novel engages this ambivalent logic. The
text deflates the triumphalism of the imperialist narrative, on the
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one hand, by defining the protagonist’s journey to South America as
motivated by an experience of domestic crisis; Tony embarks on the
trip “because the associations of Hetton were for the time poisoned
for him” (216–17). The novel also renews imperialist assumptions, on
the other hand, by representing a colonized and primitive place as a
reflecting surface for the protagonist to see himself and contemplate
his own crisis. Tony’s colonial adventure enables him to glean new
knowledge about himself, even if this knowledge forces him to confront the death of his English country house identity.
The narrative description of Tony’s motivations make it quite clear
that he journeys to South America in search of an image of what has
been threatened at home. He does not simply seek an alternative to
English country life that might be discovered in the encounter with
cultural difference. Rather, the protagonist attempts to recover in
a foreign territory the innocence he has lost at home. Before ever
stepping foot in British Guinea, Tony imagines the ancient city as a
reflection of his home; he fantasizes that the fabled city “was Gothic
in character, all vanes and pinnacles, gargoyles, battlements, groining and tracery, pavilions and terraces, a transformed Hetton” (222).
Now in the jungle with a dangerously high fever, Tony continues to
see his foreign surroundings as a mirror of country house England.
When Tony is rescued by Mr. Todd, a character of mixed descent
born to an Anglo-Barbadian father and a Pie-wie mother, the protagonist sees his wood-and-straw structure as a reflection of Hetton:
“Architecture harmonizing with local character ... indigenous material employed throughout. Don’t let Mrs. Beaver see it or she will
cover it with chromium plating” (286). The primitive location finally
brings Tony to an awareness about his home that he can no longer
defer. His delirious utterances express, in fact, a consciousness of the
loss of the country house tradition toward which the entire text has
been leading: “I will tell you what I learned in the forest, where time
is different. There is no City. Mrs. Beaver has covered it with chromium plating and converted it into flats” (288). Waugh’s protagonist
has finally come to understand that the ancient city, a place sheltered from the onslaught on modernity, does not exist; he is also
forced to realize the deadly consequences of having sustained for so
long the illusion of English country house identity.
The novel goes so far as to enact the protagonist’s symbolic death
when the illiterate Mr. Todd holds Tony prisoner, falsely informs a
108 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
search party he has died, and forces the protagonist to read and reread
aloud the complete works of Dickens. When faced with Mr. Todd’s
chillingly sentimental nostalgia for the forms of Victorian culture,
Tony is forced to acknowledge his own; his identity as an old-style
country house owner has amounted to little more than a nostalgic
clinging to outworn traditions. His South American journey teaches
Tony virtually nothing about colonized places or primitive cultures.
What the journey does teach him is that his sense of national belonging has been shattered; it teaches him that no amount of sentimental
nostalgia can bring back his English country life. Although Waugh’s
protagonist loses plenty in actuality, he does benefit, in an ironic
sense, through the contemplation of what he has lost. Traveling to
a colonized and primitive place, the colonial character encounters
himself, an encounter that renders him conscious of the decay, dissolution, and impending death of English identity.
Waugh’s text employs a circular logic in describing both civilized
England and the primitive jungle. The protagonist embarks on the
trip to South America because he regards primitive culture as an earlier version of country house England, a version prior to modernity’s
assault on rural life. Although Tony sets out to escape the truth about
his country existence, he finds himself confronted with the very
knowledge he sought to avoid, the knowledge of a national tradition of
domestic architecture and social life that has been lost. In this regard,
the circularity governing Waugh’s description of his protagonist’s
journey effaces the boundary separating the categories of the civilized
and primitive. Modernity in England now appears to be the same as
primitive culture; both are represented as barbaric. A Handful of Dust
clearly dismantles the idea of British imperial authority by destabilizing the binary between civilization and primitivism. However, the
novel, like Ninety-two Days, Waugh’s South American travel narrative
upon which the novel draws, also reinscribes at least one of the conventional ideologies of colonialism: primitive culture is valued only
for what it reveals about the English character.19 Even so, the circularity of Waugh’s irony adds yet another dimension of interpretative
significance. The ironic self-consciousness with which Waugh depicts
the protagonist’s failure to refind in a primitive location what he lost
at home invites us to read the novel as foregrounding and exposing,
rather than concealing and endorsing, the self-serving structure that
governs the colonial character’s encounter with difference.
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 109
The corrosive irony at work here produces the kind of textual ambiguity that has led many to regard A Handful of Dust as Waugh’s greatest novelistic achievement, an irony that has clearly stood up well
to the all- encompassing skepticisms of the twentieth century. If A
Handful of Dust ended here, with the protagonist’s symbolic burial in
the outback, we could indeed conclude that this satirical novel stages
and restages ambiguous conflicts between the civilized and primitive, conflicts where the social practices of civilization no longer
appear to be superior to those of primitive culture and where clinging to the English past is shown to be just as vacuous as subscribing
to the modernized present. However, the novel does not end here
and in its brief concluding section Waugh fashions a position that
is far from ambiguous. In the last chapter, “English Gothic—III,”
Waugh’s novel raises an image of decay that signifies a past more distant than the period of Gothic imitation that situates Tony and his
Victorian ancestors. The text gives expression, that is, to an authentically meaningful English past, a past that is never properly named
or explicitly defined but invoked in the manner of critical nostalgia:
as an already lost time that cannot return and from which the present slips evermore decisively away. The invocation of this lost past
takes a commemorative form; Waugh’s writing seeks to elicit respect
for this loss and compel the reader to mourn its passing. By narrating loss in these terms, A Handful of Dust represents mourning as
the final chapter in the illustrious story of a uniquely English way
of being in the world. The novel’s performance of mourning offers a
final means of displaying Englishness that is based, paradoxically, on
the bereaved knowledge of its loss.
“English Gothic—III,” the concluding chapter, begins with a satirical account of the mourning and memorialization of the protagonist, presumed by all to have died in the outback. The final chapter
returns to Hetton and offers a brief glimpse of a formerly impoverished branch of the Last family, which is headed by Tony’s brother
Richard, inheritor of the estate. The memorial service they organize
for Tony conveys their indifference toward the past; this indifference, I suggest, operates in complicity with what Waugh sees as the
failure of the twentieth century to generate meaningful forms of
social life, as well as meaningful relations to loss. The chapter articulates how the modern pursuit of personal pleasure and financial
profit has destroyed any space for mourning and remembrance. One
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of the Last daughters mistakenly refers to Tony’s memorial service as
a “Jamboree”; a son hopes it will be brief so he can return to work
(304, 305). In fact, all in the family are relieved to discover that the
service will be short since the vicar plans to forgo a sermon (305).
Most importantly, the memorial they erect for Tony is represented
as reflecting the ascendency of unbridled materialism that began
to make inroads at Hetton during Tony’s ownership of the house.
Richard unwittingly exposes the profit motive when he remarks that
the idea to dedicate a memorial to his brother came from Mrs. Beaver.
He ridiculously describes her as “one of Tony’s closest friends” and
she no doubt received a commission for overseeing the work of contractors, even if the family rejected her initial and more expensive
plan to redecorate the chapel as a chantry (307).
Waugh’s point in satirizing the family’s memorializing efforts is
to demonstrate that the country house has been fully transformed,
indeed essentially killed off, by the soulless materialism of the age.
The way the family commemorates their relative and his ownership
of the house has less to do with acknowledging the loss of the past
than with constructing a new future for the country house; Waugh
rejects this future on the basis that it follows the logic of a modern market economy. If the novel represents country house England
as lost, the new Lasts, like Tony before them, utterly fail to recognize this loss. They construct a recuperative version of the past, one
where tradition is thought to persist in the modern present. The
description of the actual memorial for Tony bears out this point:
“a plain monolith of local stone, inscribed: / ANTHONY LAST OF
HETTON / EXPLORER / Born at Hetton, 1902 / Died in Brazil, 1934”
(306). Richard comments on the local character of the memorial,
remarking that the stone “comes from one of our own quarries and
was cut by the estate workmen” (307). Over and against his contention that Tony would have preferred this indigenous memorial to
other options, the text demonstrates how the protagonist dies a symbolic death precisely because he has fetishized local life at Hetton.
Similarly, Tony’s explorations in South America have yielded nothing but a consciousness of dissolution and death, exposing the ridiculousness of the epitaph “Explorer.” The owners plan, as Richard’s
son puts it, “to restore Hetton to the glory that it had enjoyed in the
days of his Cousin Tony” (308), a plan they base on the profitability of a newly established fox farm. If the novel’s opening section
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 111
already represented the fox hunt in Tony’s day as an inane social
gathering responsible for the death of Hetton’s legitimate heir, the
closing chapter demonstrates how the new owners inhabit a house
wholly determined by the materialism of the age. Most of the ageold traditions Tony observed out of habit rather than conviction
have been abandoned; in raising foxes for the prospect of financial
gain, the new Lasts reveal that traditional customs are now sustained
only when they promise to yield a profit. Though the family plans
to restore Hetton to its past grandeur, Waugh represents the commercial reorganization of the rural estate as a modern- day Gothic horror
made possible by, yet even more terrifying than, his protagonist’s
sentimental nostalgia.
The unambiguous way to neutralize this horror, as “English
Gothic—III” conveys, is to acknowledge the loss of country house
England and mourn the passing of this tradition. Toward this end,
Waugh raises an image of decay that highlights loss and lays blame
for it on the dominant cultural currents of modernity. This image, as
pedestrian as it is fitting, is that of a broken clock on Hetton’s main
tower, a clock the new Lasts plan to repair when “the silver foxes
began to show a profit” (303), but that Waugh holds up as a sign
of the past’s terminus, its irrecoverable passing. The clock’s irregular chiming marks a time out of joint; Waugh’s aim, as I argued
throughout, in no way seeks to set it right. Rather, Hetton’s broken
clock sounds the death knell for a uniquely English tradition. In rallying the reader around the image of a broken clock, Waugh’s novel
mourns the passing of a way of life incurably diseased by empty
Victorian sentimentality and decisively buried by heartless modern
materialism. Insofar as this mourning conveys the meaningless of
the modern present, it represents English identity as a community
joined in grief, a community that still manages to display a national
form of belonging at the very moment this belonging is represented
as lost.
By showing us the Gothic horrors of the modern world, Waugh’s
novel fosters nostalgia for the past; by insisting that the past cannot
redeem the present, the text infuses a critical element into this nostalgia. If the lost country house tradition cannot be recovered, however, it can still be viewed as the conclusion of a heroic tradition of
Englishness, a conclusion about which Waugh sets himself the task
of writing. By developing an aesthetics of decay, Waugh promotes
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an identification with Englishness insofar as he writes an elegy to
its passing. This textual performance of mourning does give rise to
a critique of the ascendency of materialism and commercialization
especially important in the opening decades of the century, but it
also follows a more covert itinerary. Mourning in Waugh’s novel
offers an interpretation of the past prompted by disdain for the contemporaneous changing socio- economic landscape, one characterized by the discontents of women, demands of the working classes,
and growing unrest of the colonized. Insofar as Waugh’s lament
fosters an identification with a tradition of Englishness prior to the
rise of modernity, it yokes the work of mourning to the aristocratic
privilege and imperial dominance of the past. A Handful of Dust constructs social memory by asking us to remember a national way of
life prior to the commercialization of modern culture; the text also
constructs social memory by asking us to forget the local and global
economies of privilege that structured the country house from the
very beginning.
Consolation and heritage in Brideshead Revisited
If A Handful of Dust, as I have argued, represents mourning as a
response to the inevitable disappearance of English identity, as
a final means, that is, of displaying an ongoing identification
with a traditional form of Englishness, Brideshead Revisited, which
appeared a decade later, promotes a religious source of consolation
to bring this mourning to an end and represent a new vision for the
future. Charles Ryder, the novel’s first-person narrator, recounts his
life through the 1920s and 1930s retrospectively, telling the story of
his personal history from the bleak perspective of his military service in 1943. In situating the reader in wartime Britain, the novel’s
frame-tale depicts the widespread practice of requisitioning country houses by the British military.20 When Ryder finds himself stationed at Brideshead, an opulent stately home he visited during his
love affair with the owner’s son, Sebastian Flyte, then nearly came to
own through his later engagement to Sebastian’s sister, Julia, he sees
the destruction caused by the careless vandalism of military personnel as confirmation of the annihilation of the country house tradition. The house’s conversion to a military barracks and its advanced
state of architectural decay compel Ryder to raise a lament for the
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 113
desecration of the house and the disintegration of a way of life he
regards as the pinnacle of English cultural achievement.
At the same time that Ryder expresses nostalgia for the past, however, his recollections of the interwar period repeatedly characterize
his upper-middle- class family and aristocratic friends as suffering
from nearly pathological forms of grief. These myriad forms of melancholic despair contribute to what he sees as the feminization of
British culture, the weakening of its society.21 Ryder’s mother died
as a medical worker in the Great War and his father, who “has been
rather odd in the head ever since,” continues decades later to wear
the same style of suit “as though it were court mourning” (40, 69).
Similarly, Sebastian, Ryder’s lover from his Oxford years, writes letters on “heavy late-Victorian mourning paper,” a practice the narrator associates with Sebastian’s inability to countenance the loss of
youthful innocence and sees as leading to a life wrecked by alcoholism (72). Finally, Ryder recalls an early meeting of Julia Flyte and
remembers a debutante at her coming out party who sought “a man
a little subdued by earlier grief,” a man whose own experience of
loss promised to yield a less virile and more companionable husband
(182). From his vantage point in the 1940s, Ryder describes the melancholic dispositions of those around him as symptomatic of a more
general social disease, a widespread sense of bereavement on the cultural plane caused by the experience of two world wars, the decline
of the aristocracy, and the rise of the middle classes. He not only
attributes this melancholy to the disappearance of “the august, masculine spirit of a better age,” the disappearance of an English past
viewed as manly and powerful (138); Waugh’s narrator also responds
to this personal and collective experience of loss by advocating a
return to God; only the renewal of religious faith, as he concludes
by the novel’s end, furnishes both unassailable meaning and consolation in an otherwise meaningless modern world. Waugh’s novel,
as I discuss in what follows, describes the way in which the narrator
comes to accept God and end mourning; the text, moreover, constructs a narrative of the past that reflects a socially conservative
vision of the present, one that seeks, more specifically, to thwart “the
advance of Hooper,” Waugh’s derogatory phrase for the burgeoning
social clout of the middle classes.
The text raises God as a means of healing private and public
loss, but it also performs another kind of work as well; Brideshead
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Revisited raises an elegy for the country house that represents the
stately home as part of a cultural heritage, rather than a living tradition. Country house England was indeed laid low by World War
II, as was the aristocracy in the midst of wartime financial crisis,
but neither the country house nor the aristocracy vanished in the
years following the war. Waugh himself acknowledged how shortsighted the novel’s prediction of the destruction of the country
house and disappearance of aristocratic owners like the fictional
Lord Marchmain actually turned out to be. In the 1959 “Preface”
to the revised edition of Brideshead Revisited (1944), he raised the
often- cited description of his novel as a “panegyric preached over
an empty coffin”:
It was impossible to foresee, in the spring of 1944, the present
cult of the English country house. It seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were
doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century. So I piled it on rather, with passionate sincerity.
Brideshead today would be open to trippers, its treasures rearranged by expert hands and the fabric better maintained than it
was by Lord Marchmain. And the English aristocracy has maintained its identity to a degree that then seemed impossible. The
advance of Hooper has been held up at several points.22
The hindsight of nearly fifteen years allows Waugh to venture a critical assessment of his novel; the majority of country houses were
not, as his novel predicted, abandoned and leveled after the war.
What the conciliatory tone of Waugh’s “Preface” does not address,
however, is the extent to which the novel itself worked against
this leveling. Brideshead Revisited mourns the loss of country house
England by representing these grand structures as removed from
the rhythms of rural life and, to a certain extent, even from their
aristocratic owners; the novel represents the country house not as
the social category it was long taken to be but as an aesthetic category, as a work of art that merits attention as both England’s greatest
cultural achievement and the nation’s unique artistic contribution
to Western civilization. Even if these places were privately owned,
they increasingly came to be seen by the British public in the years
after 1944 in precisely the terms that Waugh’s novel lays out: as art
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 115
objects that reflect the height of English culture.23 The wartime
setting of Brideshead Revisited produces nostalgia for the loss of the
country house, as virtually every reader has recognized, but this is a
peculiar kind of nostalgia, I argue, since what Ryder recounts when
he describes Brideshead—since what Waugh’s novel represents in
depicting the loss of this living tradition, is a new and, indeed, fundamentally conservative idea of English heritage and the place of the
stately home in it.
Waugh’s novel describes the way the narrator comes to accept God
and resolve grief by critiquing the familiar logic of conventional
mourning: the logic of substitution. Like the work of Woolf and
Faulkner, in fact, Brideshead Revisited represents bereaved substitution
as a consolatory evasion of the event of loss. Ryder invests himself
in a series of love objects, each one of which functions as a replacement for the loss of a prior emotional investment. However, even as
Waugh’s text critiques this substitutive logic, it follows an itinerary
entirely different from the modernist narration of loss. His novel
demonstrates how Ryder’s substitute objects are themselves substitutes for God, inferior replacements for the perfection and meaning
that only divine love can offer. Ryder’s earliest recollections harken
back to his youthful Oxford days when he begins a love affair with
Sebastian, second son to Lord Marchmain; he regards this sexual
relation as fulfilling a holy mission. Given Waugh’s aim to define all
earthly forms as inadequate substitutes for God, it is not surprising
that when Ryder recalls his relationship to Sebastian, he repeatedly
appropriates religious language. “So through a world of piety I made
my way to Sebastian” (60), as Ryder remembers a Sunday morning
visit to his lover’s place. The intensity of this relationship is heightened for Ryder because Sebastian permits him access to Brideshead,
a country house the narrator greatly admires for the aesthetic value
of its architecture, art collections, and furnishings. From the very
start, Waugh’s novel conflates Ryder’s love for Sebastian and his love
for the country house: both are figured as a compensatory substitute
for God. Ryder recalls his first visit with Sebastian to Brideshead in
exactly this way:
Perhaps in the mansions of Limbo the heroes enjoy some such
compensation for their loss of the Beatific Vision; perhaps the
Beatific Vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly
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experience; I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead. (79)
Ryder represents his first love, and a socially illicit love at that, and
the “mansions of limbo” as a consoling substitute for religion.24 If
the hero no longer enjoys a relationship to God, at least he enjoys the
pleasures of sexual love and the stately house. But Ryder does not simply regard his relationship to Sebastian and Brideshead as an adequate
substitute for religion. He suggests, more significantly, that both bear
an enduring relationship to the “Beatific Vision.” Sebastian and his
family’s house begin to provide Ryder with what he sees as evidence
of God’s existence in the world, evidence that will prove increasingly
impossible for the narrator to ignore as he loses one after another of
his earthly love objects.
The novel’s critique of the logic of substitution is consistent throughout: Ryder accepts a replacement for a prior loss and this replacement
turns out to be a consoling substitute for God. Ryder loses Sebastian,
due to the aristocratic son’s rebellious rejection of his family and his
alcoholism. In response, the narrator comes to invest himself more
fully in his artistic mission; Ryder attributes his success as an architectural painter to a force emanating from an otherworldly realm.
This sense of divine inspiration becomes particularly pronounced
when Ryder, a mature painter in his mid-thirties, completes a series
of canvases for the Marchmains nearly a decade after his relationship
to Sebastian has ended. Responding to the extensive debt incurred
by the aristocracy during the financial crisis of the interwar years,
the family is forced to raise money by selling their London residence,
Marchmain House, and they commission four paintings before the
house is torn down and replaced by an apartment building. Ryder’s
art, like Waugh’s own, is made possible by modernity’s assault on the
houses of the aristocracy. When he recalls painting these canvases,
moreover, he defines himself as a conduit for a transcendent power:
I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had
my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of
the Renaissance that evening—of Browning’s Renaissance. I had
seen the stars through Galileo’s tub, spurned the friars with their
dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hairsplitting speech. (222)
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 117
Ryder sees his art as taking over the vacated space of the sacred. The
references to Browning and Galileo are telling in this regard; he identifies himself as a Renaissance artist without religion. Ryder repeats
the rejection of God in Browning’s poetry and Galileo’s astronomy,
both of which challenged Church teachings. In claiming superiority over the antiquated religiosity of the friars, the narrator appropriates the power traditionally ascribed to God for his own artistic
achievements. At the very moment Marchmain House faces destruction, Ryder’s painting assumes a religious function. His art consoles
for the loss of the house by granting the residence an immortality
achieved on his canvases.
Waugh’s narrative dismantles the logic of substitution to demonstrate how these substitutes fail to console for the disappearance of
what the novel defines as a genuine form of consolation, the “varied solace” that religion has to offer (85). It is in no way surprising, then, that Ryder soon enough regards his own artistic work as
a bleak presentiment of thwarted longing and lost possibilities. He
recalls that while popular audiences continued to value his architectural paintings, the critics began to express “an unmistakable note
of weariness” and one declared a particular canvas “facile” (268).
Ryder uses the criticism as an occasion to confess a nagging despair
about the absence of purposeful design: “But as the years passed I
began to mourn the loss of something I had known in the drawingroom of Marchmain House and once or twice since, the intensity
and singleness and the belief that it was not all done by hand—in a
word, the inspiration” (227). Waugh’s novel insists upon the failure
of finding religious meaning in the secular form of art; it goes so far
as to expose Ryder’s painting as a sentimental and nostalgic rendering of the vanishing architectural splendor of the aristocracy. Much
like the protagonist in A Handful of Dust, Ryder attempts to renew
his sense of artistic mission by traveling to Central America and
painting primitive ruins. But these paintings also constitute a failure, at least according to the character Anthony Blanche, who views
Ryder’s work from the viewpoint of a “nomad of no nationality,”
from a perspective, that is, removed from English upper- class social
conventions (46). Having assessed Ryder’s Marchmain paintings as
contaminated by “English snobbery” (271) and his village paintings
as “too English” (272), Blanche regards the primitive landscapes as a
repetition of the same: “It was charm again, my dear, simple, creamy
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English charm, playing tigers” (273). Ryder comes to realize he has
projected both a sentimental form of nostalgia for the past and his
own class aspirations onto his canvases. One step closer to accepting
what Waugh’s novel figures as the only real consolation, the consolation of religion, Ryder loses a sense of divine inspiration that he
believed informed his painting from the start.
Waugh’s dismantling of the logic of bereaved substitution takes its
most explicit form when Ryder installs Julia as a replacement for what
has been lost. It would be difficult to imagine a more perfect substitute
for Sebastian and for his painting; Julia both resembles her brother and
renews Ryder’s access to Brideshead. But she recognizes, significantly,
the role of substitute she plays in Ryder’s life. Julia expresses concern
that Ryder seems to have so completely “forgotten Sebastian” at the
point he takes up with her (302). In a statement that clarifies the extent
to which the substitutive logic of mourning serves to efface the actual
object of loss, Ryder claims of Sebastian, “it was Julia I had known
in him, in those distant, Arcadian days” (303). Julia not only realizes
Sebastian was “the forerunner” to her, but also ventures that she herself may be “only a forerunner, too” (303), a precursor to Ryder’s next
investment. The narrator, moreover, recalls his first sexual encounter
with Julia in terms that conflate his attachment to her and his attachment to Brideshead, a conflation that already existed with Sebastian
and is now made more intense when Julia’s dying father promised to
bequeath the house to her and Ryder. The narrator remembers taking
“formal possession of her as a lover” and claims that this “act of possession was a symbol, a rite of ancient origin and solemn meaning”
(216). Ryder’s linguistic choices in recalling sex with Julia reflect the
trafficking of women in a long patriarchal tradition. Marriage to Julia
offers Ryder an opportunity to surmount his upper-middle-class origins and secure a position in the aristocracy. However, more is at stake
than Ryder’s material aspirations. What the narrator hopes to possess
in marrying Julia, as already suggested in his description of their sexual union, is a sense of divine inspiration that he has to this point
repeatedly imagined but been unable to sustain.
In what should by now be his familiar rhetoric, the narrator
describes his attachment to Julia as partaking of the sacred.
Perhaps you and I are types [Ryder tells Julia] and this sadness
which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 119
in our search, each straining through and beyond the other,
snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the
corner always a pace or two ahead of us. (303)
Human love, Ryder contends, fails to guarantee permanent happiness; it registers an imperfection he experiences as the “sadness” that
intrudes in their relationship. However, love accomplishes something even more valuable; it offers a “glimpse” of the divine and
Ryder, who now must face the loss of Julia, is on the threshold of
embracing this vision. Waugh’s novel, it is interesting to note, represents human love in terms that Henry Staten has addressed as fundamental to Western idealism: as intimately related to, but ultimately
an inferior substitute for, divine love.25 As a divorced woman on the
verge of marrying a divorced man, Julia ends their engagement to
live a Catholic life. She chooses God over Ryder, as she tells the narrator: “You know I’m not one for a life of mourning” (340). Rather than
accept the loss of divine consolation in her life and perhaps enter
into the kind of endless substitutions for God that Ryder appears to
have done, Julia sets an example for the narrator when she chooses
divine love over mortal love.
Waugh’s narrator has lost Sebastian, his first marriage, a relationship to his children, and Julia. But the most devastating loss the protagonist suffers turns out to be that of Brideshead Castle. The novel,
in fact, represents the wartime destruction of country houses as a loss
that towers over all others. Brideshead, an eighteenth- century house
built in the classical style, emerges in the novel as a cultural achievement that comes closer than even human love or art to embodying
the spirit of the divine. Ryder insists on this sanctified appraisal when
he defines the large stately home, like English country houses more
generally, as “the highest achievement of man but one in which, at the
moment of consummation, things were most clearly taken out of his
hands and perfected, without his intention, by other means” (226).
In Ryder’s account, Brideshead derives from a transcendent source of
majestic vision. What inspires him most is the thought that generation after generation added to and enriched the place. By emphasizing the house’s development over the course of 150 years, which
he regards as a rich palimpsest of achievement that the productions
of modernity cannot begin to replicate, Ryder attributes Brideshead’s
perfection not to humans but to a spiritual conception of the passing
120 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
of time. This temporality, he claims, “curbed the artist’s pride and the
Philistine’s vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman” (226). Ryder views Brideshead as the material manifestation of
the divine, a view that figures the house as a shelter from the transience of twentieth- century social life.
If Brideshead embodies this transcendent perfection, it also stands
in Ryder’s account as a defense against the ascendency of a middleclass sensibility; however, he regards this defense as having collapsed
during the war years and views the middle- class platoon commander
Hooper as evidence of the decline of the aristocracy and the vulgarization of society by the middle classes. In an often- cited passage,
Ryder expresses outrage when observing that the aristocracy had
to “die to make a world for Hooper; they [the aristocrats] were the
aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot off at leisure so that
things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures” (139).
Ryder’s unrestrained loathing for the social emergence of the middle
classes obviously informs his exalted view of Brideshead. So intense
is his need to ward off the advance of Hooper and reassure himself of his own social refinement that Ryder places the house in a
position historically reserved for God. Consequently, when wartime
destruction to the house appears to have dealt the place a fatal blow
from which it cannot recover, when Ryder believes, in other words,
that the house has been decisively lost, he finally comes to accept
God and the religious consolation toward which the entire novel
has been leading. What Ryder discovers in the advanced state of the
house’s decay is “something quite remote from anything the builders
intended” (351). He discovers that the religious “flame burns again”
(351).26 Waugh’s novel concludes, then, by representing the transformation of social loss into spiritual gain, showing how the narrator
finds God in the decaying ruins of the country house and comes,
finally, to accept the consolation of religion once all his objects of
earthly love have been lost.
The acceptance of God that Waugh identifies as Ryder’s response
to loss and strives to make the reader’s is raised to generate a meaningful future for British society once the country house tradition has
been lost. The novel’s last sentence concludes with Ryder “looking
unusually cheerful today” because he has accepted religious consolation and finished his mourning for the loss of country house
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 121
England (351). In this light, the novel’s resolution of grief constitutes
an act of acceptance, an acceptance that the culture of modernity
has killed off the country house tradition and nothing can reanimate it. But if Brideshead Revisited constitutes a surrender to this loss,
this surrender is by no means unconditional. The novel responds
to the death of a living tradition by raising religion as the only
source of meaning able to withstand modern meaninglessness and
the increasing democratization of British culture. Waugh’s representation of religious renewal, it is important to understand, emerges
in relation to other available social options. In fact, English novelists responded to the cultural crisis of the 1930s and the 1940s—to
the lingering devastation wrought by the Great War, the economic
Slump, the twilight of empire, the rise of fascism, and the outbreak
of World War II—in a variety of ways. Some seized the moment to
advance the claims of the working classes, others engaged in diverse
projects of social emancipation, and still others fostered support for
the emerging independence movements of colonized nations.27 In
contrast, Brideshead Revisited concludes by raising religion as a system of meaning that consoles in the wake of the collapsing house
and emerging triumph of Hooper, a system of meaning based on an
identification with history’s old social privileges.
Waugh certainly overplayed his hand in the novel, as he acknowledged in his 1959 “Preface,” by projecting the postwar disappearance of the country house from the English landscape. Perhaps more
interesting from our vantage point today, however, is that the novel
represents Brideshead as the crowning achievement of a distinctly
English heritage. This view of the country house as an unparalleled
contribution to the nation’s historic identity, as well as to Western
civilization, proved to be crucial to the survival of the stately home
after 1944. The postwar history of how the country houses owned
by the nation’s aristocracy managed to surmount the public indifference to their future that persisted through the 1930s, as well as
survive the vastly changing socioeconomic realities that followed
the war, is a complex one, as told, perhaps best, in Peter Mandley’s
The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home.28 There is a one constant, however, that runs through this complexity. The key to garnering support for the country house—and allocating significant amounts of
public money for the preservation of these privately owned houses—
depended on a recognition of the nation’s stately homes less as the
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private residences of a privileged few and more as prized possessions
in a national heritage that benefitted all. It depended, more precisely,
on transforming the country house that was long understood as a
social category into an aesthetic one. The wartime setting of Waugh’s
novel produces nostalgia for the country house at the very moment
these places appeared to be destined for demolition, but this nostalgia does not entail a longing to return to the rural traditions of
England. Rather, the nostalgic vision of Waugh’s novel constitutes
a kind of proleptic nostalgia; his text represents these houses not
as part of a living tradition regulated by aristocratic culture but as
unique artistic treasures that came to emblematize a national heritage.29 By fostering a specifically aesthetic kind of appreciation for
the stately home, an appreciation for its architecture and fine art
collections, Brideshead Revisited participates in the establishment of
an emerging postwar narrative of English heritage and places the
country house at its center.
Public discussion of the fate of the country house had already
started in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the financial crisis of
the period prompted owners to sell off land and thus open the door
to urban development of rural England. Many Britons already recognized the need to protect the countryside from further incursion;
aristocratic and cultural enthusiasts of the country house sought to
extend this commitment to the rural landscape to encompass the
actual houses themselves. These enthusiasts also attempted to widen
the already existing interest in the preservation of Tudor manor
houses and cottages to the stately homes built in the classical style,
typically in the eighteenth century. The Tudor architecture of old
England, valued as a uniquely English vernacular style and related
in proximity to village life, was widely recognized as an indigenous
tradition worth preserving. However, the classical country house was
construed as foreign to the English tradition; it typically stood at
some distance from the village, drew on cosmopolitan influences,
and reflected a taste for the lavish and massive that appeared to many
as antithetical to the spirit of English restraint. Vita Sackville-West,
for one, attacked the classical country house as alien to the English
countryside when, in 1941, she claimed that such places stood as little more than objectionable displays of wealth that served to “gratify
the ostentation of some rich men.”30 Conversely, Brideshead Revisited
seeks to combat this lingering disdain by describing the country
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 123
house built in the classical tradition as a religiously inspired architecture. Waugh’s narrator begins by admitting that his architectural
“sentiments at heart were insular and medieval” (82); his admiration tended toward the nation’s earliest vernacular style. But Ryder
comes to abandon the national and side with the cosmopolitan style
when he claims of the classical house, “This was my conversion to
the baroque”:
Here under that high and insolent dome, under those tricky ceilings; here, as I passed through those arches and broken pediments
to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour by hour, before the
fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole
new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that
spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving
spring. (82)
Ryder pitches the cosmopolitanism of the classical house against the
nationalism of medieval architecture. Although there is nothing of
the homey cottage feel so beloved by many country house aficionados about the “high and insolent dome” or the “tricky ceilings,”
Ryder appeals to the reader to reassess the aloofness and enormity
of the classical interior. In combating the overpowering sense of the
excessiveness of the place, Waugh’s narrator claims the house, and
particularly the Italian fountain, brought to life a “new system of
nerves” that he equates with the rejuvenating properties and quasireligious symbolism of water. Ryder regards the classical style not as
an exception to but the crowning achievement of English domestic
architecture.
Waugh began to make this argument for the classical house years
earlier in “A Young Novelist’s Heaven,” a newspaper piece published
in 1930, the same year as his conversion to Catholicism. Waugh
engages his talent as a comic writer to state his preferences about
English domestic architecture. Informing these preferences, it seems
here as well, is a certain religious motivation. The article describes
the afterlife in an audaciously ludicrous manner: as a realm of timeless perfection where only worthy architectural styles are granted
immortality. In Waugh’s version of heaven, as he puts it, “There are
no Tudor mansions or cottages with half-timbered fronts, but there
124 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
are many examples of Italian seventeenth-century and English
eighteenth- century domestic architecture; there are some very comic
Gothic revival castles and a few genuine Gothic cathedrals.”31 Much
is condensed in this short passage about Waugh’s attitude toward
English architecture. Grand Tudor structures, as well as more humble
cottages, are barred altogether from heaven. The vernacular architecture of what has arguably been the most valued period of English
history reflects what Waugh saw as a loathsome national insularity; it
also recalls the Reformation and the end of Catholicism as England’s
national religion. When Waugh turns his attention to the Gothic, he
does not completely bar all examples, but permits some revival castles
and cathedrals. That he does so in the space of a single sentence calls
attention to the relation the former bears to the latter; the nineteenthcentury Gothic revival house was modeled on the medieval church.
However, by distinguishing the “comic” castle from the “genuine”
cathedral, Waugh suggests here, as he did in A Handful of Dust, that
the Victorian attempt to establish a spiritual style of national building must be understood as a failure. Because he values the spiritual
impulse behind it but condemns the final product, Waugh grants
Gothic Revivalism a measure of immortality so that this religious
impulse will not be forgotten. It is for the Italian seventeenth- and
English eighteenth- century stately home, however, that Waugh
reserves his highest admiration; he permits by far the most examples of the classical house in his version of an architectural heaven.
Waugh places supreme value on this cosmopolitan style, a style typified by the massive and opulent Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace.
It is a style that Waugh regards as combating English isolation from
continental ideas and, as we have seen in his depiction of Brideshead,
attributes to nothing less than divine inspiration.
Beyond making a special case for the classical stately home,
Waugh’s novel offers a defense of the country house that does not
depend, strictly speaking, on a defense of the landed elite. In this
regard, Brideshead Revisited might be read as an attempt to dissolve
popular apathy toward the fate of the country house by establishing a distance between these structures and their aristocratic owners, a strategy that proved to be crucial in fostering national support
for country house preservation in the postwar years. Even as Ryder
launches his diatribe against what he regards as the ascendent banalities of the middle classes responsible for killing off the aristocracy,
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 125
his own recollections of the Flytes and Marchmains repeatedly
expose the anachronistic status, as well as the eccentricities, of this
elite family. Ryder enters into intimate relations with the owners of
Brideshead, but he views the family with a certain degree of detachment; when their conduct does not elicit Ryder’s overtly critical
commentary, as it frequently does, their dealings with others and
the world typically appear to the narrator as evidence of their outmoded and self-undermining conduct. Ryder unequivocally blames
Sebastian’s life-threatening alcoholism on his mother’s handling of
her son’s drinking, her insistence on subjecting him to the surveillance of her appointed bodyguards. Moreover, although Waugh’s
narrator detests all talk of the realities of securing and maintaining
wealth, he is forced to consider the family’s inept management of
finances, their keeping up a lavish lifestyle replete with two houses
and an extensive service staff while being substantially in debt. The
marriages the Flyte children enter into, Julia’s to Rex Mottram, a
Canadian depicted as a crass materialist, and the eldest son Bridey’s
to the widow Beryl Muspratt, a money-seeking female whose age
probably prohibits her from producing an heir to the historic family, also appear to Ryder as destructive incursions on the aristocratic
family inflicted from within. Finally, when Lord Marchmain returns
from his Italian exile to die at Brideshead, he displays the idiosyncrasies of a very rich man; Ryder believes Marchmain “derive[s] comfort
from the consequences of his whim” when he demands his bedroom
be moved to a room described as an “uninhabitable museum” (316).
For all his identification with the owners of Brideshead, Ryder tells a
story of the family’s unhappiness and dissolution, often laying blame
on their own behavior for their social decline and perhaps exploiting
a certain Schadenfreude among readers in recalling the domestic tragedies of this segment of the English aristocracy.
If Waugh’s narrator manages to neutralize popular resentment
toward the landed elite by telling the tale of the family’s misfortune, he also pitches his authority to assess the value of the country
house over and against owners like Lord Marchmain and his family.
Studied in the art and architecture of Western culture, Ryder portrays himself as uniquely equipped to recognize the country house
as a national treasure that far exceeds the claims of private ownership. According to Mandler, aristocratic owners during the late 1930s
and early 1940s typically rejected any suggestion that their houses
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constituted a vital part of an English heritage; they saw themselves
as guardians for subsequent generations of their families and not the
nation, often opposing or at least resenting the requirement to open
their houses to the public in exchange for improvement grants or
tax relief.32 It is interesting in this light that Ryder repeatedly calls
attention to the fact that the family regards their town and country residences as their privately owned property rather than places
of national interest. Julia displays little regard for the public value
of her family’s London place, one of about six remaining historic
houses still standing in the city; she tells Ryder she would rather see
Marchmain House torn down and replaced by an apartment building than endure the thought of another family living there (219).
Similarly, Lord Marchmain views his ownership of Brideshead strictly
as a form of personal wealth to be passed down to his heirs. He claims
to “abominate the English countryside” and acknowledges his utter
disdain for the aristocratic culture of rural England: “I suppose it is
a disgraceful thing to inherit great responsibilities and to be entirely
indifferent to them” (99). His chief concern, he informs Ryder, is to
bequeath Brideshead to one of his children, even as he doubts that
there will be “anything to inherit” since stringent tax laws that made
country house ownership extremely difficult to maintain and pass
on in the interwar period (99).
Waugh’s novel redefines the relationship between the country
house and the aristocracy in prescient terms; it describes the link
between houses and owners in the idioms of cultural stewardship,
rather than private ownership. Ryder, in fact, describes Brideshead
in precisely these terms: “I regarded men,” he states, “as something
much less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the long, fruitful life of their homes” (226). Ryder elevates the house itself above
the family that has built and owns it. He defines the aristocracy as
temporary overseers of the houses they financed and developed over
time, as well as regarding these places as “the highest achievement
of man,” as cultural works of art whose importance exceeds their
status as private properties (226). While Waugh’s novel figures the
aristocracy less as owners than stewards of the country house, Ryder
defines himself as a knowledgeable connoisseur uniquely equipped
to appreciate the value of a stately home. Ryder makes a case for the
house itself as a work of art. On his very first visit to the place, in
Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 127
fact, the narrator claims it was “an aesthetic education to live within
those walls” and names the litany of styles of individual rooms along
with their furnishings and art collections—the Soanesque library,
Chinese drawing-room with Chippendale fret-work, and Pompeian
parlour (80). When he turns his attention to the different architectural styles of the house and asks Sebastian if the dome was designed
by Inigo Jones, the youngest son of the owner replies, “Oh, Charles,
don’t be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was built, if it’s
pretty?” (80). In the logic of Waugh’s novel, however, it is precisely
the kind of aesthetic appreciation displayed by the narrator, as well
as the role that country house tourism played in garnering recognition of the public stake in these places during the postwar years,
that would come to define the special value of the house as part of a
national heritage.33 Ryder’s appreciation of the house as an aesthetic
achievement establishes the terms with which places like Brideshead
would come to be construed from the late 1940s to early 1970s as
important works of art in a uniquely English heritage.
The concept of heritage in Britain is, of course, a contemporary
invention, less an inherited set of practices and traditions and more
a reinvention of the past by the present generation. In most contemporary accounts, English heritage, institutionalized in the 1980s
through the establishment of conservative organizations and economic legislation, entails what Peter Childs has described as “a profound nostalgia for a bygone imperial England.”34 Heritage, as critics
have argued, is a socially regressive and deeply nostalgic idea, an
investment of public monies and cultural capital in a concept of
English identity that is rooted in the aristocratic culture of the past.35
This backward-looking notion of national identity, it is crucial to recognize, emerges at the very moment when patterns of immigration
in the postimperial period and the democratization of British society along multicultural lines have already dismantled a traditional
notion of Englishness restricted to upper- class, white privilege.
While there is clearly a nostalgic animus that drives Waugh’s novel,
this nostalgia, as I have argued, does not seek to redeem the present
by returning to the living traditions of the past. Rather, Brideshead
Revisited represents the irrecoverable loss of country house England,
raises a lament for its passing, and rediscovers in religious faith a
source of meaning able to bring this mourning to an end. However,
even as the novel describes the tradition of the country house as lost,
128 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
it represents Brideshead in prescient terms: as an aesthetic achievement that would find a privileged place in a newly constructed and
socially conservative view of English heritage.
By the novel’s end when Ryder finds himself stationed at
Brideshead, he raises the question of the future of the country house.
This question centers on the appropriate use of the house. Faced with
the military requisitioning of Brideshead, Ryder acknowledges that
setting up the place as a barracks is not what the builders intended.
Waugh’s narrator blames the destruction of the country house on
“the age of Hooper” (351), but he also recognizes that modernity’s
assault on these places “is not the last word” about the fate of the
country house (351): “Perhaps that’s one of the pleasures of building,” Ryder claims, “like having a son, wondering how he’ll grow up”
(350). The English country house, as it has evolved in the decades
since the publication of Brideshead Revisited, constitutes a publically
supported yet privately owned heritage. These houses continued to
stand in the years after the war because they enjoyed the allocation of tax revenues, public monies that might have been spent on a
myriad of social projects in an increasingly multicultural landscape.
The novel, despite its proclamations about the disappearance of the
country house, constructs a narrative of the past where the massive
and most grand of the country houses of the nation come to signify
a shared sense of belonging and national pride. If the novel can be
said to mourn over an empty coffin, as Waugh put it, it also animates
a concept of heritage based on an ongoing identification with the
aristocracy and a retrospective notion of Englishness.
4
The Sexual Politics of Mourning
I couldn’t have it both ways, I supposed, couldn’t have my
closet and bitch about it.
(Emma Donoghue, Hood)
Just as the burns victim reaches a plateau of pain, so do
the emotionally wretched find grief is a high ground from
which they may survey themselves for a time.
(Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body)
I began Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism by challenging Lyotard’s
influential account of modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. For
Lyotard, as we have seen, a concept of finishable mourning drives
his analysis of both. The failure to mourn successfully the master
narratives of emancipation, he argues, renders literary modernism
a nostalgic discourse. The apparent consistency of modernist form,
in his view, offers a consoling substitute for the loss of truth, transcendence, and certainty in the culture of modernity; modernism
imposes a unified form on these ruptures, reflecting its inability to
abandon fully the epistemological foundations and transcendental
securities that it otherwise seeks to challenge. In contrast to modernism, postmodern texts succeed in severing all attachments to the
discourses of the past. Postmodernism, in Lyotard’s account, successfully mourns the loss of metanarrative by deflating the truth claims
of all discourse, including its own formal constructions. The completion of the work of mourning, he claims, not only enables the postmodern novel to dismantle the main premises of significant form;
129
130 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
this successful mourning also manages to reveal new but undefinable gaps in our understanding of the world. These gaps, Lyotard
concludes, liberate us from the restrictive conformities of consensus
and communal identifications, giving rise to what he sees as radically new social possibilities for the future.
I have suggested, however, that while the nostalgic clinging to lost
ideals characterizes Waugh’s late-modernist work, neither the modernist nor postmodernist novel can be fully assimilated to Lyotard’s
account of the aesthetic. Woolf and Faulkner, as I demonstrated, take
as an object of critical scrutiny their own aestheticizing impulses.
Both writers collapse the capacity of the aesthetic to obscure the event
of loss, showing how ongoing mourning yields alternative meanings
of the past and alternative identifications with the socially marginalized. Similarly, postmodernism cannot be reduced to either a purely
technical mastery of the contingency of meaning or a position beyond
mourning.1 A strain of postmodern fiction, as I now intend to show,
represents the ongoing mourning of loss to promote a definable social
agenda. This fiction not only counters the waning of affect, commercial impulses, and ahistoricism that describes postmodern culture; it
also places a quintessentially modernist focus on issues of loss, memory, and duration in the service of representing a new kind of sexual
politics. I oppose Lyotard’s account of successful mourning as constituting the postmodern break with modernism, then, to show how
postmodernism both rejects the social conservatism of late-modernist
mourning and reanimates the main strictures of the modernist narration of loss. This is not to suggest that postmodern fiction simply
repeats the achievements of modernism. Indeed, postmodern mourning novels, as I address below, blur the distinction between “high” and
“popular” culture; they rewrite the textual difficulty of modernist form
as an accessible literary mode made newly available to a wide range
of readers.2 The novels I discuss also shift away from the modernist
emphasis on interiority and the dynamics of bereaved consciousness
to address possibilities for intersubjective, public, and shared modes of
mourning. Nevertheless, as significant as these reformulations are, the
postmodern novel of loss, I argue, sustains the modernist rejection of
aesthetic consolation and the aim of closure to reinvigorate mourning
for a contemporary sexual politics.
Donoghue’s Hood and Winterson’s Written on the Body bring to
the representation of mourning a range of pressing social concerns
The Sexual Politics of Mourning
131
associated with lesbian subjectivity and sexual identity.3 Their
formulations of mourning inhere in the aesthetic structures of
their texts, but they also shift the practice of postmodern aesthetics from the purely auto-referential and toward the political. Hood
and Written on the Body share a similar thematic focus; both novels depict the painful process during which first-person narrators
confront love relationships brought to premature ends by accidental death and terminal illness. Donoghue defines the narrator as
a lesbian, negotiating between private and public dimensions of
grief, challenging essentialized forms of lesbian identity, and mobilizing sympathy among both gay and straight readers. Winterson,
a celebrated lesbian novelist, deliberately withholds the name and
gender of her narrator, compelling us to reexamine stereotypical
distinctions between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as
imagine a culture where such distinctions have become innocuous,
as significant as, say, hair or eye color. In contrast to the successful mourning of the political project of emancipation that Lyotard
holds up as a hallmark of postmodernism, these novels, I argue,
highlight their status as fictional inventions and frame the question
of loss to represent new social constellations for sexual subjects in
postmodern culture.
Grief, the closet, and Donoghue’s Hood
Writing in the early 1960s, social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer
was among the first to recognize that the disappearance of public
mourning rituals in the opening decades of the twentieth century
did more than simply rid bereavement of its prior Victorian excess.
The decline of nineteenth- century mourning practices, he argued,
gave rise to the “maladaptive and neurotic behavior” among those
who experienced a loss.4 Based on an ethnographic study of more
than 1,600 British men and women from all classes and geographical regions, Gorer’s work demonstrated that bereaved depression and
the mental maladjustments wrought by grief had become a Western
norm in the postwar period. If the erosion of Victorian mourning
customs had brought to an end the financial burden of the lavish
funeral, it also ushered in a modern suspicion toward any public
displays or shared customs of loss. No longer practiced was the kind
of social rituals that had regulated the ceremonial disposal of the
132 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
body, the gathering together of mourners, and the withdrawal from
and return to social life. Although public displays of loss continued
for social dignitaries including royalty and heads of state, they were
generally devalued in ordinary life, seen as little more than a practice
for the self-indulgent or a crutch for the emotionally weak. By midcentury, then, mourners experienced grief in insolation. The subjects in Gorer’s study thus epitomize a conception of mourning that
had become commonplace by the 1960s, a conception of mourning
as a solitary undertaking that occurs in the private domain of the
psyche.5 In contrast to this dominant privatization of grief, Gorer
found that a minority of mourners were able to display grief in public, ritualizing the loss through religious, social, or familial practices
and receiving sympathy from a community of friends and relatives.
Such mourners, he convincingly argued, “were well integrated and
happy in their communities and their work, and were mourning
deeply, but without either ostentation or embarrassment” (60). Gorer
concluded that “those who can accept sympathy in their grief are
better adjusted socially and psychologically than those who cannot”
(60). Mourners best positioned to resist the detrimental effects of
privatized grief were those who experienced a strong sense of communal belonging and displayed their loss in public.
Gorer’s assessment of shared rituals of grief continues to have relevance for postmodern culture; his work highlights the importance
of public displays and communal practices of mourning, as well as
suggests, conversely, the unique difficulties that loss poses to the
socially marginalized, to those who have been excluded from the
mainstream. For gay men and lesbians, in particular, mourning the
loss of partners, lovers, friends, and acquaintances has been a particularly fraught endeavor, sometimes hidden or complicated by the
closet and at other times devalued by a predominantly heterosexual
culture that fails to acknowledge or accord full importance to the
loss. Queer theorists and cultural critics have recently addressed how
heteronormative societies create obstacles to mourning same-sex
loss. The work of Judith Butler has been foundational in this regard,
particularly her analysis of “gay melancholia,” a form of bereaved
depression caused by the cultural silencing of gay male and lesbian
grief. Experiences of loss, Butler points out, characteristically produce emotions of anger and aggression. Mourners may feel this rage
for a variety of reasons, including ordinary feelings of abandonment,
The Sexual Politics of Mourning
133
actual complaints about the lost other, or grievances against the
social conditions that contributed to or even caused the loss. In the
absence of social rituals, physical spaces, and discursive practices for
grieving same-sex loss, mourners cannot direct this hostility outward; they are compelled to sequester bereaved anger in the psyche
and unleash hostility within the self. As Butler puts it, “Insofar as the
grief remains unspeakable, the rage over the loss can redouble by virtue of remaining unavowed. And if that rage is publically proscribed,
the melancholic effects of such a proscription can achieve suicidal
proportions.”6 To combat gay melancholia, Butler advocates the creation of collective institutions for grieving, social sites of mourning and memory like the AIDS Names Project Quilt that publicize
and politicize loss, foster the formation of alternative communities
and kinship groups, and contest the erasure of same-sex attachments
from the cultural landscape.
The work of Gorer and Butler has made us aware of the importance of communal mourning practices, especially for those who
have been denied full access to representation, history, and culture.
However, the shift away from the individual and psychic aspects of
grieving, which, as we have seen, characterize modernist mourning,
and toward an emphasis on the communal and public dimensions
of mourning in the contemporary period has given rise to a new
set of questions, one that has not as yet been adequately addressed.
How do social displays of loss and shared mourning rituals, even
those practices fashioned from positions of cultural exclusion, replicate heterosexual society’s harmful interpellations of homosexuality? If alternative public mourning practices have succeeded in
constructing communities crucial to the social survival of gay men
and lesbians, how have these same practices articulated homogenous
identity positions that exclude some of the very subjects they mean
to represent? How, finally, might we conceive of collective grief practices without succumbing to the essentialization of lesbian identity
and denial of individual difference? These are some of the most
compelling questions raised in Donoghue’s Hood, a novel of lesbian
mourning in which the question of loss is raised within the context of an ever- expanding consumerist society, a society, as Robyn
Weigman has addressed, that advances the cultural visibility of lesbians through marketing strategies, while at the same time reducing
this visibility to the homogenizing logic of a commodity aesthetic.7
134 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
Passions between Women, Donoghue’s study of lesbian culture
from the Restoration to the beginning of the nineteenth century,
reflects her commitment to a discourse of lesbian identity as distinct from other forms of sexuality. Donoghue makes the historical
silence about lesbians speak in a clear and discernable language; her
study demonstrates how the silencing of lesbianism perpetuated in
contemporary scholarship needs to be understood as a willful dismissal of sexual and nonsexual passions between women. In making
this argument, she confronts a pervasive issue in the early history
of female same-sex relations: the problem of anachronism. Because
the word “lesbianism” did not enter the English language until 1870,
Donoghue points out that many historians and critics have argued
that to address women as lesbians before the late-Victorian era constitutes an anachronistic discourse. According to this argument,
women who experienced erotic attachments to other women prior
to the invention of a language for female homosexuality did not
understand themselves as a distinct sexual or social group, and were
not understood in this way by others. For Donoghue, such claims
of anachronism render the historical existence of women’s relationships to women invisible and inaudible. While acknowledging the
socio-linguistic difficulty of discussing female same-sex relations in
terms of lesbianism, she defines the aim of her book as contributing
to just such a discussion: “Silences can be interesting and significant,
but this book is not about silence.”8 Consequently, her study of medical, religious, journalistic, and literary texts not only isolates a language of same-sex love centered around words including “sapphic,”
“tribade,” and “tom,” as well as phrases such as “lovers of their own
sex” and “feminine congression”; her book also argues that a distinct language for lesbian relations existed in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, evidencing that some women who experienced
sexual attachments to other women understood themselves in terms
of what today we call lesbianism—that is, as engaged in a type of
erotic love clearly distinguished from other types.
While Donoghue’s historical study of “the long eighteenth century” discerns an early language in which lesbianism spoke, her novel
Hood turns to the “interesting” and “significant” aspects of silence
in the context of contemporary Irish society. Hood, in fact, offers a
subtle evaluation of the social silencing of lesbian grief, depicting
the experience of a first-person narrator, Penelope O’Grady, over the
The Sexual Politics of Mourning
135
course of the first seven days that follows the death of her long-term
partner, Cara Walls. Set in Dublin in 1992, the text intersperses
this sequential account of the everyday events of Pen’s first week
of bereavement—a week that includes learning of the fatal car accident, arranging and attending the funeral, and returning to work
and social life—with both a series of bereaved remembrances that
span the 13-year relationship and numerous portrayals of the internal workings of her grief. As a lesbian who has not come out to her
family or co-workers, Pen realizes the extent to which the closet
renders her grief invisible to others. The narrator sees herself as a
“grieving widow,” but she cannot publically display bereavement
or receive the sympathy typically accorded to heterosexuals who
have lost a spouse. Because Pen’s grief is publicly silenced, it has
the potential to unleash the kind of emotionally devastating consequences addressed by Butler. However, while Donoghue’s novel
clearly endorses the social expression of lesbian grief, it does not
simply accept the therapeutic function of collective institutions for
grieving, even those countercultural institutions established by lesbian communities. Rather, Donoghue’s narrator revisits the question of the closet and offers a provocative evaluation of the cultural
possibilities for living and grieving as a lesbian that emerge from a
socially policed silence.
Pen clearly rails against the closet and the presumption of heterosexuality in her society for producing a situation where her grief cannot be socially recognized; however, she also values the privacy of
her mourning, a privacy the silence about her sexuality affords. Pen’s
disdain for bereavement conventions, for rituals and languages that
seek to impose normative standards on mourning, extends beyond
religious customs. Her rejection of accepted social protocols includes
countercultural grief practices, as when she responds to a popular
bereavement book aimed at lesbians and gay men given to her by
Robbie, a married male and the only co-worker to whom she has
come out. In a passage from which my first epigraph is drawn, Pen
states:
Oh look, there was the section Robbie had promised me: “Homosexuals mourning their partners often carry a burden exacerbated
by invisibility and prejudice,” and several other sensible statements I didn’t need to read. Somehow, what galled me most was
136 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
that if it had been a husband, Sister Dominic [Pen’s boss] would
have given me two weeks off. On the other hand, it occurred to
me now, watching the widow-type opposite ... losing a husband
would have been horribly public. I couldn’t have it both ways, I
supposed, couldn’t have my closet and bitch about it. (248)
Pen’s bereavement raises a contradiction: lesbian cultural visibility
and its potential for promoting social equality entails the publicizing
of a bereavement she regards as wholly private, while the closet and
its perpetuation of inequality offers her a private space where she
can mourn in unique ways. Donoghue pursues this contradiction
throughout the novel, raising the question of how the silent workings
of her narrator’s bereavement might be brought into collective institutions and social discourses without creating a new set of restrictive
conventions for lesbian identity, conventions that threaten to impose
ordering systems that silence and exclude those whose experiences
of same-sex love do not conform to these conventions.
Wendy Brown’s critique of the assumption that breaking a socially
enforced silence necessarily constitutes an act of emancipation offers
an interpretative approach to Donoghue’s ambivalent representation
of the closet. Brown addresses a prevalent discursive mode of confession and testimonial through which Holocaust survivors, immigrants, women, people of color, homosexuals, and the unpropertied
have made public their hidden suffering. On the one hand, this discourse succeeds in laying claim to the status of “liberal personhood”
for those historically excluded from speech and civic life. On the
other, this social discourse, in Brown’s words, “converges with unemancipatory tendencies in contemporary culture, establishes regulatory norms, coincides with the disciplinary power of ubiquitous
confessional practices; in short, feeds the powers it meant to starve.”9
Brown takes care not to valorize silence; she defines it as a “strategy
for negotiating domination” (324). At the same time, however, she
demonstrates how the silences fabricated and structured by social
discourse contain possibilities for privacy, autonomy, and a space for
individual creativity free from the policing effects of the public eye.
Brown makes the salient point that “compulsory discursivity” puts
the pain of trauma or loss into language by establishing a social identification between the sufferer and suffering, an identification that
condemns those who have experienced persecution, violence, or
The Sexual Politics of Mourning
137
exclusion to an identity that has been determined by past injustice.
Insofar as one emerges in socio-linguistic life as a subject of historical victimization, as Brown points out, the “possibilities of overcoming it, of living beyond it, of identifying as something other than it”
are extremely difficult to imagine and realize (321).
Donoghue’s novel offers a response to the paradox of silence; Hood
distinguishes between the private and public life of its protagonist,
while seeking a new way of relating the two. By narrating the internal and private aspects of the narrator’s mourning, the novel depicts
a work of grieving liberated from both mainstream and counterculture conventions, a work that enables Pen to engage what the novel
represents as the heightened eroticism and anger of her bereavement. Admittedly, Donoghue seems to undercut this liberatory gesture by bringing Pen’s private mourning into the social discourse of
the novel, a move that threatens to establish Hood itself as creating
new norms for lesbian identity and mourning. However, Donoghue’s
text seeks to mitigate this problem. The novel attempts to thwart any
conventionalizing interpretation of lesbian love and loss by representing the narrator’s mourning as radically individual and unmistakably personal. While depicting a zone of privacy for the narrator’s
mourning, the novel represents the content of Pen’s bereaved consciousness to initiate the possibility for thinking differently about
the communally shared activity of mourning.
Donoghue’s characterization of her narrator plays on the contradictions of the closet, showing how a culturally dictated silence manages to exempt Pen from social regulation. “Nowadays,” Pen remarks,
“ ‘invisibility’ was supposed to be the big problem, but the way I saw it
was, all that mattered was to be visible to yourself” (60). Clearly, Pen’s
refusal to publicly disclose her sexuality emerges in response to heterosexism and homophobia. And yet, one character describes her as
a “cradle dyke,” a lesbian who began acting on her attraction to other
females at a young age and who never experienced guilt or self- doubt
in the process. Pen’s invisibility grants her a power to inhabit social
institutions without succumbing to harmful interpellations. She has
long since come to regard the Catholic Church, with its equating of
homosexuality and sin, as a set of beliefs and values irrelevant to her
life. She recalls taking confession as a girl attracted to other girls.
When a priest sets the terms for the confessional exchange by asking
her questions about cigarettes, alcohol, and boys, Pen realizes that
138 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
her “story just didn’t show up in their terms” (189). Donoghue’s narrator continues to participate in the religious institutions of her culture; she attends mass throughout her life, works as a teacher at an
all-girls convent school, and organizes Cara’s memorial service in the
church. But Pen’s irreverent and irreligious attitude places her as an
outsider within these religious institutions, an outsider on the inside
who does not allow the values of Christian spirituality to injure her
self-perception as a lesbian. Even Pen’s domestic life partakes of the
closet; she and Cara have lived together for the past five years with
Cara’s father, obscuring their love under the banner of friendship.
Pen has developed what she calls “a taste for discretion,” a “concept”
she regards as “outmoded,” but that nonetheless grants her more of
“a sense of privacy and control than some blaringly ‘open’ relationship would have” (216). In Donoghue’s characterization, Pen’s reluctance to speak and aversion to visibility cannot be simply diagnosed
as a repressive symptom of external regulation. Indeed, the narrator
activates silence and exploits invisibility as a strategy to pursue her
experience of lesbian identity and love.
To claim that Hood gestures toward the creative and productive
potential of social invisibility does not mean that Donoghue’s text
fails to assess the myriad ways in which a predominantly heterosexual society consigns her narrator to the status of apparitional mourner.10 The novel, in fact, critiques the social repression of lesbian
grief. Returning to the issue of bereavement leave, Pen informs the
headmistress at school that her “housemate” has died and receives
three days off, knowing full well that heterosexual spouses would
be granted two-week leaves. The narrator suffers a social injury
as a consequence of a mandated silence, but an injury, it is worth
noting, that she regards as mild when compared to coming out at
work, losing her job as a result, and forfeiting the potentially positive
influence she may have on her students. Donoghue’s assessment of
the cultural ghosting of the lesbian continues when Pen arranges
an obituary in the local newspaper and has to settle for the nondescript phrase of “family circle” when including herself among the
bereaved. Similarly, Pen notices the memorial plaques that adorn the
church pews, plaques that acknowledge the kinship of parents and
relatives, while understanding her own memorialization would take
the misleading form of “beloved housemate, friends, schoolmate,
pal” (134). Dressing for Cara’s funeral also takes on added anxiety
The Sexual Politics of Mourning
139
for a closeted lesbian. Pen opts against donning the sartorial codes of
mourning because such a public display would result in “outing Cara
posthumously to her entire clan” (130). The church’s exclusion of
lesbianism becomes especially loathsome during Cara’s funeral service. Because the 29-year- old Cara died as an unmarried woman, the
church presumes her virginity; the white flowers surrounding her
coffin symbolize sexual innocence, a symbol particularly insulting
to a lesbian partner who knew about Cara “the important fact of her
being what in lighter moments she called a pussyeater” (135). The
silencing of the narrator’s grief clearly follows from constraining heterosexual norms, from socio-linguistic forms of power that marshal
her bereavement inward and closet her mourning within the hidden
domain of the psyche.
Pen responds to being silenced, however, not by pressing her claim
to speech but by exploiting the ambivalent freedom of her invisibility in order to give self- expression to the erotic dimensions of her
bereavement. Echoing the eroticization of homosexual grief addressed
by Michael Moon,11 Pen engages an intensely sexualized form of
mourning that enables her to sustain same-sex eroticism even when
the aim of her erotic attachment has been lost. She remembers religious instruction when Cara asked her whether they will “be allowed
to have sex in heaven,” a question that casts the irreverent demand
of a lesbian libido against sacred notions of the afterlife and immortality (188). Similarly, in attending Cara’s funeral, Pen participates in
a congregational reading of “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” by substituting
“Cara” for “Christ,” a substitution she regards as accurate, not blasphemous: “Cara within me / Cara behind me / ... / Cara beneath me
/ ... / Cara above me” (140). In addition to raising a number of highly
erotic reminiscences of her partner, mournful remembrances that
depict lesbian sex in explicit terms, Pen experiences bereaved arousal
in response to other women she sees in passing. The narrator, who
has lived monogamously and had no sexual partner prior to Cara,
sometimes scolds herself for these flights of sexual imagination:
“Would you just look at me: my lover one day in the grave and I was
fancying others already” (191). And yet, she understands the erotics
of her grief as a mode of self-preservation and a way of imagining
the possibility of a sexual life after Cara. “I am only thirty. I will not
spend the rest of my life mourning you,” Pen desperately declares in
an attempt to make room for the idea of future relationships within
140
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
a bereaved consciousness dominated by the absent other (302). In
one of the most emotionally wrenching scenes of her private mourning, Pen struggles to find a reprieve from grief through masturbatory
pleasure. After several failed attempts to reach a “blessed lull,” Pen
finally achieves orgasm by remembering a particular experience of
clitoral sex with Cara. She describes a sexual climax prompted by
recalling her menstruating lover having once marked the bereaved
narrator as her own: “Keeping time with my own memory, I came
to meet myself” (259). Through these sexualized acts of mourning,
acts she privately regards as “only natural, mother earth’s rhythms”
(192), Donoghue’s narrator finds in silence a pleasurable exemption
from social legislation and regulatory norms, from cultural conventions that threaten to stigmatize her bereavement as a form of guilty
pleasure.
In one of the most interesting aspects of the novel, Donoghue represents Pen’s grief as a challenge to the single most widely circulated
conception of mourning within consumerist pop culture: the theory
of the stages of grief. In fact, no other understanding of the grieving
process has been as insidiously enshrined in the popular imagination as the “Five Stages of Grief.” The theory, adapted from Elisabeth
Kübler-Ross’s 1969 study of patients who discover they are terminally
ill, defines five stages of the grieving process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.12 Donoghue’s novel parodies the
stage theory, suggesting the painful anguish of loss should not be
construed as a neatly codifiable or mechanical process.13 When Pen
discovers that her car will not start, she responds by engaging the
stages of mourning. She initially denies that a problem exists, repeatedly turning the ignition until she floods the engine. “Damn you
anyway, rotten little banger,” Pen scolds in anger (172). She then
enters into the bargaining stage, wanting to kick the wheel, but
resisting and continuing to hope she will arrive at work on time.
Depression sets in, as “mechanics” make her “feel so powerless” (172).
Finally, Pen accepts her situation, “giving up” on the car and calling
a taxi. The five stages of grief may well illuminate Pen’s response to
an unfortunate circumstance; what they in no way clarify, however,
are the dynamics of her bereavement.
Donoghue’s narrator explicitly rejects the stage approach to mourning, even one geared toward and marketed to gay men and lesbians,
casting aspersions on the notion that grieving can be organized or
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legislated in these terms. Pen reads a chapter on mourning stages
in her progressive bereavement book, asking herself whether she
has been “a good girl” as far as “bereaved people went” (223). In
assessing her emotions, she credits feeling numb and considers her
inability to cry over the loss as a form of denial; Pen guesses that
she has applied some “bandage,” as she calls it, “to slow the bleeding” (224). She also acknowledges anger, the rage she feels toward the
presumably drunk driver of the taxi in which Cara died, as well as
hostility toward her lover’s “rackety lifestyle” and infidelities. “But
then again,” she remarks, “I was often angry with her when she was
alive, so that couldn’t be a symptom of mourning” (224). The lessons of the self-help bereavement manual suggest to Pen that she
“was getting the stages all wrong,” engaging them simultaneously,
confusing the emotions of absence and presence, and introducing
additional feelings including “terror” into the mix (224). And yet,
she refuses to evaluate her performance of mourning in relation to
conventional models; she refuses to be socially defined as a failed
mourner. By reflecting on the complexity and uniqueness of her
own grief, Pen is able to reject “the experts and their stages and their
emotional clocks” for attempting to “impose order” on the “mess” of
her bereavement (224). In its rejection of the popular wisdom about
grief, the novel figures mourning as an open- ended labor, a response
to loss whose dimensions assume highly personal forms and cannot
be predicted in advance.
In the interstices of official discourses and public practices, Pen
creates a private space to engage not only the erotic aspects of grief
but also her anger and hostility; she criticizes the lost partner who
committed to a long-term relationship but unapologetically refused
monogamy and subscribed to countercultural practices that idealize
lesbian identity. Pen and Cara became “sort of girlfriends” in their
late teens while at the convent school where Pen now teaches; Pen
fell for her in the context of Cara’s infatuation for a female teacher,
establishing a pattern to their relationship where Pen’s nurturing and
fidelity emerged in opposition to Cara’s capriciousness and openness to other sexual encounters. The freedom to pursue recreational
sex and casual affairs that Cara insisted on as part of the terms of
their commitment contributes to the difficulty of Pen’s mourning.
But the bereaved dialogue with herself enables Pen to express anger,
as well as refuse self-blame for a relationship her partner sometimes
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experienced as stifling and claustrophobic. “Monogamy’s not natural” (121), Pen recalls her partner having pronounced, a partner who
saw herself as a “serious feminist” committed to fighting the “topos
of phallogocentrism” (207). In contrast, Pen, the stay-at-home individualist, does not see monogamy as a patriarchal myth deployed to
dominate women but a commitment difficult to sustain given desire
and its temptations. Pen never recants her criticism of her dead partner or forgives Cara her sexual escapades, though she does come to
value the role her lover’s affairs played in keeping their own sex life
active and satisfying. Cara’s other relationships motivated the couple to avoid routinized complacency in the bedroom. In an idiom
of grief formulated in private, Pen accommodates “the occasional
bloodletting of Cara’s infidelities” as a force “that has kept us pulling
each other’s clothes off, on and off, for thirteen years, when according to so many of her books, lesbians are meant to hit bed death
after two” (274). Pen does not allow her ideas about monogamy to be
legislated by either dominant or countercultural values. Instead, she
discovers in the privacy of her mourning the possibility to engage
conflicting emotions, raising a secret language of loss that resists any
unified discourse or singular truth about her love and grief.
The insistence on personal difference that informs Pen’s resistance
to mainstream mourning conventions also influences her attitude
toward other lesbians; in the wake of Cara’s death, she refuses to
identify with lesbians or form communal bonds. Donoghue’s novel
offers a sympathetic portrayal of this refusal by addressing the
way countercultural practices emerge in consumerist pop culture
through a process that idealizes and unifies lesbian identity, a process by which alternative discourse, in turn, becomes part of a newly
expanded though still restrictive form of social governance.14 Pen
recalls the popular lesbian fiction Cara bought in Britain and the
United States as an example of an oppositional discourse that circumscribes the possibilities for lesbian self-realization. Cara’s books
often told stories of “urban dykes in trench- coats solving capitalist
mysteries, or rural bare-breasted ones tending wounded deer” (60).
What these narratives market is an idealized identity of the lesbian
at war with a world that has injured her, a war waged either by living
a cosmopolitan life and curing socioeconomic ills or residing in the
country and reclaiming the devalued terms of an altruistic and caregiving female nature. Pen’s rejection of this idealization derives from
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143
her own experience, for most of the lesbians she knew were “quietly
rebellious products of the suburbs” (60). Pen also criticizes Cara’s collection of political T-shirts as a commercialized fashion that casts lesbian identity as a homogenous group of leftists, just as she ridicules
Cara’s ever- changing activist causes as a replacement for the religion
she had long since renounced. From Pen’s point of view, these countercultural values establish a link between lesbian sexuality and injurious history, a link she sees as producing triumphal narratives that
fetishize the terms of social injury.
This critique of countercultural practices extends to a grief ritual
organized by Cara’s friends, a group of lesbians who share a house
called The Attic and urge the narrator to attend. The novel shows
how this lesbian community, to repeat Brown’s formulation, unwittingly feeds the very powers it means to starve. Because dominant
social practices exclude lesbians, the women invent an alternative ritual where they lavish unadulterated praise on their departed friend;
they offer a host of mournful testimonials that represent Cara as
an accomplished cook, tireless advocate for the oppressed, emotionally sensitive woman, and complex materialist. This ritual emerges
in opposition to heterosexism and homophobia; the women give
voice to the untainted value they place on one of their own. And yet,
Donoghue demonstrates how the attic women engage an alternative grief ritual that silences the very figure they intend to engage in
speech. Pen says next to nothing during the ceremony. She regards
these bereaved speech acts as overly idealized and downright false
renderings of her partner. In Donoghue’s description of the scene,
Pen wages a silent dissent to what she perceives as a countercultural
norm for the expression of grief, a norm that can brook no difference
of opinion or conflicting forms in the memorialization of a lost one.
In pitching the narrator’s silence against a countercultural practice
too strongly formulated in opposition to the mainstream, Donoghue
invites her readers to consider how a community comes to exclude
one who might identify as an insider but whose private experience of
grief keeps her out.
If Donoghue creates sympathy for Pen’s reluctance to identify
with other lesbians, she does so not to reject the importance of collectivities but to initiate new ways of thinking about both lesbian
identities and communal formations.15 This thinking, Donoghue’s
novel suggests, involves exploiting the resources of silence, the
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silence that may be socially mandated by the closet but that still has
the potential to inform models for coming together in ways that recognize commonalities without denying differences, without imposing normative restrictions. The novel’s meditation on the word
“hood” teases out the productive potential of silence by relating the
narrator’s private mourning to the possibility of a lesbian community founded less in reaction to a world that continues to unleash
homophobic inequities and violence and more on affirmative experiences of same-sex love. “Funny word, that; why did ‘hood’ added
to nouns make them into states of being?” (113). Prompted by her
own experience of widowhood, Pen runs through a litany of such
states: sisterhood, maidenhood, spinsterhood, wifehood, motherhood. When Pen remembers the “bad girls” at the convent school,
the girls who removed the button- on hoods from their overcoats
to attract boys, she comes to an important realization. Pen realizes
that all socially constructed identities are “detachable”; she comes
to recognize human identity as a culturally defined construct that
can be removed, or at least revised, through private resistance and
public redefinition.
Hood employs a model of postmodernist self-reflexivity that begins
with the assumption of the subject’s radical embeddedness in society
and history, even as the text promotes new cultural spaces where lesbian identity and mourning may be figured differently. Donoghue’s
narrator, aptly called Pen, suggests a narrating presence who has
been written by her culture, but who, in turn, is shown to be capable
of rewriting it. Pen does not simply lament the fact that no social
discourse has as yet attached the word “hood” to “lesbian,” using
instead the “ism” that sounds “like a digestive disease” (114); she goes
further, creating a textual web of interconnections that sexualizes
the word “hood” and promotes a novel discourse on lesbianhood, an
identity that is embodied privately, shared communally, and recognized publically. Pen raises an image of the folds covering the clitoris,
“not a hood to take off, but to push back” (257); the image echoes the
Olga Broumas poem that serves as the novel’s epigraph by conveying
the special significance of social invisibility and silence for lesbians.
From its opening page, Hood foregrounds how silence and invisibility might be placed in the service of imagining an open future for
a lesbian narrator in the wake of loss, as well as establishing lesbian
communities that do not replicate the exclusionary practices of heterosexist society.
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If the focus on mourning in Donoghue’s text makes a strong case
for the merits of private grieving, it also demonstrates that the social
forces of marginalization and hostility directed at lesbians are still
very much in circulation. It is for this reason, in fact, that the novel
draws to a close by describing how the closet might liberate but it
also constrains the narrator’s mourning. Silence threatens to isolate
Pen in her bereavement, intensifying the conflicted emotions of
grief and rendering her visible to herself only as a bereaved subject of
loss. Pen has not cried since Cara’s death because, in her words, “[i]f I
broke down there would be no one to look after me” (116). What this
suppression of bereaved tears suggests is the importance of establishing communal bonds and collective institutions for the expression
of same-sex loss. In the narrator’s budding friendship with a lesbian
from The Attic, Hood suggests that the private workings of lesbian grief
might inform the creation of new kinship groups and collectivities
in which loss can be externalized and shared, made public without
the imposition of restrictive moralizing standards. The novel’s structure, moreover, its focus on the first seven days of a bereavement,
freezes a period of intense and endless sorrow. Donoghue’s novel in
no way seeks to decisively work through this loss, if by workingthrough we mean severing attachments, cutting ties with the past,
and simply moving on. Rather, the text concludes by alluding to the
deluge of tears Pen promises to shed when coming out to her mother
and telling her story of lost lesbian love. The novel gestures toward
a way of accommodating loss that might be discovered in the interstices of official and countercultural practices, representing, finally,
the possibility for a new communal politics of mourning founded on
the embodied remains of lesbian identity and love.
Desire and the lost object in
Winterson’s Written on the Body
If Donoghue’s novel depicts lesbian characters as recognizing individual differences while nevertheless forming collectives to combat
heterosexism and homophobic violence, Winterson takes an entirely
different tack. She writes Written on the Body, indeed most of her novels, from an imagined perspective where lesbians have achieved full
integration in cultural life, a strategy Winterson employs not only
to demonstrate that issues of sexuality in no way exhaust the story
of lesbian lives, but also to resist what she calls the “ghettoization”
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of lesbian fiction from the cultural mainstream.16 Of all her novels,
Written on the Body most defiantly challenges our ability to segregate
homosexual and heterosexual concerns. The text resists any easy
identification as a lesbian novel by withholding the gender of its
first-person narrator, a deliberately unnamed figure who mourns the
loss of a female lover. Most critics, however, have read the narrator as
a woman and defined the novel’s gender ambiguity as a device that
raises a lesbian character to the status of universal subject, a universality historically patterned on the heterosexual white male.17 But
Winterson’s refusal to specify the gender of her narrator ought to
guide interpretations of the novel since her strategy compels readers
to question their own assumptions about the differences between
heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as imagine a contemporary culture where the gendering of the love object is less important
than the mode in which we relate to the other. In refusing to clarify
whether the lost love relationship is heterosexual or homosexual, the
novel focuses attention on what Winterson figures as a common concern that characterizes both: the idea of desire and its dependence
on the absence of the object. Desire in Winterson’s novel, as I discuss in what follows, is shown to be in complicity with postmodern
consumer culture, with a culture that banks on the insatiability of
desire and the replaceability of the objects of this desire. My reading
thus maintains the novel’s gender ambiguity to account for the way
Winterson assesses the reduction of mourning to the metonymies of
desire and represents a new kind of embodied knowledge for sexual
subjects in postmodern culture.
Written on the Body resists the mass-marketed wisdom about
mourning, the wisdom found in “grief- counselling and books on
loss” that insist, “You’ll get over it” (154, 155). In rejecting the aim
of closure, the novel, instead, reinterprets the incorporative impulse
of melancholia, long understood as a pathological failure to sever
attachments to loss. In Winterson’s description, this reinterpretation
recalls classical humoral theory and the association between melancholia and philosophical or artistic temperament. Indeed, the narrator’s melancholic devotion to the lost object conditions his or her
emergence as a writer internal to the text; this sustained attachment
to loss marks “I” ’s transition from a translator who ekes out a living
to an inspired elegist. When the narrator discovers his or her lover
Louise has leukemia, “I” secretly leaves her and moves from London
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147
to a northern town, writing a goodbye letter and urging Louise to
reconcile with her husband, a cancer specialist who promises the
narrator to care for his wife and work toward a cure, but only on
condition that Louise returns to him. In response, “I” takes shelter
in anonymity and isolation, mourning the loss of Louise by writing
a series of elegiac prose pieces addressed to her in absentia. Moreover,
“I” finds inspiration for this elegiac project by reading bereavement
manuals, studying medical and anatomy texts, and revisiting the
poetry and literature of lost love. But this is a peculiar kind of elegy,
as we shall see, since the need to stave off loss, in a certain sense,
drives the narrator’s writing. If Winterson’s narrator has lost Louise
in reality, “I” feels compelled to create an alternative one, a psychic
and aesthetic reality in which the lover’s image is preserved:
As I embalm you in memory, the first thing I shall do is hook
out your brain through your accommodating orifices. Now that I
have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem. You must be rid of life, as I am rid of life. (119)
More than a reflection of personal grief, the compulsion to transform Louise into a photographic image immune to time, change, and
bodily decay suggests the degree to which the narrator’s response to
loss takes the form of a melancholic incorporation, a response that
has specific personal and social consequences.
Giorgio Agamben has offered a provocative interpretation of medieval melancholia; he defines the melancholic temperament as a negotiation between the individual and the social, a mode of sustaining
attachments to loss that points less to an actual object that has disappeared than a wish for a reality yet to be realized. Discussing the
association between melancholy, eros, and artistic activity in the
context of the troubadour lyric, Agamben argues that melancholic
writers do not respond to a loss that has already taken place but actually produce it, displaying “the paradox of an intention to mourn
that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object.”18 An object of
desire that cannot be possessed in reality is made to appear as lost.
This staging of loss enables the melancholic writer to withdraw from
external reality, incorporate the object, and invest the internalized
phantasm with a psychic reality. Agamben defines melancholia as “a
process in which what is real loses its reality so that what is unreal
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may become real” (25). Put differently, melancholic incorporation
offers a means by which to negotiate private desire and a world of
brute and indifferent materiality. The melancholic negotiation
between desire and reality, as Agamben explains, produces symbolic
and discursive forms “through which man enters in contact with a
world that is nearer to him than any other and from which depend,
more directly than from physical nature, his happiness and his misfortune” (25). Understood in these terms, the incorporative impulse
of melancholia gestures toward the establishment of new psychic
and social practices.
Like Agamben’s early modern poets, Winterson’s narrator precipitates the loss of Louise, hastening her absence and covering her with
the funereal trappings of mourning before she has actually died. On
the one hand, “I” ’s decision to leave Louise so she might benefit
from her husband’s care reflects an act of selflessness and personal
sacrifice. The narrator puts Louise’s life and the prospect of her husband’s discovery of a cure before his or her own needs. On the other
hand, precipitating Louise’s loss suggests a self-serving desire to possess the other beyond the threat of loss. This desire to render the
object immune to loss, however, ushers in a positive engagement
with the world and its objects; the narrator’s melancholic writing, as
we shall see, not only serves to dismantle the conventional sources
through which “I” sought inspiration—bereavement discourses,
medical texts, and lost love literature; it also enables the narrator,
as I discuss below, to give expression to a motivating wish for a new
form of erotic intimacy.
The series of four elegiac prose pieces at the novel’s center, “The
Cells, Tissues, Systems and Cavities of the Body,” “The Skin,” “The
Skeleton,” and “The Special Senses,” reflect the melancholic strategy that governs the narrator’s writing. “I” turns from the outside
and withdraws inward in order to represent his or her own desire.
Facilitated by the melancholic retreat into the self, the narrator manages to challenge social conventions that at least since Aristotle have
construed the female body as a passive container for an actively penetrating male subject. With relevance for lesbian as well as heterosexual concerns, “I” employs the language of sexual activity to
elegize Louise. The narrator raises the tabooed terms of women’s
bodies as resources for mournful poetizing. Louise’s smell, that of
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149
“iron” during menstruation, recalls a female lover “cocked and ready
to fire” (136). Her skeleton reveals an active sexual partner like “the
winged horse Pegasus who would not be saddled” (131). Even when
Louise’s body becomes an object of sexual penetration, she cannot
be elegized in the erotic language of the conventional bedroom.
The narrator recalls pressing an index finger and thumb into the
flesh behind Louise’s collarbone, an association that reminds “I”
that Louise offered her body “not just in the obvious ways but in
so many indentations” (129). By inscribing and revising the male/
active, female/passive opposition in portrayals of gender difference,
Winterson’s narrator brings the representation of loss to bear on present social concerns. “I” advances a form of erotic intimacy, one that
is “lodged in the body more than held in the mind” (82), by representing desire for the other as a corporeal reality.
The productive effects of melancholic incorporation continue to
emerge in the narrator’s writing when the elegy describes the relationship between “I” and the lost Louise by emphasizing the similarity of their bodies. Insofar as this bodily similarity names the very
source of the narrator’s desire for Louise, the elegy raises the issue
of narcissism, a narcissistic love of self typically construed as the
reduction of the uniqueness of the other, one that enables the subject to see its own image in another and contract its own abundance.
Narcissism, it should be noted as well, has particular relevance for lesbian concerns since it has been used to pathologize homosexuality.
In social and psychoanalytic traditions, women who love women,
like men who love men, have been understood as merely loving mirror images of themselves. The cultural deployment of this mirror
metaphor, as Gillian Spraggs has addressed, perpetuates a view of
homosexuals as narcissistic personalities, personalities incapable of
moving beyond an early stage of maturation and attending to the
emotional or erotic needs of anyone but themselves.19 Whether the
relationship is one of same-sex love or not, Winterson’s narrator
does not shy away from representing desire for the other as a form
of desiring the self. In raising the mirror metaphor, “I” calls herself Louise’s “twin,” seeing a reflection of the self in Louise’s body:
“Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating
in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s walls” (120). Even more
pointedly, the narrator represents desire for the other as a way of
150 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
erotically touching him- or herself:
I thought difference was rated to be the largest part of sexual
attraction but there are so many things about us that are the
same. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. To remember you it’s
my body that I touch. (129)
Winterson’s narrator explores the narcissistic components of human
love in order to advance an alternative meaning. “I” does not represent
narcissism as a either an inability to love the other as uniquely other
or a homosexual pathology, but as the very condition of subjectivity.
In the “written on the body” passage, “I” powerfully describes
how the desire to be a subject proceeds by way of a circuitous path
through the other, a description that calls attention to the permeable
boundaries that join self and other, mourner and mourned:
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights;
the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to
keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too
much, tell the whole story. I didn’t know that Louise would have
reading hands. She has translated me into her own book. (89)
The narrator describes a relation where one body relates to another
by relinquishing its own boundaries, the boundaries typically constructed to fortify a self sufficient unto itself. “I” figures his or her
body as a text upon which the world has written its own meanings,
but a text that Louise is able to translate into new significance rather
than passively read. Louise’s “reading hands” do not discern a stable
or self-contained meaning in the palimpsest inscribed on “I” ’s body.
Rather, her intimacy translates the encoded levels of the narrator’s
accumulated history into nothing less than new meaning, a meaning
where “I,” read by the other, sees him- or herself as subject. Winterson’s
engagement with narcissism demonstrates how the path through the
other shatters the notion of a self-generating and strongly bounded
subject.20 By knowing him- or herself through another’s reading, by
claiming of Louise, “[y]ou are what I know” (120), the narrator represents desire for the other as a condition of subjectivity. In fact, so
embedded is Louise in the narrator’s self-understanding that “I” seems
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to stop at nothing, including the threat of self-loss, to preserve the lover’s image. The narrator conveys a wish to follow the other into death.
“I” sees him- or herself mirrored by a funereal object, “broken” as the
other is broken, “rid of life” as the other is “rid of life” (125, 119). “I” ’s
representation of loss reflects the strength of the attachment to the
object, the intensity of love. The narrator incorporates the other in the
self, indeed risks the self, so that “I” can continue to court the object.
“Why is the measure of love loss?” (9). The question the novel
begins with and repeatedly raises both distills the achievements of
the narrator’s elegy and poses the central problem that Winterson’s
text seeks to resolve. The narrator’s elegiac writing gives new expression to the loss of a female object. Loss measures love, to begin with,
by showing how erotic attachments persist long after the other
departs. The narrator makes explicit this experience of sustained
grief and ongoing mourning:
The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How
could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to
grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart
is in the shape of you and no- one else can fit. (155)
By engaging bereavement as a sustained attachment to loss, the narrator’s elegy succeeds in creating a new textual artifact in the discourse of love, an artifact where narcissistic self-love gestures toward
a new openness to the other. But, as the narrator understands, there
are limits to this success. Loss also measures love in the fashion of a
tradition of romantic tragedies that spans, say, Romeo and Juliet and
The End of the Affair. This tradition does not simply describe how an
indifferent world of circumstance destroys love; it elevates a relationship that cannot be lived in actuality to the status of what one of
Winterson’s characters calls a “perfect romance,” a doomed relationship that achieves perfection by exempting the lovers from all blame
for love’s undoing (187). How, then, does the narrator’s own writing,
what “I” describes as a “necrophiliac obsession,” escape the logic of
tragic impossibility? How, in other words, are we to understand the
social relevance of “I” ’s private courting of the lost object, a courting
so intense that the conventional self risks itself? To pose the question in yet another way, how do we transform one of the lessons of
the narrator’s elegiac writing, the lesson that only what is lost can
152 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
be truly desired, into a different economy of desire: a desire not to
want but to have, a desire not to desire but to love? Why, indeed, is
the measure of love loss?
Winterson’s novel responds to these questions by showing how
her narrator mourns the lost object of desire as a strategy to reinvent bereavement, embodiment, and lost love writing. In drawing
on conventional grief, medical, and elegiac discourses, the narrator
creates a textual substitute for Louise, but a substitute that compels
“I” to sabotage and undermine his or her authority to elegize the
other. “I” ’s elegy calls attention to the myriad ways in which it fails
to represent the lost object’s uniqueness. To successfully render the
object, as the narrator’s writing suggests, entails possessing it, a possession that would cancel desire through fulfillment and satisfaction. Consequently, “I” ’s text employs a logic of self-undermining;
the narrator’s elegy reflects a self- deconstructing aesthetic. As a thoroughly postmodern elegist, the narrator uses the writing to turn the
elegy back upon itself. When “I” reflexively considers the medical terminology employed in the elegy, words like “maxilla, vomer, inferior
conchae, mandible,” the narrator acknowledges that these words fail
to capture the object: “Those are my shields, those are my blankets,
those words don’t remind me of your face” (132). Similarly, the narrator’s writing posits a special auditory mode where sound connects
“I” to the lost object, only to short- circuit the connection: “I wish I
could hear your voice again” (135). These instances of authorial selfundermining suggest more than the impossibility of capturing the
singularity of the desired object, more than the potential destruction
entailed in aesthetizing the lost other. What they demonstrate is how
the narrator’s borrowing from conventional discourses produces an
object that has been rendered inaccessible and unrepresentable. If
drawing on these discourses ensures “I” ’s capacity to desire, it also
entails an object of desire that is represented as unobtainable.
Winterson’s novel, I want to suggest, offers an allegory of the move
from Freudian loss to Lacanian lack. In Freud’s psychoanalysis of
grief, as we have seen, mourning emerges in response to the loss of
an actual other or ideal; this emotional labor culminates in a transformation of the psyche based on sustained attachments to loss. For
Lacan, however, mourning is disassociated from an actual object and
from any sense of history; it comes to name, instead, a metaphysical
fact of subjectivity. Emptied of its potential to relate us to lost others
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or the past, mourning in the Lacanian argument defines the condition of a subject that has been founded on its own desire. Alessia
Ricciardi has argued, with insight and force, that Lacan “does not
truly believe in mourning”: “Mourning for Lacan intervenes at the
level of a desire that is sustained by the inherent lack of an object
and hence by the erasure or flattening of history from the point of
view of the subject.”21 On this view, the desiring subject acquires an
attitude of skeptical knowingness about the world, understanding
that a central lack both structures the symbolic order and invalidates
any narrative of redemption. But this same desiring subject, characterized by a certain depthlessness of feeling and severed from the
claims of historical consciousness, finds itself moved along a metonymic chain of substitutions where desire is ceaselessly displaced
from one object to another and even intensified by a commercial
culture that exploits our propensity for the ceaseless consumption
of discardable commodities. In telling the story of how the narrator
precipitates the disappearance of Louise, Winterson’s novel not only
evaluates how loss becomes lack in postmodern culture; the text also
pitches the work of mourning against the fetishization of grief and
metonymies of desire.
The narrator’s mourning of the lost object poses a challenge to
any writing practice that grounds desire in the absence of the object.
“I” ’s desire for an object that he or she has rendered lost does not
suggest a metaphysical fact of human existence or displaced affect
for lost Lacanian origins. Rather, the protagonist’s insatiable longing for the lost object emerges as a consequence of specific sociolinguistic forms, textual and cultural practices that have failed to
mediate adequately the relationship to Louise, in both her presence
and absence. To state the obvious, when “I” elegizes Louise, it is an
aesthetic substitute for the other that is represented and not the
actual other. What this substitute consists of is nothing but a contestation of various social discourses; the lost object has been evoked
through and against material languages that produce an absent figure whose features can only be approximated. The self- consciousness
of the narrator’s writing enables us to discern that when “I” incorporates the conventional languages of mourning, medicine, and elegy
in his or her elegy, these discourses now appear as lost. Mourning
conventions teach us to sever ties to the lost object; medical conventions regard the body, in the narrator’s words, as “a series of bits
154
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
to be isolated and treated as necessary” (175); and elegiac conventions promise consolation for the painful task of letting go. When
the narrator incorporates these languages in writing the elegy, they
lose their habitual significance. This incorporative strategy shows
how bereavement, medicine, and elegy lose their external meaning by becoming internal; the new meaning they accrue points to
the textual space produced by weaving them together. To return to
Agamben, if the narrator has incorporated the real to make it unreal
and courted the unreal in an effort to make it real, it is because “I”
wants to externalize and share desire; Winterson’s narrator seeks to
transform desire for an unattainable object of tragic impossibility
into a new form of erotic intimacy, a form that depends on radically
different psychic dispositions and social practices regarding love and
loss, illness and death, grief and writing.
In acting upon the lessons of “I” ’s own melancholic elegizing, the
narrator returns to London in an attempt to refind the lover, only
to discover that Louise has not reconciled with her husband. Louise
vowed resolutely that her marriage ended when she fell in love with
the narrator, a vow she kept by rejecting her husband’s assistance even
after “I” ’s departure. The narrator searches exhaustively for Louise,
not knowing whether she has died or actually lives. What “I” initially
finds, however, are yet more conventional bereavement practices that
detach mourners from the mourned, more practices in a commercialized pop culture that have devalued mourning by preaching the
severing of ties and moving on to replacement objects. A sojourn in a
cemetery produces a series of hyperbolic observations intended to provoke thought about the way we care for the dead. Winterson’s narrator
attempts to wrest the deceased from the professionalization of death,
from the funeral directors and mortuary workers whose commerce
with the dead arises less from emotional than financial concerns.
“I” recalls a time prior to the establishment of the modern funeral
home and sees “more friendlier pictures” of the burial, pictures where
the dead are not passed “into the hands of strangers,” but “washed,
disinfected, drained, plugged, and made-up” by those most intimate
with the body (178, 177).22 The narrator also wonders why the British
obsession with “DIY,” the “do it yourself” practices sometimes motivated by economic necessity but mostly by an interest in creativity
and self-expression, has not pervaded the coffin industry. “You can
buy boat kits, house kits, garden furniture kits, but not coffin kits,”
The Sexual Politics of Mourning
155
a travesty since such coffin-making might well constitute what the
narrator calls “the tenderest thing to do for the beloved” (176). When
“I” focuses attention on the burial site, the “hole” or “dizzy chasm of
loss,” the narrator tells a story of nineteenth-century grave diggers
who often worked in cold and wet conditions, falling ill and dying
as a result. “Digging your own grave,” the narrator remarks, “wasn’t a
figure of speech then” (177). In seeking to revitalize the meaning of
this metaphor, the narrator suggests that, by doing the “hard work”
of digging a lover’s grave, mourners succeed in digging their own.
That is, they confront their own mortality and inevitable self-loss in
a way that productively relates them to both the dead and living.
The dissatisfaction the narrator expresses with prevailing death and
mourning customs points to a need for a recovery—and revision—of
the Freudian Trauerarbeit, a work of grieving that is not only psychic
and private, but also physical and social.
The narrator’s writing empties the conventional languages of
mourning, medicine, and lost-love literature of their ordinary meanings. “I” ’s elegy produces a new reality in the representation of love,
while also challenging our ability to identify the sexual orientation
of this love. But because this reality continues to exist in the wholly
private realm of the psyche, it is one that “I” regards as limited.
Consequently, the narrator seeks to make the lessons of his or her
elegizing a social reality, even if this reality entails the extreme emotional cost of caring for a dying loved one. The narrator highlights
his or her effort to reinvest loss in the social when reflecting upon
the intensity of bereavement that prompted him or her to write:
The previous months had been wild with despair and cushioned
by shock. I had been mad, if madness is to be on the fringes of the
real world. In August I felt blank and sick. I had sobered up, come
round to the facts of what I had done. I was no longer drunk on
grief. Body and mind know how to hide from what is too sore to
handle. Just as the burns victim reaches a plateau of pain, so do
the emotionally wretched find grief is a high ground from which
they may survey themselves for a time. Such detachment was no
longer mine. (156)
Winterson’s narrator has sought to achieve a level of detachment
from the painful extremity of loss by abandoning Louise. “I,” in fact,
156
Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism
has turned to both memory and a text as a desperate measure to
possess the other beyond the threat of loss, beyond the threat of
losing Louise to death, as well as to another or the contingencies of
love, as suggested by the numerous stories “I” tells about a personal
history of previously failed relationships. But because the narrator’s
elegy has dismantled this desire for an impossible mode of possession, “I” resolves to end her detachment from the social and seeks an
embodied form of erotic intimacy that begins with the recognition
of Louise’s unique otherness. As “I” puts it: “To think of Louise in
her own right, not as my lover, not as my grief. It helped me to forget
myself and that was a great blessing” (153). What the narrator has
come to realize is that the permeable boundaries that join mourner
and mourned also separate them, a separation that acknowledges a
relation, but not an identity, between self and other, life and death,
corporeality and noncorporeality.
Winterson’s novel invites us to read the narrator’s melancholic elegizing not as a retreat into the self but an encounter with the world;
the text invites us to define mourning not as a discourse of the private but an approach to the social. In depicting the productive effects
of melancholic incorporation, the narrator’s search to find the lost
Louise ends in neither success nor failure; it ends by reiterating the
possibilities produced in his or her elegy. Failing to find Louise in
London, the narrator returns to Yorkshire; “I” sees—or imagines seeing—Louise’s face in the kitchen door. Winterson herself has commented on the way the concluding scene confounds the distinction
between between fantasy and reality. She describes the novel as a
story of “love found, love lost, love found again—maybe.”23 What,
finally, does “maybe” mean as a description of erotic intimacy articulated in melancholy’s wake, one whose motivating ideal is to disrupt the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality?
The unresolved ending of Winterson’s novel may be understood
as a strategy to transfer the narrator’s desire for a “happy ending”
onto the reader, inviting the desiring fantasy for new socio-linguistic
practices involving bodies and medicine, loss and mourning, sexual
identity and love to take hold outside the confines of the aesthetic.
In creating a textual substitute for the lost object, “I” ’s elegizing has
incorporated bereavement conventions geared toward letting go to
lose the convention of letting go. The narrator’s elegy has incorporated the medical view of the body as a composite of discrete organs
The Sexual Politics of Mourning
157
to lose the view of corporeality as a dispassionate machine of working parts. The narrator’s writing has incorporated the idea of an unattainable love object to lose the idea that we are constitutively barred
from embracing the bodies of our desire. “I” has incorporated the
elegiac conventions of a male tradition to lose the idea that only men
represent their own desire for an absent female love object. Perhaps
most importantly, the narrator has incorporated the elegiac practice
of consoling through an aestheticization of loss to lose the practice
of consolation.
As Winterson puts it in an essay, “I do not think of art as
Consolation. I think of it as Creation. I think of it as an energetic
space that begets energetic space.”24 As this formulation clarifies,
Winterson’s particular practice of postmodern fiction runs against
the current of a dominant postmodernism, one that contends that
all truths are fictions and that the novel is a language game that has
no bearing on other language games in a fractured contemporary
culture. Winterson raises the idea of aesthetic consolation only to
reject and promote a view of the postmodern novel as fostering new
social constellations for identity and culture. This progressive aim,
as Written on the Body suggests, hinges on a performance of grief that
is shown to provoke different understandings of sexuality, different
public discourses, and different modes of intersubjectivity and intimacy. Instead of advocating our detachment from the lost object, a
detachment the novel represents as consorting with the metonymies
of desire in consumer society, Winterson, like other modernist and
postmodernist writers, invests loss with the potential to promote a
progressive politics and ethical mode of being in the world.
Notes
Introduction: Rethinking Loss; Remapping the Novel
1. Critics attribute the decline of nineteenth-century mourning practices
to a number of causes. Philippe Ariès links the disappearance of traditional funerary rituals to the social changes that followed World War
One. See Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York:
Knopf, 1981), 583. Geoffrey Gorer relates this decline to the increased
emphasis on a “fun-morality” and “duty to enjoy oneself” characteristic
of twentieth-century culture. See Gorer, Death, Grief, and Mourning (New
York: Arno Press, 1977), xiii. David Cannadine argues that both a decrease
in death rates and growing disdain for the commercialization and financially exploitative practices of Victorian mourning customs resulted in the
demise. See Cannadine, “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern
Britain,”in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed.
Joachim Whaley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 187–242, 193, 191.
2. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1990), 28.
3. Ibhab Hassan, Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1975); Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide:
Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1986); Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of SelfConscious Fiction (London and New York: Methuen, 1984).
4. See David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds.), “Mourning Remains,” introduction to Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2003), 5.
5. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984), 81.
6. Although Peter Nicholls similarly recognizes the importance of the
issue of mourning in Lyotard’s work, he argues that Lyotard conceives
of the postmodern in a way that expresses “the need constantly to ‘work
through’ the meaning of the modern in order to disrupt it by multiple,
conflicting narratives” (15). See Peter Nicholls, “Divergences: Modernism,
Postmodernism, Jameson and Lyotard,” Critical Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1991):
1–18. My reading of Lyotard’s conception of mourning is more in line
with John Rajchman’s critique of the “unpresentable” in his work. See
Rajchman, “Jean-François Lyotard’s Underground Aesthetics,” October 86
(1998): 3–18.
7. Critics have raised the issue of Lyotard’s own failure to lay to rest metanarrative authority. Judith Roof argues, quite cogently, that his “analysis
of this loss of metanarrative relies upon an unrecognized legitimating
158
Notes, pp. 5–10
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
159
metanarrative that establishes the ‘truth value’ of no truth.” See Roof,
“Lesbians and Lyotard: Legitimation and the Politics of the Name,” in The
Lesbian Postmodern, ed. Laura Doan (New York: Columbian University
Press, 1994), 47–66, 59.
The reduction of postmodern literature to a critical and debunking function inheres in Linda Hutcheon’s account of historiographic metafiction,
her exemplar of postmodernism. As she argues, “When conjoined with
historical references to actual events and personages, this demystifying
auto-representation engages a problematizing of historical knowledge
and of the borders between fact and fiction, conducted within the powers
and limits of narrativization.” See Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism:
History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 227. My
analysis of a strand of postmodern fiction that puts forward affirmative
social content is indebted to the recent work of Patricia Waugh, who
locates in a type of postmodern literature an “attempt to sustain collectivist or even transcendent modes of representation whilst trying to
reconcile them with a sense of identity as perspectival and radically situated in specific bodies.” See Waugh, “Postmodern Fiction and the Rise of
Critical Theory,” in A Companion to the British and Irish Novel: 1945–2000,
ed. Brian W. Shaffer (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 65–82, 75.
Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne
Schulkind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 61–138, 80.
Eng and Kazanjian, Loss, 2.
See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975), 248–63; Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
(New York: Vintage, 1994), 89–97. For critiques of Williams’s failure to
address issues of empire, see Said, Culture, 82–4; and Paul Gilroy, “There
Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation
(London: Hutchinson, 1987), 44–50.
Dominick LaCapra, “Reflections on Trauma, Absence, and Loss,” in
Whose Freud?, ed. Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2000), 178–204, 179.
Alessia Ricciardi, The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 68.
Jahan Ramazani, “Afterword: ‘When There Are So Many We Shall Have
to Mourn,’ ” in Modernism and Mourning, ed. Patricia Rae (Lewisburg:
Bucknell University Press, 2007), 286–95, 290. See also his influential
account of the rejection of consolation in modern poetry in Poetry of
Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 8.
Seth Moglen, Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of
American Capitalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), xiv.
Patricia Rae, Introduction to Modernism and Mourning (Lewisburg:
Bucknell University Press, 2007), 22.
Despite his devaluation of literature in the postmodern period—“the
architecture is generally a great improvement; the novels are much
worse”—Fredric Jameson offers, of course, an indispensable summation
160
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
Notes, pp. 10–12
of the characteristics of the culture of postmodernity. See Jameson,
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1999), 299.
In accounting for the rejection of traditional consolatory memorials,
James E. Young writes, “once we assign monumental form to memory,
we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember.” See Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 273. Geoffrey Hartman makes
a similar point when he argues that conventional memorializing practices may not be aimed at remembering the past as much as to “give it a
decent burial.” See Hartman, “Public Memory and Modern Experience,”
Yale Journal of Criticism 6, no. 2 (1993): 239–48, 242.
Rita Felski isolates political formalism as one of three main methodological approaches to modernist texts. In contrast to both cultural studies
and what she terms “the sociology of literature,” political formalism,
Felski defines, “insists on the primacy and preeminence of aesthetic
form, which it strives to decipher with a formidable array of analytical
devices. It calls for a patient poring over poetic conventions, a scrutiny
of figurative language, a neverending labor of reading between the lines.
This textual hypervigilance is understood as not just aesthetic work,
but also as political work.” See Felski, “Modernist Studies and Cultural
Studies: Reflections on Method,” Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 3 (2003):
501–17, 510.
The first epigraph is from a 1929 letter to Ludwig Binswanger, where
Freud reflects on his daughter’s death that took place nine years earlier
by emphasizing the endlessness of mourning and rejecting the notion
of consolatory substitution. See Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst
L. Freud, trans. Tania Stern and James Stern (New York: Basic Books,
1960), 386.
Kathleen Woodward was one of the first literary critics to offer an extended
critique of Freud’s early mourning theory, but she treats “Mourning and
Melancholia” as Freud’s last word on the subject of grief. See Woodward,
“Freud and Barthes: Theorizing Mourning, Sustaining Grief,” Discourse
13, no. 1 (1990–91): 93–110, 96. More recent critics, however, find in
Freud’s own work an articulation of anti-consolatory and interminable
grief. See G. H. Pollock, The Mourning-Liberation Process, vol. 1 (Madison:
International Universities Press, 1989), 31; Judith Butler, The Psychic
Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997), 167–98; Gregg M. Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 153; and Eng and Kazanjian,
“Mourning Remains,” in Loss, 4.
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), vol. 14 of The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press,
1953–74), 245.
Freud returned to the question of consolation in “On Transience” (1916),
a transitional text in the development of his mourning theory that
Notes, pp. 12–14 161
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
reexamines loss in the context of World War One and begins to express
his skepticism about the possibility of finishable mourning. Written
15 months after the outbreak of the war, the essay begins by repeating
Freud’s early account of mourning where the task is to “replace the lost
objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious.” However, when confronted with the catastrophic suffering caused by the war, Freud now recognizes that “libido clings to its objects and will not renounce those that
are lost even when a substitute lies ready at hand” and thereby acknowledges the failure of consolatory substitution to explain the dynamics of
mourning. See Freud, “On Transience,” Standard Edition, 14: 307, 306.
Martin Jay, Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique
(New York: Routledge, 1993), 94.
I engage in a more extensive discussion of the development of Freud’s
mourning theory in Clewell, “Mourning beyond Melancholia: Freud’s
Psychoanalysis of Loss,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
52, no. 1 (2004): 43–67.
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), Standard Edition, 19: 29.
See Butler, Psychic Life, 196.
See Ariès, Hour, 595. For a critique of Ariès’s claim that the twentieth century saw death vanish and mourning disappear from the sphere of the
social exchange, see Ricciardi, Ends of Mourning, 3.
Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia
Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1982),
78; William Faulkner, Wild Palms: [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] (New York:
Vintage, 1995), 273.
Jacques Derrida’s work on mourning divides into two strands, individual mourning and cultural mourning, though both share the quality of radical otherness, an alterity that resists assimilation by either
the mourning subject or social present. In the case of individual loss,
Derrida’s account may be understood as emphasizing what we might call
an ethics of mourning. Rather than reduce the lost other to an object
for the mourner, he argues for a conception of “impossible” mourning.
This unfinishable labor of grieving obliges us, according to Derrida, to
accept the “being-in-us” of the lost other as an absolute excess, a radical
otherness residing in a space that is neither properly inside nor strictly
outside the psyche; impossible mourning thus reflects an ethical condition for intersubjectivity, one that cannot be reduced to a narcissistic
desire to master the other. See Derrida, “By Force of Mourning,” in The
Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001), 139–64, 161.
For insightful discussions of Derrida’s mourning theory, see Anselm
Haverkamp, Leaves of Mourning: Hölderlin’s Late Work – With an Essay on
Keats and Melancholy, trans. Vernon Chadwick (Albany: State University
of New York, 1996), 20; Mary Rawlinson, “Levers, Signatures, and Secrets:
Derrida’s Use of Woman,” in Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question
of Woman (New York: Routledge, 1997), 69–86; and David Farrell Krell,
The Purest of Bastards: Works of Mourning, Art, and Affirmation in the
162
Notes, pp. 14–27
Thought of Jacques Derrida (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2000), 19–21.
31. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and
the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 6.
32. For interesting applications of Derrida’s notion of spectral history, see
Ricciardi, Ends of Mourning, 125; and Mark Sanders, “Ambiguities of
Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa’s
Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” in Loss, 77–98, 90.
33. The second epigraph is from Derrida, Specters, xix.
1 Woolf and the Great War
1. Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf (London: Wishart, 1932), 159.
2. See Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1972) 1: 40, 44; Louise DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The
Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (Boston: Beacon,
1989), 75, 77; and Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf (Atlantic
Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1990), 166.
3. Mark Spilka, Virginia Woolf’s Quarrel with Grieving (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1980), 7, 11. For other readings of Woolf’s unresolved
grief as a symptom of her mental illness, see Jean O. Love, Virginia Woolf:
Sources of Madness and Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977),
214–16; and Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 111.
4. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from
Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 264.
5. Critics have addressed Woolf’s defiance of traditional mourning from a
variety of perspectives. For a biographical account that disputes grief as
the cause of Woolf’s mental illness, see Thomas Caramagno, The Flight
of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic Depressive Illness (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992), 2. On Woolf’s specifically feminist challenge to Victorian grief practices, see Susan Bennett Smith,
“Reinventing Grief Work: Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Representations
of Mourning in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,” Twentieth Century
Literature 41, no. 4 (1995): 310–27. For an account that links the development of Woolf’s aesthetics to her critique of traditional mourning,
see John Mepham, “Mourning and Modernism,” in Virginia Woolf: New
Critical Essays, ed. Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (Totowa: Barnes
and Noble Books, 1983), 137–56.
6. Vincent Sherry argues that the Great War collapsed the tradition of rational liberalism and thus resulted in “the cultural crisis in Britain”; he
reads the work of modernist writers including Pound, Eliot, and Woolf
as a response to this collapse. See Sherry, The Great War and the Language
of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9.
7. Citations in what follows are from Jacob’s Room (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1950); and To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981).
Notes, pp. 28–32 163
8. The matter of Woolf’s attitude toward class division and her own privileged social status has recently been addressed. Shawn Latham argues
that Woolf and her circle “were not adamant defenders of the English
class system, but they could not envision any sort of systematic change
that would also preserve its tastes in art, music, and philosophy.” See
Latham, Am I a Snob?: Modernism and the Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2003), 66–7. In challenging the image of Woolf as an elitist, as well
as an “aesthetic capitalist” who marketed herself to achieve prestige and
fame, Melba Cuddy-Keane focuses on Woolf’s BBC broadcasts, among
other public ventures, and argues that Woolf sought to recast highbrowism as a radical social practice that fostered a classless, democratic, and
intellectually informed reading public. See Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf,
the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), 193.
9. David Cannadine, “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern
Britain,” in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed.
Joachim Whaley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 187–242, 189.
10. For studies of nineteenth-century mourning practices in Britain, see
John Morley, Death, Heaven, and the Victorians (Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 1971); and Julian Litten, The English Way of Death
(London: Robert Hale, 1991).
11. For an excellent study of working-class anxiety about the pauper grave,
see Julie-Marie Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
12. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York:
Knopf, 1981), 314–15.
13. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,
trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955),
536. See also J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 179.
14. See Margaret Higonnet and Patrice Higonnet, “The Double Helix,” in
Behind the Lines: Gender and Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Higonnet,
Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1987), 31–47. For studies of the way women viewed
and wrote about the Great War, see Jean Gallagher, World Wars through
the Female Gaze (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998);
and Sandra Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and
the Great War,” in Behind the Lines, 197–226.
15. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, 1966), 141.
16. Virginia Woolf, “A Cambridge V.A.D.,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 3
vols., ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1987–88), 2: 112–13.
17. Woolf criticizes Edward Marsh’s memoir of Brooke for being “inevitably
incomplete” and for the overt romanticism of a writer from an older generation: “No undergraduate of Rupert Brooke’s own age would have seen
‘his radiant youthful figure in gold and vivid red and blue, like a page
in the Riccardi Chapel.’ ” See Woolf, “Rupert Brooke,” in The Essays of
Virginia Woolf, 2: 277, 278.
164
Notes, pp. 32–7
18. Virginia Woolf, “The New Crusade,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 2:
203.
19. For studies of the Victorian feminization of grief on both sides of the
Atlantic, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New
York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977), 200–26; John Morley, Death,
Heaven and the Victorians (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1971), 63; and Jeffrey Steele, “The Gender and Racial Politics of Mourning
in Antebellum America,” in An Emotional History of the United States, ed.
Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis (New York: New York University Press,
1998), 91–108, 92.
20. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch,” in Moments of Being, 123.
21. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European
Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4.
22. Winter’s argument that the Great War solidified traditional rather than
modernist practices has come under critical scrutiny. Peter Jelavich argues
that Winter is “attacking a straw man; inasmuch as his conception of modernism as something radically new, forged by the Great War, is a view that
few experts on modernism share these days.” See Jelavich, “Book Reviews,”
Central European History 30, no. 1 (1997): 128–30, 129. Vincent Sherry, in
making a similar argument, writes, “Winter’s assertion turns upon a construction of tradition that takes little stock of what this charged and valorized word actually means.” See Sherry, The Great War , 9.
23. Susan Kingsley Kent, “Remembering the Great War,” Journal of British
Studies 37, no. 1 (1998): 105–110, 106–7.
24. Jacques Derrida, “By Force,” 173.
25. Derrida as well as Judith Butler have challenged the account of mourning offered by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, who argue that the
internalizing strategy of “introjection,” in opposition to the melancholic
fantasies of “incorporation,” establishes “an empty space” from which
speech and the meaningfulness of language emerge. When confronted
with the loss of the maternal breast, itself a consoling substitute for the
loss of the intrauterine mother-child union, the infant mourns, as they
put it, by learning “to fill the void of the mouth with words” (6). The successful detachment from the object takes place, then, through a process
of “vocal self-fulfillment.” The child verbalizes the painful separation,
replaces the satisfactions received at the breast “with the satisfactions
of the mouth devoid of that object but filled with words addressed to
the subject,” and hence quite literally comes to terms with the loss.
See Abraham and Torok, “Introjection–Incorporation: Mourning or
Melancholia,” in Psychoanalysis in France, ed. S. Lebovici and D. Widlöcher
(New York: International University Press, 1980), 3–16, 6. For critiques of
the failure of their theory to confront the difference, uniqueness, and
otherness of the lost object, see Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” in Abraham and Torok, The Wolf
Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2005), xi–l; and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 86–7.
Notes, pp. 37–40 165
26. Jacques Derrida, ‘By Force of Mourning’, The Work of Mourning, ed.
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2001), 139–164.
27. Alex Zwerdling, “Jacob’s Room: Woolf’s Satiric Elegy,” ELH 48.4 (1981):
894–913, 909.
28. In the only book-length study to date of the impact of World War
One on Woolf’s writing, Karen Levenback recognizes the centrality of
bereavement in Woolf’s fiction: “Mourning is itself a key, Woolf will
suggest in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, not only to acknowledging the reality of death but also to gauging what would be called the
‘public mood.’ ” However, Levenback employs a progressive narrative of
Woolf’s developing “war-consciousness” and argues, unconvincingly
in my estimation, that Jacob’s Room does not offer us a full reckoning
of the protagonist’s death and thus reflects “that the implications of
the war have not yet been either felt or recognized.” See Levenback,
Virginia Woolf and the Great War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
1999), 43.
29. Christine Froula argues that the closing gesture of the novel, when Betty
Flanders asks what to do with her son’s shoes, conveys neither “despair
or even grief” since Woolf’s narrator “has put mourning behind her
and writes a ‘disconnected rhapsody’ for those who are still here—the
war’s survivors, from whom life is a narrow pavement over an abyss.” In
contrast, I locate Woolf’s effort to promote the kinds of social changes
that Froula also discusses in the novel’s anti-consolatory and ongoing
mourning. See Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde:
War, Civilization, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press,
2005), 81.
30. Woolf thematizes the potential for mourning to lead to personal and
social transformation in Mrs. Dalloway, the text that not only follows
the publication of Jacob’s Room, but also begins in some sense where
the earlier novel leaves off. The novel expands Woolf’s mourning less
in describing a postwar society wracked by loss, both the literal losses
resulting from the war and the influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919 and
the symbolic losses stemming from disintegrating cultural traditions
and a declining empire. For an excellent reading of mourning in the
novel, see Susan Bennett Smith, “Reinventing Grief,” 310–27.
31. Critics have pointed out that Woolf intentionally refrained from rereading family documents when writing To the Lighthouse in order to explore
the workings of her own memory. See Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and
the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 181.
32. Woolf also criticized “the angel in the house,” the Victorian ideal of
domestic femininity in her famous essay “Professions for Women.” See
Woolf, “Professions,” in Death of the Moth and Other Essays (New York:
Harcourt, 1974), 235–42.
33. See Alan Bell, Introduction to Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book,
ix–xxxiii, x.
34. See Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 258.
166
Notes, pp. 42–55
35. On the anxiety that the expression of grief posed to male writers in the
nineteenth century, see Neal Tolchin, Mourning, Gender and Creativity in
the Art of Herman Melville (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 118.
36. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis,
and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1992), 42.
37. Virginia Woolf, “Reminiscences,” Moments of Being: Unpublished
Autobiographical Writings, ed. and intro. Jeanne Schulkind (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 41.
38. For an interesting account of the relationship between Leslie Stephen’s
philosophical writings on Hume and Woolf’s elegiac novel, see Gillian
Beer, “Hume, Stephen, and Elegy in To the Lighthouse,” Essays in Criticism
34, no. 1 (1984): 33–55.
39. Woolf, “Reminiscences,” 45.
40. Woolf, “Reminiscences,” 45.
41. Woolf, “Reminiscences,” 114.
42. Woolf, “Reminiscences,” 143, 114.
43. Woolf, “Reminiscences,” 114.
44. Isaac Rosenberg, The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg, ed. Ian Parsons
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 110.
45. Robert Graves, Collected Poems, 1959 (London: Cassell & Company,
1959), 121.
46. Nancy Topping Bazin and Jane Hamovit Lauter, “Virginia Woolf’s Keen
Sensitivity to War: Its Roots and Its Impact on Her Novels,” in Virginia
Woolf and War, 14–39, 19.
47. James Haule, “To the Lighthouse and the Great War: The Evidence of
Virginia Woolf’s Revisions of ‘Time Passes,’ ” in Virginia Woolf and War,
164–79, 167.
48. Pamela Caughie, Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and
Question of Itself (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 196.
49. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London:
Longmans, 1969), 1036.
50. Robert Graves, Fairies and Fusiliers (New York: Knopf, 1918), 29.
51. Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York: Delta/Seymour Lawrence, 1978), 10.
52. James Naremore, The World without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 242.
53. In the scholarship on maternal mourning in To the Lighthouse, critics have
argued that writing the novel enabled Woolf to terminate her protracted
grief for her own mother. Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” is typically cited
as evidence for this view, given that Woolf acknowledges that writing
the novel helped her accomplish “what psycho-analysts do for their
patients”: “I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And
in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.” The passage clearly
draws a connection between finishing the novel and finishing mourning; however, Woolf immediately goes on in the passage to dedicate her
writing to an exploration of the “invisible presences” that loss leaves
behind. See Woolf, “A Sketch,” 80. For accounts of maternal mourning,
Notes, pp. 55–63 167
see Jane Lilienfeld, “ ‘The Deceptiveness of Beauty:’ Mother Love and
Mother Hate in To the Lighthouse,” Twentieth Century Literature 23, no.
3 (1977): 345–76; and Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of
Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 79.
54. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch,” 80.
55. Woodward, “Freud and Barthes,” 96.
2
Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction
1. On the autobiographical sources Faulkner drew on in writing “Beyond,”
see Thomas L. McHaney, “ ‘Beyond’ and BEYOND and beyond: Faulkner
and the Threshold of Human Knowledge,” in William Faulkner’s Short
Fiction, ed. Hans H. Skei (Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1997), 299–305.
2. William Faulkner, Collected Stories of William Faulkner, ed. Erroll
McDonald (New York: Vintage, 1950), 796.
3. Citations in what follows are from As I Lay Dying (New York: Vintage
Books, 1964); and Requiem for a Nun (New York: Vintage Books, 1975).
4. William Styron, “As He Lay Dead, a Bitter Grief,” Life 53, no. 3 (1962):
39–42, 40.
5. On the modernization of American funerary practices, see James J.
Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death: 1830–1920 (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1980), 146–83; Jessica Mitford, The American
Way of Death Revisited (New York: Knopf, 1998), 14–19, 54–69; and
Gary Laderman, Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral
Home in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), 1–44.
6. Laderman notes that while the modernization of funerary customs had
taken place by the early twentieth century in most regions of the United
States, it “occurred more slowly in the South and in rural areas generally.” See Laderman, Rest, 1.
7. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn., n. “grief.”
8. Derrida uses the trope of “eating well” to express the incorporative logic
of conventional mourning. In a move that relates mourning dynamics to
the politics of both animal rights and world hunger, Derrida argues that
to eat well implies an ethical responsibility to the other, an affirmation
of a value that is separate from the self. See Derrida, “ ‘Eating Well’: An
Interview,” in Who Comes after the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter
Conner, Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 87–119, 107.
9. For an interesting discussion of Cash’s coffin-making as a metaphor for
Faulkner’s own writing in an age of consumerism, see J. T. Matthews,
“Faulkner and the Reproduction of History,” in Faulkner and History, ed.
Javier Coy and Michel Gresset (Falmananica: Ediciones Universidad de
sel, 1986), 63–76, 73.
10. André Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner’s Novels from The Sound
and the Fury to Light in August (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1990), 182.
168
Notes, pp. 64–5
11. Farrell, Thomas Lynch, and Laderman have defended the modernization
and professionalization of the American funeral and this defense has
taken a remarkably similar form: a critique of Jessica Mitford’s muckraking classic The American Way of Death. Farrell, who distinguishes
his own study from Mitford’s, challenges her main premise: “Unlike
Jessica Mitford’s book, which implies the centrality of the profit motive,
this work emphasizes the complexity of cultural change.” See Farrell,
Inventing, 213. Thomas Lynch, poet and funeral director, points out that
Mitford herself profited handsomely from her New York Times best-selling
list book by exposing the profit-making impulse of the funeral industry;
he also offers a rejoinder to Mitford’s idea of funeral pre-planning that on
the one hand acknowledges, with Mitford, that “[w]hen you’ve got a dead
body on your hands it’s hard to shop around” and raises, on the other,
the issue of bereaved affect that her study does not address: “There’s this
hopeful fantasy that by prearranging the funeral, one might be able to
pre-feel the feelings, you know, get a jump on the anger and the fear and
the helplessness. It’s as modern as planned parenthood, and prenuptial
agreements and as useless, however tidy it may be about the finances,
when it comes to the feelings involved.” See Lynch, The Undertaking: Life
Studies from the Dismal Trade (New York: Penguin, 1997), 186. Laderman,
in a less-polemic tone, suggests that “Mitford’s book exploited popular
American obsessions with death, money, and scandal, and reinforced
clear cultural trends in the evolution of a funeral director stereotype.”
Of particular interest in this context, Laderman uncovers that funeral
industry workers responded at mid-century to Mitford’s damaging portrayal of its profiteering motive by including “grief specialist” in the profession, a claim that did counter the post-World War Two silencing of
grief, though it was “propounded by funeral men and women who had
no training in psychology.” See Laderman, Rest, 83, 100.
12. Faulkner viewed funerary tradition, particularly the tombstone, not as a
private or domestic matter but as a part of the historical record, what he
called “the record of a community.” In arranging for his mother’s burial,
Faulkner expressed concerns about the accurate inscription of her birth
and death dates, as well as about the confusion that might arise in the
omission of the “u” in earlier spellings of the family’s surname. Faulkner
wrote, “If such factual information as dates etc. are to be kept secret,
the tombstone is no longer a part of the record of a place or a family,
but a private memento of grief, and should be kept in a private home.”
See Faulkner, Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner (New
York: Random House, 1977), 454. On Faulkner’s wish for a simple funeral
for himself, see Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, vol. 2 (New York:
Random House, 1974), 1849.
13. Fredric Jameson argues that modernist art “does not consist in the reinvention of the autonomous work of art, or in the achievement of major
or significant form, or any of those other things that, as we have been
told, characterize those masterworks of the high modern we have been
taught to consider classics.” Rather, Jameson puts forth that modernist
Notes, pp. 65–73 169
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
works display a “longing for such monadic closure,” while at same time
they highlight their failure to achieve this formal unity, a failure that
embeds them in the social and unleashes the capacity for critique. See
Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 163.
Darl’s protean self, what Calvin Bedient calls his “vacuum of identity”
and Doreen Fowler his “unbounded” selfhood, emerges in response to
Addie’s rejection of her second-born son, which she regards as Anse’s
fault, an intrusion of paternal authority in the realm of mothering.
Addie does, in fact, elicit her husband’s promise for a Jefferson burial
after Darl’s birth, a kind of feminist revenge, Fowler argues, that she
takes on her husband for fathering the child. See Bedient, “Pride and
Nakedness in As I Lay Dying,” in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: A
Critical Casebook, ed. Diana L. Cox (New York: Garland, 1985), 95–110,
101; and Fowler, Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1997), 59.
In an insightful account of personification, Paul de Man addresses how
assertions of eternity or immortality based on anthropomorphic tropes
call attention to their own metaphoricity and produce self-conscious
articulations of the inescapably temporal character of the human. See de
Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984), 262.
Eric J. Sundquist articulates an analogy between the novel’s thematic
content and its modernist technique, particularly its break with the realist convention of omniscient narration: “The expressions of grief that
work out their own disembodiment from a lost, decomposing object by
the insistent desire for analogous experience find analogy in the novel’s form, which, like the action of grief, relocates the limits and power
of that object in the stories of which it is now composed.” I agree with
Sundquist that Faulkner portrays “a confusion of identity” heightened
by the event of Addie’s death, but my reading of ongoing mourning and
the rejection of the logic of bereaved substitution challenges Sundquist’s
view that the novel’s representation of grief entails “the possibility of
relocating the lost integrity of one object in another as a way of expressing the maintenance of emotional connections that are threatening to
disappear.” See Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Divided (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1983), 40, 39.
Richard C. Moreland, “Faulkner and Modernism,” in The Cambridge
Companion to William Faulkner , ed. Philip M. Weinstein (Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 17–30, 26.
J. T. Matthews reads the gramophone as an emblem of a modern commodity culture to which the Bundrens fully belong. I offer as an important point, however, that Cash’s recalling of Darl at the very moment
he acquires the gramophone suggests that Faulkner represents bereaved
memory as a mode of resistance to the forces of commercialization. See
Matthews, “As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age,” Boundary 2 19, no. 1
(1992): 69–94, 76.
170 Notes, pp. 74–80
19. William Faulkner, “Upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950,”
in Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters by William Faulkner, ed. James B.
Meriwether (New York: Random House, 1965), 120.
20. See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1957), 93. Critics disagree about the significance of Woolf’s notion of the
androgynous mind as a successful move beyond conventional designations of masculinity and femininity. For negative appraisals of Woolf’s
articulation of androgyny, see Elaine Showalter, Literature of Their
Own, 264–5; sympathetic studies include Carolyn Heilbrun, Toward a
Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Knopf, 1973), 118; and Toril Moi,
Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (New York: Methuen,
1985), 13.
21. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Standard Edition 18: 29.
22. Noel Polk, “Afterword,” Sanctuary: The Original Text, ed. Noel Polk (New
York: Random House), 293–306, 302.
23. On Faulkner’s ambivalent response to the popular success of Sanctuary,
see Philip Cohen, “ ‘A Cheap Idea ... Deliberately Conceived to Make
Money’: The Biographical Context of William Faulkner’s Introduction to
Sanctuary,” The Faulkner Journal 3, no. 2 (1988): 54–66.
24. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 84.
25. Andrew J. Wilson locates a pervasive voyeurism that characterizes upperas well as lower-class figures, but he reduces Temple Drake to the stereotype of the seductive college debutante, one who may not be “entirely
pleased at the moment of her rape” but whose wish to live an “underworld” existence explains her failure to flee the scene of her violation
and the Memphis whorehouse. See Wilson, “The Corruption in Looking:
William Faulkner’s Sanctuary as a Detective Novel,” Mississippi Quarterly
42, no. 3 (1994): 441–60, 456. I argue, in contrast, that Faulkner’s novel
characterizes Temple as a traumatized subject and attributes her inability
to flee the brothel to her traumatic rape.
26. Citations from Sanctuary (New York: Vintage, 1993).
27. See Florence Dore, The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American
Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 68, 72.
28. Ann Cvetkovich argues for the importance of recognizing and establishing different kinds of archives for documenting traumas suffered
by gays and lesbians. “In the face of institutional neglect, along with
erased and invisible histories, gay and lesbian archives have been
formed through grassroots efforts, just as cultural and political movements have demanded attention to other suppressed and traumatic histories, ranging from the Holocaust, to labor and civil rights activism, to
slavery and genocide.” See Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma,
Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press,
2003), 8.
29. Barbara Izard and Clara Hieronymus suggest that Faulkner initially conceived of the text as a novel written in dramatic form and only came
later, on the prompting of Ruth Ford, to regard it as a play. Izard and
Notes, pp. 80–4 171
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
Hieronymus point out as well that the text was released by Random
House and later republished as a novel in the United States. See Izard
and Hieronymus, Requiem for a Nun: Onstage and Off (Nashville: Aurora
Publishers, 1970), 5.
Polk acknowledges that Faulkner’s text “has long been considered one
of the idiot siblings in the Faulkner canon.” He attributes the genesis
of the disdain for Requiem for a Nun to racial tensions in the 1950s,
which foreclosed the possibility of any critique of the African American
character Nancy, as well as to the assumption that the idealistic Gavin
Stevens embodies Faulkner’s own voice. See Polk, Faulkner’s Requiem for
a Nun: A Critical Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981),
xii–xiii.
For a comprehensive account of Faulkner’s development of Yoknapatawpha
County and its history, see Michael Millgate, “ ‘A Cosmos of My Own’:
The Evolution of Yoknapatawpha,” in Fifty Years of Yoknapatawpha:
Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson:
University Of Mississippi, 1980), 23–43.
Richard Moreland draws on Lacan to argue that the men attempt “to
escape their newly frightening marginality, to heal the scene of their
social wound, to fill this newfound lack, as if with the phallic shape,
sound, and systematic power of a courthouse.” See Moreland, Faulkner
and Modernism: Rereading and Rewriting (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1990), 203.
Dominick LaCapra distinguishes between historical loss and the kind
of constitutive absence he finds in the work of Judith Butler. In contrast to what he views as poststructuralism’s fetishizing of absence, he
argues, “Historical loss can conceivably be avoided or, when they occur,
at least in part compensated for, worked through, and even to some
extent overcome.” See LaCapra, “Reflections,” 187. In a similar vein,
Gillian Rose challenges Derrida’s work for promulgating “a process of
endless mourning, lamenting the loss of securities which, on its own
argument, were none such” and proposes, instead, a conception of completed mourning based on a return to reason. See Rose, Mourning Becomes
the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 11. My analysis, in contrast, rejects the clear-cut distinction
between mourning and melancholia assumed by LaCapra and Rose and
suggests that sustained attachments to loss make possible a progressive
politics and ethics of ongoing mourning.
For a reading of Nancy as a female victim of “a male desire to disempower the mother,” see Doreen Fowler, “Reading for the ‘Other Side’:
Beloved and Requiem for a Nun,” in Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner
Re-Envisioned, ed. Carol A. Kolmerten, Stephen M. Ross, and Judith
Bryant Wittenberg (Jackson: Universtiy Press of Mississippi, 1997),
139–51, 142.
Anne Cubilié and Carl Good, in their introductory essay to a special issue
on testimony, challenge the progressivist assumptions about testifying to
trauma; they focus, more specifically, on the social responses and effects
172
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
Notes, pp. 84–8
that follow testimonial acts. See Cubilié and Good, “Introduction: The
Future of Testimony,” Discourse 25, no. 1 (2004): 4–18.
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 11. Caruth’s claim
that traumatic memories entail literal repetitions of historical events
has recently come under attack, most notably by Ruth Leys. For Leys,
Caruth’s theory “is designed to preserve the truth of the trauma as the
failure of representation—thereby permitting it to be passed on to others who can not only imaginatively identify with it but literally share in
the communion of suffering.” See Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000), 253. Caruth’s trauma theory implies,
problematically to be sure, a notion of the historical truth of a traumatic
event that is unmediated by the subjective perspective of an always situated observer. In suggesting that traumatized subjects perform rather
than represent trauma, a performance that has the effect of traumatizing the witness, Caruth’s theory does not distinguish between the traumatized sufferer and the witness. Leys’s critique has made us aware of
the need to differentiate the two; however, her own argument for maintaining a critical distance between the subject of trauma and the witness, as well as her notion of traumatic reality, does not account for the
internal and external pressures that may prevent traumatized persons
from speaking about their suffering. For an excellent critique of Leys, see
Murray M. Schwartz, “Locating Trauma: A Commentary of Ruth Leys’s
Trauma: A Genealogy,” American Imago 59, no. 3 (2002): 367–84, 381.
Noel Polk has drawn an important distinction between Stevens and the
governor in relation to Temple’s confession. Stevens attempts to control
Temple’s confession in order “to assure himself of his own moral character,” but the governor displays a willingness “to hear her on her own
terms.” Polk highlights the governor’s sensitivity to Temple, but he overlooks the fact that the governor also schemes with Stevens to manipulate
her testimony by arranging to have Gowan secretly listen in on his wife’s
story. See Polk, Faulkner’s Requiem, 123, 117.
Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz argues, unconvincingly in my estimation, that
Temple’s self-condemnation reflects Faulkner’s own misogyny, his failure as a writer to represent positions for women apart from those narrowly defined by patriarchal culture. See Díaz-Diocaretz, “Faulkner’s
Hen-House: Woman as Bounded Text,” in Faulkner and Women/Faulkner
and Yoknapatawpha, 1985, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 235–69.
For a reading of Popeye that critiques the distinction between the pathological and the moral, see Sundquist, Faulkner, 49.
The notion of spectral history has been central to Jean-Michel Rabaté’s
study of transatlantic modernism, where he shows how the texts of
Joyce, Beckett, and others are haunted by history and cannot be assimilated to the ahistoricism or pure aestheticism that some postmodern
theorists have charged. See Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 1996), 1–14.
Notes, pp. 93–100
173
3 Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited
1. I am indebted for my understanding of the relationship between physical locations and the construction of English identity to Ian Baucom’s
Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 176–87.
2. The citation is taken from Waugh, “Lucy Simmonds,” Chapter 2 of
the unfinished novel Work Suspended,” in The Complete Stories of Evelyn
Waugh (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 253.
3. See Peter Kalliney, Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of
Modern Englishness (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 65.
4. Waugh’s autobiographical writing similarly represents architectural
decay as the unavoidable and even in some sense unregrettable passing
of country house England. In describing the country house of his paternal aunts, he not only highlights an advanced stage of deterioration of
the place; he also claims, “But none of this decay troubled me. I rather
relished it.” See Waugh, A Little Learning: An Autobiography (Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1964), 48.
5. Citations that follow are taken from A Handful of Dust (Boston: Little, Brown
and Company, 1962); and Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories
of Captain Charles Ryder (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973).
6. For studies of the early twentieth-century decline of the country house
tradition, see David Littlejohn, The Fate of the English Country House
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 39–56; Mark Girouard, Life in
the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1978), 299–318; and Roy Strong, Marcus Binney,
and John Harris, The Destruction of the Country House: 1875–1975 (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1974), 11–14.
7. Vita Sackville-West, English Country Houses (London: Clarke & Sherwell,
1941), 7.
8. Said argues that colonial possessions abroad and imperial ideologies in
Britain played an economic as well as symbolic role in “maintaining a
particular style of life in England.” See Said, Culture (New York: Vintage,
1993), 66.
9. Waugh claims “the post-war Corbusier plague” rendered “the face of
England scarred and pitted.” See Waugh, “A Call to the Orders,” in The
Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1984), 216.
10. Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
1928), 159.
11. On the British disdain for Gothic Revivalism, see Megan Aldrich, Gothic
Revival (London: Phaidon, 1994), 21; and John Summerson, Architecture
in Britain: 1530–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 483–4.
12. Waugh’s representation of the Gothic Revival both perpetuates and
departs from the views of John Ruskin, the most widely read nineteenthcentury advocate of building in the Gothic style. Ruskin advocated
Gothic Revivalism, with its dependence on old-style craftsmanship and
174
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
Notes, pp. 100–16
associations with spirituality, as a means to renew a traditional notion of
English identity threatened by industrialized machine-age culture. See
Ruskin, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander
Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–12), 16: 252. For a
superb reading of Ruskin’s notion of the Gothic as a nationally redemptive practice, see Baucom, Out of Place, 62–7; and Kristine Ottesen
Garrigan, Ruskin on Architecture: His Thought and Influence (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 148–51. Waugh’s representation
of Gothic Revivalism, I argue, foregrounds the extent to which this
national salvation has failed to take place, in addition to calling special
attention to the fact that industrial labor by the opening decades of the
century had thoroughly eclipsed craftsmanship.
Evelyn Waugh, “Half in Love with Easeful Death: An Examination of
Californian Burial Customs,” in Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn
Waugh, 331.
George McCartney, Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist
Tradition (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987), 40.
Michael Gorra, The English Novel at Mid-Century: From the Leaning Tower
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 18.
Baucom, Out of Place, 175.
Bernard Schweizer examines Waugh’s travel writings and confirms
the writer’s support for British imperialism, highlighting both his proimperialist attitudes and racist remarks. See Schweizer, Radicals on the
Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2001), 37–60.
Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of
Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 166.
Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-two Days: A Journey through British Guiana and Part
of Brazil (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934).
On the impact of World War Two on the landed gentry and the country
house, see David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 637–60.
Ann Douglas argues that the rise of modern culture was regarded as a
weakening of society and equated, at least by advocates of tradition, with
feminized and sentimental social practices, including those practices
concerned with mourning. See Douglas, The Feminization of American
Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 200–26.
Evelyn Waugh, “Preface,” Brideshead Revisited (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1993), 2.
In British Architects and Craftsmen, Sacheverell Sitwell typifies a shift in
emphasis that begins in the 1940s when describing the nation’s country
houses as artistic achievements comparable to English poetry and narrative art, rather than sites of a living aristocratic culture. See Sitwell,
British Architects and Craftsmen: A Survey of Taste, Design, and Style during
Three Centuries, 1600 to 1830 (London: B. T. Batesford, 1948), 190.
Responding to the homosexual/heterosexual debate regarding the relationship between Ryder and Sebastian, Tison Pugh argues, convincingly
Notes, pp. 116–22 175
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
in my estimation, that “romantic friendship,” which was seen through
the early twentieth century “as part of a young man’s maturation,” best
characterizes their bond. Over and against critics who have argued
one side or the other in the debate, Pugh foregrounds the difficulty of
applying modern categories of sexual identification to earlier practices:
“Prior to the medicalization of homosexuality in the late nineteenth
century, performing acts of same-sex sexuality did not necessarily
indicate that one was a homosexual in the modern sense of a person
who sees their identity as implicated by his/her non-heteronormative
sex acts.” See Pugh, “Romantic Friendship, Homosexuality, and Evelyn
Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited,” English Language Notes 38, no. 1 (2001):
64–72, 66, 65.
Henry Staten provides a fascinating account of the relationship between
Western idealism and what he calls “mortal eros,” an emotional investment in a human other. Western idealism, he argues, both depends on
and devalues mortal eros, representing it as imperfect and impermanent,
a mere stepping stone to a figure of transcendence, including divine love.
See Staten, Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995), 7–11.
Not all critics agree Ryder converts to Catholicism by the novel’s end.
Donald Greene argues that the text offers no evidence that Ryder formally converts. See Greene, “Charles Ryder’s Conversion?,” Evelyn Waugh
Newsletter 22, no. 3 (Winter 1988): 5–7. More persuasive, however, is John
W. Mahon, who locates Ryder’s conversion as taking place between his
breakup with Julia and the time of his narration of events. See Mahon,
“Charles Ryder’s Catholicism,” Evelyn Waugh Newsletter 23, no. 1 (Spring
1989): 5–7.
For accounts of the diverse interests and social investments of British literature in the 1930s, see John Baxendale and Chris Pawling, Narrating the
Thirties: A Decade in the Making, 1930 to the Present (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1996), 1–16.
In his excellent historical study, Peter Mandler cites the rural conservationist movement starting in the 1930s, country house tourism and
governmental support in the1950s, and the soaring market value of
land and economic revival of the aristocracy beginning in the 1960s
as social factors that proved to be crucial to the survival of the country
house in the decades after World War Two. See Mandler, The Fall and
Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 265–77,
388–400.
Laura Coffey claims Brideshead Revisited engages Waugh’s opposition
to the “museumisation of country houses,” by which she means the
transformation of the country house as the center of a living tradition
into a broader view of the houses themselves as national artistic treasures. See Coffey, “Evelyn Waugh’s Country House Trinity: Memory,
History and Catholicism in Brideshead Revisited,” Literature and History
15, no. 1 (2006): 59–73, 63. I agree with Coffey that Waugh’s novel
aligns itself with the vanishing aristocratic culture of the past to
176
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
Notes, pp. 122–30
oppose post-war social change, but I also discuss the numerous ways
that Charles Ryder’s appreciation for Brideshead establishes a critical
distance from its aristocratic owners and rural traditions to redefine
the value of the house as an unparalleled achievement in the art of a
national heritage.
Sackville-West, English Country Houses, 8.
Evelyn Waugh, “A Young Novelist’s Heaven,” Essays, Articles and Reviews
of Evelyn Waugh, 65.
See Mandler, Fall, 303–4.
For an engaging account of the historical origins of country house tourism, see Adrian Tinniswood, The Polite Tourist: Four Centuries of Country
House Visiting (London: National Trust, 1998). On twentieth-century
tourism to the stately home, see Littlejohn, Fate, 163–200.
See Peter Childs, “The English Heritage Industry and Other Trends in the
Novel at the Millennium,” in A Companion to the British and Irish Novel:
1945–2000, ed. Brian W. Shaffer (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 210–24,
212.
On the Heritage Industry as a nostalgic formation with socially conservative implications, see Childs, “English Heritage,” 212; Martin J.
Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 64; Robert Hewison,
Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987),
181; and Patrick Wright, On Living in the Old Country: The National Past
in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985), 87. For challenges to the
notion of heritage as “a right-wing project or strategy,” see Howard L.
Malchow, “Nostalgia, ‘Heritage,’ and the London Antiques Trade,” in
Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia, and Identity in Modern British
Culture, ed. George K. Behlmer and Fred M. Leventhal (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000), 196–216, 198. See also Raphael Samuel, Theaters
of Memory, Vol. 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso,
1994), 243. These critiques of the heritage industry as necessarily fueling
a conservative social agenda have called attention to the multiplicity
of ways that Britons of various classes and ethnic backgrounds engage
the past. However, even these democratizing approaches to history, I
would argue, may converge unwittingly or not with culturally regressive
visions and policies.
4 The Sexual Politics of Mourning
1. For accounts of the postmodern novel’s shifting emphasis from the
auto-referential and toward its social and political function, see Patricia
Waugh, “Postmodern Fiction,” 75–6; and Nicholls, “Divergences,”
14–15.
2. The foundational account of the modernism/postmodernism, high/low
distinction belongs, of course, to Huyssen, who sees modernism as constituted by “an anxiety of contamination by its others: an increasing
Notes, pp. 130–40
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
177
consuming and engulfing mass culture.” See Huyssen, Divide, 1. For a
recent challenge to the association between modernism and literary
highbrowism, see David E. Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 4–5, 81–2.
Citations in what follows are taken from Donoghue, Hood (Los Angeles:
Alyson Books, 1995); and Winterson, Written on the Body (New York:
Vintage, 1994).
See Gorer, Death, xiii.
For interesting analyses of the multiple intersections between private
grief and social relations, see the essays in Mourning Diana: Nation,
Culture, and the Performance of Grief, ed. Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn
Steinberg (London: Routledge, 1999).
See Butler, Psychic, 148. Michael Moon and José Esteban Muñoz also suggest that homophobia and cultural invisibility pose unique difficulties
to gay male and lesbian mourners. Moon challenges notions of Freudian
mourning that regard the end of the grieving process as “a return to
‘normalcy,’ ” pointing out gay men and lesbians “have been categorically
excluded from ‘normalcy’ at critical junctures” in life; he advocates,
instead, a gay and lesbian mourning practice that sustains sexual and
erotic attachments to loss. See Moon, “Memorial Rags,” in Professions of
Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature (New York: Modern Language
Association of America, 1995), 233–40, 235. Muñoz promotes a concept
of “disidentification,” which he defines as “a strategy that works on
and against dominant ideology” and locates in mourning rituals and
grief performances aimed toward affirming the persistence of same-sex
love attachments. See Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the
Performance of Politics, Cultural Studies of the Americas Series, vol. 2
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 11.
For an excellent analysis of the commodification of lesbian identity, see
Robyn Weigman, “Introduction: Mapping the Lesbian Postmodern,” in
The Lesbian Postmodern, 1–24.
Emma Donoghue, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture
1668–1801 (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 3.
Wendy Brown, “Freedom’s Silences,” in Censorship and Silencing: Practices
of Cultural Regulation, ed. Robert C. Post (Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998), 313–27, 314.
For an account of the “ghosting” and “recessive, indeterminate, misted
over space” in which lesbians have both appeared and failed to appear in
literature since the eighteenth century, see Terry Castle, The Apparitional
Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993), 30.
See Moon, “Memorial Rags,” 236.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Scribner, 1997).
For a critique of the stage theory of mourning as an inadequate description of the experience of grief, see John Archer, The Nature of Grief: The
Evolution and Psychology of Reactions to Loss (London: Routledge, 1999),
66–91.
178 Notes, pp. 142–6
14. In an otherwise perceptive reading, Antoinette Quinn interprets the
novel’s description of Pen’s critical attacks on Cara’s countercultural
values as advocating “lesbian integration in heterosexual familial society.” See Quinn, “New Noises from the Woodshed: The Novels of Emma
Donoghue,” in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories, ed.
Liam Harte and Michael Parker (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 145–67,
164. I argue, in contrast, that to equate Pen’s scorn for social protest with
lesbian integration in mainstream society, even a society that has come
to tolerate or value sexual difference, overlooks a fundamental aspect of
Donoghue’s characterization: Pen resists all social practices, dominant
as well as countercultural, that seek to limit the way she mourns and
defines herself as a lesbian.
15. Bonnie Zimmerman addresses the difficulty of promoting plural lesbian
identities and still maintaining the possibility for a collective lesbian
politics. In responding to this difficulty, she argues for a model of lesbian criticism that approaches “lesbian history and literary tradition as a
shifting matrix of behaviors, choices, subjectivities, textualities and selfrepresentations that is always situated in a specific historical context.”
See Zimmerman, “Lesbians Like This and That: Some Notes on Lesbian
Criticism for the Nineties,” in New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural
Readings, ed. Sally Munt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992),
1–16, 9.
For accounts of lesbian communities based on individual differences,
see Marilyn Frye, “Lesbian Community: Heterodox Congregation,” in
Feminism and Community, ed. Penny A. Weiss and Marilyn Friedman
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 155–60; Caroline Gonda,
“Lesbian Theory,” in Contemporary Feminist Theories, ed. Stevi Jackson
and Jackie Jones (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 113–30;
and Trisha Franzen, “Difference and Identities: Feminism and the
Albuquerque Lesbian Community,” in Rethinking the Political: Gender,
Resistance, and the State, ed. Barbara Laslett, Johanna Brenner, and Yesim
Arat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 61–76.
16. In “The Semiotics of Sex,” Winterson takes issue with the sexual bias
that inheres in the cultural reception of art, arguing that discussions
of writing by gays and lesbians typically foreground the writer’s sexuality, while evaluations of work by heterosexuals seldom raise the issue.
Against what she regards as an overemphasis on the biographical at the
expense of the textual, an overemphasis that tends to ghettoize lesbian
fiction, Winterson describes herself as “a writer who happens to love
women,” rather than “a lesbian who happens to write.” See Winterson,
“The Semiotics of Sex,” in Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
(New York: Vintage International, 1995), 104.
17. Andrea L. Harris follows the lead of earlier critics when she suggests that
Winterson’s “novel offers many hints that ‘it’ is in fact a she.” See Harris,
Other Sexes: Rewriting Difference from Woolf to Winterson (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2000), 137. For other readings of the narrator as a woman, see Carolyn Allen, Following Djuna: Women Lovers and
Notes, pp. 147–57 179
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
the Erotics of Loss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 49; and
Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian, 104. For an excellent account that
both recognizes the novel’s gender ambiguity and places it within the
context of Monique Wittig’s erotic lesbian writing, see Christy L. Burns,
“Fantastic Language: Jeanette Winterson’s Recovery of the Postmodern
Word,” Contemporary Literature 37, no. 2 (1996): 278–306, 297.
Giorgio Agamben, “The Lost Object,” in Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in
Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), 20.
See Gillian Spraggs, “Hell and the Mirror: A Reading of Desert of the
Heart,” in New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings, ed. Sally
Munt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 115–32, 123.
In a deconstructive reading of Freud’s work on narcissism, Mikkel BorchJacobsen articulates “an ethical beyond of the subject,” which he defines
as a priority granted to the other and locates in the very failure of the
ego “to represent itself—and thus inevitably, to represent itself—in the
specular mirror-image reflection in which it loves and desires itself.” See
Borch-Jacobsen, “The Freudian Subject, from Politics to Ethics,” in Who
Comes after the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc
Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 61–78, 68.
Ricciardi offers an astute analysis of the way the devaluation of mourning in the work of Lacan consorts with the commodification of postmodern culture. See Ricciardi, Ends, 39.
For a recent account of the emergence of the home funeral, as well as the
“greening” of contemporary funerary practices, see Mark Harris, Grave
Matters: A Journey through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of
Burial (New York: Scribner, 2007), 7–27.
Jeanette Winterson: The Official Site, 2 June 2008 <http://www.
jeanettewinterson.com/pages/books/written_on_the_body/html>.
Winterson, “Semiotics,” 114.
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Index
Abraham, Nicolas, 17, 37, 59
Agamben, Giorgio, 21, 147–8, 154
A Handful of Dust (Waugh), 19,
96–103
aesthetics of modern culture,
99, 108
colonial/imperialist attitudes,
105–7, 108
conservative social agenda, 112
critical nostalgia, 111
English country house identity,
19, 105, 107–8, 111, 112
Hetton Abbey modernized, 109,
110–11
past and present indicted, 101–4
performance of mourning, 104,
109, 110, 111, 112
ridicule of Gothic Revivalism,
99–100
threats to tradition, 98–9
Arad, Michael, “Reflecting
Absence”, 10
Ariès, Philippe, The Hour of Our
Death, 13, 29, 30
As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 17–18, 57,
58, 59–61, 63, 72
challenge to commodity culture,
67–8, 73–4
commodification of loss, 64–6
compensatory substitution,
59–64, 65–7, 71, 73–4
grief and social determinants, 65,
72–3
modernist aesthetic structure,
69–70
Auerbach, Erich, 31
Brideshead Revisited (Waugh),
19–20, 96, 115–19, 123–4
aristocracy in decline, 113,
120, 124
Brideshead Castle: house as work
of art, 127, 128; manifestation
of the Divine, 119–20, 124; in
war time, 128
country house: annihilation of
tradition, 112, 121; aristocratic
owners, 125–6; “English”
national heritage, 121–2, 125,
128; religiously inspired
architecture, 122–4; survival
of, 114–15; in war time,
112–13, 128; as work of art,
114–15, 126–7
Gothic revival, 124
Hooper, middle class epitome,
20, 113, 120, 121, 128
human and divine love, 118–19
logic of bereaved substitution,
115–18
middle-class ascendency, 20, 113,
120, 124, 128
“Preface” to revised edition
(1959), 114, 121
religion as consolation, 7, 19–20,
112, 113, 119, 120–1, 127
socially conservative vision, 113,
115, 127
Brooke, Rupert, 32
Broumas, Olga, 144
Brown, Wendy, 20, 136–7, 143
Butler, Judith, 13, 20, 132–3, 135
Cannadine, David, 29
Caruth, Cathy, 18, 84
Caughie, Pamela, Virginia Woolf
and Postmodernism, 50–1
Childs, Peter, 127
Baucom, Ian, Out of Place, 19, 105
Bazin, Nancy Topping, 48
Bersani, Leo, 2, 4
Bleikasten, André, 63
181
182
Index
Conrad, Joseph, 106
consolation and closure rejected, 2,
3, 5–6, 9, 10–11, 26–7, 49–55,
130, 146
Derrida, Jacques, 14–15, 17, 88
“By Force of Mourning”, 36–7
Spectres of Marx, 1, 14
Donoghue, Emma,
Passions between Women, 134
postmodern mourning, 2, 3, 8,
15, 20, 145
see also Hood
Duckworth, Stella, 41–2
Eisenman, Peter, Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe, 10
Eng, David, 3, 7
Faulkner, William,
Absalom, Absalom!, 75
“Beyond”, 56–7
conception of historical trauma,
82–3
grief and social determinants, 57,
65, 72–3
loss and commodity culture, 58,
64–5
modernist writing, 74–5, 82,
95–6, 130
mourning, 1–2, 7, 13–14, 82–3,
84, 88: as ongoing
convalescence, 18–19, 82–3,
84, 88
Nobel Prize speech, 74
temporality of trauma, 81
The Sound and the Fury, 58
unresolved grief, 56–8
see also As I Lay Dying; Requiem
for a Nun; Sanctuary
Felman, Shoshana, 76
Felski, Rita, 11
Foucault, Michel, 11
Freud, Sigmund,
on loss, 21, 152–3
“Mourning and Melancholia”,
1–12
mourning theory, 1, 11–13, 59
The Ego and the Id, 12
Trauerarbeit, 155
on trauma, 75–6
Fukuyama, Francis, 14
Fussell, Paul, 35
“gay melancholia”, 20, 132
Gikandi, Simon, 19, 106
Gorer, Geoffrey, 131–3
Gorra, Michael, 104
Graves, Robert,
“Recalling War”, 47
“When I’m Killed”, 52
the Great War (1914–18), 26,
31, 121
postwar mourning practices,
35–7
Greene, Graham, 106
grief, 56, 57, 58–9
privatization of, 132
Handley, William, 38
Hassan, Ibhab, 3
Haule, James, 48
Holtby, Winifred, 25
homosexuality and narcissism,
149–50
homosexual loss and mourning,
132–3, 140–1
Hood (Donoghue), 20,
130–1, 133, 134–5,
138–43
anger and hostility, 141
Catholic Church, 137–8
closet privacy of grieving, 135–6,
137–9, 141, 145
counter-cultural practices,
143–4
eroticization of homosexual
grief, 139–40
“Five Stages of Grief”, 20, 140–1
“hood”, meanings of, 144
lesbian identity and mourning,
15, 137, 138–9, 142–4, 145
mourning, new communal
politics of, 20, 145
Index
Hood (Donoghue)—Continued
post-modernist
self-reflexivity, 144
socially enforced silence,
136–7, 138–9,
144, 145
Huyssen, Andreas, 3
Jacob’s Room (Woolf), 16–17
consolation refused, 26, 27
consolatory mourning rituals,
28–31, 51
death and mourning, 29–30
ethics of mourning, 36–7
female grief and feminist
grievance, 17, 27–39
the Great War, 16, 31–3
inheritance and cultural
traditions, 34–5
lost other/unknown quantity,
37–9
postwar gender reform,
31–5
Jay, Martin, 12
Kalliney, Peter, 94
Kazanjian, David, 3, 7
Kent, Susan Kingsley, 36
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, 140
Lacan, Jacques, on loss and
mourning, 21, 152–3
LaCapra, Dominic, 9, 18, 82
late modernist writing, 2, 7–8, 19,
106, 130
see also Waugh, Evelyn
Laub, Dori, 76
Lauter, Jane Hamovit, 48
lesbian,
identity, 8, 131, 134
loss, 132–3
see also Hood
Lin, Maya, Vietnam Veterans’
Memorial, 10
Lyotard, Jean-François, The
Postmodern Condition, 4–5, 14,
129–30, 131
183
McCartney, George, 104
McCrae, John,
“In Flanders Fields”, 28
Maitland, F. W., 44
Mandler, Peter, The Fall and Rise of
the Stately Home, 121, 125–6
Marsh, Edward, The Collected Poems
of Rupert Brooke: with a
Memoir, 32
Matthews, J. T., 67
modernist aesthetics, 2–3, 4, 5
modernist writing, 11, 109, 129
on mourning and loss, 2, 6–7,
9–10, 130
Moglan, Seth, 9
Moon, Michael, 20, 139
Moreland, Richard, 72, 81
mourning
devaluation of, 154–5
in modernism, 2, 3, 10, 128–30
politically and ethically
progressive, 2, 3, 4, 7,
10, 11, 157
public rituals, 131–2
Naremore, James, 54
Olsen, Tillie, 53
Polk, Noel, 76
postmodern writing
on mourning, 10, 20, 129, 130,
157: consolation rejected, 3, 4,
7, 10, 157; identity and social
change, 2, 4; “on–going
mourning”, 3, 10; politics and
ethics of mourning, 3, 157
see also Hood; Written on the Body
Rae, Patricia, 9
Ramazani, Jahan, 9
Requiem for a Nun (Faulkner), 18–19,
57, 58, 75–6, 78–80, 84–7
abjection of women and blacks,
83, 85–6, 88, 89
bearing witness to trauma,
84–5, 89
184
Index
Requiem for a Nun
(Faulkner)—Continued
Chickasaw and slave losses, 81
Jefferson town, 80–2
Mohataha, 81, 82
present and past, 79, 80,
85, 88
private and public memory, 83
study of trauma, 80
traumatic repetition, 18, 79,
80–2, 86, 87–9
Ricciardi, Alessia, 9, 153
Rose, Gillian, 18, 82
Rosenberg, Isaac, “Dead Man’s
Dump”, 45
Sackville-West, Vita, 122
Sanctuary (Faulkner), 58, 75–8,
85–7
Schiesari, Juliana, 43
Showalter, Elaine, 25–6
Spearing, E. M., From Cambridge to
Camiers under the Red Cross, 32
Spilka, Mark, 25
Spraggs, Gillian, 149
Staten, Henry, 119
Stephen, Julia, 39–44
Stephen, Leslie, The Mausoleum
Book, 17, 39–44
Styron, William, “As He Lay Dead,
a Bitter Grief”, 56, 57
Sundquist, Eric, 70
Tennyson, Alfred, “The Charge of
the Light Brigade”, 52
To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 17,
46–7
art as consolation, 51–5
consolation refused, 17, 25, 26,
27, 49–50, 51–5
legacy of war, 26, 48–9
mourning art, 39–55
past and present, 54
pathetic fallacy, 44–7, 48–9
women’s art, 53
Torok, Maria, 17, 37, 59
trauma, study of, 18, 75–6, 80
Waugh, Evelyn
classic architecture, 123–4
conservative social agenda, 7–8,
16, 96, 112
conversion to Catholicism,
123–4
country house tradition, 93–6
“critical” nostalgia, 8, 19, 94, 96,
109, 111, 130
Decline and Fall, 98
on mourning and loss, 2, 7–8, 19,
95–6
Ninety-two Days, 108
Work Suspended, 94
see also A Handful of Dust;
Brideshead Revisited
Waugh, Patricia, 3
Winter, Jay, 35–6
Winterson, Jeanette
art as creation,
not consolation, 157
“ghettoization” of lesbian fiction,
145–6
ongoing mourning of loss, 3,
20–1
practice of postmodern fiction,
2, 8, 15, 157
see also Written on the Body
Woodward, Kathleen, 55
Woolf, Virginia,
A Room of One’s Own, 53
art as consolation, 51–5
“A Sketch of the Past”, 25, 33
consolation resisted, 7, 55
critical account of Great War, 16,
31–3, 47–8
elegiac dimension, 13, 25–7
failed artists, 50–1
gender and feminist aims, 55
loss of her mother, 44
modernist writing, 51, 74–5,
95–6
on mourning, 1–2, 13, 28–31, 36,
37, 95, 130
Index
Woolf, Virginia —Continued
“Reminiscences”, 44
Three Guineas, 32, 48
women’s writing, 74–5
see also Jacob’s Room; To the
Lighthouse
World War Two, 121
Written on the Body (Winterson),
20–1, 130–1, 145
closure rejected, 146
desire and postmodern consumer
culture, 146, 153
devaluation of mourning, 21,
154–5
elegy and the language of sexual
activity, 148–9
erotic intimacy, 154, 156
Freudian loss to Lacanian lack,
21, 152–3
gender ambiguity, 20–1, 146
185
loss: as measure of love, 151–2;
reinvestment in the social, 4,
21, 155, 156, 157
melancholic incorporation of lost
object, 146, 147–8, 149–50,
154, 156
narcissism, 149–50
ongoing mourning, 151
postmodern reflexive
elegy, 152
professionalization of death,
154–5
sexual orientation of love, 15,
155, 156, 157
unobtainable object of desire, 21,
152, 153–4, 157
Young, James E., 10
Zwerdling, Alex, 38