Colonial modernism's thwarted maternity: Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris and Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark

Abstract

Anglophone women experienced modernism as a negotiation of an interrelated set of ideologies, including that of the imperial mother. A comparative reading of Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris and Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark demonstrates ways that Bowen's and Rhys's formal experimentations reveal the impact of colonialism on maternal ideology in the interwar period. Critical assessments of Bowen and Rhys have tended to treat the women's writings separately, but a comparative reading helps to illuminate shared reproductive concerns that characterize women's writings from the margins of the British Empire. Furthermore, this interrogation of gender as it intersects with modernism opens up critical inquiry into a neglected subcategory of sexuality and maternity. This reading argues that Karen and Anna (the respective characters) represent a thwarted maternal identity because colonial strictures have deemed them incapable of fulfilling imperial maternal imperatives.