Formations of Discipline and Manliness: Culture, politics and 1930s women's writing

Abstract

This paper considers the political consciousness in evidence in texts published by Katharine Burdekin, Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf. It is proposed that, in addressing contemporary political landscapes and speculating about the future, the selected texts confront the institutionalised and discursive production of an English masculinity perceived as akin to a category of manliness mobilised by European fascism. Consequently, this paper begins with attention to tendencies concerned with mastery in both public and private spheres evident in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Processes of disciplining alleged irrational impulses gain centrality-and this can be read in relation to the desire of some English male modernists to 'discipline' the cultural domain with a reassertion of masculine dominance. In response to this, Burdekin, Rhys and Woolf variously manifest consciousness of the gendered nature of debates about English literary culture and its specific effects on the woman writer. Further, all express concern with evolved and prevailing definitions of bourgeois English manliness, and propose a link between this entity and the invasion of public and private domains by proto-fascistic dynamics. While attentive to differences among the three writers, this paper examines how they encourage critical awareness of formations of discipline and manliness in terms of impersonal forces focused in extreme and dehumanising rationalisation. These forces are most apparent in Europe, but all three writers insist on evidence of their aggressive presence in England. In this, selective accounts of early 20th century English culture which emphasise only progressive radicalism become significantly compromised.