M. Barnard Eldershaw’s maritime modernism: economies of literary value and the woman writer at sea

Abstract

ABSTRACT Interest in global modernisms has been followed by increased attention to connections between modernism and the oceanic world. This paper contributes to growing understanding of how writers from around the globe harnessed maritime settings and poetics to generate alternative perspectives on modernity. Using the ship at sea to stage a self-reflexive literary experiment, M. Barnard Eldershaw’s The Glasshouse (1936) can be placed in an expanding archive of interwar texts collected under the rubric of maritime modernism. Set on a cargo-boat as it makes its slow way down the globe, The Glasshouse concerns an Australian novelist, Stirling Armstrong, who hopes the sea voyage will alleviate the existential and creative ennui that is constraining her as a woman and a writer. Through Stirling’s experiences of living and writing onboard the oceangoing cargo-boat as a space both embedded in and outside of the marketplace, Barnard Eldershaw launches an investigation of the ways in which gender, national identity, and aesthetic allegiance shape the work of the women writer and augment judgments of literary value. This paper extends the scholarly discussion of maritime modernism by supplementing the field’s focus on marginalized labor and economic relations with attention to gender.