Modernism's Handmaid: Dexterity and the Female Pianist

Abstract

Representations of female pianists in early twentieth-century literature often link the instrument with a burgeoning self-expression. Miriam Henderson in Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs (1915) finds both substance and solace in her morning practice, while Lucy Honeychurch in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) eventually learns to live as fearlessly as she plays her Beethoven sonatas. In Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out(1915), the reticent pianist Rachel Vinrace briefly acquires autonomy as she free-wheels through dance tunes on a ship’s piano, and the gathered audience find themselves ‘tripping and turning’ to her music. 1 Yet Rachel’s position is telling: she finds verbal communication more difficult, and music provides a hermetic seal rather than a means of communication. Fellow passenger Miss Allan warns her, somewhat gnomically, that music and the English novel ‘don’t go together’ (VO 295), and Rachel is dead by the novel’s conclusion, unable to link the social gift of her piano-playing with the possibility it offers her for personal expression. 2 Other works from the period are more explicit about the dangers of the female pianist in modernist culture: in James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), the ambitious Mrs Kearney jostles her piano-playing daughter into an uncomfortable spotlight. Here we find an anxiety about the female musician as a public spectacle, and a fear of the porous boundary between the amateur and professional. Willa Cather’s short story ‘A Wagner Matinee’ (1904) presents a particularly unsettling meditation on a similar theme. The story’s narrator takes her elderly aunt to a chamber