Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945 by Anna Snaith

Abstract

Anna Snaith’s Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945, is a timely study that illuminates colonial women writers’ foundational role in literary modernism and the ways in which their representations of London disrupt imperial claims to stability. Through her paradigm of the “voyage in,” with its playful reversal of Virginia Woolf ’s The Voyage Out (1915), Snaith focuses on the unprecedented mobility offered by the ship to demonstrate how colonial women writers shaped modernity: “These women were not coming to London solely to experience modernity, they were a constituent part of it” (26). Modernist Voyages is, in short, a story of reversals: a reversal of the traditional route of imperial expansion from London to the colonies, a reversal of London’s assumed influence on colonial literary production, and a reversal of critical conversations and practices. Modernist Voyages participates in the “spatial turn” within the new modernist studies and yet distinguishes itself by restoring the issue of gender to current debates within the field. Feminist scholars of modernist literature, particularly Jane Garrity and Anne Fernald, have critiqued Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz for their dismissal of sexuality and gender as alternate modes of scholarship in “The New Modernist Studies” (2008). Snaith lends her voice to this debate and poignantly summarizes the problem: “It is as though that primarily recuperative project [on modernist women writers in the 1970s–1990s] is now complete, and critical momentum needs to look elsewhere” (10). Feminist recuperation and “critical momentum” are not mutually exclusive, and Snaith’s refrain of “both … and” attempts to address this impasse: these writers were both feminists and anticolonialists, a position that scholars consistently fail to appreciate. Snaith’s deep historical research into the lives of these seven women—Olive Schreiner (South Africa), Sarojini Naidu (India), Sara Jeannette Duncan (Canada), Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand), Jean Rhys (Dominica), Una Marson (Jamaica), and Christina Stead (Australia)—raises provocative methodological questions as she gestures toward a more expansive understanding of literary modernism’s terrains.Uniting the diverse cast of characters in Modernist Voyages are London and the sea, two settings whose importance raises them almost to the status of character in Snaith’s work. In line with Henri Lefebvre’s work on the social production of space, Snaith’s spatial analyses of London trace different topographies that illuminate how various colonies subtend and haunt the unreal city, signaling London’s inherent instability. Instead of reifying London’s position as the facilitator of transnational modernism, then, Snaith’s concentration on these writers’ London years demonstrates how the imperial city fostered both their feminism and anti-imperialism, thus contributing to the destabilization of empire’s ideology. London also epitomizes the criteria by which Snaith designates these writers as “modernist”: “The combined focus on urbanism, capitalism and colonialism in their work constitutes a thoroughgoing consideration of the forms of modernity and its transnational manifestations” (8). In terms of recuperative praxis, finally, the focus on London introduces several writers into the broader category of transnational modernism. For instance, until now Sara Jeannette Duncan and Una Marson have primarily been discussed in the context of either Canadian or Jamaican literature, subordinating each writer’s cosmopolitanism to her national origins.Snaith’s remapping of London is compelling, but her emphasis on the sea as a facilitator of a distinctly feminist transnational modernism proves her most significant accomplishment. Employing Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia from “Of Other Spaces” (1984), she argues that the ship represents a place moving through a hegemonic space and creating a space of resistance. Snaith highlights both the sea’s formative role in each woman’s career and scholars’ tendency to concentrate exclusively on male exiles and their modernist voyages, from James Joyce to V. S. Naipaul. For instance, both Una Marson and C. L. R. James traveled from Jamaica to London in 1932 and both moved within the same literary and political circles in London, yet Marson often remains a footnote in our understanding of transnational modernism while James holds a prominent position as an outspoken political activist and prolific writer. Interest in the sea has regained critical momentum due in large part to renewed interest in Caribbean modernism. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Mary Lou Emery, for instance, have both discussed how the sea allows connections between islands in such far-flung locales as the West Indies and the Pacific, thereby attenuating Europe’s role in their transnational relationship. Snaith’s discussion of the sea suggests that oceanic studies is in desperate need of a feminist intervention, an intervention whose currents carry both recuperative possibilities and “critical momentum.”Here is how Snaith justifies her book’s structure: “In focusing on the London writing of seven colonial women, this study does not pretend to be exhaustive, but instead to offer case studies, each chapter providing readings attuned to the historical and geographical particularities of the country concerned” (17). In not pretending to be exhaustive, Snaith emphasizes that there remains more work to be done. And yet the design of the book, as a series of case studies, seems out of sync with Snaith’s own assertion that recuperative work such as she is doing need not lead to a limited or exclusionary focus. Here her concerns intersect with debates concerning comparison currently abounding within new modernist studies’ spatial turn. The two dominant modes of comparison, generally speaking, are the world-system model, which emphasizes power inequities through its center/periphery binary, and the circulation model, which emphasizes how texts travel and interact with one another outside of a binary worldview. Susan Stanford Friedman has demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches: world-system analysis risks positioning colonial production as derivative of Western ideals, and circulation analysis risks downplaying the historical realities determining artistic production (2012, 501–4). Jed Esty shares Friedman’s concern with circulation analyses, arguing that they run the risk of “turning comparative analysis into an exotic catalogue of pure differences and thus risk an inadequate historical reckoning with the facts and legacies of European/Western power” (2012, 198). Friedman, however, sees potential in these approaches and supplements them with strategic reading practices—revision, recovery, circulation, and collage—in an attempt to render comparative modernist studies more self-conscious.Modernist Voyages attempts to conflate these two approaches: the reversal of the center/periphery binary illuminates alternate routes in which texts circulated, thus forming heterotopic spaces for colonial resistance attuned to the historical realities of British imperialism. Snaith’s case study methodology undoubtedly respects particularity—Una Marson’s struggles to find housing and gainful employment upon arriving in London in 1932 are not exactly similar to the experiences of Katherine Mansfield arriving in 1908. But while Snaith’s series of case studies avoids easy generalizations and returns our attentions to stories lost in previous accounts, does it provide the necessary basis from which to rethink gender systematically? One might argue that her approach seeks to redress a gender imbalance by merely adding seven more women writers to an ever-growing field of literature.To restore gender to critical conversations within a field requires defining the field, which raises a corollary problem: with what scale are we measuring the field? Snaith opts for a transnational approach because, she contends, the imperial project itself was predicated upon promoting certain notions of womanhood (11). In her chapters on Olive Schreiner’s posthumously published From Man to Man (1926) and Sara Jeannette Duncan’s Cousin Cinderella (1908), she considers how the marriage market operates analogously to international trade markets, treating women as commodities. Snaith writes, “The market encourages competition between women: as commodities themselves their only option is to devalue others. Women betray each other to ensure their elevated position on the market” (52). Here is a moment wherein a more rigorous comparative approach could yield new ways in which to think of gender, but in which “critical momentum” is impeded because the discussion only initially engages Schreiner. When Snaith does gesture toward a parallel between Schreiner and Duncan, it reads as repetitive instead of as a rigorous new way to rethink issues of gender in this period (97).The case study design thus may be too cautious, too self-aware about the pitfalls of comparative modernisms. This presents a serious obstacle for scholars, such as Snaith, invested in returning the issue of gender to the center of the new modernist studies. In terms of design and presentation of argument, Jessica Berman’s Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (2011) provides a potential counter model, establishing a comparativist reading practice in its first half before turning to a series of case studies in its second. Berman’s “transnational optic” also reads canonical figures such as James Joyce alongside Mulk Raj Anand to suggest new constellations attuned to anticolonial specificity (28). By beginning with a comparative reading practice, Berman invigorates her case studies and encourages the reader to consider new constellations for the figures she recuperates.Snaith also employs intertextual analysis to recalibrate the coordinates of literary modernism spatially and temporally. For instance, she references W. B. Yeats’s influence on Sarojini Naidu when both attended the Rhymers’ Club and the echoes in Marson’s poem “Nostalgia” of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (72–80, 154). Similarly, Snaith calls for critical editions of Jean Rhys’s densely allusive work because “only when we have scholarly editions of Rhys’s texts will the range and subtlety of her politics emerge” (151). Her study might have benefited from an even more sustained attention to intertextual analysis, whose benefits have been demonstrated in recent work by Christopher GoGwilt and Wai Chee Dimock.But although the design of Modernist Voyages has its limitations, the content is full of rich historical information, and its chapters engage in some of the most current critical conversations in the new modernist studies. In “Katherine Mansfield: Colonial Modernism and the Magazines,” Snaith focuses on Mansfield’s early New Zealand stories published in London magazines, specifically The New Age and Rhythm, and reads Mansfield’s problematic identification with indigenous people within the framework of anticolonialism, making clear Mansfield’s entanglements within the matrix of gender and colonialism. In line with Saikat Majumdar’s rejection of the idea that Mansfield’s aesthetic development is predicated upon Europe and her depictions of urban life, Snaith boldly contends, “the debates about her experimental aesthetics in which she participated were conducted in and through her negotiation of her cultural identity” (114). Through close readings of Mansfield’s Urewera Notebook, which details a 1907 trip the author took along the northern shore of New Zealand, Snaith illuminates Mansfield’s awareness of the complications in colonial representations, whether of herself or of the Maori people. Snaith’s readings of “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped,” “The Woman at the Store,” and “Je ne parle pas français” trace recurring issues of childhood (sexual) agency in new, bold ways that radically challenge conventional readings. Briefly, Snaith contends that Mansfield benefits from the child’s inability to articulate racial difference in conventional language, which enables her to present a perspective free from racist discourse.Regardless of how one currently defines the field of modernist studies, there seems to be an implicit understanding that discussion of Jean Rhys is required. Although some invocations of Rhys share uncomfortable parallels with earlier turns to Woolf and Stein as the token woman, at least studies of Rhys must contend with her racial ambiguities. In “Jean Rhys: A Savage from the Cannibal Islands,” Snaith considers how Rhys’s precarious position offers a way to remap the topography of London. Rhys, along with Una Marson, provides an opportunity to consider global and planetary modernism(s) since different imperial powers possessed Dominica (133). Following Mary Lou Emery’s identification of the plantation as the “matrix of modernity” (57) that paradoxically marginalizes the plantation workers who are central to the global economy, Snaith argues that Voyage in the Dark (1934) cultivates an analogous position for its protagonist, Anna Morgan, as she walks the streets of London: “The voyage between them [Dominica and England] is not a seamless one, but a jarring code-switching given the ways in which each space has produced the other” (140). Snaith goes on to demonstrate how Rhys’s racial politics destabilize hierarchies, perform blackness to render visible the West Indies in London, and, finally, perform gendered blackness to illuminate how gender is defined around the ideal of the “Englishwoman” (134–35). Snaith’s historical and biographical insights into Rhys will be especially useful to students and scholars encountering the writer’s work for the first time.In “Una Marson: ‘Little Brown Girl’ in a ‘White, White City,’” Snaith demonstrates the necessity of feminist historicist work as she works to incorporate Jamaican poet, playwright, and political activist Una Marson into conversations within the new modernist studies. Gestures to Marson abound, but few scholars have engaged her work in any sustained manner. In this chapter, Snaith stakes her claim in Marson scholarship by offering an insightful look at Marson’s four-year stay in London from 1932 to 1936: her interactions with the Gold Coast Delegation, her play “At What a Price?” (which was the first West End production staged by a black woman), her work with the British Commonwealth League, and finally her work at the BBC contributing to George Orwell’s Voice broadcast and founding Caribbean Voices. Snaith situates Marson alongside feminists such as Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby without ever losing sight of her particularity as a black colonial woman. For Marson scholars, this chapter is particularly useful since Snaith concentrates on manuscripts and publications that are hard to obtain outside the United Kingdom.Heretofore I have been considering Modernist Voyages in terms of major theoretical questions that subtend critical conversations within the new modernist studies: ethics of comparison, field definition, methodology. But there is one practical problem that remains to be addressed: namely, the accessibility of women’s literature more generally. Snaith calls for critical editions of Rhys’s work, but many of the texts she examines are out of print (or, in the case of Marson’s plays, have never been printed for publication). How can scholars return issues of gender to the new modernist studies if there is limited access to writing by women? All hope is not lost, however. In “Making It New: Persephone Books and the Modernist Project” (2013) Urmila Seshagiri details Persephone Books, a small publishing house in London founded in 1999 by Nicola Beauman and dedicated to republishing works by neglected women writers. Beauman’s explicit aim of printing forgotten women writers, Seshagiri argues, “brings a deliberate transparency to the institutional vectors of literary production, promotion, and circulation” (244). Seshagiri highlights Persephone Books’ republication of Constance Maud’s suffragist novel No Surrender (1911) and Cecily Hamilton’s William, an Englishman (1919) as instances of how reprinting forgotten women writers brings to light histories that have been overlooked. If the suffragist history of England itself is left out of our analyses because texts are out of print, then what stories and forgotten histories of colonial women writers await recovery?While Snaith’s chapters on Schreiner, Sarojini, Duncan, and Stead also contain many insights, I chose to concentrate on the ones on Rhys, Mansfield, and Marson for an additional reason. In 1984 the feminist scholar Erika Smilowitz completed her PhD dissertation, entitled “Marson, Rhys, and Mansfield,” at the University of New Mexico. Throughout the 1980s she published articles, especially on Rhys and Marson, that served as introductions for these writers into studies of twentieth-century literature. While new modernist scholars can (and should) commend themselves for recent innovations and redefinitions of the field that account for different modernities and different modernisms, we should not lose sight of the fact that it has taken thirty years for these three writers to be recognized as modernist. And, what’s more, in thirty years we still do not have critical editions of Jean Rhys’s interwar fictions, while much of Una Marson’s oeuvre remains out of print. This alone makes a strong case for the significance of continued feminist scholarship, as well as the debt of gratitude we owe Snaith for Modernist Voyages.