Pen-is-envy: psychoanalysis, feminism, and the woman writer in May Sinclair's Mary Olivier

Abstract

May Sinclair took the risk of using psychoanalysis and the modernist technique of ‘stream of consciousness’ to revise and explore the Victorian world that had shaped her childhood and early youth. This article examines psychoanalysis as Sinclair's instrument to achieve self-realization: in writing her female self through fiction, Sinclair came to terms with the conflicts of her childhood, while redefining herself as a writer and as a woman. The act of writing as a form of sublimation as presented in Sinclair's novel Mary Olivier (1919) will be explored along with Sinclair's own development of the ideas of Freud and Jung. Although it might seem anachronistic to look at the novel in the light of scholars such as Luce Irigaray or Julia Kristeva, this essay would be incomplete if feminist psychoanalytic theory and more recent feminist criticism were not also taken into account. In view of this methodological approach, this paper will attempt to illustrate how Sinclair's inner quest towards adulthood challenged (and succeeded in escaping) domestic imprisonment without actually leaving the home.