Refiguring the Binary, Breaking the Cycle: Rebecca West as Feminist Modernist

Abstract

Rebecca West wrote her way into the major cultural dilemmas of the twentieth century: suffrage, socialism, women's employment, sexual liberation, war, treason, and communism. She grappled constantly with the laws of patriarchy, and was obsessed with dualism. Deconstructionist and feminist critics have come to regard the binary principle as fundamental to Western thought, lending importance to West's engagement with this structure.' West has been appreciated and anthologized by materialist feminists for her early, outspoken, even pugnacious liberal feminism,2 but she has not been considered sufficiently within the context of modernism. The view of West as a buffeter and battler goes back to Virginia Woolf, who used the phrase in her diary to define the difference in their personalities, as well as her respect for the public, active role West was taking in Parliament, where West had just testified for married women's rights to earn (Woolf, Diary, 4: 261). The feminist activist version of West continues to hold its appeal, as it operates on clear historical ground, and offers hope of problem-solving through political agitation. West's 1914 short story, Indissoluble Matrimony, was worthy of a place in The Norton Anthology of Women Writers because its editors admired its depiction of a socialist, activist woman winning at sex war.3 West's late, stylistically traditional, autobiographical novel The Fountain Overflows (1956) may have appealed to a large female reading audience because of its emphasis on the experience of a talented family of women.4