Transnational History at Our Backs: A Long View of Larsen, Woolf, and Queer Racial Subjectivity in Atlantic Modernism

Abstract

Transnational History at Our Backs:A Long View of Larsen, Woolf, and Queer Racial Subjectivity in Atlantic Modernism Laura Doyle (bio) Early in her novel Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf makes us privy to a suggestively erotic scene between two men, and in the process she signals her interest in a certain dimension of British history. The title character Jacob Flanders and his friend Will Durrant read Shakespeare and eat lunch together as they sail to the Scilly Isles to visit Durrant's family: [Timmy Durrant] with a sprout of beard, looking sternly at the stars, then at a compass, would have moved a woman. Jacob, of course, was not a woman. The sight of Timmy Durrant was no sight for him, nothing to set against the sky and worship; far from it. They had quarreled. Why the right way to open a tin of beef, with Shakespeare on board, under conditions of such splendour, should have turned them to sulky schoolboys, none can tell ships have been wrecked here.1 Although "none can tell" why two young men might become sulky in a scene presided over by Shakespeare (whom Jacob places even above the Greeks, and Richard Dalloway in Woolf's next novel deplores for his sonnets that invite us to peep through keyholes), and although Woolf's narrator doth protest (too much) about the possibility that Jacob could be moved by the sight of Durrant, most twenty-first-century readers would detect the gay codes (as a circle of Woolf's contemporaries undoubtedly did). Woolf more broadly hints at her gay subtext when she has Jacob undress, swim, and bathe "naked" at the very moment when Shakespeare is knocked overboard, "floating merrily away . . . he went under" (JR, 39). The narrator ends her description with [End Page 531] a vision of "waves breaking unseen by anyone" and the whole bay rising "to heaven in a kind of ecstasy" (ibid.). The ecstasy is, however, quickly followed by (post-coital?) sorrow, so that "the cottage smoke droops, [and] has the look of a mourning emblem, a flag floating its caress over a grave" (ibid.). In Greece, the narrator notes, this "sadness would be routed by strangeness and excitement and the nudge of a classical education,"—in other words, a community of male intimacy—but on the Cornish hills, "the chimneys and the coast-guard stations and the little bays with waves breaking unseen by anyone make one remember the overpowering sorrow." "And what can this sorrow be?" the narrator asks. And then answers: "It comes from the houses on the coast. We start transparent, and then the cloud thickens. All history backs our panes of glass. To escape is vain" (JR, 40). What is this history that clouds the panes of glass and saddens the swimmer? One answer would of course be the legacy of all manner of gendered cruelty. Yet Woolf gives us clues to another, closely related history at the heart of this passage: Atlantic history. It is no coincidence, I will argue, that this is a boat scene, a sea-crossing associated with wrecked ships, the sorrow of which is particularly evoked by coast-guard stations and little bays and waves breaking unseen by anyone—which make one "remember" a sad history. Woolf understands that this history is a long, transnational history, full of perilous sea crossings that often entail a sexual crisis or ruin. A striking number of English-language modernist writers likewise situate their stories of sexual or gender trouble within a transnational, Atlantic history. Here I will ultimately focus on Nella Larsen and Virginia Woolf as two authors who typify this pattern among a number of English-language modernists—such as Rhys, McKay, Stein, Hurston, Forster, and Hemingway, to name a few—whom I will call Atlantic modernists and understand as one kind of geomodernist.2 It is by now a commonplace that modernism probes the formation of the social subject, using literary form to expose or rearrange the subject's social coordinates. For these writers, Atlantic and transnational history provides one crucial set of such coordinates, a historical set. Indeed, attention to the Atlantic dimension of their work may allow us to do fuller...