Broken Gifts: May Sinclair, Modernism, and the Motif of Exchange
p. 229-244
Texte intégral
1This chapter arises from the work of the Edinburgh May Sinclair Critical Editions Project: a series of annotated scholarly editions, or themed tranches, on Sinclair’s work that emphasise the author’s multi-disciplinarity as well as her place within literary modernism.1 My discussion focuses specifically on Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), which as Rebecca Bowler argues, is the novel that most emphatically ‘marks the transition between the fin-de-siècle novels of the young May Sinclair and her later modernist efforts’ (Bowler and Drewery 139). Reading against the grain of extant scholarship that reflects a preoccupation with Sinclair’s aesthetic of sublimation, my work calls attention to the pile of objects that circulate as gifts alongside the protagonist’s mystical visions in the novel.2 I argue that the first section of the novel, titled ‘Infancy’, is rooted in the language of the gift: a critical manoeuvre that, à la Rebecca Colesworthy, can be read as a distinctively modernist phenomenon. Yet, it remains the case that broken and seemingly negative gifts dominate the proceedings of the section. My article examines such failed or fractured acts of gift-giving in Sinclair’s fiction and locates them within post-war theorisations on the gift. While anthropologists like Marcel Mauss or modernists like Virginia Woolf and Hilda Doolittle are typically credited with ushering in the theoretical revival of the gift in the twentieth century, my readings show that they were hardly alone in their endeavours. I suggest that Mary Olivier reveals traces of a valuable pre-theorisation of the gift on Sinclair’s part: one that demonstrates how Sinclair’s contributions to literary modernism extend beyond her experimentations with the psychological novel. I conclude by arguing that rhetoric and motifs of gift-giving offer fresh potential for investigating Sinclair’s place within the twentieth-century literary canon or the broad tradition of modernist women’s writing.
‘Clinging to Objects’3
2Sinclair’s allegiances, as Suzanne Raitt points out in her biography of the author, were often ‘complex and contradictory’ (2). Such contradictions play out poignantly in both Sinclair’s fiction and non-fiction that bring together disparate concerns and are replete with negotiations between the embodied and the corporeal self; the physical world and the mystical higher self of consciousness; the spiritual and the abject; subjectivity and objectivity. In their introduction to May Sinclair: Rethinking Bodies and Minds, Rebecca Bowler and Claire Drewery similarly remark: ‘Sinclair was preoccupied throughout her life with precisely this invisible and slippery border between the inner and outer self’ (6). The tension between interiority and exteriority is perhaps best exemplified in the first two sections of Mary Olivier that reveal a young Mary’s struggle with her environment, a sense of clinging to objects, and a reckoning with the limitations of her physical and domestic world. The ‘Infancy’ section of the novel, in particular, reveals a claustrophobic proliferation of objects that exist in sharp contrast with the mystical bent of the later sections. Sinclair develops these objects as catalysts for intersubjective reactions that subsume their initial definition as vectors of externality and otherness. She presents us with a veritable range of objects in these pages: Mary’s bed and cot; wooden rings that ‘turned into squab faces smeared with green’; the ‘stiff white counterpane’ that Mary played with; Jenny’s ‘doll and donkey’; the ’iron railing of the cot’ that Mary poked with her fingers; the ‘lashing flourishes of the ironwork’ she tip-fingered; the green knob that ‘winked and grinned’ at Mary from the railing; the ‘curleykew’ at the end of the bed; and the white globes above the dinner table that Mary perceived as ‘hanging, shining globes’ (3–4). Sinclair’s text develops objects as tied up with affective and sensory phenomena: that is, as things that matter beyond their tangible limits. They bear distinct echoes with the sensory, felt, concrete object in Melanie Klein’s work that underpins experience and elicits a multi-faceted set of associations.4 Much like Klein, Sinclair seems interested in the centrality of objects for psychical processing and their role in the gestation of human subjectivity. The novel goes on to emphasise further links between the material and the maternal that could be read in line with Klein’s observations on the mother’s symbolic breast as ‘the first internal object’ (Barratt 9). Sinclair writes:
Mamma’s breast: a smooth, cool, round thing that hung to your hands and slipped from them when they tried to hold it. You could feel the little ridges of the stiff nipple as your finger pushed it back to the breast.
Her sobs shook in her throat and ceased suddenly. (4; italics mine)
3The line echoes Klein’s observations on the infant-breast relation. Following Freud, Klein regarded the breast-object as the first creation: the original source of creativity as well as a psychic creation in the mind of the infant.5 The Kleinian infant conjures a feeding breast as ‘the first manifestation of creativeness’ (201). In Envy and Gratitude (1975), Klein writes: ‘(i)n this fundamental relation the infant receives not only the gratification he desires but feels that he is being kept alive’ (201). In Playing and Reality (1971), D.W. Winnicott further elaborates on the links between creativity and the maternal breast. ‘The breast’, Winnicott writes, ‘is created by the infant over and over again out of the infant’s capacity to love’ (13). Young Mary’s encounter with the milk-giving breast echoes Winnicott’s later observations on the transitional object as ‘the first possession’: an object that is neither entirely a subjective internal object nor an objective external object (Winnicott 90). Mary’s encounter with the milk-giving breast can similarly be regarded as an experience with a transitional object that paradoxically affirms the subject’s sense of ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ (89). The encounter is characterised by anxiety (fear of loss); sorrow (loss of the breast-object from which the child must eventually be weaned); and frustration (a desire to attribute the loss to somebody or something). The passages bind together the emotional, experiential/sensory, and physical dimensions of young Mary’s life. Sinclair seems to be probing the emotional mobility and performative elasticity of objects: their ability to simultaneously affirm and challenge the subject’s sovereignty.
4The inundation of objects in the opening pages of Mary Olivier is a striking depiction for a writer for whom perfect, disembodied happiness—rather than earthly, material ties—seemed entwined with the creative genius. But these passages might also be read as astute observations of modernity under capitalism and contain some of her most intriguing literary—and feminist—contributions to the modernist archive. As Douglas Mao observes in Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (1998), the ‘feeling of regard for the physical object as object—as not-self, as not-subject, as most helpless and will-less of entities, but also as fragment of Being’ is a recognisably modernist technique (4). Noëlle Cuny and Xavier Kalck’s Modernist Objects (2020) similarly puts objects at the heart of the modernist project: one that was poised on acknowledgements of the insecurity of the subject as the pre-eminent source of epistemological productivity. It was in the twentieth century, Cuny and Kalck write in their introduction, that objects were seen as taking on a ‘life of their own, irremediably and threateningly deepening the gap between the self and outer materiality’ (11). Through legacies of the surrealist objet trouvé and Duchampian readymades; strategies of the neo-avant-garde; the rise of the Minimalist object and its later de-materialisation into a range of conceptual and process-based works, one discerns a steady focus on objects as entities worthy of preservation and contemplation. Sinclair’s text reveals an attentiveness to this chequered history. Her text demonstrates an attempt to synthesise different traditions: ranging from the modernist fascination with objects to her own early interest in psychoanalytic theory and sublimation.
5It is, however, a particular kind of object that finds repeated mention in the ‘Infancy’ section of Mary Olivier. That object is the gift: an object that ‘exceeds the bounds of commerce’ and defies economic notions of necessity (Colesworthy 116). In her monograph titled Returning the Gift, Rebecca Colesworthy argues that questions ‘of what a gift is and of what modernism is—are deeply interrelated’ (2). Focusing on a series of works by early twentieth-century writers like H.D., Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Rhys, Colesworthy elaborates how questions of ‘what a gift is, what it means, what it does, what it could be, and even what it should be’ were central to the modernist aesthetic project (2). Her book goes on to show how rhetorics and figurations of gift-giving ‘consistently served as vehicles for representing modern social life’ after the crisis of the First World War (2). In his influential work of 1925, The Gift—originally published as Essai sur le don in L’Année sociologique—anthropologist Marcel Mauss similarly elaborates how discourses of giving and exchange took shape in relation to the devastation and disillusionment brought about in Europe by the wars. Mauss was a committed socialist who wrote Essai sur le don as a surge of cooperative and socialist movements took place after the First World War. Colesworthy traces the shift in his social consciousness back to the ‘cooperative movement and the rise of new labour policies’ (23) in the early twentieth century: indisputable social facts that entailed a rethinking of the politics of the marketplace. In The Return of the Gift: European History of a Global Idea (2011), Harry Liebersohn similarly observes: ‘the crisis of World War I, with its breakdown of elementary civilities within and across state borders [. . .] provoked a quest for new forms of solidarity’ (167). For Mauss, this quest led to the identification of alternate systems of exchange that are different from the wage labour relation: capitalist forms of contract that are morally repulsive because of the alienation they cause in workers. ‘The theory of the gift’, Mauss thus writes in his foreword, is a ‘theory of human solidarity’ (xiii). ‘A gift’, he continues, ‘that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction’ (x).
6Having served as a war correspondent in Belgium in 1914, Sinclair is certainly no stranger to the ‘immense vortex of the War’ and its longer-term effects on society or the psychic life of the individual (Sinclair 1917, 188). Much like Mauss, her writing—particularly between 1914 and 1918—pays significant attention to the shifting ideas around national culture and citizenship in Britain in the early twentieth century.6 However, as early as September 1908—almost two decades before Mauss’s publication of the intellectual history of the gift—Sinclair had already published her short story titled ‘The Gift’ in Fortnightly Review.7 The text focuses on immaterial rather than material gifts: gifts of the mind and character, and uses them to grapple with the varied ethics and politics of modernism. Mary Olivier, similarly, displays a prolific reserve of imaginative and critical thinking on the notion of the gift. Not only does Sinclair anticipate the post-war intellectual turn to the gift that would place the notion at the heart of public debates during the 1920s, but her writing also allows us to retrospectively rewrite our engagement with questions of gift-giving. In this regard, it bears mentioning that Mary Olivier casts women as desiring subjects and participants in gift-exchange, which excavates a distinctively feminist contribution to the notion of the gift. In her book, Colesworthy gestures to the patriarchal bent of anthropological theories of the gift. She writes:
Gift theory has tended either to identify woman with the gift itself or to fetishize feminine generosity for its nominally exceptional status with respect to the market, its place outside commerce and, by extension, civil society. In so doing, this theory has reinforced a patriarchal ideology of separate spheres and, with it, a sexual division of labor. (6)
7In Mauss’s work, for instance, such androcentrism is historically justified, given that his work is largely based on archaic and indigenous societies in which women feature as less than full social actors. Marilyn Strathern’s powerful feminist anthropological analysis in The Gender of the Gift (1988) similarly draws attention to the fact that men and women are indeed placed differently when it comes to gift-exchange in (indigenous) societies. Strathern writes: ‘it seems clear that men are exchange partners, while women guarantee or are in some sense a cause of their being so linked’ (68). Only men, in these societies, transform value by converting raw material into gifts. They remain in charge of the political sphere, their production linked directly with the maintaining and upkeep of political hierarchy. Women, on the other hand, are confined to domestic activities and remain cut off ‘from the social world of men’ (74). Such androcentrism also resurfaces in structuralist and poststructuralist discourses. Lévi-Strauss famously declared in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) that woman is ‘the supreme gift’ and is exchanged among men as the most archetypal form of reciprocity (65). In The Gift (1983), Lewis Hyde similarly reinforces a sexist ideology of separate spheres with his claim that gifts—by virtue of their excessiveness—bear ‘a mark of the female gender’ (141).
8Mary Olivier allows us to reverse the terms of this debate. Sinclair’s female characters are delineated as desiring subjects who possess buying power and are placed at the forefront of social, economic, and political participation. Shopping, Erika Diane Rapport suggests in her book, was also crucial to women’s entry into the public sphere at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (1999) she writes: ‘[d]uring a period in which a family’s respectability and social position depended upon the idea that the middle-class wife and daughter remain apart from the market, politics, and public space, the female shopper was an essentially disruptive figure’ (54). In the early twentieth century, suffragists in Britain and the United States also frequently leveraged women’s status as primary buyers of the household, arguing that their competence as consumers would translate into competence at the polls. Even though the status of consumption remains highly charged and incredibly complex in Sinclair’s works, the efficacy of this move as a political strategy must be taken seriously. Sinclair was a profoundly rigorous thinker of equality and exchange. Already in 1912, she had published her essay titled Feminism for the Women Writer’s Suffrage League and had justified the political sensibilities of suffragettes and suffragists to secure equality for women on all fronts. Sinclair’s essay, Wendy Truran writes, ‘addressed the sexual double bind constraining women as either over- or under sexed; what Mina Loy calls the “division of women into two classes—the mistress, & the mother”’ (Loy 154 qtd. in Truran). In ‘“Dying to Live”: Remembering and Forgetting May Sinclair’, Raitt similarly remarks on Sinclair’s feminism: ‘[d]uring the wave of feminist recovery in the early 1980s, Virago Press reissued Mary Olivier, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean and The Three Sisters with introductions by Jean Radford in their Modern Classics series’ (23). In what follows, I argue that it is this contrary thinking in Sinclair’s work that provides the critical framework for reassessing the political stakes of the gift in modernism: a period that also incidentally had a deeply troubled relationship to the market.
Broken Gifts
9The gift appears to sight as an event in the opening pages of Mary Olivier. ‘Aunt Charlotte’, Sinclair writes, ‘had sent the Isle of Skye terrier to Dank’ (10). The text had previously framed Charlotte through notions of excess. Sinclair writes:
Aunt Charlotte sent things. She sent the fat valentine with the lace paper border and black letters printed on the sweet-smelling white satin that Papa threw into the fire, and the white China doll with black hair and blue eyes and no clothes on that Jenny hid in the nursery cupboard. (10)
10Similarly:
You never know when Aunt Charlotte mightn’t send something. She forgot your birthday and sometimes Christmas; but to make up for that, she remembered in between. Every time she was going to be married she remembered. Sarah the cat came too long after Mark’s twelfth birthday to be his birthday present. There was no message with her except that Aunt Charlotte was going to be married and didn’t want her anymore. Whenever Aunt Charlotte was going to be married she sent you something she didn’t want. (12)
11In her article on Sinclair’s female characters, Leslie de Bont writes: ‘Sinclair’s modernism focuses on portraying the psychological singularity and “misfit femininity” of her heroines, and on showing their maladaptation to public discourses’ (de Bont 60). The framing of Charlotte’s character through notions of excess symbolically works to remind us of her outsider status in 1920s Britain and of the male authority to which she is subjected. As an unmarried, older woman, Charlotte is positioned outside the heteronormative, coupled, feminine norm that is produced and replicated through discourses of power.8 Single feminine subjectivity, in this regard, is stigmatised as abject: a notion that is in itself built on connotations of excess. As Julia Kristeva argues in Powers of Horror (1982), the concept of abjection remains rooted in the fluid outpourings of the (maternal) female body.9 As an abject feminine other, the single or unmarried woman is deemed whimsical and excessive: a body that must be cast out for it exceeds the heteronormative matrix. Sinclair’s depiction of Charlotte thus riffs on the failure of the social system to incorporate women—in particular ‘surplus’ women—who threaten social order and cohesion.
12The notion of the gift is similarly associated with the law of the excess. In his treatise on the gift, Jacques Derrida remains particularly attentive to the excessive nature of the gift, or its tendency to evade valuation and measurement. The gift, as Derrida understands it, stands in excess of utilitarian economics or utilitarian visions of capitalism. He writes: ‘[t]he gift, if there is any, will always be without border [. . .] A gift that does not run over its borders, a gift that would let itself be contained in a determination and limited by the indivisibility of an identifiable trait would not be a gift’ (91). But the gift is also associated with power and prestige. Mauss’s fieldwork for Essai takes him to scenes surrounding the potlatch practices of indigenous cultures, which are extreme forms of gift-exchange or a ‘totalized competitive giving’ in which gifts are destroyed and burnt at the stake to outrank the donor. Charlotte’s gifts that are thrown into the fire by Mary’s father might be read in line with Mauss’s conception of the ‘agonistic potlatch’: a practice that revolves around ‘big men whose practices of exchange serve to establish the rank and relation of identification-based masculine groups’ (Colesworthy 6). However, it bears mentioning that Sinclair anticipates—by almost two decades—the notion that Mauss would later frame as his ethnographic point of departure. Sinclair also reverses the terms of the debate by which gift-giving is traditionally regarded as the sole property of men. Writing at a time when women had taken to the streets as shoppers, suffragettes, social reformers, and labourers, Sinclair allows her female characters to come into relief as fully realised subjects who participate in gift-giving and social recognition: subjects who are even bound by systems of exchange for which the laws of political economy cannot fully account for. Sinclair’s account might thus retrospectively be regarded as an alternate discourse of the gift. Her contribution is distinctively literary and feminist: one that reveals the insufficiency of extant discourses of the gift that fail to take into account the agency of women as donors and equal participants in exchange.
13Through gifts, Sinclair ratifies the vision of the subject as a being who permeates the world as much as she is permeated by it. The various gifts described in Mary Olivier are by turns personal and interpersonal. Most of these gifts that circulate in the novel revolve around young Mary: she is the web of relations that she inhabits and is, in turn, inhabited by it. By trying to enter the world of gift-objects, Mary enters a world of relationality. The fact of her being ineluctably implicated in such relations might offer a helpful rejoinder to the self-proclaimed individualism of high modernism. In her chapter of Sinclair, Sanna Melin Schyllert writes: ‘Sinclair’s texts written around the time of the war exhibit the opposition between the needs of the community and that of the individual, which is an issue that comes to the fore in times of national crisis’ (191). Sinclair was actively negotiating the place of the individual within the community in her writings during and after the First World War. In A Defence of Idealism (1917), Sinclair similarly stresses the importance of selfhood and individuality as only one stage—and not the highest or the most important stage—in the dynamic process of psychological development. The problematisation of unfettered individualism also appears in Mauss’s theory of the gift in which the latter appears as vehicle of communistic mutuality. Mauss’s theorisations are prompted largely by his own ego-shattering experiences of the war. Grappling from the experiences of World War I, Mauss turns away from the ‘brutish pursuit’ of individual ends that is unsustainable and ultimately rebounds on the individual itself (Mauss 76). Sinclair’s focus on relationality via the gift is matched with Mauss’s check against excessive individualism. Both writers—separated by time and place—strives to maintain a delicate balance between egoism and altruism and worked to further the revolution of the gift to which their work calls attention.
Pharmakon
14Mary Olivier, however, also raises the additional question of what counts or should count as gift. Much like Tib, the Skye Terrier who was sent as a gift, we also encounter Sarah the cat who was sent as Mark’s birthday present. The idea of sending animals as gifts reveals, I argue, Sinclair’s ambivalence about gifts and the sacralisation of giving. Failed, awkward, and fractured exchanges dominate the first two sections of the novel. Charlotte’s gifts are burnt and hidden; Tibby was sent back to Charlotte and later run over; Mary received a lamb who arrived dead with its ‘body drawn out and knotted like an enormous maggot’ (20). ‘It lay twisted’, Sinclair writes, ‘to one side and its eyes were shut’ (20). Scenes of excessive violence play out during the reception and exchange of gifts. Recall the scene of the dying lamb: ‘something lay on the floor wrapped in a piece of dirty blanket. When Uncle Edward pushed back the blanket a bad smell came out’ (20). Later passages include two Civil War songs and rhymes that deliberately go awry after Tibby is exchanged as a gift: ‘John Brown’s body lies a-rotting in his grave/John Brown’s body lies a-rotting in his grave—’ (11). Roddy continues: ‘And from his nose and to his chin/The worms crawled out and the worms crawled in’ (12).
15These are atypical images of infancy and childhood that are engendered in Sinclair’s texts through broken or toxic gifts. Gifts in Mary Olivier are thus not just associated with relationality and nurture. They are also associated with anxiety and aggression affects that haunt the first two sections of the novel. As discussed earlier, Charlotte’s gift of a naked doll highlights the ‘misfit femininity’ of Sinclair’s female characters (Wilson 49). Indeed, after Charlotte gives Mary the doll, Mary has two dreams: one in which Charlotte is naked and gives her another doll; and another in which Charlotte stands in the exact same place and gives Mary a secret gift.10 The repetition at work in these pages emphasises Charlotte’s maladaptation to Victorian values and rigid constructions of femininity. Yet the image of naked dolls and dead babies could also be read, as Charlotte Beyer points out, as Sinclair’s depiction of the grim realities of baby farming and ‘the dark repressed side of Victorian maternity’ (157). Beyer explains the process in greater detail:
Baby-farmers either sold children to childless couples for a profit, or sold children on to poorer baby-farmers for a smaller fee and pocketed the difference. Others kept their adopted babies in farming conditions until they died from disease, neglect, starvation or murder. (Cossins 68 qtd. in Beyer)
16Naked dolls in Mary Olivier could thus symbolically point to the plight of these infants—the misery, neglect and social isolation they faced—as part of the baby-farming practice in England. Charlotte’s awkward and failed gifts allow Sinclair to constantly negotiate the terms of gift-giving and exchange and explore unchartered territories within the context of modernist fiction. The toxic and atypical gifts that circulate in Mary Olivier through bodies of naked dolls and dead animals would, however, later be theorised in Given Time as the pharmakon. In his excursus on the gift, Derrida juxtaposes the affirmative condition implied by the word with the full force of its negativity: as poison. Attending to the etymological underpinnings of the gift, Derrida repeatedly draws attention to its connotations as ‘pharmakon or a poisoned present’ (36). He reminds us that the word is derived from its Latin equivalent dosis that translates to ‘a dose of poison’ (36). The gift, for Derrida, is therefore not an object of supreme value. Rather, it upholds ambivalence as value. The ambivalence of the gift inheres in the difficulty of reconciling its opposing urgencies. Derrida continues: ‘[the gift] will not simplify things [. . .] and will redouble endlessly not only through semantic ambivalence [. . .] but also the ambivalence of the gift as good and bad, as gift and poison’ (81; italics in original).
17Sinclair’s attention to the ambivalences of gift-giving might reveal a remarkable early theorisation of the pharmakon on her part. Toxic and broken gifts in Mary Olivier are, I argue, markers of anxiety that haunt Sinclair’s fiction. They reflect the changing relationship of young Mary to her newly discovered environment and underscore the vulnerability of the infantile body. In trying to enter the world of relationality, Sinclair’s protagonist is repeatedly brought up against its opposites that manifest through broken and toxic gifts. As Klein wrote in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, for every child ‘things represent human beings, and therefore objects of anxiety’ (213). Damage to external things can seem to constitute ‘a rent in the fabric of the world’ (211–212). If Klein’s formulation demonstrates situations in which anxiety becomes thinkable—as a productive, psychical tool to think with—Mary Olivier, I argue, urges us to think about situations in which anxiety may equally be ‘thingable’: that is, ‘experienced as external, material objects’ (Barratt 11). My article is an attempt to capture what I take to be Sinclair’s investment in thinking with exchange: her investment in thinking in ways that are conceptually coextensive with—and even anticipate—modernist writing about the gift. In situating her Bildungsroman novel within post-war thinking about the gift, my objective here has been to expand and revise our historical and theoretical framework for conceptualising Sinclairian fiction; and to lay the literary groundwork for a reappraisal of her relationship with materiality.
Conclusion
18Sinclair’s attention to the politics of the gift thus suggests that she might have been one of the earliest writers who diversified, complicated, and modernised the field of gift discourse in the early twentieth century. As Colesworthy mentions, it is Woolf—a writer who had more in common with Sinclair than she liked to admit—who is solely discussed in light of gift theories within modernist studies. Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) was published the same year as Mauss’s Essai: a text that, as Colesworthy argues, ‘represents modern experience as an experience of gift exchange’ (18). Colesworthy reads Woolf’s and Mauss’s responses to the gift as ‘analogous’, as both writers share an interest in the fate of the social under capitalism (37). A similar interest in the gift can be traced back to H.D.’s writing—in particular, her memoir titled The Gift—that was written in London during World War II.11 As Colesworthy later writes, gifts in H.D.’s writing remain ‘limned with danger’ (Colesworthy 2018, 222): much like the toxic gifts in Sinclair’s Mary Olivier, H.D.’s gifts are often ‘shadowed by danger and uncertainty’ and are exchanged with anxiety surrounding their potential loss or failure (10). In Modernist Objects, Nonia Williams similarly calls attention to Gertrude Stein’s love of broken objects: that is, ‘breakable, cheap objects’ whose value lies in their destruction and erasure (220). These objects, Williams explains, help complicate the ‘modernist aesthetics of absence’ as they remain perpetually in deferral (221). Williams reads The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas with particular focus on broken objects that are ‘more to be remembered than to be kept hold of’ (221). Stein’s text allows her to theorise the ways in which modernist women’s writing illuminates ‘an aesthetics grounded in deferral rather than immediacy, absence rather than plenitude’ through broken, lost, or forgotten objects (221). Yet, even before any of these twentieth-century texts were published, Sinclair had already engaged more widely and deeply with questions of the gift than many of her fellow modernist writers. Situating Sinclair within the discourse of the gift reveals that her influence on modernist women writers might have been more extensive than her experimentation with the stream of consciousness label. As I hope to have shown, Sinclair’s work needs to be reappraised as having made a more significant and lasting contribution to modernism than has been previously acknowledged. The focus on the gift allows us to assess the originality of Sinclair’s fiction and place her aesthetics more firmly within the experimental and modernist tradition.
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Notes de bas de page
1 The Edinburgh May Sinclair Critical Editions Project, led by Rebecca Bowler and Claire Drewery, will be published in themed tranches: ‘Philosophy and Mysticism’, ‘Psychology and Genius’, ‘Women, War and Feminism’, ‘Social Satire’ and ‘Social Realism’. My work as a Research Assistant on the critical editions project focused exclusively on the first tranche and looked into the collection of Sinclair papers acquired by the University of Sussex Special Collections at The Keep, Brighton in 2019. This article arises from archival and editorial work conducted for the critical editions during my role as a researcher in the same year. For more information on the critical editions, see: https://maysinclairsociety.com/2017/08/22/, last accessed on June 18, 2023.
2 For scholarship on Sinclair’s work on sublimation, see Drewery 2017. Sublimation forms the crux of Sinclair’s work on psychoanalysis and appears in a number of essays in the collection. Also see de Bont 2017. For Sinclair’s own work on sublimation, see Sinclair 1916a and 1916b.
3 The phrase derives from Melanie Klein’s Observations after an Operation. For an excellent analysis of Klein’s text, see Harriet Barratt, 2021.
4 See for instance Melanie Klein 1997. As Barratt argues in her article, the ‘sensory, felt, concrete object in Klein’s work and in psychoanalytic theory more widely has too often faded from view, with Christopher Bollas calling for more attention to be given to a material object’s status as a “thing-in-itself” with a “specific character” and “its own integrity”’ (3) (Barratt 3–4, 11–12).
5 Freud located the origins of sexuality and self-preservation at the site of the mother’s breast. In ‘Findings, Ideas, Problems’, he writes: ‘A child’s first erotic object is the mother’s breast that nourishes it; love has its origin in attachment to the satisfied need for nourishment’ (Freud 1938, 188). Also see Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 23 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1905), 123–246.
6 See in particular May Sinclair’s A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915) and ‘Women’s Sacrifices for the War’, Woman at Home, 67, 7–11.
7 Sinclair’s short story was also published, with decorations by W.E. Spader, in The American Magazine in 1908.
8 For scholarship on the heteronormative matrix, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990) and Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry 8.4 (1982): 777–795, https://doi.org/10.1086/448181, last accessed on July 23, 2023.
9 Julia Kristeva defines the abject as that which lies ‘beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable’ and overruns borders (Kristeva 4). In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler identifies ‘abject zones’ as that which are liminal and marginalised, outside the identificatory spaces of the majority’ (Butler 186). In Essais de Sociologie, Georges Bataille similarly describes the abject through notions of excess. Abjection, Bataille argues, is occasioned by ‘the inability to assume with sufficient strength the imperative act of excluding’ (Bataille 217).
10 For an analysis of these dreams and Charlotte’s gift of dolls, see Leslie de Bont, ‘Portrait of the Female Character as a Psychoanalytical Case: The Ambiguous Influence of Freud on May Sinclair’s Novels’ in May Sinclair: Re-Thinking Bodies and Minds, eds. Rebecca Bowler and Claire Drewery (Edinburgh UP, 2017), 59–78, 70–71, 73.
11 The publication history of The Gift has been fraught. It was started in 1940, as bombs routinely rained down around the London apartment where H.D. lived with her partner, Bryher, and daughter, Perdita, and was finally completed in 1944.
Auteur
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Shalini Sengupta
Shalini Sengupta is a lecturer in Diasporic and/or Black British Literature at Newcastle University, UK.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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