This thesis reconsiders in detail the connections between a selection of innovative female modernist writers who experimented variously with stream-of-consciousness techniques, May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. It describes in this context the impact of the philosophy and thoughts of both William James and Henri Bergson upon these women writers’ literary work. It also argues for a fundamental revision of existing understandings of this interconnection by considering the feminist context of such work and recognising that the work of these four female writers in effect incorporates a ‘gendered’ reading of James and Bergson (encountered both directly and indirectly through the cultural and intellectual zeitgeist). In establishing a feminist perspective as key elements of their aesthetic the thesis explores the vital influence of existing tradition of female autobiography upon their reception and usage of both James and Bergson. The latter’s impact on such women writers were so distinctive and powerful as the work of these philosophers seemed to speak directly to contemporary feminist concerns and in that context to represent a way of thinking about society and culture. This echoes and has parallels with existing attempts at revisions of patriarchal society and creating new spaces for female independence. In the above context the thesis reviews existing research on the impact of James and Bergson on these four writers and offers new insights into how each of them made use of these two seminal thinkers by analysing the relationship between theories, selected literary and philosophical texts. Stream-of-consciousness ought to be seen as a distinctive, specific tradition connected with feminist concerns and as a way of writing the inner and hidden self, rather than just a narrow formal feature of literary texts; it offers women a continuing, creative exploration of its possibilities as fictional practice. The female modernists included in this account represent the celebrated: Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, together with writers largely and unjustly forgotten in subsequent periods: Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair. However, the thesis demonstrates that such female modernist writers gained much from being part of a range of informal networks, being almost within a tradition in which they learnt, borrowed and reacted to each other; an interconnection that requires new critical recognition.

This thesis investigates a neglected sub-genre of women’s writing, which I have termed the literature of the boarding house. Focusing on unmarried women, this is a study of the alternative rooms ‘of one’s own’ that existed in the nineteen thirties: from the boarding house and hotel, to the bed-sitting room or single room as a paying guest in another family’s house. The 1930s is defined by the conflict between women’s emerging social and economic independence and a dominant ideology that placed increased importance on domesticity, the idea of ‘home’ and women’s place within the familial structure. My research highlights the incompatibility between the idealised images of domestic life that dominated the period and the reality for the single woman living in temporary accommodation. The boarding house existed outside conventional notions of female domestic space with its connotations of stability and family life. Women within the boarding house were not only living outside traditional domestic structures; they were placing themselves outside socially and culturally defined domestic roles. The boarding house was both a new space of modernity, symbolising women’s independence, and a continued imitation of the bourgeois home modelled on rituals of middle-class behaviour. Through an examination of novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Lettice Cooper, Stella Gibbons, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and E. H. Young, this study privileges the literary as a way in which to understand the space of the boarding house. Not only does the boarding house blur the boundaries between public and private space, it also challenges the traditional conceptions of the family home as the sole location of private domestic space. I argue that by placing their characters in the in-between space of the boarding house, the authors can reflect on the liminal spaces that existed for women both socially and sexually. In the literature of the boarding house, the novel becomes a site for representing women’s experiences that were usually on the periphery of traditional narratives, as well as a literary medium for articulating the wider social and economic issues affecting the lives of unmarried women.

[Truncated abstract] This thesis is concerned with the representation of madness in three texts by modernist women: Dorothy Richardson' Pilgrimage, Leonora Carrington's

本篇論文主要探討1880至1930年代英國女性作家所再現的性別化空間。女性逐漸在十九世紀末倫敦的公共空間嶄露頭角，扮演各種不同的重要角色，舉凡上班族、消費者、俱樂部會員、電影迷、行善者及觀光客等都是當時女性公共形象的最佳例證。然而這些跨越公/私領域界限的女性漫遊者迄今都未獲得學界足夠的重視。女性漫遊者在世紀末文學研究中長期遭受忽視主要肇因於早期學者對於十九世紀男主外、女主內的公/私領域劃分大致認同，未能加以批判。透過檢視艾蜜‧列薇 (Amy Levy)、桃樂斯‧理察森 (Dorothy Richardson) 以及維吉尼亞‧吳爾夫 (Virginia Woolf) 等三位女作家的跨文類書寫，本篇論文指出世紀末的中產階級女性已逐漸掙脫傳統私領域以及家庭意識形態的束縛，開始在城市空間行走與觀看。在十九世紀末許多新興的大城市例如倫敦，如此的女性公共行走則又更加顯著並且和日益蓬勃發展的商品文化、大眾消費/享樂以及公共空間皆有極密切的關聯。流動 (mobility) 與觀察 (spectatorship) 因此成為中產階級女性在城市空間行走與觀看時的重要經驗，前者來自於女性在日益開放的公共領域遂行的空間探索，後者則是來自女性觀察者對於城市景觀例如商品展示、來往的人潮以及繁忙的街景所做的視覺凝視。經由書寫世紀末的女性城市漫遊，上述三位女作家明確地指出這些表面看似被動的中產階級女性其實早已跨越傳統空間限制，不斷挪用與創造新的城市公共空間。 / This study has examined the numerous roles played by women entering the public spaces of London in the half century from the 1880s to the 1930s as workers, shoppers, diners, clubbers, cinema-goers, philanthropists, and tourists, a wide spectrum of active female social actors that until recently have not attracted enough attention from scholars of late-Victorian and Edwardian literature. The neglect of these newly pubic women in the fin de siècle period, who are distinct from their home-bound Victorian predecessors, is largely ascribed to an uncritical acceptance of or surrender to the long-held, dominant assumption of separate spheres in the nineteenth century. Through examining the writings of Amy Levy, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf, who portray the multifarious pictures of women rambling the streets of modern London, this study has demonstrated that female public visibility and mobility have at least since the fin de siècle period been commonly practiced by a conglomerate of middle-class women. Mobility and spectatorship are thus two significant tropes applicable to women’s spatial and visual explorations of the fin de siècle city, the former underscoring their meandering footsteps threading through the increasingly egalitarian public space while the latter their roving eyes casting glances at those enticing urban spectacles which are already a phantasmagoria of commodity display, jostling crowd, and bustling streetscapes. Through writing about fin de siècle female streetwalking, the three women writers have demonstrated that those seemingly passive women of the middle-class may indeed be capable, through their public presence and their incessant footsteps, of pushing at the established boundaries.

本論文以女性主義學者葛洛茲的身體理論為主軸，旨在探索詹姆斯、艾倫及理察森三位作家作品中的勞動女性，如何挪用新興的都市公共空間，形塑及展現個人獨特的身體能動性。十九世紀晚期的倫敦市景最顯著的改變莫過於如雨後春筍般四處林立的公共空間，例如藝廊、俱樂部、餐廳、茶室、百貨公司等等，因此女性進入各種公共空間的機會或頻率皆日趨增加。除了以消費活動為主的中上階級女性之外，愈來愈多的女性進入都市公共空間的原因是來自於工作謀生，以期在都市中獨立生活。這些勞動女性，相異於中上階級女性，並無經濟優勢亦無階級優勢，他們的身體往往面對性別與階級雙重社會論述的宰制與規範，然而在此雙重論述力量之下，經由勞動女性的舉動表現，反而愈見身體原有的抵抗、挪用、操演等種種潛力，使我們得以觀察省思身體如何運作與適應外在空間。以葛洛茲的身體概念為中心，本論文嘗試提問如下：首先，探究當代社會論述力量如何介入女性身體的形成？其次，都市公共空間的特質如何與此身體相互作用？而這些女性身體又如何在此空間中發展其能動性？本論文分為三章：第一章分析詹姆斯《卡薩瑪斯瑪公主》中女店員的展示身體；第二章發掘艾倫《打字機女孩》中女職員的勞動身體；第三章討論理察森《歷程》中勞動女性的進食身體經驗。經由檢視這些勞動女性身體和都市公共空間的積極互動關係，本論文認為，縱使勞動女性的身體，雖然總是受到性別與階級等社會意識型態所銘刻或支配，她們的身體仍舊存在著「既有」的主體性，在流動變幻的都市公共空間特質中，展現了與眾不同的能動性。 / This dissertation aims to explore how working women take advantage of urban public space and develop specific bodily experiences in Henry James, Grant Allen, and Dorothy Richardson’s novels. The booming public spaces of fin-de-siècle London, including galleries, clubs, restaurants, teashops, and department stores—all served as new spaces which gave urban women to access a public life. Working women, who entered those public places for employment, directly encountered the conventional masculine codes and discourses with regard to the real difficulties of independent lives in the city. However, their social and economic disadvantage, at a more profound level, reflects the complex social reality and bodily experiences as well as reinforces volatile urban space where working women are involved and perceived. This complicity and volatility is, in fact, characteristic of the late Victorian working heroine’s new participation in the labor market. Centering Grosz’s concept, this study is structured into three chapters: the first chapter analyzes the displaying body and the department store in Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima; the second chapter deals with the laboring body and the office in Grant Allen’ The Type-Writer Girl; the third chapter discusses the consuming body and the dining places in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage. By asserting a positive relationship between the body and the public space from the feminist perspective, this study proposes that, while social discourses, mostly permeated with dominant oppressive powers and ideologies, give strict constraints to the working women, their bodies still acquire certain agencies to transform public places into a place for their ways of experience and appropriation.