This project argues that British modernism was directly informed by the theories of eugenic race-regeneration that gained popularity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. In particular, the central figure of the eugenic mother, or race-mother, influenced the portrayal of maternal figures in modernism and offered a locus through which modernist authors could critique this construction and enter into debates about artistry and national regeneration.
I begin by defining and contextualizing race-motherhood, a concept which united racial purity, imperialism, social service, and literal and metaphoric good breeding. I discuss the participation of little-known women, such as Victoria Welby, in the eugenics movement, and I argue that New Woman authors, such as Emma Brooke, Menie Muriel Dowie, and Olive Schreiner, challenged male-centered eugenic discourses through the creation of narratives centered on eugenic motherhood. The modernist authors I discuss -- Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce -- are simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the symbolic and political power of eugenics. Mina Loy actively endorsed eugenic motherhood; she desired a eugenic love child that would represent the fusion of masculine Futurism and feminist poetry. Like Loy, Woolf rejected Victorian models of femininity and sometimes endorsed eugenic feminism in her essays. However, in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, she remained deeply skeptical about the regenerative power of biological motherhood. The power of the race-mother (in the form of Mrs. Ramsay) proves to be insufficient, and the female artist must replace biological creativity with artistic creativity. James Joyce makes a similar move in Ulysses: although his artists are male, they figuratively give birth in Oxen of the Sun with the aid of a midwife who replaces the mother. Thus, modernist authors reference the symbolic construct of the race-mother in order to both criticize and appropriate her power for the creation of art.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-07222008-123454 |
| Date | 26 July 2008 |
| Creators | Harbin, Persephone Emily |
| Contributors | Roy Gottfried, Jay Clayton, Mark A. Wollaeger, Volney Gay |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu//available/etd-07222008-123454/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
Page generated in 0.0125 seconds