Politics and Poetics of Gender in the Early 20th Century

Argument

If anything, academic work should be about “the best which has been thought and said”, as Matthew Arnold persuasively argues in Culture and Anarchy. Postmodernist aesthetics, however, abandoned this Faustian dream of logocentric excellence in the “leaning tower” (the title of Virginia Woolf’s 1940 essay) of down spiralling modernism in the pre-war years. The unexpected outbreak of the Second World Conflagration probably got into Virginia Woolf’s mind the idea that the modernists’ aloofness had been an attitude of sheer irresponsibility, a charge already laid against them by Edmund Wilson in his 1931 essay Axel’s Castle. The stories of totalitarianism and the war years cured aesthetics of its arrogant search for a gratuitous perfection savoured by the artist in his isolation from the historical world.

That is why post-war aesthetics headed towards a new ideal: meaning. Drifting away from the cult of form and subjective introspection, postmodernist semiotic aesthetics has progressively morphed into a search for meaning in a society still stunned by recent horrors and experiencing an existentialist nausea towards what looked like a post apocalyptic and absurdist scene. In my search for a relevant subject, therefore, I inspected the 20^th-century literary canon of works in English fishing for a common subject matter.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Silvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou Maxine Hong Kingston, Alice Munro, or Margaret Eleanor Atwood, but also male authors (Ralph Waldo Ellison, James Arthur Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, Caryl Phillips, John Coetzee, Salman Rushdie) wrote extensively upon the issue of identity in a society ruled by stereotypes, asymmetric power relationships and various forms of gender, racial and class discrimination in an otherwise rapidly changing world. In less than a century women had moved from a claustrophobic domestic milieu into the Prime Minister’s, magistrate’s, or academic’s chair; within decades the Afro-Americans hunted down by the Ku-Klux-Klan rose to top positions in the world’s networks of power. Double standards, discriminating categories, and biased identity-kit are still there. Identity is manufactured in representations, images, slender words, that is, in language. Literature is still the battery capable to generate another world of representations.

The choice of subject has concomitantly circumscribed our method. Feminism was superseded in the nineties by the post-gender approach to identity that no longer privileges one factor over the other (male or female superiority). The ←9 | 10→Deleuzian body without organs can be written into the subject’s identity of election. New is now the study of the “intersection of gender, race, class and sexualities through the notion of decolonial feminism [...]. This theory provides us with an understanding of the complex interaction between economic, ethnicized and gendered systems that each colonized individual faces throughout their life. The analysis of these intersecting oppressions is the coloniality of gender and the opportunity to overcome it is what Lugones defines as decolonial feminism.” (Indome 2018: 24). By colonized groups, Maria Lugones, quoted in the passage above, understands all minorities, the marginalised or oppressed categories of people subject to religious, racial, gender, or class discrimination.

Introduction

While European communities are characterised by a patriarchal type of social architecture, there are other societies that are based on matrilineal relations. Malinowski’s study on the Trobriand Islanders of North-Eastern Guinea (1937) shows that social order is established differently according to cultural traditions; compared to Europeans, the Trobrianders have instituted an inverted gender order. These Melanesian communities living on a coral archipelago had developed kinship based on matrilineal relations, in which the dignities and social position are acquired through the mother’s family. In a typical Trobriand family, the father is regarded as a “beloved, benevolent friend, but not a recognized kinsman of the children. He is a stranger, having authority through his personal relations to the child, but not through his sociological position in the lineage.” (Malinowski 1937: 10) Women have more authority than men; they have their own possessions and exert an enlarged sphere of influence; most families would welcome the birth of a daughter more than that of a son.

So what made European societies develop a pattern specific to patriarchal cultures?

Gender roles and the way they are assigned to men and women according to their biological sex represent a sort of a mental by-product of human culture; this differs depending on the type of culture, traditions and collective mores people were born and live in. These shape each individual and, in turn, by the power of tradition, culture, art, and so on, they continue to pass them to new generations. Both in Trobriander and European culture, this repetitive pattern predisposed individuals to the formation of certain inclinations and social connections with other individuals.

Starting from Maria Ana Tupan’s assertion that “[n]‌o object can be assigned only one and exhaustive description, because, on the one hand, it appears to us under various phenomenal aspects, and, on the other, because it changes in time through interferences with new environments. The thing in itself unfolds in the world as a paradigm of states only partially revealed” (Tupan 2016: 4), this thesis takes as a subject of discussion the notion of Woman, in some of its most important stances: women as fighters for their political rights, women as social outcasts, objectified women, women as writers and opinion-makers, and confined women. The period I focused on was that of the first decades of the twentieth century, up until the 1930s, as it supports the modernized image that ←11 | 12→women seem to have created for themselves, even though the patriarchal system had kept them in a rather redundant position throughout the previous centuries.

The fin-de-siècle normative view was that the biological differences between men and women were also reflected by the intellectual possibilities of each. The main idea put forward by the medical world was that women were more prone to mental health issues and less intellectual achievements because their reproductive system basically depleted them of their vital energy; subsequently, they ←12 | 13→were unable of displaying abstract thought and scientific logic and other higher brain activities.