Authenticity of self‐expression: Reinterpretation of female independence through the writings of simone de beauvoir

Based on the autobiographical writings of Simone de Beauvoir, this paper reinterprets the concepts of “dependency” and “independence” with respect to women's experiences. De Beauvoir, considered a strong and independent woman, continuously struggled for emotional independence, a struggle which she conceived as being against the need that drove her “impetuously toward another person”. However, a careful examination of de Beauvoir's inner voice as it is reflected in the subtext of her autobiographical writings, suggests that her true struggle revolves around a desire for authentic expression of her feelings and needs — rather than for separation from others.

As an adolescent de Beauvoir was caught between the expectations of her parents and her own needs, remaining the “dutiful daughter” at the expense of being false to her own self. This pattern of dependency reappears in her adult life, when she seems to be incapable of validating her feelings of jealousy and anger in her relationship with Sartre. Her means of coping with this problem is by giving it a literary expression, hence, she seems to gain a sense of freedom and independence by giving her repressed feelings an authentic outlet.

The re‐reading of de Beauvoir's autobiography in a new light of feminist criticism reveals a concept of dependency different from the need to rely on, receive help from, and be influenced by another. When one examines the meanings of dependency and independence through the female language of connectedness and women's values of care and involvement, the essential meaning of dependency shifts from the lack of self‐reliance to suppression of self‐expression, and from struggles for separation to struggles for one's personal truth and for authenticity in one's relations with others.     

Conversations with Lil: A play with Alzheimer's in five scenes and a couple of phone calls

Editors’ note – Elinor Fuchs's family memoir, Making an Exit, the story of her mother Lillian's unusual career and later memory loss, was published in 2005. Since that time Elinor has been invited to speak before many different groups on her experience as a caregiver. On occasion, instead of a talk, she has offered a performance, spliced together from the fragments of conversation she taped with her mother over several years. In these conference performances, Elinor performs both her own words and her mother's, and reads all notes, scene titles, asides, and “stage directions.”     

A footnote in history? Mary Gawthorpe,Sylvia Pankhurst,the suffragette movement and the writing of suffragette history[1]

In 1931, the Suffragette Fellowship invited several ex-suffragettes to contribute biographical statements and material to their archive to create a ‘Book of Suffragette Prisoners’ which would introduce the women who had been to prison in pursuit of the vote. In response, the suffragette Mary Gawthorpe, a member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) committee between 1906 and 1911, deposited a series of testimonies describing her political activity beyond the WSPU. Gawthorpe's actions were partly prompted by her recent representation in Sylvia Pankhurst's text The Suffragette Movement which dismissed her as having ‘emigrated to America, [taken] up journalism and married’. This article draws on material from Mary Gawthorpe's papers, recently deposited in the Tamiment Library, New York, to investigate Gawthorpe's response to Pankhurst's text. From this perspective, it considers some of the circumstances which provoke autobiographical responses to history.     

Vera ‘Jack’ Holme: cross-dressing actress,suffragette and chauffeur

This article provides a chronological account of the life of Vera Holme—a militant suffragette in Edwardian Britain, chauffeur to the Pankhursts, actress, and aid worker—focusing on the period 1900–20. The account is based largely on readings of papers, diaries and photographs within her personal archive, held at The Women's Library at the London School of Economics (LSE), as well as identifying references to Holme in secondary texts. The article traces the development of her identity as an unconventional woman by focusing on her work as an actress, driver and mechanic, her lesbian relationships and her increasingly masculine image, in the context of the women's suffrage movement and the First World War.     

Primum Mobile: Women and Auto/mobility in the Era of the Great War

Abstract: This article explores the construction of Andrea Dworkin as a public persona, or a ‘feminist icon’, revered by some and demonized by others. It argues that in both her fiction and non-fiction, Dworkin engaged in a process of writing herself as an exceptional woman, a ‘feminist militant’ as she describes herself in the subheading of her 2002 memoir, Heartbreak. The article illustrates Dworkin's autobiographical logic of exceptionalism by comparing the story told in Heartbreak to the story of Dworkin's major novel, Mercy, which features a heroine, Andrea, who shares Dworkin's name and significant biographical details. While Dworkin has insisted that Mercy is not an autobiographical novel, the author undertakes a reading here of Mercy as the story of Dworkin if she had not become the feminist icon of her own and others' construction. In Mercy, Andrea unsuccessfully attempts to escape the silent, victimized status that Dworkin has insistently argued is imposed upon women. In her repeated victimization, Andrea functions for Dworkin as an ‘everywoman’ who both embodies Dworkin's world-view and highlights how Dworkin's own biography exists in tension with some of her central assumptions about women, gender and contemporary society.     

Sacred Belonging: Writing,Religion and Community in H.D.'s Second World War Novels

Abstract: This article considers two works from H.D.'s Second World War writing: The Gift and The Sword Went Out to Sea. In these texts, H.D. situates herself in the context of diverse intimate communities: her spiritualist circle, her partnership with Bryher, her family and previous generations of Moravians. These communities ground her personal vision of writing as a spiritual exercise that will bring healing to both the individual psyche and the wider society ravaged by war. The significance of community is such that when she becomes isolated, desolation and breakdown follow. The restoration of communication and community through vision and writing leads to healing and a particular understanding of religious modernism as a unity of spiritual and material, transcendent and ordinary.     

‘A sort of Rathmines version of a Dior design’: Maeve Brennan,Self-Fashioning and the Uses of Style

This article explores the politics of style in the writing of Maeve Brennan. Brennan's concern with style, subjectivity and power is strikingly visible in her short stories and ‘Talk of the Town’ essays for the New Yorker. While in some of her short stories published in the New Yorker in the 1950s, Brennan seems to offer an extended critique of dandyism, elsewhere in her writing self-fashioning takes on an altogether more positive value and is steeped in the political as well as literary commitments of her work. The article argues that Brennan's interest in the politics of style, both personally and in her writing, is informed by the different strategies she deployed as an Irish woman writer establishing her place amongst a New York literary elite in the mid twentieth century.     

Netta syrett's lesbian heroine

This article discusses Judgment Withheld (1934) in which Netta Syrett makes it clear that the most likeable character, Mimi Landsfeld, is a lesbian. This was unusual, other writers being too afraid of prosecution to depict lesbianism sympathetically, particularly after Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness was banned in 1928. The article also shows how Syrett combined her established reputation as a writer of popular fiction with offering her middlebrow readers varied and controversial portrayals of sexual relationships, including homosexuality. The article concludes with comments on Syrett's personal life, thereby placing her novels in context.     

The Artist is Present: performing the icon

This article considers the work of performance artist Marina Abramovi?, focusing on the use of reperformance, the practice of hiring others to recreate historical performance works, in her 2010 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, The Artist is Present. Brawner utilizes Abramovi?'s artistic work with iconography and icon making and draws on her own experience as one of the retrospective's reperformers to highlight both the affective work that went into the creation of the show as well as its function as a religiously inflected meditation of celebrity and art stardom. The artist's work is explored through sources including New York Times art critic Holland Carter's turn of phrase “diva hokum,” a pejorative here reclaimed to mean the process of one's own icon making, a control of image and message that becomes integral to the structure of the work, and a balancing act between the performance and its afterlife.     

The making of Catherine Cookson's autobiography

Catherine Cookson's Our Kate, is undoubtedly one of the most widely read English language autobiographies ever written. It is loved by her fans and has also been drawn on quite frequently by historians seeking details of early-twentieth-century life amongst the very poor, and especially by those concerned with the fate of illegitimate children. The production of this work was complicated and lengthy, however. It took Cookson twelve years to write Our Kate, and she discarded many drafts before settling on the final version of her story and of her depiction of herself. This article explores the process Cookson went through in writing her autobiography and the ways in which she managed ultimately both to create a very distinctive persona and to use it to develop and expound her social, religious and moral values and beliefs in their most authoritative form.     

Political Life in the Shadows: the post suffrage political career of S. Margery Fry (1874–1958)

Drawing upon research on the working life of the penal reformer and educationalist S. Margery Fry (1874–1958) and her role as a policy-maker, this article argues that there were alternative ways in which women could participate in post-suffrage political culture, other than through elected office or party politics. The article positions Margery Fry both as a feminist and a public intellectual and argues that the First World War and the granting of women's suffrage allowed a step change to take place in Fry's career, taking her from a regional political stage to a national and international one. It also contends that she was able to wield considerable power ‘in the shadows’ as a policy advisor.     

Editing daphne du maurier

The author of this article edited all Daphne du Maurier's work for nearly forty years, from 1943 until she published her last book in 1981. The article discusses the qualities which made her a best seller, whose books are read and studied in universities all over the world, and provides insights into her skill as a writer, and into the links between her books and her own life. It describes how author and editor worked together, and seeks to throw light on du Maurier's complex and often contradictory personality. There are also quotations from her letters, published here for the first time. Because of the author's particular relationship with du Maurier, the article gives a new and personal insight into how so many world-famous books came into being.     

The Double Play of Mirrors: Anna Kavan,Autobiography and Self-Portraiture

Abstract

Better known as the author of complex visionary novels of female experience, it is important to note that Anna Kavan was not only a writer, but also an artist, painting throughout her adult life in tandem with her writing. This article considers the nature of the relationship between her literary life and her artistic life, and what her novels tell us about her relationship to the cultivation of her self-image. Famously destroying her personal archive, shirking notable correspondents and recapitulating a mental disquiet across many of her paintings and prose works, it is of little surprise that Kavan’s enigmatic presence often figures more prominently than serious discussion of her literary and artistic achievements. How did this mercurial relationship to identity shape the ways in which Kavan explored her self-image?     

Stevie Smith's Myth-Kitty

Abstract

Although Stevie Smith's poetry is in many ways very close to the laconic and less-deceived tone characteristic of Philip Larkin, there is one aspect of her work in which she differs strikingly from him and from the general features of Movement poetry: that is, in her use of what Larkin, in his 1956 ‘statement on poetry’, contemptuously called a ‘common myth-kitty’. In this chapter, I attempt to examine the treasures of Stevie's myth-kitty, not merely with the aim of distancing Smith from the Movement, but of reassessing her relationship with modernism and other poets of the generation which came to prominence in the 1930s, in particular, W. H. Auden. Smith's closest connection with modernism has often been seen to be her use of a stream-of-consciousness technique, as deployed in Novel on Yellow Paper—a technique which is inevitably compared to and dismissed as inferior to that of Virginia Woolf. Instead, I will put forward the claim that Smith's relationship to modernism should also be seen in her use of intertextuality, in the classical and other mythic fragments which, despite considerable differences of tone, place her work in the same tradition as James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T. S Eliot. I attempt to demonstrate how she draws on this ‘myth-kitty’, especially ?n her poetry, focusing on her treatment of female mythical figures, and argue that the key figure in Smith's oeuvre—the counterpart and equivalent of Eliot's Tiresias—is the figure of Persephone on her journey to the underworld.     

When Art Does not Represent Life: Nogami Yaeko and the Marriage Question

Nogami Yaeko's (1885–1985) early works “Meian” (1906) and Machiko (1930) critique marriage customs by portraying New Women who challenge the status quo. Yet Nogami is not directly connected with marriage debates or the New Women. To explain this paradox, this article examines these two works, comparing their New Woman heroines with Nogami herself. I argue that it was precisely because Nogami's art did not represent her life that she was able to express her opinions on marriage without attracting the notoriety and unfavorable publicity experienced by those who lived and wrote as New Women.     

Eve Drewelowe: feminist identity in American art

Eve Drewelowe (1899–1988) was an American artist who attended the University of Iowa, where she received a BA in Graphic and Plastic Arts in 1923. During these early years when university art programs were being established, Drewelowe became the first person to receive an MA in art from the University of Iowa; one of the first people to receive such a degree in the United States. Drewelowe reinvented herself throughout her life and her artwork reflects a current knowledge of modern styles that emerged in the twentieth century. Drewelowe exhibited under the name Eve Drewelowe Van Ek shortly after her marriage in 1924 until the early 1950s, when she chose to resume using only her own surname. During the three intervening decades, her signature varies from one artwork to the next. In some instances, the artist later rubbed out or painted over the ‘Van Ek’ with little attempt to conceal the change, leaving a visual indicator of the artist's identity struggles. Her personal papers also reflect the challenges she faced reconciling public expectations of her role as the wife of a university dean with her profession as an artist. This essay considers the ways Drewelowe performed her identity as an artist in order to maintain her personal autonomy against the backdrop of the male dominated social and artistic world.     

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon's Travel Letters: performative identity-formation in epistolary narratives

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was a mid-nineteenth-century feminist, philanthropist and painter. This article examines Bodichon the female traveller as a way of discussing the process of identity-formation in letter-writing. It proposes reading letters through the lens of Judith Butler's theory of gender (1990). Following her concept of performativity, letter-writing is conceived as a performative act of identity-formation. The article argues that, conditioned by the addressee she wrote to, Bodichon gave written expression to her subjectivity in her travel letters via her epistolary persona. This autobiographical gesture acted as one means through which she constituted her identity as a female traveller. In turn, drawing on Butler's notion of subversive repetition, the article concludes that the resulting multiple epistolary ‘I's Bodichon developed in accordance with each of her addressees permitted her to venture into her subjectivity as a female traveller—ultimately prompting her epistolary challenge of normative codes.     

Bedtime

In a review of the responses to British artist Tracey Emin's exhibition of her own bed as an artwork nominated for the 1999 Turner Prize, Merck considers it as a figure of the personal trauma said to be constitutive of subjectivity in the decade. Reviewing theorists of the period including Hal Foster, Marc Augé and Wendy Brown, she considers the artist's work as an illustration of individual isolation assuaged by narcissism. Must the woman artist function as the victim of her own cult of celebrity? In the ensuing months since her nomination, Emin's changing circumstances suggest that other fates- and other histories- may be possible.     

At Home with the Women's Guild of Arts: gender and professional identity in London studios,c.1880–1925

This article explores a recently discovered archive, pertaining to the Women's Guild of Arts, in order to deepen understanding of the ways middle-class women, working in the fine and applied arts, constructed artistic identity in London, c.1880–1925. The Women's Guild of Arts was formed as women artists were not allowed to join the Arts and Crafts male-only Art Workers' Guild. Analysis of the Women's Guild of Arts archive, alongside the personal memoirs of members of the Guild, show the importance women artists placed on the acquisition of studios, and the significance of studios in building a professional network of female sociability and artistic contacts. Analysis of a sample of studios belonging to Guild members develops knowledge about how professional identity was achieved, and mediated, by women artists. The archive provides the opportunity to consider how both singular, and collective, studio activity was gendered. It reveals the persistent concerns members had about the appropriate use of space in their quest for professional status and examines their views on drawing rooms, exhibitions, male-only spaces, and their adapted use of At Homes in their studios.     

Europe's Northern Periphery and the Future of Women in the Travel Narratives of Ethel Tweedie

Among the writers who defined the European northern periphery for British readers towards the end of the nineteenth century, Ethel Brilliana (Mrs Alec) Tweedie was a significant figure. In addition to numerous articles about various aspects of Fenno-Scandinavian culture, she published three book-length narratives based on her northern journeys, A Girl's Ride in Iceland (1889), A Winter Jaunt to Norway (1894), and Through Finland in Carts (1897). Though almost forgotten today, these books were widely read at the time, and Tweedie came to be regarded as an authority on the north. What makes Tweedie's Nordic travel narratives unique and of interest today is their conflation of discourses of northernness and female emancipation.

This article outlines two different and apparently contradictory representations of the European north in Tweedie's travel narratives of the 1890s. On the one hand, they primitivize Fenno-Scandinavia by emphasizing the arctic climate and the area's distance both culturally and geographically from metropolitan European centres. On the other hand, Tweedie's Nordic travel narratives give the peripheral countries of Fenno-Scandinavia a symbolic centrality in the development of Europe. In some respects, particularly women's participation in social life, the northern nations are represented as models of progress. My focus is on Tweedie's final and most ambitious Nordic travel narrative, Through Finland in Carts, which equates northernness with modernity and the future of women. Compared to this exemplary north it is Britain that lags behind, and the contrast implies a fundamental critique of British culture at the fin de siècle. Finally, I trace the personal circumstances informing Tweedie's interest in Finnish women and discuss why they are deliberately concealed in the text itself.