Women of the Left Bank and Girl on a Marsh Bank

If these women were writing on the Left Bank of the Seine, it seems only fitting that I read Shari Benstock's text Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900 - 1940 on the bank of some sort of body of water. A tidal marsh would have to do.

There is not a single cloud in the sky which means I am going to have a book-shaped tan by the end of this. Or rather a book-shaped pale spot. Perfect for writing notes on when I forget my notebook or laptop (which is often).

And, of course, since this is a food blog as well, I needed something to munch on. Trekking through history requires brain food! On today's plate (or in today's tupperware) is some pasta salad. This is a recipe that my friend shared with me. I then shared it with my mom and sister and now we pretend it's a family recipe because we all suck at cooking and can actually manage this. Baking? We can bake our hearts out. Cooking? We collapse like butter in a hot pan. So because my friend is so generous, this pasta salad has become our saving grace, and let me tell you, this stuff is true salvation. Veggies, cheese, protein. IT HAS EVERYTHING so my brain power is a go to day. Or, at least, I hope it is.

Now because this is a critical rather than a primary text, my notes are going to be more like lecture notes. Deal.

One of Shari Benstock's underlying arguments is that the modernist movement for women was initiated by WWI because the war acted as a catalyst for the formation of female communities beyond class. The class conscious salons of pre-war Paris had already collapsed under the weight of changing politics, but the war effort gathered women from disparate backgrounds together and forced them into conversations.

I think something that is standing out to me is that both male and female modernists grapple with separation from tradition and then a search for/formation of a new community. That said, the female modernist perspective is so tied to the physical body. The female modernist must separate from tradition/ history/ society/ family to liberate her physical body from marriage/ unwanted pregnancy/ heterosexual relations/ abuse/ gendered clothing/ and more. It is not just her soul or intellect on the line, but her control over her physical self. Once they have freed their bodies, they then can find a community that fosters and nurtures their minds. Their struggle--and often the tension in their texts--results from a difficulty to achieve the third step: a reconciliation between the freed female body and the stimulated female mind in a community that fully supports the two.

(Note: I think one male modernist who would fit this "female" tradition is James Joyce, but I think that results from growing up in a feminized colony among other things.)

Benstock traces how these women attempt to form communities that would perform this reconciliation or struggle from the absence of such communities.

There is a real concern that female artists create a female aesthetic rather than imitate a male tradition, but there is equal concern about how this translates practically. How can women form relationships and communities that do not simply mirror patriarchal hierarchies and norms?

A lot of these female writers seek to find the answer through dreams, dreamscapes, and nocturnal imagery. The writers explore the societies of nighttimes, invoke dreamy prose/language, construct impossible images, deconstruct linguistic meaning so dialogue and grammar sound dream-like as meanings shift, etc. We have "Melanctha," Nightwood, House of Incest, Hermione, and imagined fantasy worlds like Odeonia.

Djuna Barnes: "Barnes was also at work reconstructing the 'abandoned traditions' of woman's culture. This effort simultaneously searched for woman in the patriarchal culture that had abandoned her and sought to give back to woman the voice that had for so long been silenced"; interested in the difference between men and women but also the difference between hetero and homosexuality; lots of doubling and inversions; could do lots of work with Bakhtin and the classic/grotesque bodies

Natalie Barney: salon, queer community, believes homosexual love sanctifies and elevates the female body as opposed to heterosexual love which degrades it via pregnancy; interested in the economic capital of women's (in)dependence.

Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier: Midwifery of editing, motherhood of authorship; writer versus the word; example of a relationship that creates a new sort of pairing of body and minds rather than simply being "modeled on heterosexual unions" and "neither was it given to male masquerade."

H.D.: under Ezra Pound's influence; movement to her "Imagist" poems to explore sexual difference and cultural tensions; focus on dualities and doubleness with the impossibility of fusion; her linguistic splits reveal the larger psychic splits; "poetic forms 'unhinge' any forged alliance between signifier and signified.

Anais Nin: In her novel House of Incest, the "'house' figures woman's fragmented and internally divided personality; through its rooms she wanders in search of her identity"; uses language based in sadomasochism and sensuality--more poetic than other styles; female characters actively resist patriarchies.

Sappho: fragments of her poetry became readily available in the 1890s. This re-discovery of her work not only gave further depth to the inclusion of classics into modernist texts but it also provided a literary matriarch much like Homer of Shakespeare; modernist women were inspired to learn Greek and gain further cultural capital, claim a more prominent authorial role, or search for more feminine/feminist voices

Gertrude Stein: a series of conundrums (an anti-semitic Jew, a sexist female artist, a patriarchal lesbian, etc.); wants to create a 20th century free of the traditions of the 19th century; "stripped language of its natural associations"; focused on the perpetual present (with no or little allusions to the past); certainly not derivative or imitative

Edith Wharton: bffs with Henry James; acts as a maternal literary ancestor; critical of the 19th century American values but also interested in the cultural capital offered by Europe (i.e. Paris)

Virginia Woolf: really considers the roles of mothers in creating and resisting the patriarchy; believes that the patriarchy and fascism makes women slaves for their reproductive abilities; wanted "a more open and obvious political literature"; struggled with the tension of literature allowing an individual to represent political ideals without the power to enact the ideals

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