ENGL 179B: Modernism
Physical Suspension
Katherine Mansfield
"The Tiredness of Rosabel"
"(The real Rosabel, the girl crouched on the floor in the dark, laughed aloud, and put her hand up to her hot mouth.)
...
So she slept and dreamed, and smiled in her sleep, and once threw out her arm to feel for
something which was not there, dreaming still."
- Page 4
James Joyce
"Eveline"
"Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the window curtain...
She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her."
- p. 33
Archive / History
National Identity
Epistemology
Elizabeth Bowen
The Heat of the Day
Ali Smith
Autumn
Revelation
Katherine Mansfield
"At the Bay"
While death has its own places in Modernism, this theme is birthed by the historical events that take place such as the World Wars, but death also produces a physical suspension or stillness both for those who have died and in those mourning the dead
W.B. Yeats
"Easter 1916"
Death
Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse
The house in "Time Passes" sits between suspension and death, as the house becomes a liminal space between life and death. The house is on the brink of death, but has not yet fallen into disrepair, and it sits on the precipice of completely falling apart and anticipation of life returning. The house becomes a place of stillness as the group mourns the death of Mrs. Ramsey, and seems to be stuck in stillness, waiting for their return.
"Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions — 'Will you fade? Will you perish?' — scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain."
- "Time Passes," IV p. 133
Katherine Mansfield
"The Garden Party"
Katherine Mansfield
"The Daughter of the Late Colonel"
Katherine Mansfield
"Prelude"
H.D.
"The Walls Do Not Fall"
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Virginia Woolf
"On Being Ill"
"'I am in bed with influenza' — but what does that convey of the great experience; how the world has changed its shape; the tools of business grown remote; the sounds of festival become romantic like a merry-go-round heard across far fields; and friends have changed, some putting on a strange beauty. others deformed to the squatness of toads"
- p. 3
Ultimately, when Rosabel wakens, it was simply a fantasy. She is only able to fantasize a different reality when her body is still, allowing her mind to wander off, and yet when her body begins to move again, her reality remains unchanged. Rosabel is stuck in suspension herself both during her fantasy and afterwards, unable to move forward and achieve the reality she desires.
James Joyce
"Araby"
W.B. Yeats
"Leda the Swan"
T.S. Eliot
"The Waste Land"
"Josephine could only glare. She had the most extraordinary feeling that she had just escaped something simply awful. But how could she explain to Constantia that father was in the chest of drawers? He was in the top drawer with his handkerchiefs and neckties, or in the next with his shirts and pyjamas, or in the lowest of all with his suits. He was watching there, hidden away - just behind the door-handle - ready to spring.
She pulled a funny old-fashioned face at Constantia, just as she used to in the old days when she was going to cry.
'I can't open,' she nearly wailed.
'No, don't, Jug," whispered Constantia earnestly. "It's much better not to. Don't let's open anything. At any rate, not for a long time.'"
- p. 7
In this passage, Josephine expresses a desire to leave everything as it was in the room after her father dies. Much like "The Garden Party" there is a desire for stillness in order to grieve. However, Josephine also seems to display a different perspective on death, suggesting that her father is still there, inhabiting the space around them which requires the room remaining still and unchanged. The stillness becomes a vehicle for grappling with her father's death and perhaps even allowing him a life after death
Smith highlights an extraordinary moment in which a divided nation in the aftermath of a Brexit vote is simultaneously united in their division. They are united by the circumstances, the historical moment, the lack of knowledge, and they are even united simply by the fact that they are all divided. Not only is their national identity being shifted and broken down, but a new identity is emerging
Stella is navigating her own national alliances by deciding whether or not to help Harrison spy on Robert, while also holding valuable information which she can choose to give or not to give to whomever she wishes. She is faced with the crucial decision of choosing either her relationship or her allegiance to her country. This passage displays Stella's power of being able to access information and choosing who else has access to it, or who she will give it to. In reading the note and tearing it up, she claims ownership of the information and knowledge. Her choice not to divulge the contents of the note further displays that power.
"Rapidly she had unfolded the sheet of paper: now she was glancing through what was written on it in a semi-abstracted, calm, quite business-like way. 'Nothing at all,' she said, 'as we might have known.' Idly, she tore it across once, still more idly tore it across again, then stood up to brush the pieces from her dress to the floor."
- p. 68
"All across the country, the country split in pieces. All across the country, the countries cut adrift. All across the country, the country was divided, a fence here, a wall there, a line drawn here, a line crossed there."
- p. 61
"All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the countrym people felt they'd really lost. All across the country, people felt they'd really won. All across the country, people felt they'd done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU?"
- p. 59
W.B. Yeats
"The Second Coming
"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand."
- Lines 3-11
In this poem, Yeats documents the effects of a historical events in a unique way, in which the causes of the violence is omitted and instead, the speaker focuses on the actual violence itself and its aftermath. Yeats also describes a shift, or a breaking down of a national identity and unity. This poem blurs the lines between the multiple catastrophes happening simultaneously in order to insert into the archive a new kind of history which focuses on the aftermath.
"Now, become as the leaf or the daisy, lying recumbent, staring straight up, the sky is discovered to be something so different from this that really it is a little shocking. This then has been going on all the time without our knowing it!"
- p. 6
Woolf uses her own illness to describe the transformational qualities that being bed-bound provides. Being forced to remain still due to her disability allows one to see the world from a new perspective which they would never have seen if they had never fallen ill. Much like "The Tiredness of Rosabel," stillness gives way to epiphany or revelation
James Joyce
"The Dead"
"Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
- p. 225
"'Stop the garden-party? My dear Laura, don't be so absurd. Of course we can't do anything of the kind. Nobody expects us to. Don't be so extravagant'
'But we can't possibly have a garden-party with a man dead just outside the front gate.'"
- p. 7
Mansfield tackles the issue which many people were facing in the outbreak of the first war: how do you respond to death that you cannot see, but that you know is happening? Especially when it doesn't affect you or your ability to continue living on. Despite the mass tragedy and casualties happening day-to-day that the whole world was aware of, life kept going, including celebrations. This is further significant because it highlights that only certain groups are able to choose to continue on after something tragic occurs, and even chooses to make others continue on even if they have been affected as well.
Yeats is changing the narrative and giving a place in history to those who sacrificed their lives for their country in the civil unrest. The speaker is interested in entering an Irish perspective into the historical archive of the modern world by giving names to those who died and portraying them as neighbors and people. This contrasts the idea and narrative that their deaths were needless because they were unsuccessful
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
- lines 11-24
This passage brings together themes of death and nationalism, with the weather uniting all of Ireland while also suggesting that the news is doing the work of creating unity across the country. Further, the dead is significant because as the snow falls, it unites both the living and dead, making them indistinguishable from one another.
"Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled.
- I. Burial of the Dead, lines 60-64
In many modernist works, Winter becomes a symbol of death and stillness. However, this moment in the poem is unique because it depicts a different form of death in which it is possible to be dead and yet still living. The crowd itself serves as an image of death, a condition of modernism which forces the life out of living bodies. Additionally, the fog alludes to the ongoing WWII and the chemical warfare which made air itself — a requirement to live — a weapon, or a vehicle of death.
Eveline is caught between forcing herself into transformation or remaining where she is. In her conflict, she is physically unable to move, and yet she is left in a position, like Rosabel, in which she cannot stay in this state of suspense, both physically and mentally, and has to make a decision either to embrace the change or return to a stagnant life and a different kind of stillness. Eveline's physically body mirrors her mental suspension, as she decides between the two lives presented to her. She finds herself unable to get on the train with Frank yet simultaneously unable to return to her previous life. Even before the train station, it is not until she forces herself out of the physical suspension and imagination that she decides to escape with Frank. One element that is shared throughout these texts is that although a person is in physical suspension, unable to move, the world continues to move around them, and yet they remain motionless.
"A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand:
— Come!
All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.
—Come!
No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy."
- p. 34
"A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead"
- lines 9-11
It is not often that people are taught about the violent roots which led to the birth of Helen and even the Trojan War. In this perspective, the rape is inserted in a way that is inseparable from the war and the history itself as it suggests that this births, or is responsible for, the Trojan War. However, this part is also rather ambiguous because it is unclear whether it is the act of rape itself that is being held responsible for the Trojan War, or if Yeats is upholding the tradition of the women in Greek mythology receiving the blame for such tragedies.
H.D.'s poem "The Walls Do Not Fall" is interested in exploring the role and purpose of humans in history, both as individuals and as a collective. This passage reveals an attempt to define a relationship from on person to the next, as if trying to forge a new identity in which minds and thoughts are shared between each person. Additionally, the emphasis on a "search for historical parallels" give the sense of trying to find a place in history to belong and relate to, as well as creating an identity from past history and current events. Further, it establishes an idea of cyclicality; that history has a sense of ongoingness and will never be complete.
"This search for historical parallels,
research into psychic affinities,
has been done to death before,
will be done again;
no comment can alter spiritual realities
(you say) or again,
what new light can you possibly
throw upon them?
my mind (yours),
your way of thought (mine),
"When he stooped to move her she would not let go or take her head away. She held on as hard as she could and sobbed: 'Head back! Head back!' until it sounded like a loud strange hiccup.
'It's stopped. It's tumbled over. It's head,' said Pip.
Pat dragged Kezia up into his arms. Her sun-bonnet had fallen back, but she would not let him look at her face. No, she pressed her face into a bone in his shoulder and clasped her arms round his neck.
The children stopped screaming as suddenly as they had begun. They stood round the dead duck. Rags was not frightened of the head any more. He knelt down and stroked it now.
'I don't think the head is quite dead yet,' he said. 'Do you think it would keep alive if I gave it something to drink?'"
- IX, p. 27
"'We're not asked, Kezia,' she said sadly. 'It happens to all of us sooner or later.'
Kezia lay still thinking this over. She didn't want ot die. It meant she would have to leave here, leave, everywhere, for ever, leave--leave her grandma. She rolled over quickly.
'Grandma,' she said in a startled voice.
'What, my pet!'
'You're not to die.' Kezia was very decided.
'Ah, kezia'--her grandma looked up and smiled and shook her head--'don't let's talk about it.'
'But you're not to. You couldn't leave me. You couldn't not be there.' This was awful. 'Promise me you won't ever do it, grandma,' pleaded Kezia.
- p. 16
"I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real. Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."
- p. 27-28
The children realize that the act of killing and death cannot be undone. However, they desire to undo the killing of the duck and try to revive it by giving it water, something that people rely on to live. Further, they learn that the line between life and death is not a clear line, that stillness does not define death. As this revelation comes to fruition, the fright turns into wonder as they discover what it means to die. It becomes unclear whether they want to revive the duck to further learn about death and the possibility of its reversal, or if they would prefer to unlearn this revelation that was thrusted upon them. This displays the revelation of death itself as well as the fine line and finitude of death and death at the hands of a human.
The speaker realizes that he has been deceived and complacent in capitalizing on the foreign. Despite his being drawn to Araby and desiring to experience something foreign to his own experience, once he get there he realizes that the entire experience is artificial, and a different kind of foreign than the one he was seeking. This sparks a revelation which is not productive but simply makes the boy aware of the deception that he is a victim of.
In this moment, Kezia, a child, realizes not only the everyone must die, including herself and her grandmother, but she uses this realization to further consider that death means that she is being left behind. Her initial revelation was guided by her grandmother's lesson that death is not in her control, which allows Kezia the freedom to consider the implications of death being a requirement of life