Table Of ContentROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE
Locating Gender in Modernism
The Outsider Female
Geetha Ramanathan
Locating Gender in Modernism
Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
1 Testimony from the Nazi Camps 11 Travel and Drugs in
French Women’s Voices Twentieth-Century Literature
Margaret-Anne Hutton Lindsey Michael Banco
2 Modern Confessional Writing 12 Diary Poetics
New Critical Essays Form and Style in Writers’
Edited by Jo Gill Diaries, 1915–1962
Anna Jackson
3 Cold War Literature
Writing the Global Con(cid:2) ict 13 Gender, Ireland and
Andrew Hammond Cultural Change
Race, Sex and Nation
4 Modernism and the Crisis of Gerardine Meaney
Sovereignty
Andrew John Miller 14 Jewishness and Masculinity
from the Modern to the
5 Cartographic Strategies of Postmodern
Postmodernity Neil R. Davison
The Figure of the Map in
Contemporary Theory and Fiction 15 Travel and Modernist Literature
Peta Mitchell Sacred and Ethical Journeys
Alexandra Peat
6 Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics
of Consumption 16 Primo Levi’s Narratives of
Eating the Avant-Garde Embodiment
Michel Delville Containing the Human
Charlotte Ross
7 Latin American Writers and the
Rise of Hollywood Cinema 17 Italo Calvino’s Architecture
Jason Borge of Lightness
The Utopian Imagination in an
8 Gay Male Fiction since Age of Urban Crisis
Stonewall Letizia Modena
Ideology, Con(cid:2) ict, and Aesthetics
Les Brookes 18 Aesthetic Pleasure in
Twentieth-Century
9 Anglophone Jewish Literature Women’s Food Writing
Axel Stähler The Innovative Appetites of
M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas,
10 Before Auschwitz and Elizabeth David
Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Alice L. McLean
Landscape of Inter-war France
Angela Kershaw
19 Making Space in the Works of
James Joyce
Edited by Valérie Bénéjam and
John Bishop
20 Critical Approaches to American
Working-Class Literature
Edited by Michelle M. Tokarczyk
21 Salman Rushdie and Visual
Culture
Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting
Borders
Edited by Ana Cristina Mendes
22 Global Cold War Literature
Western, Eastern and Postcolonial
Perspectives
Edited by Andrew Hammond
23 Exploring Magic Realism in
Salman Rushdie’s Fiction
Ursula Kluwick
24 Wallace Stevens, New York, and
Modernism
Edited by Lisa Goldfarb and
Bart Eeckhout
25 Locating Gender in Modernism
The Outsider Female
Geetha Ramanathan
Locating Gender in Modernism
The Outsider Female
Geetha Ramanathan
NEW YORK LONDON
First published 2012
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2012 Taylor & Francis
The right of Geetha Ramanathan to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Locating gender in modernism : the outsider female / Geetha Ramanathan.
— 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Routledge studies in twentieth-century literature ; 25)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Modernism (Literature) 2. Women in literature. 3. Gender identity
in literature. 4. Fiction—20th century—History and criticism.
I. Title.
PN56.M54R35 2012
809'.9112—dc23
2011049688
ISBN13: 978-0-415-50970-1 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-11449-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by IBT Global.
Printed and bound in the United States of America on sustainably sourced
paper by IBT Global.
For Valerian De Sousa, Vaz Building, Bombay
Contents
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
1 The Female Outsider in the Modern 21
2 Modernisms and the Woman in History 52
3 Figuring the Female in Modern Realisms 81
4 Magical Women in the Modern 105
5 Modern Women in Feminist Realisms 132
Conclusion 161
Notes 165
Bibliography 185
Acknowledgements
The fi rst proposal of the project was read by Jennie Skerl of West Chester
University’s College of Arts and Sciences. Thanks for her useful comments.
A very early version of a segment of chapter 1 was presented at the Ameri-
can Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) of 2006, and a diff erent
segment was presented at the ACLA of 2009. A small portion of chapter 3
was presented at the ACLA of 2008, and the initial ideas for it were pub-
lished in CLCWeb in an issue on neo-modernities and the third world. One
of the ideas of chapter 5 was part of the seminar of the ACLA of 2010. I
thank all the seminar participants for their comments.
Mona Fayad read the introduction and made important suggestions.
Elizabeth Larsen read the original proposal and the fi rst draft of the intro-
duction and helped with clarifying the focus. I thank both of them for their
support and encouragement.
I owe a debt of gratitude to the unknown Routledge readers who cared
about the project and helped defi ne it. Many thanks to Routledge’s Liz
Levine for her patience and support of the project.
A sabbatical from West Chester University between 2008 and 2009
made it possible to do research on the book. Many thanks to my trusted
trio in the library, Dana, Tracy and Neil.
Thanks to mom and pop for their unfailing encouragement of all my
projects including this one. And fi nally, I thank Dhario for his unwavering
moral support.
PERMISSION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Copyright 1971 Bessie Head. Reproduced from Maru by Bessie Head with kind
permission of Virago Press, an imprint of Little, Brown Book group.
Copyright 1989 Bessie Head. Reproduced from Maru with the kind permission of
Johnson and Alcock Ltd.
Permission to quote from Josiane Racine and Jean-Luc Racine’s Viramma was
granted by Verso (London: Verso, 1997).
Permission to quote from Sahar Khalifeh’s Inheritance was granted by the American
University in Cairo Press (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005).
Introduction
WHOSE MODERNITY, WHOSE MODERNISM
In this book I question the central importance of Euro-modernist aesthet-
ics to the fi eld of literary modernist studies. The term, attached to a set
of aesthetic conventions and themes in texts produced between the 1890s
and 1930s in Western Europe and the UK, has assumed a status quite
out of all proportion to a simple descriptive label affi xed to literary or
artistic production in this period. “Modernism” quite frequently speci-
fi es a privileged relationship to modernity that subverts or questions it.
Raymond Williams, in looking at one of the favoured tropes of modern-
ism, exile, has suggested that migration into the metropolises and the
diversity of populations that has produced modernism render it diffi cult
to consider the valorized defi nitions of high modernism—experimental
forms, investment in the sovereign ego, alienation of the self, mistrust
of mass culture—tenable for any socially more progressive ideal. The
complex strands of modernism are of course not limited to the above;
however, Williams’s sharp criticism of modernism’s self-construction as
metropolitan and universal is one of the departure points of my own
venture into (dis-)locating modernist aesthetics. I concur with Williams’s
sense of urgency in scrutinizing modernism “with something of its own
sense of strangeness and distance” to call into question “the metropoli-
tan interpretation of its own processes as universals.”1 Despite a range of
interventions that have responded to an unsettling of Euro-modernism
and partial inclusion of texts outside the metropolis, modernism has not
been suffi ciently theorized with reference either to non-metropolitan texts
or to diff erences in aesthetics.
Many eff orts to contextualize Euro-modernism “to understand colo-
nialism and conquest as the very condition of possibility for modernity and
aesthetic modernism”2 remain stilted because the subject of study remains
Euro-modernism, and high modernist aesthetics is enshrined. The privileg-
ing of high modernist aesthetics has also meant that this mode has remained
the chief literary interpreter of modernity, modernities and alternative
modernities. I argue that many realist texts have written meaningfully on
