Women in the Early-to-Mid 20th Century
Women in Great Britain and the United States owe many of their rights to World Wars I and II. Women played active, visible, and useful roles in both wars. They were nurses and code breakers and munitions factory workers; women pilots taught male soldiers to fly planes; women took over jobs that had been performed by men while the men were off at war. In England and Europe, a large percentage of those men never came home after World War I, and women carried on doing their jobs. After World War II, many women who had held jobs and run households without any help for years were unwilling to give up their authority and freedom after their fathers, brothers and husbands returned.
Economic depressions and wars have a way of levelling the playing field: of necessity, whoever can do the job does it, and gender expectations and roles are less important than getting the crops harvested and the planes built. But great social changes seldom happen without a great deal of mental and cultural adjustment. And the periods after the wars were difficult for both men and women as they tried to return to a "normal" that no longer existed.
These conflicts can be seen in the stories we are reading this week. Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, and Katherine Mansfield all knew about the Angel in the House, and they all fought her, some more successfully than others.
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker never wrote an autobiography. Near the end of her life she tried to begin one, but filled it with fictional episodes that bore no resemblance to reality. Perhaps she didn't think her life was worth writing about. She never liked herself much and thought very little of the work she'd done was worthwhile. Yet her stories are moving, funny, and in many cases tell profound human truths. In stories like "Big Blonde," "Horsie," and "Clothe the Naked," she reveals a great wisdom about human nature. But she seems to have been unable to apply that wisdom to herself.
Nearly everyone who has written about her life has noticed glaring contradictions in her. Leslie Frewin, one of her biographers, says of her, "She appeared to be a social diptych, two images uncomfortably posed side-by-side, each contemplating the other in distaste." Or, as John Keats points out in less abstract terms,
Shy and retiring, she dominated every room she entered. She made a great deal of money but her purse was always empty. At the time of her greatest wealth, she believed herself to be a Communist. She hugely enjoyed her fame and was bitterly derisive of it; well aware of her power, she felt herself to be utterly helpless and useless. She was unhappiest when most deeply in love; and while seeming to personify the carefree exuberance of the twenties, she tried to kill herself on at least two occasions.
Dorothy Parker wrote of Katherine Mansfield,
She was not of the little breed of the discontented. Writing was the precious thing in life to her, but she was never truly pleased with anything she had written. With a sort of fierce austerity, she strove for the crystal clearness, the hard, bright purity from which, she considered, streams the perfect truth. She never felt that she had attained them.
Parker might as well have been writing about herself.
She got her first writing job in early 1914 at Vogue, for $10 a week. She was thrilled, even though the salary was so small, and started climbing the ladder. Soon she had a job at Vanity Fair and was publishing stories, poems, and reviews and collaborating on novels, plays and movies. She married in 1917, but the marriage was not a success. Over the next few years, she attempted suicide three times, once by cutting her wrists and twice by overdosing on barbiturates. She worked very hard all day and partied at night, always witty and charming, showing her true unhappiness to only a very few close friends.
By 1931, she'd been divorced for several years. She met a young actor, Alan Campbell, at a party and fell in love with him. He was bright, witty, extroverted, and flamboyant. He had expensive tastes and liked high living, good food, nice clothes, and parties. He was also bisexual, but Dorothy refused to look at the problems that could cause in the future. In a short time he had moved into her apartment and was making himself indispensable as her "assistant": he cooked, did the laundry, acted as her secretary, paid the bills, cleaned, walked the dogs, and entertained her. Some of her friends hated him, but according to Donald Ogden Stewart, "He took her and probably kept her living. Alan was an actor and he may have been playing a part which, little by little, took over, but he wasn't a villain. He kept her living and working." She still drank too much, but there were no more suicide attempts and Alan encouraged her to write.
In 1933, Dorothy and Alan moved to Hollywood, where they worked as a writing team for MGM and Paramount. They made a staggering amount of money, but happiness was harder to come by. Dorothy and Alan married, and Dorothy became unexpectedly and joyously pregnant, but miscarried after only a few months. She threw herself into political activities: union organizing, the Communist Party's anti-Fascist activities, and so on, and later went to Spain to write about the Spanish Civil War. All of these activities cost her dearly after World War II; when the Red Scare began, she was blacklisted in Hollywood.
Alan had enlisted in the military during World War II, and they had drifted apart. They divorced, but weren't happy apart from each other. Eventually they reconciled and remarried, but Alan died in his sleep just a few years later, at the age of 58. She moved back to New York and spent the remaining few years of her life writing a little and drinking a lot. She died in 1967.
Dorothy Parker's stories are very much like she was: cynical but romantic, funny but cruel, and fond of understatement. The women in her stories leap romantically into marriage, full of optimism, but find that their husbands and their marriages are unable to live up to their expectations. The husbands come to realize that they're wrong, but they never quite know why. The husbands and wives in her stories never see what the reader knows long before the end: that marriage, unlike fairy tales or Hollywood movies, seldom ends well.
Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888. Her father was a merchant and banker. She wrote from a very young age. Her first published story, "Enna Blake," appeared in The High School Reporter when she was 9 years old.
She went to Queen's College in London in 1903 and studied music. She also contributed articles to the college newspaper, and became its editor eventually. She returned to New Zealand in 1906 and determined to become a professional writer; her first paid stories were published at this time under the name "K. Mansfield."
By this time, she had rejected her family's middle-class values and had begun having affairs with both men and women. She finally persuaded her father to let her leave New Zealand, and she went to live in London. She had an affair with Garnett Trowell, a musician, became pregnant by him, and broke up with him. She miscarried a short time later. She impulsively married her singing teacher, George Bowden, but left him on their wedding night.
In 1911 she met John Middleton Murry and fell deeply in love. They wanted to have children, but Katherine was unable to conceive. Their relationship was turbulent, and they separated several times but always got back together. In 1918, Mansfield divorced her first husband and married Murry. In the same year she was found to have tuberculosis.
Mansfield spent her last few years in southern France and in Switzerland, trying every treatment she could find to cure her tuberculosis. She died on January 9, 1923, in the Gurdjieff Institute, near Fontainebleau, France.
"The Garden Party" was written in 1922, when she was desperately ill. In it, an upper-middle class family is preparing for a garden party. Their preparations are interrupted by news of the death of a young working-class man from the village. The mother is unaffected by the news and continues on with her plans for the party. The daughter, Laura, is shocked by her mother's lack of concern, and her encounter with the man's family makes her see her own family in a new light.
The story's obvious theme is classism: the brutality of a class system which separates the upper classes from the invisible workers who make their food, do their laundry, clean their houses, and help set up their garden parties. But there is also a strong undercurrent of the changes wrought by World War I: the implication of the impending collapse of such rigid class systems, and of gender roles as well.
Rebecca West
Rebecca West was born Cicely Isabel Fairfield in London in 1892. Her father was a journalist who abandoned the family when she was a child, and her mother was a pianist. They came from wealthy and educated families who had lost all their money. So West was raised among pianos and good furniture and books, but her mother spent most of her time trying to scrape a living so they could eat. Eventually, the family moved to Edinburgh to live with relatives. Cicely went to a good girls' school on scholarship, and then later spent a year at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where she studied to be an actress. Her acting career was short-lived, but she did play a rebellious heroine named Rebecca West in Ibsen's play Romersholm, and shortly after that, when she began writing for a feminist magazine in 1911, she adopted that name as her pen name, partly because she didn't think she'd be taken seriously with the name "Cicely Fairfield," and partly to spare the family embarrassment. For its first issue, she wrote, in an article advocating free love, "Marriage had certain commercial advantages. By it the man secures the exclusive right to the woman's body and by it, the woman binds the man to support her during the rest of her life... a more disgraceful bargain was never struck."
She began writing more and more essays and literary criticism, and quickly gained the respect and friendship of writers such as George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, and Max Beerbohm. She was not awed by fame or reputation. In a review of one of Strindberg's plays, she wrote, "Writers on the subject of August Strindberg have hitherto omitted to mention that he could not write."
In 1912, she wrote a scathing review of H.G. Wells's book Marriage. Intrigued, he wanted to meet her. They began an affair in 1913 and she had his son, Anthony West, in 1914. The relationship lasted 10 years, during which time he refused to acknowledge his son publicly (although he did infrequently provide financial support for him), and saw him only a few times. West continued to write, adding travel and political writing to her repertoire, and published her first novel in 1918: The Return of the Soldier.
In 1930, West married Henry Maxwell Andrews, a banker, and they moved to a working farm outside of London. They worked the farm, traveled, and she wrote. The relationship was a happy one. She wrote that, until she married him, she had never had "one human being close to me who ever thought of saving me fatigue or pain or irresponsibility." She was "at last able to take pleasure in both my family and my work." Andrews died in 1968; West then moved back to London, where she lived until her death in 1983.
The Return of the Soldier tells the tale of a man, Chris, who returns home from World War I with amnesia: the last 15 years of his life have disappeared from his memory; he doesn't remember his wife, Kitty. He believes himself still to be in love with Margaret, his girlfriend from 15 years before, who is now married herself to someone else. Jenny, his cousin, lives with them and narrates the novel; he doesn't remember her, either, except as a child.
The novel explores a number of themes: classism, feminism, the role of memory and truth, and the loss of a way of life that is being destroyed by the war, among others. And there is great irony: if the women can heal Chris, he will have to return to France, to the war, where he will once again risk being killed.
If you'd like more information on any of the topics covered in this lecture, go to the Links page. Enjoy!
Some of the information in this lecture derives from:
1. The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker, Leslie Frewin
2. You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker, John Keats
3. "The Private Papers of the Dead," Dorothy Parker, qtd. in The Portable Dorothy Parker
4. Katherine Mansfield
5. Gordon, Ian A. "Katherine Mansfield: Overview." Reference Guide to English Literature.
6. Pinkerton, Steve. "Trauma and cure in Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier." Journal of Modern Literature
7. McDowell, Margaret B. "Rebecca West." British Novelists, 1890-1929: Modernists. Ed. Thomas F. Staley.
8. Rebecca West: The Paris Review Interview
9. Rebecca West Biography, Petri Liukkonen