Mystical compositions of the self: women, modernism, and empire【翻译】

ABSTRACT
Mystical Compositions of the Self: Women, Modernism, and Empire explores women’s early
20th-century literary inscriptions of mysticism’s entanglement with empire and the figure of
the female at the center of each. Through an examination of selected texts by Evelyn
Underhill, Eva Gore-Booth, May Sinclair, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mary Butts, and
Virginia Woolf, Mystical Compositions argues that the discourse of mysticism underwrites
modernist aesthetic strategies and ethical questions, particularly the pressing concerns of the
self’s relation to gendered, religious, colonial, and socioeconomic others within the strictures
of British imperialism.
Employing a combination of postcolonial, feminist, and religious studies
methodologies, this dissertation begins by briefly tracing the discursive history of
“mysticism” from ancient mystery religions to its late 19th- and early 20th-century “revival” in
British culture, paying particular attention to the prominent use of Woman as a figure of
mystical unity in modernist literature and imperial scholarship and propaganda. The project
then argues that selected women writers lace their characters’ lives with mystical discourses
in ways that suggest the skepticism and hopeful longing of living within an imperial system of
inequalities and interactions: mysticism can engender connection with others and can offer
counter-cultural resistance to the oppressive powers of state, empire, and patriarchal family.
It also comes with the potential for minimizing the consumption of the other and for losing
the self during a historical moment when women are organizing to actualize their political
selfhood through suffrage campaigns, World War I efforts, and non-conscription
movements.
Instead of providing a taxonomy of mysticism or a singular categorical definition, the
project’s chapter studies present a prismatic array of the various mysticisms, the diverse
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“mystical compositions of the self” that proliferate through the dynamic of modernism’s
ambivalent relation to empire. The dissertation then proposes that these compositions
operate, to varying degrees, within a “mystical economy of the impossible,” in which the
willing offering of the self to others paradoxically brings about self-abundance. Ultimately,
Mystical Compositions highlights the mutually-shaping nature of early 20th-century British
mystical, modernist, and imperial discourses and considers the gifts and costs of
collaborations between politics, art, corporate religion, and personal spirituality.
Abstract Approved: ____________________________________
Thesis Supervisor
____________________________________
Title and Department
____________________________________
Date
MYSTICAL COMPOSITIONS OF THE SELF:
WOMEN, MODERNISM, AND EMPIRE
by
Cory Bysshé Hutchinson-Reuss
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
December 2010
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Mary Lou Emery
Copyright by
CORY BYSSHÉ HUTCHINSON-REUSS
2010
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
_______________________
PH.D. THESIS
_______________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Cory Bysshé Hutchinson-Reuss
has been approved by the Examining Committee
for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in English at the December 2010 graduation.
Thesis Committee: ___________________________________
Mary Lou Emery, Thesis Supervisor
___________________________________
Teresa Mangum
___________________________________
Lori Branch
___________________________________
Lara Trubowitz
___________________________________
Jeffrey Cox
To Bryan and Esmé
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deep gratitude to Professor Mary Lou Emery for impeccable guidance and
support, for incisive, productive comments and queries, for the ability to see my work for
what it was and what it could be, for encouragement, for affording me the freedom to learn
and work in my own rhythm and time, and for exemplary teaching, including the England
Between the Wars seminar that led me to this dissertation in the first place.
I also owe a generous measure of thanks to my dissertation committee: Teresa
Mangum, Lori Branch, Lara Trubowitz, and Jeff Cox. Thank you for offering your direct,
searching questions and suggestions, for bringing your wealth of knowledge and expertise to
bear on my thinking, research, and writing, for your encouragement, and for helping shape
this project from its earliest stages in my comprehensive exam portfolio. Thanks also to
Florence Boos, who chaired my comprehensive exam, asked provocative questions that
moved me towards the dissertation, freely loaned me books, and continues to model a
dedicated life of teaching, scholarship, and political commitment.
I’d also like to extend my appreciation to the English Department at the University
of Iowa for awarding me the Elizabeth Dietz Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship, and to
the students in my British Mysticism, Modernism, and Empire course, whom I had the
pleasure of teaching as a result of the Dietz fellowship. I’m particularly grateful to Bret
Scofield, Jasmine Hemery, Sarah Jane Miller, Alyssa Perry, and Cole Konopka for their
enthusiastic and intelligent discussions and inquiries that helped me better understand my
own reading of modernist mysticism, and for their imbuing the corporate experience of
discussing literature with such quirk and charm that I was inspired to write poetry again.
Though writing a dissertation is in large part a solitary endeavor, my steadfast
community has enabled me to make it through this arduous process not only intact but
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joyful. My lifelong thanks to Jessica DeSpain, who has been with and for me since my first
year of graduate school and is my abiding friend and refuge; to Tembi Bergin-Batten, Deb
Manion, and Vickie Larsen for reading drafts of my chapters, pressing me into the difficult
work and contemplative pleasures of rigorous scholarship, and sharing good food, drink,
conversation, and mature friendship; to Ellie Alberhasky, JJ Alberhasky, Nichole Eden, Nina
Cilek, Martin Carpenter, Fran Pratt, and Jordan Gadapee, for song, prayer, laughter, honest
dialogue, and the sustenance of your unwavering love and friendship; to my brother, John
Hutchinson, and his family, Sarah, Shiloh, Eden, and Jay, for their palpable love and support
from afar; and to my parents, John and Debbie Hutchinson, who are, in countless ways, the
foundation of my world. I hope I have made you proud.
I dedicate this dissertation to Bryan and Esmé, who have shown me that with love
and joy, work becomes treasure, but that some treasures are truly gifts.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................................................1
Women, Mystical Death, Political (After)Life............................................................1
Modern Mysticisms and the Challenge of Definition ...............................................5
The Story of “Mysticism” ...........................................................................................10
Inherited Mysticism and the Modernist Moment....................................................15
Empire’s Imprint: Modernism’s Mystical Aesthetics and Ethics ..........................24
Women at the Crossways of Mysticism, Modernism, and Empire.......................27
CHAPTER ONE: INCARNATIONAL MYSTICISM AND EVELYN
UNDERHILL’S PIETA OF THE SELF................................................................34
Breaking and Re-Making Madonnas..........................................................................34
Mysticism for the Modernist.......................................................................................40
The Divine Image(d)....................................................................................................50
Madonna of the Drawing-Room: Icon of Fashionable, Marketable
Mysticism..................................................................................................................62
The Holy Grail: Cup of Christ, Body of the Mother (Country)............................67
The Pieta of the Self.....................................................................................................81
CHAPTER TWO: “IT’S ALL IN THE PICTURE”: UNITY AND AESTHETIC
MYSTICISMS IN THE TRIUMPH OF MAEVE AND THE TREE OF
HEAVEN....................................................................................................................87
Unity’s Call ....................................................................................................................87
Eva Gore-Booth and the Work of Peaceful Rebellion...........................................89
Reviving and Revising Irish Myth..............................................................................96
The Sword of Pity and Peace....................................................................................106
Becoming the Other: The Imaginative, Mystical Basis of Non-Resistance.......109
Beyond “Any Golden Goal of Empire”: Mystical Pacifism and Political
Sovereignty.............................................................................................................112
May Sinclair and the Vortex of War ........................................................................116
Make Them New: “Sane” Mysticism and “Direct Treatment of the
‘Thing’”...................................................................................................................119
From Suffragist’s Vision to Soldiers’ Bodies: Mystical Idealism and the
Sacrificial Ethic......................................................................................................128
Modernist Poetics for the Mystical Mind................................................................134
Political Conversion, Spiritual Compensation........................................................140
After the War ..............................................................................................................146
CHAPTER THREE: PRIMITIVE MAGIC, SACRED PROPERTY, AND THE
LOGIC OF POSSESSION IN ASHE OF RINGS AND LOLLY
WILLOWES...............................................................................................................148
Inheritances and Dispossessions..............................................................................148
Primitive Magic, Mysticism, and Sacred Property .................................................152
Reclaiming the Temenos of a “Profoundly English Life”: Ashe of Rings ...............158
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Seeing the World with “Collector’s Eyes”: Exotic Objects and the Décor
of the Self ...............................................................................................................168
“The Great Work” of the Will .................................................................................174
The Levity of Lolly Willowes.......................................................................................182
Witchcraft, Primitivism, and Property.....................................................................187
Property as Souvenir: Remembering Ancestors and Institutional Powers ........194
“To be almost wholly earth”: In the Market for Material Simplicity....................197
The Props of Civilization ..........................................................................................200
Possession and Belonging .........................................................................................203
CHAPTER FOUR: “TO WORSHIP AT THE SHRINE THAT [HER] OWN
HANDS HAVE BUILT”: CLARISSA DALLOWAY AND THE
MYSTICAL IMMANENCE OF THE SELF.......................................................208
Endings and Beginnings............................................................................................208
Woolf’s Mystical-Aesthetic Philosophy...................................................................216
Clarissa, Contradictions, and the Artistry of Everyday Life.................................224
Jewel and Crown: Clarissa and the Self as Center .................................................229
“Odd Affinities”: The Dispersed Self and Imperial Expansiveness...................235
Goods, Gifts, Mystical Devotions ...........................................................................241
AFTERWORD: WOMEN, POLITICAL DEATH, MYSTICAL LIFE, OR, THE
MYSTICAL ECONOMY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE............................................246
BIBLIOGRAPHY...........................................................................................................................251

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