4/11/2024
Desire and Identity: Modern Fiction Lecture 10
Identity
● Psychological construction of the self, the definition of personhood.
● How the individual understands themselves to be.
● Is identity fixed? Is it performed?
● Is it singular? Is it natural?
● What can challenge identity - change (time), others or desire (love)?
● Identities created afresh - no prints, rather mutable.
Desire
● Woolf’s desire to see women in fiction; desire to represent women in fiction, as themselves
and different from men.
● Desires for women, more enriched lives.
● Desire for women (as loved/wanted) as represented in Mrs Dalloway, The Great Gatsby.
● Desires of women, for men, for better lives; as seen in Their Eyes Were Watching God.
‘Women and Fiction’
● ‘In the early nineteenth century, women’s novels were largely autobiographical. One of the
motives that led them to write was the desire to expose their own suffering, to plead their own
cause, to write of women as women have never been written before; for of course until very
lately, women in literature were the creation of men’.
● ’Often nothing tangible remains of a woman’s day. The food that has been cooked is eaten;
the children that have been nursed have gone out into the world. Where does the accent fall?
What is the salient point for the novelist to seize upon? It is difficult to say. Her life has an
anonymous character which is baffling and puzzling in the extreme. For the first time, this
dark country is beginning to be explored in fiction; and at the same time a woman has also to
record the changes in women's minds and habits which the openings of the professions has
introduced. She has to observes how their lives are ceasing to run underground; she has to
discover what new colours and shadows are showing in them now that they are exposed to
the world’. Virginia Woolf, ‘Women and Fiction’.
● Creates a space for not only for her own fiction, but that of Rhys and even Hurston.
● Deeper desires beyond the home and illustrate their suffocation in the home: historical
consciousness forms the whole.
1918 to 1923 - Those Five Years
● ‘…had been, he suspected, somehow very important. People looked different. Newspapers
seemed different. Now, for instance, there was a man writing quite openly about water
closets… And then there was this taking out a stick of rouge, or a powder puff, and making up
the public. On board ship coming home there were lots of young men and girls - Betty and
Bertie he remembered in particular - carrying on quite openly… And they weren’t engaged;
just having a good time; no feelings hurt on either side. As hard as nails she was - Betty
Whatshername - but a good thorough sort. She would make a very good wife at thirty - she
would marry when it suited her to marry; marry some rich man and live in a house near
Manchester. Who was it now who had done that?’
● Writing in 1920s at a time of residual change of women but also in the ways which gender
and relationships were understood.
● This quote illustrates Walsh accepting that he is part of an older generation - not quite
grasping what young people want. Not judging the youths behaviour as negative.
Clarissa Reflects
Desire and Identity: Modern Fiction Lecture 10
Identity
● Psychological construction of the self, the definition of personhood.
● How the individual understands themselves to be.
● Is identity fixed? Is it performed?
● Is it singular? Is it natural?
● What can challenge identity - change (time), others or desire (love)?
● Identities created afresh - no prints, rather mutable.
Desire
● Woolf’s desire to see women in fiction; desire to represent women in fiction, as themselves
and different from men.
● Desires for women, more enriched lives.
● Desire for women (as loved/wanted) as represented in Mrs Dalloway, The Great Gatsby.
● Desires of women, for men, for better lives; as seen in Their Eyes Were Watching God.
‘Women and Fiction’
● ‘In the early nineteenth century, women’s novels were largely autobiographical. One of the
motives that led them to write was the desire to expose their own suffering, to plead their own
cause, to write of women as women have never been written before; for of course until very
lately, women in literature were the creation of men’.
● ’Often nothing tangible remains of a woman’s day. The food that has been cooked is eaten;
the children that have been nursed have gone out into the world. Where does the accent fall?
What is the salient point for the novelist to seize upon? It is difficult to say. Her life has an
anonymous character which is baffling and puzzling in the extreme. For the first time, this
dark country is beginning to be explored in fiction; and at the same time a woman has also to
record the changes in women's minds and habits which the openings of the professions has
introduced. She has to observes how their lives are ceasing to run underground; she has to
discover what new colours and shadows are showing in them now that they are exposed to
the world’. Virginia Woolf, ‘Women and Fiction’.
● Creates a space for not only for her own fiction, but that of Rhys and even Hurston.
● Deeper desires beyond the home and illustrate their suffocation in the home: historical
consciousness forms the whole.
1918 to 1923 - Those Five Years
● ‘…had been, he suspected, somehow very important. People looked different. Newspapers
seemed different. Now, for instance, there was a man writing quite openly about water
closets… And then there was this taking out a stick of rouge, or a powder puff, and making up
the public. On board ship coming home there were lots of young men and girls - Betty and
Bertie he remembered in particular - carrying on quite openly… And they weren’t engaged;
just having a good time; no feelings hurt on either side. As hard as nails she was - Betty
Whatshername - but a good thorough sort. She would make a very good wife at thirty - she
would marry when it suited her to marry; marry some rich man and live in a house near
Manchester. Who was it now who had done that?’
● Writing in 1920s at a time of residual change of women but also in the ways which gender
and relationships were understood.
● This quote illustrates Walsh accepting that he is part of an older generation - not quite
grasping what young people want. Not judging the youths behaviour as negative.
Clarissa Reflects
