Patricia Moran

Shame, Subjectivity, and Self-Expression in Cora Sandel and Jean Rhys

the author of Word of Mouth: Body/Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf and Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and the Aesthetics of Trauma, and she is the co-editor of Jean Rhys: Twenty-first Century Approaches, The Female Face of Shame, and Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in 19thand 20th-century Women’s Writing. Formerly Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, she is now a Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick. modernism / modernity volume twenty two, number four, pp 713–734.

“The Flaw in the Centre”: Writing as Hymenal Rupture in Virginia Woolf’s Work

In a remarkable letter to Ethel Smyth in 1930, Virginia Woolf locates the source of female creativity in women’s “burning centre.”

The ‘dream of roots and the mirage of the journey’: Writing as Homeland in Katherine Mansfield

In a poignant letter to her partner John Middleton Murry, written during one of her numerous sojourns in France, Katherine Mansfield lamented her lack of a ‘real home’ and a ‘real life’: ‘Why haven’t I got a chinese nurse with green trousers and two babies who rush at me and clasp my knees — Im not a girl — Im a woman. I want things. Shall I ever have them?’1 Mansfield’s definition of a ‘real life’ as a version of middle-class, settled (white) domesticity remained elusive in her adult life: a restless nomad, repeatedly moving between England and Europe and setting her most evocative stories in the New Zealand of her childhood memories, Mansfield exemplifies instead the post-colonial subject who is never ‘at home’ anywhere, subject of a ‘mother country’ and ‘homeland’ (England) that affords no home at all. Mansfield’s repeated references to her desire for a ‘real home’ instead underscore the way in which the category of ‘home’ functions not only as a geographical and social concept, but as a psychological and abstract marker of personal, cultural, and national identity. For Mansfield, like many other writers, ‘language becomes the country. One enters the country of words’.2

“A Doormat in a World of Boots”: Jean Rhys and the Masochistic Aesthetic

Near the end of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, the protagonist, Sasha Jansen, very drunk and alone in her room with a gigolo, struggles against his advances, only to find herself pinned beneath him, her dress torn, tears trickling down her face, speechless in the face of his taunts and threats of violence and gang rape (“[I]n Morocco it’s much easier. You get four comrades to help you, and then it’s very easy. They each take their turn. It’s nice like that” [182]). Yet instead of reacting with anger or fear, Sasha somewhat disturbingly proclaims her resurrection as a subject and human being: noting the concrete fact of Rene’s “hard knee between my knees,” Sasha submits, thinking, “My mouth hurts, my breasts hurt, because it hurts, when you have been dead, to come alive… ” (182). Even when Sasha finally rouses herself enough to fend off the gigolo’s attack, this disturbing definition of rebirth persists: the novel ends as Sasha welcomes into her bed a traveling salesman who has denigrated her as a “sale vache” or dirty cow, a man to whom she has earlier responded with fear and repulsion, calling him “the ghost of the landing” and “the priest of some obscene, half-understood religion” (35).