Phyllis Lassner

Domestic Gothic, the Global Primitive, and Gender Relations in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and The House in Paris

The representation of domestic space and its gendered formulations has become an important perspective through which to further our understanding of women writers in the interwar period and their relation to modernism. As Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen persistently shows, it is necessary not only to contextualize domestic space historically, but to read it as a contested site in which men and women, young and old, redefine and conflict over definitions of national and cultural memory and identities. For Bowen, these definitions are complicated by recognitions and denials of the place of those who are deemed ethnically, racially, and culturally Other. In turn, the presence of the Other creates an unsettling sense of instability and uncertainty about individual and national identity. Thus, regardless of how insular or stable, domestic space in Bowen’s writing is never merely private, but rather always generative of and invaded by the history and politics constituting the public sphere. This chapter focuses on the domestic spaces, so important throughout Bowen’s work, that encapsulate and reflect Bowen’s most central artistic concerns during the interwar period. We begin with the Big House in The Last September (1929) and then move to the urban middle-class homes depicted in The House in Paris (1935).

Differences that Divide and Bind

The title of this chapter is the title of a 1942 essay in Time and Tide by Rebecca West.2 Like so many British women writers, her inspiration to find meaning in a second world war began with the losses of World War I. Their painful memories were often similar, and not just because so many lost loved ones. It was also because they remembered how their struggles for equality lost ground to the lure of supporting the nation last time it was threatened by world war. Many had rallied to that earlier war effort on behalf of brothers and lovers who risked their lives for it. When the war invaded the home front with a dreaded telegram, many women, including Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson, and Virginia Woolf, turned their anguish into rage against all wars and became pacifists. But just as World War I garnered impassioned differences among women, the awful possibility of an even more engulfing war moved them to weave memory into different patterns for world peace. So Vera Brittain crafted her 1933 odyssey of feminism and pacifism, Testament of Youth, out of her diaries of World War I’s inexplicable waste. Storm Jameson wove her despair at her young brother’s senseless death into many later narratives, each of them arguing the justice of a new and different world war.

Dancing on a Powder Keg: Letters and Poems: Weber, Ilse, Trans. Michal Schwartz Charlottetown, PE, Canada: Bunim & Bannigan Ltd. 337 pp.,

Historians have paid increasing attention to the twentieth-century redevelopment of industrial cities in recent decades, alongside a growing body of work relating to civic promotion, citizenship, and civic ritual. Yet there have been few attempts to unite these key themes in order to ascertain a true perspective of urban culture. This highly impressive monograph by Charlotte Wildman provides a fresh perspective by focusing on the oftenneglected interwar period in Liverpool andManchester, demonstrating exactly how much can be achieved with a fresh standpoint on urban renewal. Building on an extensive body of research, the study seeks not only to challenge the dominant narrative of negativity that has characterized previous consideration of (particularly northern) nonmetropolitan towns and cities of this period, but also to use the umbrella term of modernity to explore manifestations of urban culture. The all-toofrequent argument that local government and civic culture were simultaneously weakened in the early-to-midtwentieth century is tested and found to be far from accurate. The book’s structure does much to strengthen its argument and clear contribution to historiographical debate. Divided into three sections considering civic culture, consumer culture, and Catholic urban culture, a nuanced case is presented that leaves the reader in little doubt regarding its legitimacy. Crucially, these themes are all too often neglected in favor of a socio-political or economic narrative of change in the industrial city. Here, Wildman successfully demonstrates the efforts made by interwar urban authorities to promote and regenerate local culture, economics, and cityscapes. In the first section, regeneration efforts and civic week celebrations are discussed. This represents one of very few studies to focus on a northern locale in the interwar period. The chapter clearly demonstrates the efforts of civic leaders to not only transform their cities with investment in infrastructure but also to promote them. Of particular note is discussion of British mayors making civic visits to cities in the Americas, furthering notions of modernity, progress and connectivity. This theme is further developed through exploration of CivicWeek, when urban ritual was combined with trade promotion, essentially as a form of boosterism. Crucially, this was for both external audiences (and potential commercial investors) and the local community, in terms of nurturing civic pride and a deeper connection to the revitalizing locale. The comparative model allows frequent contrasting between the examples and efforts of Liverpool and Manchester, with the former finding more success in its civic weeks than the latter. With the social foundations of the two cities and their relationships with urban redevelopment firmly established in the first section, the second section focuses on shopping spaces and fashion culture, with a clear causality between the local community and retail development. Although the commercialization of leisure and the continued development of mass consumption in this period are well-explored topics, this study successfully humanizes the concepts, reclaiming and situating them in the urban, community-based setting. The commercial centers of both cities were remade as social spaces, serving to empower women as consumers with strengthened social identities that went beyond societal restrictions of class. Consideration then turns to religious identities, with a particular focus on processional culture. This allowed individual communities, particularly those of Irish Catholic descent, to express their connection through their faith while laying claim to the urban landscape. Though these processions did not always find favor with the Catholic hierarchy, Wildman makes clear that this was further evidence of a broader modernity that had taken hold of the redeveloped cities, even serving as a form of entertainment, despite connection to traditional values of devotion. This is further demonstrated in the final substantive chapter, focusing on—ultimately unsuccessful—efforts to build the world’s second-largest Catholic cathedral, after St Peter’s Basilica. The account reinforces the sense of identity and drive present in the Catholic community of Liverpool, which is also showcased in earlier chapters. Overall, the study has an overarching sense of ambition and embracement of progression, which was used by officials in the two cities to foster urban renewal. Significantly, particular attention is drawn to the role of the local press in working with local authorities to transform the urban landscape through internal and external promotion, perhaps indicating that the established view of civic decline in this period bears more significance than Wildman suggests. The broad themes also mean that the reader is occasionally left wanting to know more (a testament to the richness of the topic). However, there is no doubt that the study makes an outstanding contribution to the field of urban history, which students and academics will find invaluable for many years to come.

34.95, ISBN 978-1-933480-39-8 Publication Date: January 2017

mental Corporation for Israel “mediated relationships between the Jewish-American community and Israel” (138). Missing from this discussion is the larger historical context in which they operated. The ways in which Israel had weaved its way into American Jewish life after its founding, particularly into American Jewish culture, are central to any understanding of relations between American Jews and Israel during the early years of Israel. This cultural phenomenon, however, is blatantly absent in Lainer-Vos’ book. Finally, the validity of comparing Irish-American nationalists during the 1910s and American Zionists during the 1940s is questionable. The historical contexts in which they operated were so vastly different that without a thorough discussion of those contexts, any arguments coming out of the comparison are unconvincing. Lainer-Vos presents organizational mechanisms as key to understanding historical change. For him, “national mobilization rests on mechanisms” that nationalist organizations establish which allow for different groups to participate in those organizations (130). This may or may not be true, but the argument lacks complexity when the organizations studied are outside their historical context. For readers of this journal interested in relations between American Jews and Israel, the focus of Sinews of the Nation on gift-giving offers an innovative way for trying to understand the development of this complex relationship. Ultimately, though, they will find the work unsatisfying if they seek a study that addresses the historical complexity of the nation-building process.

Whatever happened to British-Jewish studies?

family sport, promoted by its own particular demographic ‘soccer moms’. This enthusiasm is reflected in his focus upon theUSA,which, however, leads to a positioningof theMiddleEast, Africa and Latin America as ‘other’, not set the context of global football – although there is interesting inclusion of grass roots in these different parts of the world. The progressive neoliberal state of the USA sets the agenda which the book then contrasts with the constraints and repression of those regimes that limit women’s freedom and are largely classified as sexist. Machismo is located in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa, but not in Europe, the USA or Australia. I would have welcomed a bit more critical analysis of how patriarchy has worked to marginalise and exclude women in football in places where it is also the main men’s game. Thiswould apply to SouthAmerica andEurope of course and perhaps especially to the UK. The famous and very popular Dick Kerr’s Ladies of the 1920s are not mentioned until page 215 as part of a brief discussion of English football and the ban on the women’s game by the FA, but I understand that Grainey’s main interest and sources of evidence are NorthAmerica.Thebookcould havebenefited frommore engagementwith feminist critiques which would also offer a theoretical explanatory framework for rich empirical data. For example, some of the evidence is taken at face value, such as the claims of male coaches, such asAnsonDorrance and Tony di Cicco, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that women are easier to coach than men. This attributes homogeneity to the category ‘woman’, which feminists have long since questioned. There is also no critical perspective on the dominance of mencoachingwomen’s teamsor any questioningofFIFA’s positive claimsabout the futureof football as female. However, the book does refer to the frequent discriminatory comments, for example about women’s appearance or clothing, usually dismissed as faux pas, of FIFA’s President Sepp Blatter. There is, on the other hand, little critical analysis of the sexualisation of women in sport although some of the instances are recorded. Another example which presents scope for critical exploration of the sexualised position of women in sport is the decision of the Australian football team, the Matildas, to produce a nude calendar in 2007. The empirical detail of the sports writing is excellent. Indeed, the major contribution of this book, especially with reference to recent US teams and players, is to put women footballers into the public arena and to demonstrate women’s struggles for recognition. The visibility and celebrity status of men’s global football means that men dominate the media, but work like Grainey’s offers women heroes of the sport too. I look forward to women’s accounts of their success in the sport.

Olivia Manning: a woman at war

408 nity,” a side of him that is often lost (300). In his two chapters on James Agee, Folks responds to the charge that the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men “failed to present any significant politics at all” (32). Rather, as Folks points out, Agee was deeply aware of his ethical position as voyeur/ investigative reporter. His political awareness, as Folks convincingly argues, is illustrated by his recognition that the disadvantaged need to exist on their own terms. Moving from a discussion of Agee’s awareness of his position, Folks iterates the importance of the author’s sense of failure, and the impact of his relationship with his parents, a theme that is continued in a discussion of The Morning Watch. Folks’s chapters on Gaines emphasize the author’s ethical rather than racialized themes, focusing on how shared experiences forge communities. In his reading of A Gathering of Old Men, Folks examines the importance of “home” to Gaines’s characters, exploring how individuals from different ages, backgrounds and classes are connected through a shared history and experience of oppression. In A Lesson Before Dying, Folks charts how Gaines began to come to terms with Southern culture, exploring how the author connects individuals to their social environments in order to make a stand against the alienating effects of racism and capitalism. Moving from community to alienation, Folks examines Henry Roth’s conflicting tensions between assimilation and immigrant identity, perceptively outlining the lack of criticism that explores the conflict between Jewish immigrant and middle-class American culture in his work. In two chapters on Flannery O’Connor, Folks explores the impact of chronic illness on the author’s work, suggesting that her experience of suffering not only permeated her fiction in language and imagery, but that her disability offered her insight into the plight of others. In his discussion of The Last Gentleman, Folks turns to Percy Walker’s use of satire and caricature, arguing that his work in fact evinces a complicated concern for social ethics. In contrast to Percy, Folks argues in his chapter on the The Sportswriter that Richard Ford’s work “consistently stresses the untranscendent nature of literature,” privileging experience over writing (123). The tensions between experience and writing are sharply drawn in Folks’s discussion of William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner and Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Examining both books through the familiar lens of Spivak’s work on the subaltern, Folks urges that the latter’s work be modified in order to ask how we might achieve “sympathy, or respect, or simply knowledge of others” (136). Whilst Folks raises pertinent questions, the brevity of the chapter leaves little space for the complexity of the issues that he raises. The final two chapters focus on Kay Gibbons and Toni Morrison. For Folks, the originality of Gibbons’s work lies in her pressing concerns about the “need for a coherent system of ethical beliefs and priorities” (157). In his examination of Jazz, Folks deftly outlines Morrison’s concerns with language, and in particular her call to rewrite the past in order to change present consciousness, a theme that arguably characterizes Folks’s own project. Notwithstanding the book’s lack of development at the cost of examining so many authors, Folks has presented an original and often fascinating contribution to the growing field of ethnicity studies.

Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff, and Roth (review)

Stephen Spender begins his account of the 1930s by declaring it ‘the decade in which young writers became involved in politics’.1 Reflecting his own turbulent political involvement, instead of assuming any harmony or consistency, he describes his generation’s divided heart: … extremely non-political with half of themselves and extremely political with the other half. With the political half they really did try to see the world from the ideological viewpoint … a struggle between opposed interests, those of capitalist imperialism and those of the socialist revolution. Perhaps one might not in past historical situations have seen this, but in the thirties it was so highlighted by current circumstances … (p. 18).

From Fascism in Britain to World War: Dystopic Warnings

Like Storm Jameson, Phyllis Bottome (1882–1963) created a series of fictions that analyse Britain’s historic relationship to Europe. A prolific and popular author in her own day, Bottome combined her interest in the psychology of social responsibility and women’s self-determination in several novels, including the 1934 Private Worlds, whose central character is a woman psychologist torn between the professional pressures of forging a place in a male-dominated hospital, her work with patients, and her love for a male colleague. Bottome also lectured and wrote about international relations and political responsibility from the perspective of having lived in Vienna in the early twenties and then in Munich from 1931 to 1933. Her European fiction was based on her experiences there and the force of her social and political involvement led her to create plots that predict the fate of European civilization through the plight of its Jews. She and her husband, Ernan Forbes Dennis, a British passport officer, left Munich in May 1933, ‘when it was no longer possible to live there without witnessing the cruel persecution of our Jewish friends, or ourselves refusing to make terms, however passively, with the controlling gangsters’.1

Defending Europe’s Others

By the time England prepared for a German invasion in 1940, Storm Jameson was envisioning an unabridged, unrevised replay of the Great War. Her reading of continuous world war would not suffice, however, to explain her apocalyptic vision of high-tech escalations of terror compulsively repeating the savagery of the past. But as she foresaw it, a Second World War ‘forces us to think about the catastrophes of the past, the destruction of cities, the collapse of empires, the return of poverty and barbarism’, as a future that would meld ‘London and Nineveh in the same breath’ (‘Crisis’, p. 136). While she would build this eschatology into her speculative fiction of the forties, it would also be tempered by reconfiguring the universal icons of good and evil that were typically written into the heart of other dystopias. Jameson’s aim was to deconstruct such icons because they all too often gave rise to the foundational and romantic myths which supported supremacist ideologies and politics. Although many other dystopias of the period drew upon the rise of Hitler and warned of international crisis, unlike Jameson’s analysis of power politics, their focus on weapon technology would draw readers’ attention away from the human consequences of Europe’s current antagonisms.1

Dystopic Visions of Hitler’s Victory: ‘The Future is Our Business’

British women writers represented the shattering social conditions of the home front; the bombing, however, usually provided only a backdrop to dramas instigated more by the social pressures driven by wartime domestic ideology. Many writers only found the emotional stability to write about women’s wartime lives years after, while others felt compelled by the urgency of the moment to put pen to paper, even as paper was becoming a luxury. Noel Streatfeild, a successful children’s author, wrote in her diary of the Blitz: ‘Tried to write yesterday and couldn’t. Repeated to myself over and over again all that anyone has ever said about carrying on as usual, but sat with my pen in my hand staring at a blank sheet’.3 For some women writers the end of the war was therefore cause for many celebrations, not the least of which was the peaceful time to translate their wartime experiences into written narratives. One of the most successful examples is dramatized in the work and life of Betty Miller (1910–65), who was still struggling to become a serious writer when the war broke out. Having to uproot herself and her two children each time her psychiatrist husband was moved to a different army hospital made the act of writing impossible.