Off-campus UMass Amherst users: To download dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your UMass Amherst user name and password.
Non-UMass Amherst users, please click the view more button below to purchase a copy of this dissertation from Proquest.
(Some titles may also be available free of charge in our Open Access Dissertation Collection, so please check there first.)
Metaphysical havens as sexual fantasy: Epistemological and sexual construction in the modern British novel
Abstract
This study expands the definition of British Modernism by interweaving an epistemological analysis with issues of sexual construction in the following texts: Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, E. M. Forster's Passage to India and Maurice, and D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love. My reading of Modernism illuminates how the epistemological concerns of the British modern novel both expose a collapsing patriarchal order, and conversely, how anachronistic epistemological systems become resuscitated through gender relations. Gender relations, in essence, become a substitute metaphysics. Hardy's Jude, suggests that neither the Platonic/romantic nor the empiricist/realist episteme is a valid way of reading the world. In doing so, it collapses traditional notions about sexuality upon which these systems rely. The larger narrative structure, though, anchored in a romantic distancing attempts to revive a slipping patriarchal control. Conrad's Heart of Darkness, subverting Descartes, empiricism, and Romanticism disrupts the possibility for mastery which challenge the traditional means of storytelling, upon which Marlow, in part, relies. Exposing the adventure and the romance as meconnaissance, Heart of Darkness links the exclusion of women from both action and knowledge as a mistaken fantasy of male autonomy. Yet like Jude, Heart of Darkness oscillates, attempting to preserve the status of the male community to whom Marlow relays his tale. Victory, Conrad's last novel, continues this critique with less equivocation. The most radical of the selected texts, Forster's Passage to India and Maurice, invoke Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" and Phaedrus respectively. Connecting metaphysics to how one thinks about sexuality, Forster's texts illuminate how a Platonic preoccupation with fixity and binary oppositions generate a misreading of the world and sexual relations. Lawrence's Women in Love, the most conservative of this selection, resuscitates a Hegelian metaphysics under the guise of a supposed liberatory "blood consciousness" and philosophy of the body. In Lawrence most explicitly, the love relationship becomes haven not for its promises of love, but for its enticement into epistemological certainty.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
Recommended Citation
Raschke, Debrah K, "Metaphysical havens as sexual fantasy: Epistemological and sexual construction in the modern British novel" (1991). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9207449.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9207449