The art of being ill: Literature, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis in early twentieth-century Britain (Virginia Woolf, H.D., Hilda Doolittle, D. H. Lawrence).

摘要

Entitled "The Art of Being III: Literature, Aesthetics, and Psychoanalysis in Early Twentieth-Century Britain," this dissertation discovers that in several early twentieth-century texts, representations of illness serve as the means by which their writers corporeally theorize aesthetics. Although there has been a vast amount of good social history and literary criticism inquiring into illness as it was experienced historically and fictionally in the nineteenth century, there has been little sustained commentary on its representations in twentieth-century literature. Concentrating on the literary work of Virginia Woolf, H.D., and D. H. Lawrence, I address questions such as the following: Once women have secured the vote, have entered the public sphere, and have in essence buried the proverbial "angel in the house," what role does illness play in the work of women writers like Woolf and H.D.? What does an understanding of the representations of illnesses in texts by Woolf, H.D., and Lawrence contribute to our understanding of a new aesthetics for the novel? These questions are considered within the context of debates surrounding psychoanalysis and aesthetics as they were being generated by the English translation of Freud's Collected Works and the arrival in England of Melanie Klein. Each of the writers explored in this study engages with psychoanalysis quite self-consciously. Furthermore, each certainly can be said to allude to the types of illnesses commonly addressed by psychoanalysis during this period: hysteria, anxiety, neurosis, dissociation, and hypochondria. However, although Woolf, H.D., and Lawrence all play with the implications of these neurotic illnesses and their diagnoses, they ultimately subject their central protagonists to some form of physical illness which, aesthetically speaking, overrides the predetermined narratives imposed upon sufferers of the former and exploits the symptoms generated by the latter, thereby opening the way into the "undiscovered countries" made accessible only by the drama of the body. I am not, then, addressing states of psychosis or madness, both of which are conditions that remove their sufferers to a large degree from an interaction with their world. Nor am I applying psychoanalysis as a diagnostic paradigm to either the authors or their characters. Rather, I argue that the novels I read imply the bankruptcy of institutional diagnosis and radically revise our notions of "symptom" as configured by psychoanalysts like Freud. In doing so, they force us to rethink the Freudian conception of art as a sublimation that enables illness to be bypassed, a configuration that typically leads to readings of art as symptomatic of illness. The physical illnesses represented in these novels and the symptoms they generate are instead the foundation for a new aesthetic consciousness, a new interpretation of the body's relation to language and by extension to narrative. This new consciousness in turn breeds new forms for the novel.