| This dissertation constructs a genealogy of the epistemological, aesthetic, and political functions of bisexuality in key texts by H.D., Rosamond Lehmann, and Virginia Woolf. I argue that in interwar London "bisexuality" was a powerful literary trope for modernist intellectuals resisting imperatives to categorize, define, and control desire and sexuality. At the socio-historical moment that the heterosexual/homosexual dyad was achieving cultural consecration, these women used bisexuality to expose the limitations that dyad imposed on interpersonal and social relationships, reasoning, politics, artistic creativity, individual psychology, ethics, even spirituality. I aim both to restore the role of female bisexuality in the historical development of gendered sexual epistemologies and to recapture literary interpretative possibilities lost to the hetero/homo dyad.;Because these authors mediated and challenged the work of other theorists of gender and female sexuality, Chapter 1 examines the competing theories of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sexual scientists and sociologists: Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, Hirschfeld, Freud, Stekel, Carpenter---particularly theories of bisexuality, psychosexual hermaphroditism, sexual inversion, lesbianism, intersexuality, true sex, the third sex, and the intermediate type. Chapter 2 contextualizes the interwar debates over gender and female sexuality in terms of women's increasing socio-political equality, their professional gains before and during World War I, imperatives to reproduce, and anxieties about young women's mannish self-fashioning and sexual freedom. This chapter also details two competing interwar sexual epistemologies: the "modernist" proliferation of distinct female sexual types and the "postmodern" understanding of gender and sexuality as performative. Chapter 3 shows how H.D. mediates the intellectual paradigms of Pater, Ellis, and Carpenter to formulate tropological, generic, and feminist uses for gendered duality and bisexuality in Paint It To-day. Chapter 4 examines Woolf's theorization of the commonness of bisexuality as challenge to competing notions of sexual identity and androgynous genius promoted by other women writers, especially Radclyffe Hall and Vita Sackville-West. Chapter 5 argues that Lehmann achieved bestseller status with Dusty Answer by juxtaposing competing interwar sexual epistemologies. The protagonist's femininity and bisexuality made her provocatively unrecognizable to middlebrow readers fascinated with identifying types, while the theorization of her queer desires seemed avant-garde to highbrow readers. |
