Rhetorical weapons: Gender and violence in modernist literature

Within the modernist period, the avant-garde "aesthetics of assault" and the women's writing so often contrasted to it in fact share an engagement with aesthetic agency and violence. Rather than renouncing the rhetorical weapons of their male modernist colleagues, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) mobilize this violence to disrupt patriarchal literary conventions from within. Drawing upon feminist and poststructuralist theories, especially the work of Judith Butler, I argue that through their citational practices these women writers subvert disabling cultural conflations of masculinity, violence, and agency.;Beginning with the avant-garde hope, prior to World War I, that violence would be a force of cultural renewal, I analyze the contradictions inherent in the aesthetics of assault. Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis's vorticism and F. T. Marinetti's futurism may gesture toward galvanizing their audiences into active involvement in art and politics, but they actually position readers as passive followers behind an elite vanguard of artists. In their parallel rhetorical constructions of the reader and the feminine, Marinetti's and Pound's manifestoes seek to eliminate woman: Marinetti's futurism deanimates and then recuperates the feminine, while Pound's depersonalized formulation of vorticism edits out gender difference altogether. Stein positions woman and reader very differently in Tender Buttons, where the experimental wordplay exposes the semiotic violence of "patriarchal poetry". Stein's own self-reflexive prose poetry, I argue, engages readers in the active process of resignifying gendered categories at the level of language.;From skeptical postwar positions, Woolf and H.D. reveal literature and gender as implicated in the project of war. Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway cites the normalizing discourses of imperial unity and properly violent masculinity in order to expose the absurdity of this invented Englishness. Through characters' consistently inappropriate Shakespearean quotations, Woolf satirizes the ideology that had reduced the bard to an icon of empire and reveals the limits of imperial consolation. Re-citing classical myths and modern psychoanalytic narratives, H.D.'s Helen in Egypt explores the role of image-making in the interpellation of gendered subjects and the perpetuation of war. Despite its reinstatement of patriarchal rule, H.D.'s revisionary epic creates radical new images of nonsovereign masculinity and female agency.