The androgyny crisis in Modernism

Although central to the volatile gender politics of Modernism, androgyny is often obscured and encoded to evade canonical exclusion. Transgressive in a canon largely determined by a prescriptive anxiety of patriarchal influence, androgyny acts as anathema to proponents of literary tradition and as an ideal to those whose voices are contingent on the defiance of the strictures of canonicity itself. The paradigm of the censorship of androgyny in Modernism is reflected not only in Sigmund Freud's model of the enforced repression of pre-Oedipal bisexuality but also in C. G. Jung's analysis of the progressive historical devaluation of Western culture's anima. The androgyny crisis in psychology and culture is the encoded objective correlative of Modernism, effecting a polarized no man's land between the traditional Oedipal canon, based on the privilege of literary fathers, and the revisionist androgyny canon which presupposes the levelling of gender hierarchies.; This dissertation dissects the myriad cultural, canonical, and editorial layers of censorship that camouflage and sometimes even eradicate the embattled androgynous muse of Modernism. Contextualizing the progressive cultural censorship of androgyny through the lens of Jungian and feminist archetypal theory, Chapter One sets the stage for subsequent textual studies of editorial censorship by anatomizing Freud's modernization of the Oedipal imperative which underscores T. S. Eliot's codification of Modernist canonicity. Focusing on Hemingway's The Garden of Eden, Chapter Two scrutinizes the editorial process that transformed the dynamic gender ambivalence of the manuscript--a masterpiece of the androgyny canon--into yet another tribute to the merely virile tip of Hemingway's massive gender iceberg. In Chapter Three, editor T. S. Eliot's deletions from the manuscript of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood constitute another case study of canonical censorship which effaces yet does not completely erase the novel's apocalyptic vision of androgynous spiritual and political transcendence. Ultimately, the androgyny canon survives Oeditorial censorship.