Writing the body across the disciplines: Social science and literature, 1880-1940

This project contributes to ongoing critical re-examinations of the Modernist era by approaching the work of H.D., Djuna Barnes, and Zora Neale Hurston through that era's newly enfranchised disciplines of psychology and anthropology. I focus this historical/cultural approach by examining representations of the body as a vehicle of gendered, sexual, and racial identity within selected literary and social scientific texts.; In the first part of my project, I argue that investigations of sexuality by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Sigmund Freud function to shore up a regime of two fixed and invariable genders, while the fiction of H.D. and Barnes opposes medical codifications of normalcy with a gender and sexual fluidity inimical to sexological categorization. I explore the narrative experimentation of both H.D. and Barnes as a stylistic analogue to their confusion of gender and sexual categories. In the course of my discussion of the sexed and gendered body within the fiction of H.D. and Barnes, I also interrogate the place of the body within contemporary feminist thinking, where debate continues over women's relationship to both language and the body.; The second part of the project moves from a discussion of the sexual body to an examination of the racial body, via a similarly staged confrontation between literary and social scientific texts. I begin by exploring the contradictory impulses in a premiere text of cultural relativism, The Mind of Primitive Man, by Hurston's teacher and mentor Franz Boas. In spite of Boas's intention to respect the specificity of the cultures he investigates, his work participates in the creation of a silenced and domesticated "other." I then examine several of Hurston's essays and her 1935 folklore collection Mules and Men as they construct and deconstruct racial identities and challenge the methodological foundations of the Boas school of "salvage" anthropology by turning the gaze of the "native" back on Western science. Both parts of the dissertation are united in challenging the epistemological assumptions of a social science whose claims to value neutrality allowed it to ground its pronouncements in an allegedly natural and eternal order.