British Modernism and Censorship (review)

If you think of censorship as consistently detrimental to art, Celia Marshik's provocative British Modernism and Censorship might surprise you. Censorship could be, and often was, repressive, however its "productive" and generative effects have not been fully investigated (4), and this study aptly fills in important gaps in histories of the modern period. Marshik reminds us that even "geniuses" such as Woolf or Joyce lived and worked in the world, not above it, and their historical moment was saturated with discourses of morality, purity, and indecency that colored and even transformed their works. Marshik defines the simultaneous process of defense and attack against pressures from "purity organizations and government censors" as "censorship dialectic" (3); she traces this dynamic relationship in texts by figures both canonical (Shaw, Woolf, Joyce) and marginalized in traditional narratives of modernism (Rossetti and Rhys).

The Rossetti chapter focuses primarily on the poet's revision of "Jenny" in light of the Hicklin judgment (1868) which defined obscenity as a matter of effect rather than authorial intent (21–22). Marshik demonstrates that the version ultimately published, while still viewed as overtly sexual by the likes of Buchanan in his "The Fleshly School of Poetry" (1871), turns Jenny herself into a text to be interpreted and the poet into a premodernist of sorts whose embattled position with puritanical critics anticipates the next generation's struggles with censorship.

The following chapter details G. B. Shaw's complex relationship with the social purity movement and censors, from his initial support of William Stead and his influential "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon" (1885), through his long struggle to bring Mrs. Warren's Profession to the stage, to his later skill at "manipulat[ing] the censorship dialectic to his advantage" with his increasing use of "irony and satire to criticize the purity movement" (10–11). In his preface to Plays Pleasant & Unpleasant (1898) and his "The Author's Apology" (1902) Shaw frames his texts as "scandalous works that challenged established morality" (52) and positions himself as modern by discrediting censorship (59). Like Rossetti before him, Shaw asserts his aesthetic choices in direct reaction to his experience of censorship (59). With plays such as The Shewing of Blanco Posnet (1909), Shaw became even more committed to "using drama to satirize social and political problems" (61), while simultaneously using comedy to sugarcoat his "didactic pills," with Pygmalion as his crowning achievement in this satirical vein (60). He mocked Stead's tenuous position between philanthropy and predation when Higgins offers five pounds to Alfred Doolittle in exchange for Eliza (the exact amount supposedly paid for a virgin in Stead's "Maiden Tribute").

While Virginia Woolf also increased the level of satire and parody in her novels between The Voyage Out (1915) and Orlando (1928), her relationship to the censorship dialectic was more fraught than Shaw's due to her role as publisher. "Hogarth placed Woolf inside a panopticon" (11), making her much more aware of the real possibility of prosecution and fines. Woolf deftly "satirized moralists" but also "gently parodied her own reticence" in her novels (91), especially in her use of prostitutes to critique the moral hypocrisy of British society. In Voyage Out, for instance, Woolf "asserts that moralists and censors, and not white slavers, are the biggest threats to Rachel" (97), and suggests that "the preservation of middle-class virginity" such as Rachel's "is constituted with and by the sexual availability of the public woman" (97). For Marshik, Woolf "parlayed her battles with censorship and social purity into innovative and ethically engaged modernist art" (94), but only up to a point. If her protagonist Orlando could have a moment of intimate connection with a prostitute, Woolf herself remained "still fettered [by] the pressures of the social purity movement" throughout her career (117).

Like Shaw and Woolf, Joyce featured prostitutes in his works and "directly responded to the purity movement," especially its Irish incarnation, through parody and satire (11). And like Rossetti, he "became deeply involved in constructing a critical apparatus that would...