May Sinclair, Feminism, and Boredom: "A Dying to Live"

May Sinclair, Feminism, and Boredom: "A Dying to Live" Allison pease John Jay College of Criminal Justice City University of New York IN HER three most critically acclaimed novels, The Three Sisters (1914), Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), and The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), May Sinclair focuses on the experience of boredom in women's lives to explore the ways that late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century British culture rewarded women for renouncing their desires and developing self-inhibited characters whose lives appear meaningless and empty. It may not seem like a winning formula for a best-selling author to write novel after novel in which "nothing happened. Nothing ever would happen,"1 where characters sit "doing nothing"2 as their minds carry on "empty, in empty, flying time,"3 and yet Sinclair was one of the most respected, intellectually connected, and widely read novelists of the early twentieth century. Indeed, between 1910 and 1920 she was considered England's foremost woman novelist.4 Although Sinclair knew and maintained friendships with many of the major literary figures of the time (Arnold Bennett, Ezra Pound, H.D., Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf, among others), these writers have received significantly more critical and biographical attention .5 There are to date only three monographs written exclusively on Sinclair's substantial body of work, which includes twenty-one novels, a novel in verse, numerous short stories, two books on idealist philosophy , a book on the Brontes, and a journal of her brief time assisting an ambulance during the First World War. Suzanne Raitt's excellent May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian (2000) is a welcome recent contribution to Sinclair scholarship, and contextualizes many of the ideas in her novels, but is, like the other two monographs—Boll's Miss May Sinclair Novelist (1973) and Zegger's May Sinclair (1976)—largely a chronological accounting of her life and work. The effect of such stud168 PEASE : SINCLAIR ies is that individual novels and ideas attach themselves more readily to Sinclair's idiosyncratic personality and concerns, rather than circulate among the broader set of ideas at work within British literature and culture in the early decades of the twentieth century. Two purposes of this article are to identify a central thematic concern of Sinclair 's—the bored woman—as an idea in circulation during the era and to show how Sinclair's specific uses of boredom participated in broader political and intellectual movements in feminism and psychology. The argument here is not just that Sinclair featured boredom as a problem resulting from women's conditioning in psychological repression, but that she did so in the cause of feminism. May Sinclair was an early advocate of the burgeoning field of psychology in England and in 1913 she became a benefactor and member of the board of the first clinic in Britain to offer psychoanalytic treatment , the Medico-Psychological Clinic. In addition to her familiarity with the work of Freud, Jung, and Janet, Sinclair, in her own nonfiction writings, strongly praises the work of William McDougall, a pioneer and leading authority of British psychology who wrote a number of best-selling books on psychology in the 1910s and 1920s in which he praises Freud's work on hysteria and repression.6 Zegger writes that "Sinclair was sympathetic to psychoanalysis because many of its beliefs were ideas to which she was already committed: the idea of the importance of sex, of the harmful effects of repression, and of the value of self-development or self-realization. She regarded psychoanalysis as an ally in the struggle against Victorian values."7 In her broad-ranging A Defence of Idealism (1917), Sinclair, who declared Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" a "tragedy of submerged passion,"8 claims "psychoanalysis rests on the assumption that we only live sanely and perfectly so far as we live consciously, so far as our psyche lifts us up above its racial memories and maintains the life which is its own—that is to say, so far as we are individuals. The secret of individuality lies in the sublimation to consciousness of the unconscious Will-to-live."9 Although she is often accused by...