Modernism's Mothers; or, Figures in the Carpet

ELT 44 : 4 2001 way Grene finally reads The Plough and the Stars underlines its display of human diversity: how can such an ill-assorted, overly-individualised cast of characters be made over into a nation? Here Grene moves towards a politics that is neither nationalist nor anti-nationalist, but post-nationalist and post-Marxist (social class won't organize this cast either). Finally, in his celebration of Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire (Murphy is the anti-pastoral vulpine hero of this book, and Brian Friel comes close to being its pastoral goat), Grene praises Murphy for representing famine , poverty, the American diaspora, and the less charming side of Irish habits as central, in place of the national question. While the book accepts that the "Irish drama" is shaped—down to its privileging of language , its representational mode, its focus on what makes the culture itself, its concern for history—by a colonial/postcolonial situation, it displays a degree of weariness with national self-assertion or nationalist self-admiration. In the two-term dialectic of the old Troubles, this may well be taken by those committed to a republican line as spelling unionism , but all may still see that the humanity of his readings of plays is luminous and exemplary. These are, admittedly, guesses at the politics of the Politics of Irish Drama, a book that for the most part is a safe zone from polemic and theory . It is open-minded, thoughtful, non-tendentious, and delightful to read. Respectful and curious about readings given by other scholars where these are particularly relevant, it is unpedantically inspired by pleasure taken in the great plays it illuminates. Adrian Frazier National University of Ireland, Galway Modernism's Mothers; or, Figures in the Carpet Talia Schaffer. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. χ + 289 pp. $49.95 WITH Women and British Aestheticism (co-edited with Kathy Psomiades, University of Virginia Press, 1999) and now The Forgotten Female Aesthetes, Talia Schaffer has emerged as a leading critic of Victorian Aestheticism, a proverbial "must-read" for anyone working on the period and a sine qua non for anyone working on women or gender in Aestheticism. By the time she concludes with the Postscript, Schaffer is absolutely convincing on the repression of the women aesthetic writers 496 BOOK REVIEWS in the modernism of Hardy, James, and Woolf; in chapter 4, "Ouida and the Origin of the Aesthetic Novel," she reveals the mandarin Ouida as the inventor of Wildean wit and dandyism. But there is more here than the restitution of women to the histories of Aestheticism, modernism, and taste. There is also an aesthetic of everyday life that reminds us of a pre-Woolfian, feminine aesthetic, of the sensuous daily experience of living with children, of beautiful objects ready-to-hand (that at one point Schaffer points out are "a psychological defense against abuse"). Schaffer's chapter on Alice Meynell, "The Angel in Hyde Park," should lead to Meynell's immediate rediscovery. To my mind there is no more aesthetic text than Meynell's "The Colour of Life," which can compare with Tuke's paintings of boys bathing in Cornwall, Symonds's "In the Key of Blue," and Auden's "In Praise of Limestone," among the great aesthetic paeans to everyday life. In Meynell's "The Rhythm of Life" she aestheticizes "the rhythmic pangs of maternity"; in "The Colour of Life" she picks the child out from London's greys and browns. The passage shows the distinctions of the connoisseur: the reduction of the child to "figure," the emergence of color and character through contrast and juxtaposition : "The popular face of the Londoner has soon lost its gold, its white, and the delicacy of its red and brown.... The little figure of the London boy has restored to the landscape the human colour of life.... The most luminous thing was the shining white of an edge of foam, which did not cease to be white because it was a little golden and a little rose in the sunshine. It was still the whitest thing imaginable. And the next most luminous thing was the little unclad child, also invested...