Bennett & Modernism

Book Reviews Bennett & Modernism Robert Squillace. Modernism, Modernity, and Arnold Bennett. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1997. 223 pp. $36.50 A WOOLFIAN by trade, I must confess to having had serious misgivings about this book at first. Arnold Bennett? And modernism? What extraordinary contortions would be necessary to make those two terms happily co-exist in the same title? Well, none, it turns out. All Robert Squillace does is remind us of the great modernist lesson—how crucial position and angle are to what is seen—and then ask us to shift our gaze. That's all. In his well-written examination of Arnold Bennett's career, Squillace invites us to shift our gaze in three major ways. First, he asks us to momentarily suspend the modernist version of literary history and to look at the transition from Edwardian to modernist from Arnold Bennett's point of view. Second, he wants us to ignore the customary equation of Bennett with the Five Towns novels and to consider the whole span of his career as an embodiment ofthat transition. Third, he asks us to set aside the standard of realism as it is usually applied to Bennett's work and to focus on narration, point of view, and reader expectations instead. The main difference between Edwardian and Georgian, according to Squillace, is the difference between "modernity" and "modernism," so he opens his book by placing those terms in their historical context and carefully distinguishing between them. For the Edwardians, he explains , modern meant progressive, a belief in the human ability to change one's self and one's society according to rational principles, to overthrow inherited privileges, and thus to create a more equitable society , particularly in terms of class and gender. For the Georgians, such beliefs were destroyed in the Great War trenches. Consequently, they dissociated themselves from the past, especially the Victorian and Edwardian past and its belief in progress, and defined their discourse as one of discontinuity in response to fragmentation. That supposed rupture came to be called modernism. Squillace convincingly argues that over the course of his career, Bennett moved from Edwardian assumptions about the self and society to a more modernist questioning of those assumptions, but that modernists could not see or credit this accom180 BOOK REVIEWS plishment because of their commitment to a discourse of discontinuity; such a discourse demanded that they erase the one career demonstrating the close relation of modernism to its immediate forebears, the intimate connection between "modernity" and "modernism." Squillace's remarkably evenhanded account of the Woolf/Bennett quarrel and the larger context out of which it emerged foregrounds a generational anxiety that influenced the creation of modernist literary history and sets the stage for his readings of representative Bennett novels. Though he includes other Bennett novels in his discussion, Squillace focuses on The Old Wives' Tale, the Clayhanger trilogy, The Pretty Lady and Ricey man Steps, and Lord Raingo to illustrate the steps in Bennett's gradual passage from Edwardian to modernist, from an analysis of the struggle to overthrow patriarchal authority and a faith in a resulting autonomy, organization, and equality to a questioning of that faith and an acknowledgment of how unconscious desires underlie even the most seemingly rational behavior. Although Squillace provides a wealth of detail about these novels—those with little or no familiarity with Bennett 's work will quickly feel more knowledgeable about Bennett's characters, themes, plots, and techniques—that detail always supports his larger claims about the direction Bennett's career took. Indeed, Squillace expertly weaves details, interpretive commentary, historical background, and primary source material to enlarge, enrich, and complicate the novels and our understanding (or misunderstanding) of them. (One minor quibble: some of the best discussion has mysteriously been relegated to several very long footnotes, such as numbers 5 and 6 in Chapter 2 and number 14 in Chapter 4.) Most illuminating, for example, is his examination of the interplay between secrecy and advertisement in Edwardian fiction, and his study of male/female relations both at the time and in Bennett's fiction. Although his discussion is clearly informed by contemporary theory, Squillace does not ride or deride any particular theoretical hobbyhorse...