Modernism, Metaphysics, and Sexuality (review)

The fascinating nature of modernism assures–since the fragmentation of boundaries of knowledge is, ironically, at the heart of a definition of the concept–that critics will forever come to the table to explore the way modern literary texts attempt to capture the subjectivity of what can or cannot be known. Debrah Raschke is one such valuable critic, and her recent book, Modernism, Metaphysics, and Sexuality, offers a useful contribution to the said exploration. In her study, Raschke posits that poststructuralism provided the means to discuss the connection between sexuality and knowing so that new readings of modernism emerged, readings that emphasized what Raschke refers to as “decenteredness, fractured subjectivities, and shifting boundaries–in short, a metaphysical groundlessness” (12). Yet even within this poststructuralist paradigm, according to Raschke, modernism sometimes assumes, though other knowledge systems collapse, that metaphysical structure is still somehow in place. Furthermore, Raschke asserts, “one of the most important boundaries–the boundary between masculine and feminine–has also frequently remained intact” (12). Modernism, Metaphysics, and Sexuality thus revisits, within a framework of metaphysics, the interrelation between what constitutes truth and gender.

Raschke’s first chapter, “Modernism’s ‘Bang Clash’” sets the foundation for her argument. In this extremely thought-provoking and impressively well-researched chapter, Raschke traces the points in history and culture that established modernism as an epistemological crisis. Raschke simultaneously weaves into the narrative an accompanying narrative about feminist readings in this time of tension that have offered alternative narratives. Chapter two, also excellent, discusses the ways in which the early twentieth century inherited a tradition of literary interpretation that tended to read a metaphysical system into a text and thus, Raschke asserts, also often created a framework of subjectivity casting the identity category of woman in a negative light. The theories of Luce Irigaray play a key role in chapter two as Raschke demonstrates the way Irigaray’s rethinking of Western metaphysics necessitates a revisiting of issues related to gender and sexuality.

Raschke uses the subsequent chapters in Modernism, Metaphysics, and Sexuality to test her argument that where theories of metaphysics become problematic, so, too, do issues pertaining to sexuality become more complicated. For example, according to Raschke, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness during Marlow’s moments of panic a crisis in knowing accompanies an almost epiphany-like experience by which Marlow comes to more fully understand a troubling (for him) narrative vision related to sexuality. Victory and Chance, Raschke explains, also address this synergistic crisis. Chapter four taps into Forster’s interest in epistemology as evident in A Passage to India, while chapter five, perhaps one of the strongest chapters in the book, considers Lawrence’s enjoinder that fiction is philosophy and that gender situations can constitute a substitute metaphysics altogether. Raschke’s final chapter, on Woolf, considers A Room of One’s Own and To the Lighthouse and shows that Woolf, through Lily’s painting, is able to revise both metaphysical vision and the place of gender within this vision. Each chapter in the book thus effectively contributes to Raschke’s contention that “if modernism is a collapse of boundaries, if it is a crisis in knowing as so many readings suggest, the masculine/feminine binary that undergirds metaphysics’ foundation is part of that crisis. Where there is a crisis in knowing, there is a reciprocal crisis in sexuality: neither one without the other” (170).

Raschke’s breadth of knowledge about other critics and theorists who have considered these issues is impressive; the book, in other words, is extraordinarily well-researched. The strongest element of the book, I believe, is Raschke’s wonderful study of the trials modernism has undergone. On one hand, it seems to me, the fact that the study of metaphysics exists and has been in place for thousands of years signifies the need in human nature and in the universe to establish meaning and a way of knowing, and modernism, while it tries to reconcile this need, also struggles constantly with what seems to be so truthful to...