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  • Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom by Allison Pease
  • Bonnie Kime Scott (bio)
Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom, by Allison Pease . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2012 . 159 pp. $94 cloth; $75 ebook.

Boredom is an unlikely impetus for modernist feminist fiction, but Allison Pease makes this claim plausible in her brief study, Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom. She devotes a chapter each to May Sinclair’s The Three Sisters (1915), Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), and The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915–67), and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915). In the process of her work, Pease discovers a remarkable gender divide between women’s depictions of bored females at the turn of the twentieth century and the treatment of that same subject by male authors. Her chapter on male writers looks at Arnold Bennett’s Hilda Lessways (1911), E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), and Robert Hichens’s best-seller, The Garden of Allah (1904).

Well worth consulting is the first chapter, which offers a history of older terms related to boredom, situating it, by way of Michel Foucault, in the worldview of René Descartes and Immanuel Kant, and arguing for “modern boredom’s emphasis on the individual as producer of his or her own meaning” or the self as author of desire (p. 4). This authority evades upper and middle class women of modernist era fiction, who, despite increased educational opportunities, still fall into the passive role of helpmate. Pease’s selected male writers may grant women the sexuality denied them by the Victorians, but each, in his own way, reasserts a biological imperative of heterosexual love. She is sensitive to the views of contemporary feminists such as Olive Schreiner, suffragette Teresa Billington-Grieg, New Woman novelist Mona Caird, and Freewoman editor Dora Marsden, as related to the quest for and obstacles to women’s individualism. Their published efforts and those of popular novelists create an “intimate public based on the affective experience of stunted personhood” (p. 11). Pease locates a secure place for boredom within medical and psychoanalytic discourses of the day, which have already been made familiar in much feminist criticism. Her study joins Patricia Meyer Spacks’s Boredom: A Literary History of a State of Mind (1996), attending more to twentieth-century examples, and Reinhard Kuhn’s The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (1976), which fails to consider women’s writing while glorifying male ennui.

Each of the chapters dedicated to modernist writing has its own take on boredom. The chapter on male writers, titled “Overcoming Nihilism,” suggests that the potential meaninglessness of the universe serves as a deepening backdrop for their fiction. Fewer works, with each discussed in one segment would have made this a more profound, less scattered and [End Page 251] repetitive chapter. Sinclair, Richardson, and Woolf are studied for their differing takes on individualism, with Woolf diminishing the importance of individualism as she struggled to bring forth her first novel. The treatment of Richardson’s Pilgrimage would have benefitted from deeper analysis of one early and one late volume of that work, rather than generalizing and skipping around. Pease addresses the boredom of the reader hinted at by early reviewers and concludes that for its protagonist, “individuality is an end in itself” (p. 89). Boredom for all three authors is relieved by exalting moments, she concedes. Readers can hardly be blamed for alighting upon these moments, as well as complicating the sources of what looks like boredom.

While Pease frames her study in terms of theory by Martin Heidegger and Foucault and grounds the subject of boredom well in existing scholarship, she displays a strained relationship to feminist literary scholarship. She reserves until her conclusion the genetic connection of her study to feminist work of the 1980s, arriving there through a series of detractions. While it is understandable as an individual to want your project to emerge in an original light, I find it regrettable that she misses out on constructive conversations with scholarship. My own work is first cited misleadingly...

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