Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf (review)

In the last decade, there has been an increased interest in modernist fiction by women. Within the context of the diversified new modernist studies, much work has focused on reviving supposedly minor writers while others have offered new critical perspectives on the short fiction of famous authors such as Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.¹ But since Dominic Head's 1992 study of the modernist short story and his statement that the genre "ought to be seen as centrally involved in the revolution in fictional practice,"² Claire Drewery's book is the first to take up the subject of modernist short fiction's specificity by examining the complex interconnections between genre, gender, and liminality through an original corpus of texts. In fact, one of the achievements of her book is to convince us, if need be, that the marginalized Richardson and Sinclair should be included in a study of female modernism. Her research also makes a valuable contribution to recent scholarship on the literary codings of female experience in modernist fiction, although she specifies in her introduction that "the liminal themes common to women's short fiction are . . . characteristic traits of both modernism and the short story in general" (11).

Drewery's book maps the locations of liminality in the short stories of Mansfield, Woolf, Richardson, and Sinclair not just as a "pervasive theme" but as a trope expressing "the condition of short fiction as genre" and revealing how it is often preoccupied with "in-between spaces," "moments of interlude," "crises of identity," and the transgression of "boundaries, whether psychological or social, thematic or theoretical" (3). As the liminal is a "complex phenomenon," "both palpable and intangible" (4), Drewery draws on the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralist theory with illuminating readings from Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, and Terry Eagleton, among others. Her main thesis is that "as writers, as modernists, and as women," Mansfield, Richardson, Sinclair, and Woolf "negotiate [liminality's] embodiment of an ominous threat of exclusion with a realm of creative and potentially subversive possibility" (13). As such, her work offers a new reading of the tensions, paradoxes, and ambivalences that are central to the aesthetics of the modernist short story while showing the intimate ties between liminality and "women's subjectivities" (11).

The book falls into six chapters, all of them exploring a different aspect of the liminal through the textual analysis of a few representative stories. The first chapter focuses on the spiritual and aesthetic metaphor of the journey as a spatial, temporal, and psychological experience of alienation, exile, and transience. In the second chapter, Drewery addresses the subject of mortality and mourning, two hardly articulable liminal and subjective conditions the representation of which challenges the modernist drive towards formal and structural unity. She offers particularly subtle and convincing pages on Mansfield's fictions of haunting memories. The third chapter logically moves from "impossible mourning" to the study of death as a pervading theme and generic trope whereby modernist short fiction negotiates its intrinsic impulse towards an absent "other." Expanding on the recent research on modernism's nostalgia for the past and its resulting "uncanny tradition" (67), the fourth chapter offers a thought-provoking discussion on the psychological and psychoanalytical gothic in a few short fictions by Sinclair and Woolf, and analyses how this other type of liminal experience is conveyed through an experimental and elliptic prose. In the following chapter, Drewery uses Julia Kristeva's theory of signification, Judith Butler's notion of performativity (to me the most useful reference here), and the work of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman on Modernity and Ambivalence to look in a fresh way at the modernist literary representation of "inner life," its paradoxes and dilemmas. Her concluding chapter explores the link between the modernist epiphanic moment and the liminal condition by building on the recent research on...