Reading Pilgrimage

158 any case its bulk and format will not make it the edition in which most of us will choose to re-read the novel in its entirety. It is greatly to be hoped, therefore, that the Grindle-Gatrell text, shorn of most of its scholarly accompaniments, will quickly become available in the excellent new World's Classics series of paperbacks, since it is now clearly the text in which we and our students ought to be reading Hardy's finest novel, and one of the greatest of all English novels. Norman Page University of Alberta 2. READING PILGRIMAGE Gillian E. Hanscombe. The Art of Life: Dorothy Richardson and the Development of Feminist Consciousness. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1983. Cloth $20.95 Paper $10.95 Gillian Hanscombe's book, originally an Oxford dissertation published in England in 1982, is one of several treatments of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage that have recently appeared. [See Avrom Fleishman's chapter on Pilgrimage in Figures of Autobiography (California, 1983) and Stephen Heath's essay, "Writing for Silence: Dorothy Richardson and the Novel," in Teaching the Text, eds. Susanne Kappeier and Norman Bryson (London, 1983) as well as Doris Wallace's doctoral dissertation, "The Fabric of Experience: A Psychological Study of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage" (Rutgers Univ., 1982).] Together they suggest that critics are trying to come to terms, at long last, with one of the most troublesome novels of the twentieth century. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that having finally acknowledged the existence of a problem, critics are beginning to inquire into its precise nature. What has made Pilgrimage so hard to read and place? Why is Richardson's position in literary history still ambiguous, while Virginia Woolf's has shifted radically since her death in 1941? Dorothy Richardson has not yet been taken up by any special group nor have the novels that comprise Pilgrimage been subjected, like Virginia Woolf's, to exhaustive literary analysis, in large measure because unlike Woolf's or Joyce's or Proust's novels, Dorothy Richardson's are sui generis in their materials as well as their form. But conceivably the close reading of Pilgrimage—without which no judgment of Dorothy Richardson's rank as a writer can be made—is now at hand. Certainly Avrom Fleishman, Stephen Heath, and Gillian Hanscombe do not regard her novel-sequence from the safe distance preferred by the older literary historians; they enter the text with a view to engaging it. Whether they plunge in and "look innocently about," the method Richardson herself recomended to the readers of Finnegans Wake, is another question. Gillian Hanscombe has in mind a story to tell of a Pilgrimage that is an "enactment" of its author's "prescription for female art." In Hanscombe's view, this prescription "entails the manipulation of reality in as conscious and assiduous a manner as the fictional subject-matter is manipulated." Which means that the story told by Hanscombe has to do with Pilgrimage not as process but as program. In brief, Hanscombe holds that Pilgrimage should be read as the working out of Richardson's "twin dilemma": how to reconcile herself to being a woman, and how to be a writer as a woman. In Hanscombe's own words, "the psychological role conflict between 'personhood' and 'womanhood' 159 suffered by Richardson gave rise to her bl-polar world-view, in which female consciousness is contradistinguished in nearly every particular from male consciousness. This perception of the distinctiveness of female consciousness in turn gave rise to the evolution of an experimental technique of fiction, and because Richardson held constantly to the validity of her perception and because, also, we can see how the perception shaped her technique, we may justifiably call it 'feminist.'" Revising Richardson's own description of her work as "the feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism" (in the forword she wrote to the 'omnibus' edition of Pilgrimage published in 1938), Hanscombe would have it instead that the "stream of consciousness" technique was developed by Richardson as a distinctly feminist alternative to the narrative conventions associated with male writers. Since Pilgrimage itself serves as Hanscombe's primary source and principal body of evidence...