Liberal Use of Possession: Intellectuals, Abortion, and Tess Slesinger's Modernism

This essay argues that Tess Slesinger's novel, The Unpossessed (1934), exemplifies an emerging pattern of shared conceptual work between liberal intellectuals and modernist literature in the United States.Slesinger extends a contemporary critique of possessive individualism by intellectualslike John Dewey, showing how discourses of gender, sex, and reproductive rights remain constrained by this liberal logic. Her novelthereby renders visible a long critical genealogy, linking Dewey to later feminist writers such as Judith Butler. Slesinger'streatment of abortion finally dramatizesan enduring aporia in liberal thought, a practice that cannot be coherently legislated through a right to individual self-possession.