Dangerous Masculinities: Conrad, Hemingway, and Lawrence

8. Conclusion: Lawrence, Positionality, and the Prospects for New Masculinity Studies

8 Conclusion Lawrence, Positionality, and the Prospects for New Masculinity Studies Concepts of performance have been vital to this study. They underpin my readings of gestic narrative form in Hemingway, Conrad, and Lawrence; those readings in turn afford a way of understanding constructions of masculinity in gendered approaches to modernism as an exercise of professional power rather than as an inevitable outcome of these writers’ masculinist presuppositions . For a variety of reasons, intellectuals have had to assume masculinist principles actively at work in modernist fiction: early male scholars anxiously resisted the implications of their fast-growing dependence on symbolic capital because they collided with hegemonic ideals of masculinity; feminist reevaluations studies of modernism resist the implications of symbolic capital because they collide with the truth-claims of the feminist critical charter. A very important consequence has been the closing down on a number of fronts of the disturbing potential of modernist theatricality. In what follows I explore some of the implications of this argument for a new approach to the issue of positionality in profeminist studies of modernism . First I consider, by way of interpretations of Lawrence’s work, some contemporary efforts on the part of male scholars to investigate, and to complicate , narrative constructions of masculinity in modernist writing. The best of these studies have been very self-conscious about the relationship of their work to feminist critiques of modernism and eager to explore the new territories a self-consciously profeminist perspective grants them. They recognize that there is little point in simply claiming what David Seelow calls a “radical agenda” for Lawrence, as if his works and the interpretive practices brought to bear on his works somehow existed outside the systems and fault lines of power.1 They, and I, argue that male scholars must continue to examine their privileged position and make that examination a constitutive part of their interpretive work. These studies are nonetheless too quick to close down the implications of their own ideas by imposing limits to the critique of masculinity they often Conclusion: Lawrence, Positionality, and the Prospects for New Masculinity Studies 0 discover in Lawrence’s fiction. One reason, as I have argued all along, is that the concept of ‘privilege’ in both feminist and profeminist accounts of the work undertaken by intellectuals tends to be under-theorized because it is theorized solely, or primarily, in terms of gender power; and ‘staging’ one’s position under such premises affords an insufficient grasp of the kinds of authority accruing to all intellectuals. Reintroducing the class status pertaining to professionals , to experts, to paid intellectuals, as a fundamental and powerful and generally wholly ignored function of literary study—but without abandoning the category of gender—allows a new kind of self-’staging.’ I therefore conclude by arguing that the profeminist study of the gender of modernism might be better served by embracing wholeheartedly an ethic of performance as a strategy for staging anew—for transforming into a gest—the scholarly discourse on modernism. I A few writers have attempted to reclaim masculinity in Lawrence’s fiction without considering the problematic issue of their scholarly position.2 I am more interested here in recent forays into masculinity studies that announce their prospectuses in terms rather like mine. Ben Knights argues in Writing Masculinities : Male Narratives in Twentieth-Century Fiction (1999) that texts are not monolithic; readers are active collaborators, not passive sponges for ideological messages; men can be resisting readers, for ‘being’ a man is an alienable construction rather than a given.3 Robert Burden, in Radicalizing Lawrence: Critical Interventions in the Reading and Reception of D. H. Lawrence’s Narrative Fiction (2000), echoing the cautionary note sounded by many scholars wary of what Bonnie Kime Scott calls the “all too neat divisions” of modernist scholarship, sets out to avoid the “ideological reductionism of American and British sexual politics” by posing a “much more elastic understanding of Modernism than has hitherto been in circulation in Lawrence studies.”4 And Joseph Boone also wants in Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (1998) to avoid the “trap of arguing for a ‘good’ subversive modernism (conceived as oppositional, marginal, and most often female) and a ‘bad’ high modernism (conceived as hegemonic, canonical, and most often male)—a simplistic binary that has been one negative effect of the otherwise salutary debates about modernism that have helped revitalize the field.”5 These interpretive premises give rise to often startling readings. Knights argues, for instance, that D. H. Lawrence...