Electric Modernism
Abstract: My dissertation traces invocations and theories of electric power in modernist literature by women, showing how four modernist authors—Edith Wharton, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Olive Moore, and Jean Rhys—deploy electricity in their fiction and highlight its varied and contradictory cultural meanings. Rather than put forward any clear or definitive case for what electricity means, modernist literature by women leverages the open and strange impressions from the era of what electricity might mean, so that they might make their own arguments about where artistic impulses originate, how homes would change when they became wired, how modernization would change modernist art forms, or why some social spaces gleam brighter than others, in their fiction. Edith Wharton and Jean Rhys highlight cultural and class system dynamics with their electric metaphors and electrically wired settings, in which they fuse mental states with modern atmospheres. H.D. and Olive Moore explore how women experience artistic inspiration, as either a transcendent space of unlimited possibility for the former or as proof of the limitations of gender for the latter.
Interested? Read a related, short essay I wrote for Lady Science.