Gendered Pronouns in Early 20th Century Fiction: A Simple Quantitative Study

Gendered Pronouns in Early 20th Century Fiction: A Simple Quantitative Study

The following short essay is a work in progress -- I am exploring the uses of a corpus of early 20th century literature I have been developing for a few months. The study below represents an attempt to make use of that corpus to query a topic that has been of interest in quantitative DH in recent years. 

I have long been fascinated by a DH paper published in 2018, “The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction” (link here; authors were Ted Underwood, David Bamman and Sabrina Lee) that has suggested strong statistical evidence that men were increasingly dominating the world of fiction in late 19th and early 20th centuries – that between 1850 and 1950 the percentage of published novels that were authored by women dropped dramatically (from near parity to more like a third or a quarter). Thus, at the exact period when we might have expected women to be gaining visibility and influence – associated with the early 20th-century suffrage movement and the appearance of important feminist voices like Virginia Woolf – they were actually losing position on the whole in the publishing world. 

According to the authors, the pattern only started to reverse in the second half of the twentieth century (and today, the publishing industry would of course look very different). Also, within their fiction, “The Transformation of Gender” authors indicate that men writers tend to write more about men, while writers who are women might be closer to gender parity in the amount of time given men and women in the social world represented in the story. The authors suggest that particular tendency hasn’t improved or changed as much.

Source: Underwood, Bamman, and Lee (2018)

Incidentally, the concern with the growing marginalization of writers who were women alluded to above is not a new one. The authors of “The Transformation of Gender” cite a 1989 study, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change (Gaye Tuchman and Nina Fortin), where the authors did quantitative (but not digital!) scholarship with similar findings. Tuchman and Fortin counted and classified entries in Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography to compare how women writers were talked about versus men writers. They found that while books by men were reviewed more frequently on the whole, the gender disparity in the more recent authors (late 19th century) became especially sharp with respect to works of nonfiction.  The authors of “The Transformation of Gender” used a very large corpus of tens of thousands of novels from HathiTrust (and checked against the smaller University of Chicago novel corpus) as well as sophisticated modeling techniques built around Natural Language Processing (NLP) to infer gender within a text and derive percentages. Some years ago, I finally gained enough confidence in basic Python to explore some of these methods on my own, using David Bamman’s BookNLP software (sadly, that software does not appear to be working at present, so I will not be using it for the results below).

One other bit of background: in the revised version of the essay published in his book, Distant Horizons, Ted Underwood mentions the Gendered Language Visualizer, a simple but deceptively powerful tool that tracks the association between non-gendered words and gendered pronouns in works of fiction. The technique behind that led to the beautifully illustrative image below (from the jointly written 2018 essay)

Source: Underwood, Bamman, and Lee (2018)

What it shows: women in fiction tend to "smile" and "laugh"; men tend to "grin" and "chuckle." (Though note that the divergence diminishes over time -- so in contemporary fiction that 'gendering of mirth' would be much less pronounced than it was at the peak of the divergence, around 1950.) 

Earlier studies: I should say that this is a more complex version of a type of analysis scholars have been doing in stylistics for many years; there are studies that go back to the 1990s that aimed to predict the gender of a writer based on characteristics of function words and articles. Koppel et al. (2002) used sophisticated statistical techniques with a fairly straightforward counting to find that writers who are men tend to use a higher proportion of noun specifiers (a, the, that), and numbers in their fiction. They also claim women tend to use more pronouns (she, herself), negation (not), and certain prepositions (for, with) and conjunctions (and). By lining up counts of these various parts of speech, the authors claim to be able to predict the gender of an author of an anonymized text with 80% accuracy. (Note: for what it’s worth, I tried to replicate their results with my own small, early 20th-century corpus, and failed. The only place where I saw a clear correlation was with gendered pronouns -- which might explain how I got to the design of the present study below.)

Moving past binarized gender thinking: Admittedly, I am not so interested in this particular application for my own research – it’s almost never the case with 20th-century fiction that the gender identity of an author is unknown. I also tend to be interested in writers who pushed against conventional gender roles and expectations in any case, many of whom might be understood as LGBTQIA+ today – writers like Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, or Wallace Thurman. Today, most scholars would find the "predict the gender" type of analysis overly restrictive and as essentially reinforcing binarized gender thinking. If E.M. Forster, for example, breaks with the expected pattern in novels that feature women protagonists (spoiler: he does!), that would be a more interesting finding than simply that reconfirming that 80% of men are from Mars, as it were.  

A simplified method for the present study: What if we drastically simplified the query with a corpus of early 20th-century fiction? As a starting point for thinking about patterns with respect to gendered socialization, why not simply look at gendered pronouns: he/him/his and she/her/hers? If the conclusions by Underwood et al. are correct, we should expect to see a lopsided homosocial tendency in fiction by men (men mostly talking to and about other men, and only occasionally mentioning a woman), and maybe a more balanced gender representation in fiction by women. We might also see some interesting anomalies in the patterns that might be worth exploring.  

Before doing this at a mid-range scale, I was curious to see how authors I know would shake out. Over the past few months, I’ve been developing a custom corpus of early 20th-century texts. I have described the basic design of the corpus here; it contains about 1000 total texts, including about 100 texts that might be thought of as canonical high modernist texts, 130 texts by African American authors, and about 90 texts associated with colonial South Asia. It also contains a substantial amount of genre fiction. The results below only reference works of fiction, though there are works of poetry, drama, and nonfiction in the corpus. 

With a little help from generative AI coding assistants, I devised a simple bit of code to count the use of gendered pronouns (he, him, his vs. she, her, hers), first, in a single novel, then in a batch of files, and then derive a percentage from the total word length of the file. I then took those gendered pronoun percentages, and compared them to one another to get a ratio. Rather than overwhelm the reader with a vast array of raw data, I’ll start with some smaller findings, initially focused on gendered pronoun ratios in a small set of ‘high modernist’ works of fiction, mainly by white British and American authors. I’ll then expand the conversation to other authors and consider broadly why any of this might be significant. 

From my limited high modernist collection, what are some texts that are especially lopsided towards men? (If you expected to see Ernest Hemingway on this list, you would be right!)

Text	Ratio of masculine to feminine pronouns
Ernest Hemingway: Men Without Women	11.4 to 1
Hemingway: In Our Time	9.4 to 1
James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man	9.2 to 1
John Dos Passos: Three Soldiers	7.3 to 1
D.H. Lawrence: Kangaroo	4.2 to 1
Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises	3.5 to 1
James Joyce: Ulysses	3.0 to 1
James Joyce: Dubliners	2.2 to 1
E.M. Forster: A Passage to India	2.2 to 1
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby	2.0 to 1

What to make of the lopsided nature of some of these texts? I should say, off the bat, that I don’t think the lopsidedness necessarily serves as an indictment of someone like Hemingway. The relative absence of women in his various short stories is partly due to their settings (several in Men Without Women deal with soldiers and World War I, and “The Undefeated,” about an aging Spanish bullfighter out for a last hurrah, is a pretty marvelous critique of dysfunctional masculinity). Moreover, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a coming-of-age narrative for Stephen Dedalus at schools that only admit boys and men with teachers who are also only men, so it’s not a huge surprise that the social world represented in the text is also pretty lopsided. (The imbalance might have been less if Joyce had kept in more of the love interest/romantic sections that were in the original Stephen Hero version of his manuscript.) The lopsidedness of other writers (and other Joyce texts) is less extreme, though it’s striking to see novels by D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster here (especially since Forster, with Howards End, is also on my second list below). 

Again, I don’t see it as an indictment per se, or as a reason to drop Hemingway or Joyce from my syllabus, though it is still worth knowing. (Do readers want or need to see characters that match their own gender identity or expression in order to connect with a text? Probably not, but my hunch is that it might help...) Still, the pattern does appear to show that there is a pretty limited role for women in the social worlds we find in these texts. It is not as if the authors don’t know it, either: the title Men Without Women can be read as self-critique of a symptomatic nature. These are men without women, and perhaps that’s why they are so broken.

And what about woman-centered texts by writers of literary fiction typically associated with high modernism? 

Text	Ratio of feminine to masculine pronouns
Dorothy Richardson: Pilgrimage 1Pointed Roofs	13.1 to 1
Bryher: Development	9.9 to 1
Richardson: Pilgrimage (other volumes)	varies between 5 to 1 and 2 to 1
Nella Larsen: Passing	4.9 to 1
Radclyffe Hall: The Unlit Lamp	3.9 to 1
Radclyffe Hall: The Well of Loneliness	2.8 to 1
Wallace Thurman: The Blacker the Berry	2.8 to 1
Gertrude Stein: Three Lives	1.6 to 1
Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway	1.6 to 1
Katherine Mansfield: The Garden Party And Other Stories	1.6 to 1
Mansfield: Bliss and Other Stories	1.5 to 1
Virginia Woolf: The Voyage Out	1.5 to 1
Woolf: Night and Day	1.4 to 1
Woolf: Orlando	1.4 to 1
Woolf: To the Lighthouse	1.3 to 1
Forster: A Room With a View	1.2 to 1
Forster: Howards End	1.2 to 1

It was not hugely surprising to see Pilgrimage: Pointed Roofs as the most lopsided she/her centered text in the high modernist selection from my text corpus. Pointed Roofs is the story of a young woman teaching at a girls’ boarding school, so, as with Portrait of the Artist above it is not surprising that it reflects a homosocial world with largely girls and women as characters. 

Also, anyone who has read Passing recently would not be surprised to see how prevalent she/her/hers pronouns are there: it really is a novel focused on the relationship between two women. (If anything, this finding only reconfirms readings that have stressed the homoerotic subtexts of that relationship.)

I was intrigued to see a book by a man, Wallace Thurman, come out fairly high on this list (2.8 to 1). I am not entirely sure what to make of it; the novel in question is a thoughtful and often bitter account of colorism within the Black community with a woman protagonist. 

The bigger takeaway might be that the pattern described by Underwood et al. appears to be in evidence with this small group of high modernist writers – writers who were women were, on the whole, less lopsided than were their peers who were men. Instead of a ratio of 10 to 1 or 4 to 1 or even 2 to 1, the median here for writers like Woolf and Mansfield – two of the core authors in the modern feminist canon – is closer to 1.5 to 1. 

Expanding the Range of Authors: Genre Fiction Writers

Now, let’s move to the broader dataset. The first discovery might be that the gendered pronoun disparity can be wildly lopsided in adventure fiction and westerns: 

Text Ratio of masculine to feminine pronouns

Zane Grey, The Young Pitcher 630 to 1

Zane Grey, Ken Ward in the Jungle 433 to 1

G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was 

Thursday 139 to 1

H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon 104 to 1

John Buchan, Prester John 101 to 1

Lord Dunsany, The Gods of Pegana 57 to 1

L. Frank Baum, The Master Key 47 to 1

Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Kari the Elephant 44 to 1

G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew 

Too Much 43 to 1

Jack London, The Call of the Wild 18 to 1

John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps 15 to 1

Dorothy Sayers, Lord Peter Views 

The Body 5.8 to 1

Agatha Christie, The Big Four 4.0 to 1

The scale of lopsidedness is pretty vast – and consistent – with early 20th century men who wrote westerns, science fiction, and detective fiction all showing a highly lopsided, man-centered social world. (I ran hundreds of titles for this study, and am only including a few noteworthy titles on these tables; readers who want to see the raw data can find it here; note that it contains texts that are not works of fiction--I've been disregarding those in the present study) Even women who wrote detective fiction tended to show a version of it, though Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Views the Body (at 5.8 to 1) is still much less imbalanced than something like The Young Pitcher (another narrative of a young man at school, with no girls or women about). 

And what about woman-centered genre fiction / popular fiction? 

Text Ratio of feminine to masculine pronouns

Rokeya Hossain, Sultana’s Dream 10.8 to 1

Vita Sackville-West, The King’s Daughter 5.7 to 1

Edith Wharton The Old Maid 5.4 to 1

Elinor Glyn, Man and Maid 5.0 to 1

Gertrude Atherton, The Living Present 3.8 to 1

L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green 

Gables 3.2 to 1

Somerset Maugham, Liza of Lambeth 2.9 to 1

Louis Bromfield, The Green Bay Tree 2.4 to 1

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth 2.4 to 1

Zane Grey, The Call of the Canyon 2.4 to 1

Temple Bailey, Judy 2.0 to 1

H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica 1.8 to 1

Again, while there are some texts that are highly woman-centered (Sultana’s Dream is, famously, a feminist utopia with men kept in enclosures, while women run the world), the imbalance for romance fiction writers like Elinor Glyn or girl-oriented children’s fiction writers like L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables) is considerably less pronounced than with their counterparts who were men. 

Given how lopsided Zane Grey generally is, it is interesting to see one of his novels here (a shell-shocked World War I veteran moves to Arizona and has to choose between two different women). It’s also noteworthy to see an instance of H.G. Wells’ “new woman” fiction here. (Again, if anyone would like to see the full / raw data, it is here.) 

Quick conclusions; Next steps in the analysis?

Admittedly, this is a fairly crude method. At most, it shows some general patterns and trends, and confirms (albeit with a very small sample of texts) what Underwood/Bamman/Lee claimed using a much larger statistical model. Here is Underwood in Distant Horizons: 

“It turns out that women are consistently under-represented in books by men. On average, only a third of the words men use in characterization are used to describe feminine characters. Women writers, on the other hand, spend equal time on fictional men and fictional women. This difference remains depressingly constant across two centuries, and it may help explain why books by men tend to have more stereotyped gender roles.” (Distant Horizons, 127)

For me, the next steps might not be more quantitative queries. Rather, I am curious to look at the anomalies and exceptions in the early 20th-century corpus to try and learn more about what might have been going on, perhaps the old-fashioned way (i.e., actually reading the novels in question). For instance, for a writer who was so dramatically lopsided towards men otherwise, how did Zane Grey's  The Call of the Canyon feature women's voices in a 2:1 ratio? What was he doing differently here? (Especially curious since for someone like Hemingway, fiction responding to the psychic effects of World War I was often overwhelmingly oriented to men.)

Also, for writers like E.M. Forster and Wallace Thurman, both writers of literary fiction who lived their lives as closeted gay men, it is intriguing to see they both wrote novels with women protagonists who scored fairly high on the second table above. It might be interesting to gather together other novels written by cis-identified men with women as protagonists. Are there any patterns that can be gleaned from them? 

Finally, I'm curious about the representations of animals in the corpus. It's striking that a big part of the reason Hemingway's "The Undefeated" and Jack London's The Call of the Wild appear so lopsided in terms of gendered pronouns is that the vast majority of the animals are gendered male in both texts (alongside the human protagonists of those stories, of course). It might be interesting to make a small corpus of animal-oriented fiction from this fiction and study how animals are gendered (perhaps adding in more emphasis on non-gendered pronouns...).

Mimicry and Hybridity in Plain English (Updated and Expanded)

Update from April 2017: I added a new section called "Close Reading Bhabha's 'Signs Taken For Wonders.'" Also, for folks assigning this in a classroom, there is a downloadable PDF version of this essay here. 

(Hindi version of this page) 

* * *


When the terms “mimicry” and “hybridity” are invoked in literary criticism, or in classrooms looking at literature from Asia, Africa, or the Caribbean, as well as their respective diasporas, there is usually a footnote somewhere to two essays by Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” and “Signs Taken For Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.” But students who look at those essays, or glosses of those essays in books like Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, generally come away only more confused. Though his usage of a term like “hybridity” is quite original, Bhabha’s terminology is closely derived from ideas and terminology from Freud and French thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. I do respect the sophistication of Bhabha’s thinking -- and the following is not meant to be an attack on his work -- but I do not think his essays were ever meant to be read as pedagogical starting points.

What I propose to do here is define these complex terms, mimicry and hybridity, in plain English, using references from Bhabha's own writings, but also from other sites -- from specific cultural contexts, historical events, and works of literature art that aren't under Bhabha's purview. The point is not to tie the ideas up nicely, the way one might for an Encyclopedia entry, for example. Rather, my hope is to provide a starting point for initiating conversations about these concepts that might lead to a more productive discussion in the classroom than Bhabha's essays tend to do alone.

DHSI 2015 Notes 1: Pre-conference on "Social Knowledge Creation"

I'm here in Victoria for week 2 of the DHSI; I might try and post a few brief notes along the way for myself and any others who might be interested.

There were two pre-conferences meeting at the same time on Sunday. One was on maximizing accessibility in DH projects -- especially for users who are sight-impaired -- and the other was on "Social Knowledge Creation."  It was a tough decision, but I decided to go to the Social Knowledge Creation session.

The keynote, on the history of the Wiki idea, was given by John Maxwell. He started with a quote from Ivan Illich from 1973, on "Tools for Conviviality." I'll just post the whole quote, since it's interesting:

“Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision” Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. Most tools today cannot be used in convivial fashion.

In effect, a highly open-ended tool like a Wiki is a 'convivial' tool, while other, more strictly hierarchical, means of structuring knowledge are more "industrial."

Maxwell talked about the creator of the first Wiki, Ward Cunningham. Wikis were named after the Hawaiian "Wiki-Wiki Bus," and initially written using the early Mac HyperCard software. Cunningham went on to create the first Wiki website, called WikiWikiWeb, focusing mainly on creating a base of knowledge about software development.

Cunningham defines a Wiki as "a body of writing that a community is willing to maintain." Maxwell, in his comments, expanded on this, describing Wiki writing as "the textual embodiment of a community of inquiry" and as "collective autoethnography." What he finds remarkable about the Wiki framework is that it's a software system "that has no features"; it's effectively just a system of writing. Maxwell also talked about some of his own experiences using Wikis in his research ("Coach House Technological History").

At the end of his talk Maxwell talked about Ward Cunningham's fascinating recent shift away from his own creation -- the idea of a community-edited, but still centralized, body of knowledge. Ward has now invented a new model of a distributed Wiki system that he calls a "federated" Wiki.

Cunningham talks about the reasons for the shift in this article in Wired: 

But there is one thing about the wiki that he regrets. “I always felt bad that I owned all those pages,” he says. The central idea of a wiki — whether it’s driving Wikipedia or C2 — is that anyone can add or edit a page, but those pages all live on servers that someone else owns and controls. Cunningham now believes that no one should have that sort of central control, so he has built something called the federated wiki.

This new creation taps into the communal ethos fostered by GitHub, a place where software developers can not only collaborate on software projects but also instantly “fork” these projects, spawning entirely new collaborations.

To me, it seems like there’s an unresolved contradiction here: Cunningham started out wanting a centralized index with multiple authors. When that worked -- almost too well -- he changed his mind, and wanted to decentralize his own index, achieving multiplicity not just of authorship but of web domains.

I think many people share Cunningham's ambivalence about centralized knowledge. On the one hand, don’t we want there to be authoritative references out there? The feminist DH critique of the male-centered tendencies in Wikipedia (who edits it, who contributes “knowledge? see this) is in a way accepting the premise that Wikipedia is a powerfully central site for knowledge production and distribution. Insofar as centralized knowledge production is still a widely felt social need, perhaps we need a better, more diverse Wikipedia, not a decentralized, confederated Wiki system where everyone creates and curates their own bases of knowledge.

Moreover, if a decentralized mode of knowledge production really does take off, it likely won’t be led and scripted by Ward Cunningham. The decentralization might also have a price that maybe we haven’t anticipated: the decentralization of knowledge and history can be as empowering to conservative revisionists as much as to progressive thinkers.

During the break, I said as much to a faculty member from a University of Wisconsin campus (I didn't catch her name); she mentioned to me that this debate over the centralization of knowledge was in fact happening in the 18th century as the first Encyclopedias were being compiled. She mentioned a book that sounds relevant, Seth Rudy's Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain. 

The lightning sessions had many interesting papers. Because these are works in progress, I won't say too much here. I will say that the papers I was personally most interested in were both by graduate students from the University of Victoria itself, and both involved applying various mapping visualization techniques to works of literature. Alex Christie's Z-Axis 3D maps are far enough along that he's collaborating with Modernist Studies Asociation members and planning a session at the MSA that will showcase the methodology at MSA 2015 later this year. Randa Khatib has, in conjunction with colleagues in computer science at the American University of Beirut (which has its own Digital Humanities Center!), developed an installable tool called Topotext, that automatically annotates text files, using natural language processing to extract geographic data. 

On my own, I installed Topotext from the version I found on Github at the link above, and played around with a .Txt version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 

The concentration of location on the east of Ireland should be obvious for those who know the novel. But what's interesting are all the references in the southwest of Ireland. It's easy to forget the trip Stephen takes with his father early in the novel to Cork, and think, instead, of Portrait as first and foremost a Dublin novel. But that trip to Cork is of course important, both to Stephen's development of his sense of space, and to the concept of Irish space in the novel more broadly. There's more we could say here, but suffice it to say for now that it seems like the Topotext tool has justified its existence here by getting me to think about Portrait's relationship to space in Ireland a little differently than I had before. 

"The First Four" -- Women Faculty in the Lehigh English Department

One of my students was involved with the making of a documentary about the first women faculty in the English department. I had a chance to see the film a few weeks ago at a public screening, and it's terrific -- probably of interest to anyone interested in gender issues in academia. Happily, permissions have been ensured to allow the film to be posted online (on Vimeo). An embedded link to the film is below.

A bit of background. At its inception in 1865, Lehigh University was an all-male college mainly focused on engineering. The university was founded by Asa Packer, a railroad tycoon, and over the years the university had connections to the steel and auto industries as well (major buildings on campus are the "Iacocca Building" and "Packard Lab" -- named after James Packard, who founded the eponymous car company). Colleges of Business, Arts and Sciences, and Education were later added; today they are highly ranked and well-funded.

The university moved to include women as students in 1971 (see "40 Years of Women at Lehigh"). As part of that change, the university also began to attempt to diversify its faculty (which was, not unlike other American academic institutions of that era, universally white and male). A large number of the first women faculty hired by Lehigh in those first years (1972-3) were in the English department.

Three of the first four women faculty were still part of the department when I joined the faculty in 2001. Rosemary Mundhenk, Elizabeth Fifer, and Barbara Traister are friends and have been mentor-figures to me. (Another faculty member hired in this period who also played a mentoring role for me, Jan Fergus, joined the department a bit later.) I consider myself lucky to have started my career as a professor in a department with a strong cohort of senior colleagues who were women. That said, as you'll see from the documentary, things were not easy for these women in the early years.

Finally, I'm quite proud of my student, Laura Casale (@lauralehigh on Twitter), who is one of the four students involved in putting this documentary together. Well done!

The English department's intro to the film is here:
https://english.cas2.lehigh.edu/

And the film itself:

THE FIRST FOUR from Lehigh IMRC on Vimeo.

Teaching Notes: Transatlantic Modernism

This spring I taught a new graduate course at Lehigh on Transatlantic Modernism. 

As a bit of back-story: Several Ph.D. students I have worked with in recent years have expressed interest in defining their Modernism reading and teaching fields along transatlantic lines, but neither my colleague Seth Moglen (who does American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance) nor I (generally w/ British modernism and postcolonial literature) had looked closely at the historical premises of this. Nor had anyone taught a course with a specifically transatlantic focus.

That resistance to Transatlanticism in English literary studies comes from some deep-seated professional biases. Transnational research projects have become increasingly encouraged and common in literary studies in recent years, but generally speaking regional and period grounding has remained pretty much constant: for the purposes of the academic job market, you are still either an Americanist or a British literature person. One incidental goal of teaching this particular course was to test out whether a transatlantic approach to the writing of this period is in fact intellectually coherent -- rather than simply convenient for students aiming to pitch themselves broadly.

So my query going into this course was: does the "transatlantic" designation -- equal parts British and American -- actually fit modernism as I would like to see it defined? Many readers will be familiar with the transatlantic careers of major American figures such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Nella Larsen. Here I wanted to cross-reference these American writers' approaches to England and Europe against several key British writers who ended up as expatriates in the United States, most prominently D.H. Lawrence, Mina Loy, and W.H. Auden. The hypothesis is that modernism unfolded in the 1910s and 20s as a singular, transnational literary movement not seriously hampered by the vast distance between the two ends of the Atlantic Ocean.

The conceptual hypothesis might have major pedagogical implications: is it perhaps time for English literary studies to dispense with the traditional segregation of "British" and "American" writing from this period? Despite the major changes in literary methodology that have occurred over the past few decades – the rise of new modes of literary theory, and new sensitivity to issues of social justice and gendered and racial inclusiveness – for the most part, American and British literatures are today thought of and taught as separate from one another. While a certain amount of overlap is acknowledged (writers like T.S. Eliot are generally taught in courses on both British and American modernism), the idea that modernism in English might have been effectively a single event occurring nearly simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic hasn’t really hit home yet.

As I was designing the course, I was especially interested in focusing on the social networks, friendships and literary magazines that linked the various writers to one another. Who travelled where, when? What was everyone reading? In many cases writers who were living in Paris or London published their work in American journals. An American magazine called Little Review, for instance, was the first to publish Joyce’s Ulysses; it was also the defendant in the first obscenity trial against the novel. Similarly, the American magazine Others was the first to publish the provocative early poems of British writer Mina Loy.

I have been interested in whether it's possible that the changing dynamics of transatlantic travel and communication may have played a role in helping modernism play out as it did. Since the advent of faster and larger steamships starting in the 1870s and 80s, transatlantic travel had become considerably more common and manageable. Henry Adams has a great line about boarding a new transatlantic steamer called the Teutonic (on the Cunard / White Star Line) in 1892:

The voyage was less trying than I expected. The ship was so big and so fast, and relatively so comfortable, that as I lay in my stateroom and looked out of my windows on the storm, I felt a little wonder whether this world were the same that I lived in thirty years ago. In all my wanderings this is the first time I have had the sensation. All the rest of the world seems more or less what it was, and Europe is less changed than any of the rest; but the big Atlantic steamer is a whacker. (Henry Adams, cited in Stephen Fox, Transatlantic: Samuel Cunard, Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships)

By the 1910s, of course, with the advent of the HMS Mauretania and the HMS Lusitania, the experience was even better and faster than it was in 1892. One cannot help but think that the fact that it took less than a week to cross the Atlantic in person -- not to mention the ease of circulating and disseminating both magazines and books -- may have had ripple effects, and helped to allow new aesthetic styles and ideas to proliferate with new speed in the early 1910s in particular. Could the HMS Mauretania been one of the hidden historical "whackers" that helped put transatlantic modernism in motion? (One might also mention the role of transatlantic telegraph cables, though by the 1910s these were nothing new.)


(More after the break.)

Me on Manto: Interview in "Viewpoint"

Qaisar Abbas of UNT interviewed me on Sa'adat Hasan Manto by email for a magazine he writes for called "Viewpoint." You can see the interview here.  Also see a new essay on Manto by the great Tariq Ali here. There are a number of other essays in the special issue on Manto, which I haven't read yet. The magazine in general is at:

http://www.viewpointonline.net

Probably the most arguable (interesting?) section of the interview might be this one:

Manto was tried in India and Pakistan for “obscenity” as he used images of women as sex object and prostitute in several of his short stories. How would you compare obscenity and portraying sex as a social reality in literature? Who defines standards of pornography and sex in fine arts and literature in South Asia?

Manto wrote about prostitution because it was a part of life in his era. Once he was asked this same question, and he had the following rejoinder: 

“If any mention of a prostitute is obscene then her existence too is obscene. If any mention of her is prohibited, then her profession too should be prohibited. Do away with the prostitute; reference to her would vanish by itself.” (via Harish Narang)

I do not think Manto was particularly obsessed with prostitution. It might be more accurate to say that he was part of a broader movement in Modern literature to depict sexuality more honestly and sincerely than earlier generations had done, and writing stories with characters who were prostitutes was one way for him to do that. Even within Urdu and Hindi literature, Manto was not the only one to push the boundary with regards to explicit sexuality in his writing. The first wave of Progressive Writers, emerging from the Angarey group, also did this. One infamous story by Sajjad Zaheer, for instance, was called “Vision of Paradise” (Jannat ki Basharat) which featured a Maulvi who begins to have erotic dreams while he intends to stay up late praying. The story was controversial at the time because it was seen as blasphemous, and reading it today there’s no doubt that Zaheer intended to be provocative regarding religious piety. But it is no less provocative because of its use of explicit sexuality.

Alongside the Angarey group, Premchand himself was often more direct about matters of sexuality than many people realize. His famous 1936 novel Godaan, for instance, features a cross-caste sexual relationship described quite frankly – though it’s by no means pornographic. Finally, it should be noted that Manto’s friend and rival, Ismat Chughtai, also pushed the line regarding the depiction of sexuality.

That said, there’s no question that Manto takes things a step further. A story like “Bu” (Odour) is significantly more explicit in its depiction of a random sexual encounter than anything written by Zaheer or Chughtai. As a side note, this story, which is one of Manto’s most infamous ones, is not actually about prostitution, but rather a middle-class man’s encounter with a poor woman (a Marathi “Ghatin”) working as a laborer. Other stories do deal directly with prostitution, but often with a focus on the hypocrisy and weakness of men. Manto’s prostitutes are often honest and even noble individuals – trying to survive in a society that treats the exploitation of women’s bodies as merely another kind of financial transaction. 

On the question of who sets the standards for obscenity. Here I think there’s no question that by the standards of his time, some of Manto’s stories could be found to be “obscene.” As is well-known, he was tried for obscenity six times during his career, some by the British Indian government before 1947, and some by the independent government of Pakistan. I certainly oppose the censorship, but I think Manto knew what he was doing in writing stories like “Bu,” and I don’t think he or his career suffered greatly because he got in trouble for it; if anything, it may have gotten him more attention and thus helped his career in some ways. That said, with the sexual elements in “Khol Do!” or “Thanda Ghosht,” I do feel these are worth defending, since Manto is referencing sexual violence not for titillation but to make an important ethical point. 

"Ulysses": A Couple of Documents Related to the Obscenity Trials

I am teaching "Ulysses" again this fall with undergraduates, roughly along the same lines that I described in a blog post I wrote after the last experience. It's still every bit as exhilarating and exhausting as it was three years ago.

This time I am paying a bit more attention to some of the legal history surrounding the novel, which as is well known was banned for obscenity in the United States in 1921, and unbanned in 1933. The immediate episode that provoked the ban was episode 13 ("Nausicaa"), which was printed in pieces by the journal The Little Review. The editors of that journal, Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, were the ones prosecuted in the initial trial, after a lawyer in New York complained about it. That lawyer stated that his daughter had read and been shocked by "Nausicaa" after receiving The Little Review in the mail. The figure of the innocent daughter, "the young girl" reader who might be corrupted by Ulysses became a key rhetorical figure in the to-and-fro over the novel that followed.

1. The documents related to the original trial are not easy to come by online. The best essay I have seen on the subject is a Washington University Law Review essay by Stephen Gillers that describes the history of the trial (as well as its precedents) in great detail. The key discussion related to Ulysses begins around p. 250.

2. One document that is online, but not in a very good form, is Jane Heap's initial printed defense of the novel, and of the Nausicaa episode in particular, which she printed in The Little Review in the fall of 1920 (before the first trial was decided). That essay is called "Art and the Law," and it can be found in an Archive.org uncorrected scan of several issues of the magazine here.

I have gone through that scanned version and corrected the mistakes caused by OCR. Since the document is, I believe, out of copyright, I am posting the corrected version of the essay here as a service to any colleagues who might find it useful:

"Over and Over He Said 'Survive'": the Poetry of Khaled Mattawa in Light of Libya

I was lucky, at Duke in the mid-1990s, to overlap for a few years with the Libyan poet and translator Khaled Mattawa, then enrolled in Duke's Ph.D. program. I don't think I really grasped the extent to which Khaled's experience as an expatriate (really, exile) would end up impacting me at the time. And I was also a bit too young to be able grasp the level of accomplishment and power of Khaled's first published book of poetry, Ismailia Eclipse. (Sheep Meadow Press, 1995. The book is difficult to find now, though Khaled has helpfully put many of the important poems online here.)

Since the recent uprising in Libya began, I've been slowly revisiting Khaled's work and using the poems, where possible, to help process the incredibly stirring -- but also distressing -- events that are taking place in that country. As one of very few Libyan intellectuals fluent in English living in the United States, Khaled has of course been in demand in the U.S. media in the past two weeks. He did a great interview on PBS's NewsHour, and another on NPR in the past few days. But the most moving statement he's made in light of the rebellion is to write a personal account of growing up in Libya (Benghazi) at the beginning of Qadhafi's rule: "Rising to Shake Off the Fear in Libya". (The essay has appeared as an Op-Ed in several newspapers today.)

Here is an excerpt from that Op-Ed:

A few months earlier on April 7, 1977, members of the revolutionary committees had plastered a poster of Gadhafi’s image on my father’s car. On that same day they had, under the dictator’s direct supervision, publicly hanged several dissidents in Benghazi. 

On the day of the execution, the Ghibli winds blowing from the desert filled the air with dust and turned the sky into a reddish-gray canopy. I’d taken a bus with a friend to catch a movie downtown. Nearing Shajara Square, the bus simply turned around and took us back to where we had come from. Later that evening, state television repeatedly broadcast the hangings. I went to our garage to peel the dictator’s poster off our car. It took an interminably long time.

Along with millions of other Libyans, I have never stopped trying to peel Gadhafi’s image from my life. Even after I came to the United States in 1979 to continue my education, the dictator seemed to follow me. He was the one Libyan most people had heard of, and they wanted to talk about him. I used to be enraged when women told me how handsome he was. To me he was the face of evil itself, the face of separation, exile, thuggery, torture and lies.
(Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/03/03/2096377/rising-to-shake-off-the-fear-in.html#ixzz1FeVTVOts )

Reading this, I couldn't help but think of Khaled's early poem, published in Ismailia Eclipse, describing the very same event, "Fifty April Years". Here is an excerpt from that poem, which Khaled has posted in its entirety on his website: