Excursions into modernism: Women writers, travel, and the body

"Excursions into Modernism" examines representations of travel in transnational modernist fiction by women, focusing on the body as a site which enables both physical and imaginative journeys. Positioned at a crossroads between feminist geographies and "new modernist studies," thus joining in recent efforts to remodel and remap the modernist canon, my dissertation views modernist fiction in tandem with contemporary but more rarely explored travel narratives by women. In a period when painters, writers, and musicians sought the "primitive" to redefine their art, I locate a key similarity between travel writing and fiction in the way women's quests for foreign experiences inspire innovations in written language. Working, in my first chapter, with Edward Said's term "imaginative geographies," I analyze the crossing of early twentieth century travel narratives into the realm of fiction. These narratives move away from realism, presenting altered subjectivities of women who perceive themselves freed from previous constraints of language and space and who align themselves with the foreign or racial other. In examining these narratives, I suggest that women's travel writing paralleled, even inspired, fundamental practices of modernist literature.; In subsequent chapters, I explore women's embodiment of geographic space in modernist fiction. I focus on the pairing of outward journeys with more inward, introspective ones made possible through corporeal vehicles that are traditionally part of a Western woman's personal geography: the skin, the ill body, the womb, and the piano. In texts ranging from Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark to Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out and from Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage to Evelyn Scott's Escapade, I explore the interactions between geographic movement, identity (re)creation, and imaginative "excursions" that produce modernist experimentation with language. I choose the term "excursion" for my project because of its multiple geographic and linguistic resonances. While it implies both a physical journey and a deviation from a direct course, even suggesting an overstepping of societal boundaries, the term also can signify a digression in language or mental flight highlighted by the adjective form "excursive." An "excursion" in language then connects to the experimental interiority and fluidity of modernist writing.