The New Woman: Literary Modernism and the Trans Feminine Allegory

My dissertation argues that the allegory of male-to-female transsexuality in canonical and minor novels of British, American, and French Literary Modernism relocates the antagonism assumed to exist between the sexes within the formation of sexed identity itself; a conflict that has at its center the horror of castration. The trope of the trans feminine emerges directly from the Modernist absorption of Freud and by extension engages the wholesale political and biological redefinition of the category "woman" that the period witnesses. Further, her self-division figures the formal fissure that the discovery of the unconscious creates in the act of writing in the Modernist moment. My project radically recontextualizes several of the most fundamental precepts of Modernist Studies. Modernists depict the alienating effects of early 20th-century technology; I argue that the transsexual woman alienated from her body is the limit case of this experience. These novels' suffragists, lesbians, and career women compose a critically noted coterie of Modernist "New Women" that the feminine transsexual joins and thereby redefines. My readings of Huxley, Joyce, Barnes, and Genet trace the career of this field-changing object for Feminist Studies of Modernism, a subfield founded to explore representations of women and by women. My project probes the intricate literary responses to the early 20th-century renegotiation of what a woman is biologically and socially. Ultimately, this project lays bare the Modernist transsexual that is embedded in the conceptual foundation of Queer Theory.