Eroticizing aggression: Power, pleasure, and modernist representation (D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Sayers, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston)

The linkage of eroticism and aggression comprises a crucial dynamic in the modernist representation of individual agency and social power that has not yet been recognized in its full force in criticism to date; eroticized violence serves not only as a means of limiting individual agency, but also as a means of destabilizing the categories of identity upon which social hierarchies depend. Both through innovations in narrative form that enact a dynamics of erotic aggression and through narrative representations of sexualized violence, the canonical and non-canonical British and American texts included in this project reveal the complex interrelationship between erotic pleasure and the threat of danger that mediates the individual subject's relation to surrounding social forces of power.; In my introduction, I analyze the various social and historical factors render modernist fiction unique in its representation of erotic aggression, as well as introduce the theories of power and subjectivity that inform my analysis. Chapter two analyzes the displacement of homoerotic repression and gender anxiety onto acts of erotic aggression in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love and Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night. In chapter three, I argue that the fantasies of erotic violence in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out work to expose early twentieth-century constructions of gender, sexual, and national identity. Chapter four explores the mythos of sexual violence and racial identity that is confronted in two regional novels of the American South: William Faulkner's Sanctuary and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. This project aims foremost to suggest new insight into the cultural politics and narrative poetics underlying the unprecedented eruption of erotic aggression in British and American modernism; it will also posit how such insights may contribute to a better understanding of the contemporary debates over representations of sexuality and violence and their impact on concepts of identity.