May Sinclair's modernist experience: A political revision of female subjectivity and autobiographical writing

Drawing on the current feminist debate on the nature of subjectivity, this dissertation explores May Sinclair's revision of the models of woman's identity issuing from the political, literary, and medical discourses of the early twentieth century, and reconstructs her political theory of psychotherapeutic autobiography. This study offers the close reading of some of her novels, but it especially focuses on her less known published and unpublished articles, pamphlets, and books on philosophy, feminism and psychoanalysis. The interdisciplinary character of these works unveils a writer who was deeply involved in the feminist, philosophical, and psychoanalytical debates of her times and who indirectly comes to the present debate as a source of inspiration.;The first chapter discusses Sinclair's revision of woman's public and private image according to the model of martyrdom proposed by militant suffragettes and the troubling model of "sacrifice" proposed by T. H. Green. The second chapter presents a historical analysis of Sinclair's stream-of-consciousness metaphor within the modernist debate on feminine consciousness, and it proposes Sinclair's vision of selfhood as unified whole constituted by fragments as an alternative to both Victorian individualism and modernist diffusion. The third chapter further investigates Sinclair's construction of political feminine identity within the psychotherapeutic practices of the Medico-Psychological Clinic in London. Sinclair's political literary stance involves a writer/healer who adopts self-writing to promote consciousness raising in the reader. This "feminist autobiographical contract" encourages a therapeutic experience for both writer and reader and thus presents a unique twist to the reader-response approach.