At the turn of the twentieth century the ‘Modernist writers were almost obsessively concerned with history in a double sense: they were concerned both about what was happening in their world and the nature of historical understanding as such.’ (Bell 14-15). Despite Ezra Pound’s mantra of ‘Make It New’ large proportions of the modernist canon are deeply influenced by, feature characters from, and justify their causes with the use of a plethora of different strands of mythology. This essay will explore the use of mythology to express the processes and sensations of the body on three accounts: firstly I will consider the way in which modernist use of myth had the capacity to express the racial body. I will start by considering the autoethnographical novel Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston and the way in which she embraces the diasporic African-American folklore of her own upbringing. I will consider this in contrast to the role that anthropology plays in Between the Acts. Analysis of the story “Why the Black Sister Works the Hardest” in Hurston will lead me to consider the use of myth to situate the gender of the hermaphroditic and female bodies in Eliot’s The Waste Land. From here I will consider the presentation of masculinity in Between the Acts. Through an investigation of generational conflict I will be led to think about the presentation of the ageing body as seen in Eliot, Woolf and Hurston.
The eurocentric nature of literary criticism often implies that the modernist movement was a purely European phenomenon. In recent years more and more focus has been paid to the eruptions of modernist literature which emerged across the globe during this same period. In the US, the Great Migration at the beginning of the 1900s led to large groups of black US citizens leaving the southern states. Fleeing the persecution of Jim Crow laws, large numbers of African-American communities found themselves congregating in large northern cities such as Chicago and New York. Fostered in this new and, in some ways, liberating environment, an outpouring of black culture became the object of popular interest now known as the Harlem Renaissance. A writer who could be considered as a ‘product’ of the great migration was the author, filmmaker, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston’s autoethnographical ‘novel’ Mules and Men, captures the racialised body through her tracing of African-American folklore tales. Hurston frames these myths with the way in which she found herself moving though these communities in the south and collecting unwritten social histories of the Afro-american diaspora, acting, as she did, in a role as both a participator in a community and an anthropological observer on it. As her mentor Franz Boas notes: ‘It is the great merit of Miss Hurston’s work that she entered into the homely life of the southern Negro as one of them and was fully accepted as such by the companions of her childhood.’ (Boas 9). Involved in this ‘entering into homely life’, Hurston’s own body, and the way she chose to adorn it, became the subject of observation. She noted her physical difference from the group she wanted to integrate: ‘I mentally cursed the $12.74 dress from Macy’s that I had on among all the $1.98 mailorder dresses. [...] I did look different and resolved to fix all that no later than the next morning.’ (Hurston 69). This same process - of entering into a culture and participating to an extent but not completely - is seen in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts. The character of Miss La Trobe has a combination of different and familiar characteristics that has the effect of heightening the alienation of the English countryside. She, much like Hurston actually did, ‘plays an autocritical role in the work. She is an amateur ethnographer or participant observer, an insider with an outsider’s perspective.’ (Southworth 206). As the figure who curates the pageant play at the heart of the novel the role that La Trobe plays in the community is strikingly similar to the role that Hurston plays in capturing - performing in La Trobe’s case, and recording in Hurston’s - the mythical narratives that inform the social history of the racial group in which the ‘ethnographer’ is interested. The comparison between these two highlights the way in which Hurston found the need to capture these tales in written form “Before everybody forgets all of ‘em.” (Hurston, 21), because the culture that they emerged from was an oral one. It shows a racialised aspect to the processes of mythmaking which is being observed and participated in by a member of the community who wishes to preserve ‘the past history of resistance to oppression and violence into the present; the apparent benign and apolitical presentation of folk tales is a powerful validation of black people’s struggle for self-affirmation and survival’ (Fascina 63).
The oral tradition, the act of bodily passing these tales on from one person's mouth to another’s ear rather than through an intermediary resource can be seen in the spelling in the texts which offers an accurate presentation of a diasporic cultural vernacular. Hurston made it very clear that the maintaining the integrity of the vocality of black populations was really important to her. ‘If we are to believe the majority of writers of Negro dialect and the burnt-cork artists, Negor speech is a weird thing, full of “ams” and “Ises.” Fortunately we dont have have to believe them. We may go directly to the Negro and let him speak for himself.’ (Hurston, ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’ 1031). An accurate presentation of the black voice then is central to the novel on a level of both artistic honesty and anthropological posterity.
Although almost all of the stories and myths tackle the racialised body explicitly in one form or another, “Why the Black Sister Works the Hardest”, is perhaps the most interesting example for the way in which it not only questions inequalities of race, but also the inequalities of gender within race. The story tells of a box that is left untouched on a road for thousands of years after God creates the world, ‘then Ole Missus said to Ole Massa: “Go pick up dat box, Ah want to see whut’s in it.”’ (Hurston Mules and Men 78). The ‘Ole Massa’ tells a black man to pick up the box, and ‘he tell his wife: “Oman, go git dat box.”’ (78). Inside the box ‘is full of hard work’ (78). Not only does this narrative highlight the ‘exploitation of black men’s labor’ (Fascina 64) associated with the ‘mules’ of the books title, it explores the fact that the ‘black woman bears a double burden because of a double oppressing system:’ (Fascina 64) where to use Hurston’s writing of these native storytellers ‘De white man tells de nigger [sic] to work and he takes and tells his wife’ (Hurston 78). The black woman is therefore bearing the double weight of being born in a body which is not only black but is also female.
An alternative, but equally complex, mythological articulation of the gendered body is seen in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The epitome of this is the figure whom Eliot himself identified to be the most important of his fractured narrative: ‘I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, / Old man with wrinkled female breasts,’ (Eliot). His appearance roughly half-way through the poem in “The Fire Sermon” is the first of three and it naturally adds new dimensions to the depictions of gender based violence found in “A Game of Chess”. He is marked from the opening by the duality of his gender determination. This not only links the reader inline with the Greek myth from which the character derives: ‘I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs / Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—’. He personifies the gendered polyvocality of the poem most shockingly at the point when immediately following a depiction of the rape of a typist by a clerk the character claims:
‘(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)’ (Eliot)
This sense that the character has experienced life as both genders, touches upon the idea that perhaps ‘rape in The Waste Land works on one level to allow for a connection between the traumatized rape victim and the traumatized modern world.’ (Chadwick 382). This example of gender violence is one of several throughout The Waste Land. Eliot turns to the figure of Philomel and the way she was first raped and then left voiceless as another mythical reference point in “A Game of Chess”. Naturally, figures such as this often encourage contrasting readings of the presentation of women within the poem. Some critics, such as Shahzad, Baig, and Abdullah, argue that The Waste Land presents women as erotic and objectified objects of the male gaze. This is of course true. And yet, ‘quite untraditionally the poem concerns itself not just with women as objects of desire, but also with women as subjects with desires’ (Davidson 127), and ‘these depictions are not because of overt misogyny’ (Chadwick 391) but instead are a criticism - much in the same way as can be seen in Hurston’s black folklore collection - of the social structures which objectify and commodify other human beings. It should be noted that despite the ‘The change of Philomel,’ she nonetheless ‘Filled all the desert with inviolable voice’ (Eliot). This winning out echoes the winning of wit in many of the John/Jack tales in Mules and Men.
The masculine strength that facilitates gender bias is articulated by Hurston in the folktale “Why Woman Always Take Advantage of Men'' which explains the way in which man asked God for strength to win a fight against woman and he gave it but God would not grant that same strength to woman when she asked. She turns to the devil who shows her that she can find strength in her ‘weaker’ position by metaphorically taking ‘dese keys and go lock up everything [kitchen, bedroom, cradle] and wait till he come to you.’ (Hurston 42). In noting the possibility of non-compliance, the tale highlights the same dependency of patriarchal structures upon the continued cooperation of women. An extension of this process of deconstruction of traditional patriarchal strength can be seen in Between the Acts. As Giles, Dodge and Isa wait for the next part of the pageant of English lore to play out they unconsciously and yet collectively articulate that ‘They were all caught and caged; prisoners; watching a spectacle. Nothing happened. The tick of the machine was maddening.’ (Woolf, Project Gutenberg Edition: No Page). Woolf implies here that structures of the patriarchy which entrap women in the kitchen, bedroom and cradle serve to harm men as much as they do women. ‘Woolf here was trying to imagine that power could be different, more humane’ (Flora 172). The criticism of traditional modes of masculinity is shown by Woolf through the use of intergenerational discordance. Very early in the second chapter of the novel the free indirect narration of the narrative inhabits the mind of the little boy George Oliver who is absorbed in holding a flower. This curiosity that George displays towards the flower which ‘blazed between the angles of the roots’ (Woolf) is a genderless emotion, heavy with a deeply human connection to nature. This is interrupted by the old man who ‘sprung upon him from his hiding place behind a tree.’ (Woolf) and his dog who George configures as a monster. By inhabiting the voice of the (male) child, Woolf is able to articulate the distinctly human (rather than gendered) reality of fear in that moment. The way in which Woolf contrasts the generations in order to criticise the social desire for men to show strength, brings to light a third aspect of the body, that of ageing. The way that ‘Old Oliver ‘raised himself, his veins swollen, his cheeks flushed.’ (Woolf) expresses the elder man’s anger: ‘His little game with the paper hadn’t worked. The boy was a cry-baby.’ (Woolf). Old Oliver’s frustration is presumably derivative of his grandson’s failure to express the ‘masculine values of physical bravery,’ (Flora 176) and yet at the same time he is powerless to change his grandson and in attempting to he exposes the frailty of his own values which seem to be vanishing in the shifting of the twentieth century.
At the opening of the third chapter we see Giles Oliver’s wife Isa brushing her hair contemplating her appearance, her husband, and the farmer she fantasises about: ‘Inner love was in the eyes; outer love on the dressing table.’ (Woolf). A very similar moment of physical self-consciousness and awareness of relationships can be seen in section 2 - “A Game of Chess” in The Waste Land. The conversation between Lil and the narrative voice revolves around the way in which Lil must make herself look younger for the consumption and satisfaction of her husband. The narrative around this scene is exemplary of ‘money chasing a body’ (Chadwick 383) most specifically around the concept of ageing - the voice of the poem points out to Lil that
‘You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same.’ (Eliot)
The implication that Lil has aged so severely into her early thirties highlights a double standard between the genders on one account but the fact that she has had an abortion is the more shocking revelation of the scene. The implication appears to be that the damage she has done to the reproductive facilities of her body has aged her almost punitively.
Much later on in Between the Acts a different contrast of generations is also played out. While touring a group around the house Mrs. Swithin takes them to the empty room. ‘"The nursery," said Mrs. Swithin. Words raised themselves and became symbolical. "The cradle of our race," she seemed to say.’ (Woolf). A couple of paragraphs after the image of the empty nursery the reader is presented by Mrs. Swithin touching ‘her bony forehead upon which a blue vein wriggled like a blue worm. But her eyes in their caves of bone were still lambent’ (Woolf). The sense of loss which permeates this scene is exaggerated by the weary older woman whose skin is thin enough to see her veins through. It is reflective of the fact that, despite the celebratory tone of the play and the summer's day, the country is on the cusp of war and the empire that they are celebrating is disintegrating. This description of the nursery in the country home then in the ‘heart of England’ (Woolf) as the ‘cradle of our race’ is a particularly powerful one which articulates the values of the wider society which are starting to dramatically shift. If the values of a race are formulated in this cradle then Woolf’s presentation is in stark contrast to that of Hurston. In the opening framework of Mules and Men she contemplates herself moving around the south and collecting these stories so that they aren’t lost: ‘When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of negroism.’ (Hurston 16). The crib for Hurston is no one single place or even representation of a place, it is instead an oral and literary tradition which unites groups of people and racialises them as much as their physical bodies do. In Mules and Men the elderly people know the stories and pass it on to their children: ‘Let me talk some chat. Dis is de real truth ’bout Ole Massa ’cause my grandma told it to my mama and she told it to me.’ (Hurston 77). The ageing body is representative of history and carries within it the stories that have the capacities to shape the future generations and the values that they uphold.
What is clear is that each text explores the body very differently. The body as illustrated through Woolf’s constructed generations, combined the grapple with inequality in the expectations of ageing and gender is delicately expressed throughout the novel. Through Miss La Trobe the novel works to alienate the reader from the familiarity of the ‘country house’ trope through the heightened romantic mythology of the pageant play. She presents the bodies of these characters as something new, unfamiliar, and an object of our consumptive observation as readers. In Eliot the use of Greek myth to investigate gender and ageing especially in an overlapping context represents the complexities of reproduction and womanhood through the ‘inexact formula’ of ‘“emotion recollected in tranquillity.” For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration,’ (Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’). The use of the African-American diasporic folklore in Hurston’s novel, constructed into an emotionally intelligent frame structure which is organised for natural readership rather than intellectual efficiency, offers a narrative with evidence of the strength of community in which each body participates. Within this there are cultural expressions of the structures of race, age, and gender in the body. The diversity of such perspectives is reflective of the depth and width that the modernist movement encompassed and the deep wells of mythology from which they drew.
Works Cited:
Bell, Michael. "The Metaphysics of Modernism." The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Ed. Michael Levenson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 9-32.
Boas, Franz. ‘Preface’. Mules and Men. Harper Perennial, 2008. p. 9.
Chadwick, Julie Goodspeed. “SEXUAL POLITICS IN ‘THE WASTE LAND’: TREATMENT OF WOMEN AND THEIR BODIES IN ‘A GAME OF CHESS’ AND ‘THE FIRE SERMON.’” CLA Journal, vol. 52, no. 4, 2009, pp. 382–92.
Davidson, Harriet. “Improper Desire: Reading The Waste Land.” The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, edited by A. David Moody, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 121–131.
Eliot, T. S. ‘The Waste Land’ Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land
Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent by T. S. Eliot.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent
Fascina, Camilla. “Retrieving the Voice of the Ancestors: Folktale Narration in Hurston’s Mules and Men.” Iperstoria, no. 4, 2014, pp. 59-65.
Flora, Luísa Maria Rodrigues. “‘Manacled to a Rock He Was’: Exhausted Patriarchy in Between the Acts.” Virginia Woolf: Three Centenary Celebrations, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007. pp. 169–182.
Hurston, Zora Neale, et al. Mules and Men. Preface by Franz Boas. Harper Perennial, 2008.
Hurston, Zora Neale. ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression.’ Pp. 1019-1032.
Shahzad, Khurram, et al. “Analyzing Patriarchal Preoccupation and Instinctual Delectation in Waste Land: A Gender Perspective.” International Journal of Arts and Humanities, vol. 49, no. 49, 2021.
Woolf, Virginia. Between The Acts, Project Gutenberg / Don Lainson, 2003, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301171h.html
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