Maria Bucur. Gendering Modernism: A Historical Reappraisal of the Canon. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. 168 pp. $25.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-350-02625-4.
Reviewed by Sergiy Yakovenko (MacEwan University, English Department, Instructor)
Published on H-SHERA (July, 2020)
Commissioned by Hanna Chuchvaha (University of Calgary)
A Trojan Horse for the Modernist Canon
Artistic and literary canons have the tendency to calcify with time, and in the wake of this process the contents imperceptibly become obfuscated by a semi-transparent shell of official adoration, incessant reproduction for educational purposes, and mass-culture commercialism. To shake the holy egg of the canon proves, therefore, at least from time to time, effective even for the sake of actually penetrating the ossified shell and viewing what is inside, if not, altogether, for the purposes of debunking its filling. English Romantic poetry’s status, for instance, was reinstated largely by the Yale school of criticism (and mostly by the biggest advocate of “the Western canon,” Harold Bloom) in the middle of the twentieth century, following its disparagement by T. S. Eliot in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). If we look at the literary canon of the recent decades, however, we will see that the most drastic changes that it, indeed, has undergone were effected by political or ethical concerns, rather than—as in the Eliot-Bloom case—aesthetic considerations, and resulted from the ever-growing impact of interdisciplinary fields such as postcolonial or feminist studies.
In this light, Maria Bucur’s monograph Gendering Modernism: A Historical Reappraisal of the Canon definitely continues the tradition of the interdisciplinary revision, which is signaled here by the key words “gendering” and “historical.” Given that the varying criteria of the canon formation, especially after the foundationalist idea of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, stretching largely from Plato to Matthew Arnold, has been successfully contested in recent decades to ameliorate the historical inequity of sexism, the first key term, “gendering,” places itself within what is now already a tradition of the politics of feminism. The term “historical,” on the other hand, is less self-explanatory: is it a reappraisal of the canon that naturally occurs within the discourse of a new historical period, or is it a kibitzer’s look at the purportedly artistic concept, which entails all the considerations for the canon that a historian, rather than a critic of art, can offer?
Bucur, a historian, starts her book with a strong inclination toward the latter but ultimately, and fortunately, slides toward both. She invites the reader to share her reservations regarding “an iconic place” of René Magritte among Belgian modernists based on the disparity between Magritte’s public self-image as an opponent of bourgeois ideology and his objectification of women in his art, their reduction to an “object of use, manipulation, conquest, and ridicule” (p. viii). The Magritte case marks one of the most important purposes of Bucur’s book—to hold the canonical artists responsible for their own public proclamations. To put it in the author’s own words, her “study questions the extent to which we can accept the claims made by some of most celebrated modernists that their aesthetic, intellectual, or political vision departed radically from the conditions in which these cultural producers lived” (p. ix). This task relies heavily on the sweeping definition of modernism, borrowed from Roger Griffin, that departs from its aesthetic understanding in the direction of a more general history of ideas, in which artists and intellectuals alike are supposed “to collaborate proactively with collective movements for radical change and projects for the transformation of social realities and political systems.”[1] Griffin’s sociological notion of modernism is the reason for Bucur’s treatment of modernist art as an ideological platform rather than aesthetic expression. The author does acknowledge the existence of the variety of aesthetic definitions of modernism, “from distortion to abstraction,” but finds them unsatisfactory due to the lack of a consensus regarding a specific element that would “mark an individual work or person as unmistakingly modernist” (p. 1). Similarly, in relation to modernism’s timeframe, Bucur refers to the absence of a unified conception and therefore suggests her own focus, “gender norms,” as a criterion for the chronological delimitations, which yield a rather vague beginning in the 1890s and “the tail end of the story” in the mid-1930s, marked by “the rise of authoritarian regimes in interwar Europe” (p. 6). As for the contents of the canon, which has become the object of scrutiny and reassessment, the author specifically points only to some “canonizing exhibits” (such as the Blue Rider Museum in Munich or “the centenary celebration of the Armory Show”) that are responsible for “commodification” (p. 2) of the modernist movement. Among the precursors of her study, Bucur acknowledges her indebtedness to feminist scholarship—both in historical research and cultural criticism—which, gaining prominence from the 1970s, has successfully redressed some “sexist assumptions” of earlier “art and literary historians like Milton Brown” with respect to the historical agency of women during the modernist era (p. 7). While praising contemporary scholarly periodicals such as Modernism/modernity for its interest in masculinity and Modernist Cultures for its “greater interest in gender analysis,” as well as individual scholars like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler for “the queering of scholarship on modernism,” Bucur notes “that some recent syntheses of modernism,” like the volume dedicated to the centenary of the Armory Show, insufficiently integrate gender analysis in their revisions (pp. 8-9). Seeing it as an opportunity, Bucur also posits this factor as the criterion for her choice of modernist artistic production in her own study—works that have been underappreciated from the perspective of gender analysis. In terms of the novelty of her interpretations, as “a particularly significant case study” she mentions her discussion of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, whose image challenges and subverts traditional masculinity (this analysis, unfortunately, runs only for one page).
The necessarily limited historical understanding of art as a potential generator of social change is especially evident in the first chapter of the monograph, “Modernism before the Great War.” Starting with fiction, Bucur states that because “the novel had become a widespread form of reading,” “a number of prominent novelists used this beloved form to introduce unorthodox takes on themes of broad sociocultural relevance” (p. 12). This is a common misconception that every student of literature is familiar with—that authors of fiction, like other intellectuals, want to express their ideas and “use” characters or artistic forms to complete this task. From the perspective of a literary critic, novelists who use their characters to voice their own ideas, rather than resorting for the contemporary ideas to shape the characters, can hardly be called “prominent.” By the same token, Bucur maintains that “the rise of psychology as a new science inspired new ways of experimenting with fiction in the 1880s” (p. 19), while one can reasonably argue that even Freud’s psychoanalysis that appears in the next decade is little more than a misreading of Shakespeare. This approach to literature as a vehicle for ideas is certainly nothing new, and this is a bitter pill that we have learned to swallow both in the classroom and in the interdisciplinary scholarship, but we shall lose all touch with the art of word if we do not at least feebly protest against its preponderance in forming the canon of readings. As a historian of the ideas related to gender, Bucur focuses on a few classical (canonical) works that mark the early modernist “awakenings” (p. 12): from Gustav Flaubert and Henrik Ibsen to Kate Chopin and Oscar Wilde. While the choice of the authors and their works is relevant with respect to the topic (Madame Bovary, A Doll’s House, The Awakening, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and Salomé), it is necessarily limited, and the interpretations are rather traditional. Among the most serious omissions that chronologically fall between A Doll’s House (1879) and Dorian Gray (1890), for example, is Henry James’s novel The Bostonians (1886), which regards the topic of emancipation, and gender roles in general, in a much more intellectually intricate way than Ibsen’s portrayal of a Victorian “doll.” In accord with the adopted approach, Bucur cannot refrain from reading literature as a social “message” and from ascribing a political agenda to an artist: “One can go as far as to say that Ibsen called for an emboldening of female subjectivity and autonomy as necessary conditions for the flourishing of modernity” (p. 14). It does seem going a little too far, especially if we take into account Ibsen’s own repeated protests against the attempts to make him a propellant of social revolution. In 1898 Ibsen was invited to address the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights, where—much to the gathering’s chagrin—he admitted the following: “I have never written any play to further a social purpose. I have been more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than most people seem inclined to believe.”[2]
Bucur is much more persuasive when she writes about the ideological context of art, namely the influence of established gender norms and roles on the artists whom she calls “self-avowed modernists” (p. 105). Among the antebellum modernist European artists, Bucur zeroes in on those who “created a new visual vocabulary for depicting sexual intimacy, entwining nature and the social, and revisiting romantic sensibilities from an ironic perspective” (p. 22). Admitting the revolutionary shift in the visual interpretation of gendered themes in Gustav Klimt, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brâncuși, she notes the perpetuation of stereotypes which, while liberating, still demonize female sexuality and appeal more to emotional content than to female subjectivity. These contradictions were epitomized in the seminal-for-modernism 1913 Armory Show in New York, whose organizer, Robert Henri, allowed only an insignificant percentage of artistic production by women, describing it as lacking in autonomy and “the straightforward unfinicky manner of the male” artists (p. 29). The continuous cult of the masculinist sensibility in the context of polarized gender roles successfully transferred into the postwar period, modernism’s mature stage (chapter 2, “Modernism Flourishes”). The surrealists’ objectification of women (both in André Breton’s Manifesto and in the artistic work of Magritte) is juxtaposed to Hannah Höch’s Dadaist satire “Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife” (1919), with its symbolic figures of a headless ballerina and a cabaret dancer with a cut-out face, and to Virginia Woolf’s defiance of the traditional economy of desire in her novel Orlando (1928), which portrayed an androgynous character of fluid and shifting sexuality yet “intellectual and emotional integrity” (p. 46).
In chapter 3, “The Modernist Canon: How Did It Come About?,” Bucur undertakes a complex historical analysis of the impact that societal gender norms exerted over the formation of the modernist canon in the twentieth century. Her main point is an inadequate, sexist distribution of opportunities in education and professional training, in collecting artistic products, and in shaping the canon of works and authors through art criticism and scholarship. For example, by scrutinizing the reflection of the Armory Show in twentieth-century art and scholarship, Bucur vividly demonstrates that between the two most important representatives of the theme of the nude, Marcel Duchamp (Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912) and Abastenia St. Leger Eberle (White Slave, 1913), Duchamp’s artistic-philosophical statement on the de-sexualization of the female naked body was later exalted at the expense of the total oblivion of Eberle, then an established sculptor, who “gambled on her selection and reputation to make a strong feminist statement against child prostitution” (p. 72). Unfortunately, the repetitive focus on the Armory Show throughout the book limits the study’s comparative perspective, and the author does not juxtapose these works with other nudes of the period.
The last chapter of the book, “A New Set of Criteria: Rebellion, Rejection, and Reimagining Gender,” discusses, in the author’s own words, “the relationship between modernism and gender from the perspective of gender innovations that have not yet been associated with modernism” (p. 76). Encouraged by Griffin’s revisiting of the definition and scope of modernism toward a greater inclusiveness and expansion of the field of inquiry, Bucur—in a sweeping overview—goes over a few scientific and sociopolitical movements whose advocacy for “radical change” relies on “gender as a core component” (p. 77): the suffrage movements, psychology, sexology, eugenics, nudism, and even anarchism, communism, and fascism. Among a number of movements that reconceptualized and revamped masculinist ideals to meet their political agendas, such as communism and fascism, Bucur highlights much less numerous voices raised to address gender inequities: the sexologist Marie Stopes’s advocacy for “women’s full agency” (p. 85) both in social relationships and in matters of sexuality or the anarchist Emma Goldman’s critical commentaries on contemporary gender norms in her monthly magazine, Mother Earth (1907-15).
Gendering Modernism definitely opens many new horizons for those who are interested in the evolution of gender norms and its influence on the formation of the modernist canon. As a historian, the author understandably tries to present a picture that is all-encompassing in scope and nondiscriminatory in content, approaching literature and art as an integral part of sociopolitical movements and the history of ideas. However, even in full appreciation of what the book offers, one may not be able to get rid of two questions: what “modernism,” and the canon for whom, for what purposes? Bucur convincingly demonstrates that the reason for the exclusion of Goldman and for the solid position of Breton in the modernist canon may very well be a gender bias because this choice is based on our twisted “gendered assumptions … regarding what is radical and innovative—what is core to modernism” (p. 107). But if the core of modernism is radicalness and innovativeness in gender awareness, then should we still keep, say, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, or Joseph Conrad in the modernist canon? William Faulkner? Bruno Schulz? One of Bucur’s major concerns is “the contemporary trends in the commodification of modernism as an artifact of mass consumption” (p. 107). She states that the “commodification of modernism as ‘style’ rather than content has created its own challenges to altering the modernist canon” (p. 108). My concern is the opposite: if we continue to see an artistic product, particularly a work of literature, as a jar full of sociopolitical ideas, as it is already and often the case in the university classroom, we will end up with the necessity of regarding Joyce and Faulkner as phenomena of the same order as communism and fascism. One cannot deny some relevance of this procedure in historical studies (with further specifications such as gender studies), but do historians need a notion of the modernist canon to structure such initiatives? Today’s students are already well trained in reducing literary masterpieces to a “message” and sometimes cannot tell a novel from a political manifesto. The canon that is based on the message is already there. This is the commodification we should be worried about.
Notes
[1]. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 200), 62.
[2]. Quoted in Michael Meye, “Introduction to A Doll’s House,” in Henrik Ibsen, Plays: 2 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 20.
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Citation:
Sergiy Yakovenko. Review of Bucur, Maria, Gendering Modernism: A Historical Reappraisal of the Canon.
H-SHERA, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54208
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