Not Entirely Secular, Not Entirely Sacred: Women, Modernism, and Religion

Abstract This dissertation defines a tradition of American and British female modernists whose desire for full emancipation in the early twentieth century compelled them to engage dialectically with their own religious inheritances. Unlike many later twentieth-century feminist thinkers who have advocated a surgical response to gendered religious oppression - one that finds a solution in eliminating religion altogether from women's lives - novelists May Sinclair and Zora Neale Hurston and poets H.D. and Anne Spencer are representative of the surprising number of female modernists who insisted that simply walking away was inadequate. These authors believed that, in order to be free, women must critique and then revise the patriarchal Christian traditions that had so powerfully shaped their emotional, material, and imaginative lives. In Sinclair's Mary Olivier, for example, a woman's creative, intellectual, and sexual development is threatened by a doctrine of self-renunciation rooted in an austere Victorian Anglicanism that extols a model of self-denying womanhood, while in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, a similar threat is produced by a religiously infused response to the violence of slavery that equates self-relinquishment with self-protection. But for all these writers, the ultimate act of empowerment was spiritual reclamation through revision. Each sought to transform religious discourse into an idiom for women's liberation: Spencer's female prophets, for instance, provide a model of African American female authority that appropriates sacred language as a means of resisting male domination, while the resurrection poetics in H.D.'s long poem Trilogy links women's divinity to their fully realized capacities for love, desire, and creativity. By uniting women from such varied backgrounds, my dissertation seeks to reveal the full extent to which female modernists saw religion as an urgent site for gender-conscious contestation. My feminist, postsecular approach thus allows me to offer an alternative account of the cultural conditions for modernism's emergence - one that challenges the familiar vision of literary modernism as unequivocally secular literature produced by a uniformly secular Western modernity. I argue that, on the contrary, the most famous literary movement of the early twentieth century emerged largely from women's efforts to respond, not to the loss of religion in modernity, but rather to its complex persistence and its ongoing impact on women's lives. Moreover, the problem of how religion affects women's creative, intellectual, and libidinal development remains urgent today as religious fundamentalisms exert increasing influence nationally and internationally. The authors I study encourage us neither to demonize nor sentimentalize the role of religion in women's lives by modeling a mode of engagement that refuses to accept religious oppression, yet honors women's liberatory appropriations of their own religious inheritances.