Collaborative individualisms in the autobiographical writings of H.D., Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein and Emily Coleman
View/ Open
Date
29/06/2020Author
Perrin-Haynes, Hannah Sara Jean
Metadata
Abstract
In this thesis I investigate how far ‘collaboration’ can be used an aesthetic
interpretative category to examine the subjectivities narrated in the
autobiographical writing of H.D., Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes and Emily
Coleman. These writers were living and working in the collaborative literary
networks of the modernist period, which provided aesthetic stimulus, models of
exchange and reciprocity, and creative influence. I argue that, beyond being a
social context, collaboration was also a central narrative tool used by these
writers to achieve autobiographical self-definition by presenting the self
relationally through the prism of an other.
I engage directly with relevant theoretical frameworks that examine relationality,
including crowd theorists who were writing about the impact of the multitude and
proposing methodologies for navigating the boundaries of individualism and
collectivism, and contemporary autobiographical theory that examines the
plurality of the autobiographical subject and how it is constituted by its relations
with others.
In chapter one I look at the autobiographical novels of H.D. that include the
depiction of a collaborative union with Bryher that manifested in the self-creation
of multiple relational subjectivities. In chapter two I examine the journalism of
Barnes from 1913 to 1931, as well as her novel Nightwood (1936), and find her
navigating varying levels of connection to explore how subjects are constituted
in and by their relations to an other or several others. In chapter three I turn to
Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1938), in which she is developing a
narrative and stylistic conception of the inescapable effect of the multitude on a
subject’s self-perception, while also trying to carve a space for the subject to
exist outside this context in order to preserve their individuality. In chapter four I
find that Coleman’s diaries are an account of an ultimately futile search for a
creative other with whom she could collaborate to fully realise her
autobiographical selfhoods.
The notion of collaboration enables an interrogation of the specific textual
strategies that these writers use for autobiographical self-representation, which
reveals distinctive methodologies for writing in a way that takes account of the
context of the multitude in the shaping of and insistence on the individual.