ABSTRACT
Only a decade ago, the exploration of Sapphic modernism would not have been possible. The titles of two 1979 publications by Blanche Wiesen Cook link the reasons behind that impossibility: "The Historical Denial of Lesbianism" and "'Women Alone Stir My Imagination': Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition." The denial of all forms of lesbian experience, including artistic and aesthetic experiences, and the suppression of lesbianism by and , within history have defined it as an excluded Other within cultural tradition. Virginia Woolf, for instance, has only rather' recently gained admission to the modernist canon, where her status rests primarily on experiments in 1/stream of consciousness" narrative method. She has not yet been accorded full status with T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound as one of the "giants" of modernism. Were the critics who confer canonization to take seriously Cook's claim that Woolf's imagination was fueled by Sapphic erotic power, they would be forced to redefine modernism in ways that acknowledge its Sapphic elements. If this erotic power were theorized as Sapphic modernism, as Cook claims is possible for Woolf (1979b), as Susan Lanser does for Djuna Barnes (1979), as Susan Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis do for H.D. (1981), and as Catharine Stimpson has done for Gertrude Stein (1977), it could profoundly change not only our notions about modernist art, but also redefine the erotic in relation to the creative sources for all art. Cook claimed in 1979 that "we have just begun to name our own world and to
consider the full implications of women's friendships and the crucial role played by female networks of love and support, the sources of streng~h that enabled independent, creative, and active women to function U ("Cultural Tradition" 720). Within modernist studies our efforts to "name our own world" have met with (mostly silent) resistance. While many scholars have accepted feminist remappings of modernism in London, Paris, New York, and Berlin, few believe that our work offers serious challenges to the theoretical and critical definitions of modernism. That is, we may have proven that there were Sapphists who wrote, but our claims for Sapphic modernism are open to question. -
Modernism is itself a disputed terrain. Within this past decade the moderriist cultural construct created by literary historians and critics has begun to crack under pressure from poststructuralists, semioticians, social historians, and theorists of mass culture. Ther~ is tremendous debate these days regarding definitions of modernism, but as Bonnie Scott acknowledges in her introduction to The Gender of Modernism, this activity in modernist studies is still primarily devoted to canonical male authors.1 That is, this work starts from a knowledge of who the great modernists are (or were), even if it is not possible to say what modernism is (or was). Scholarly discussions of these issues further compound critical confusions: in the past decade the differences among modernism, postmodemism, and the avant-garde have been argued from a variety of theoretical viewpoints, but we still understand these terms-and the artistic movements they presumably describe-only very imprecisely. Perhaps most troublesome to scholars of English~language literature is the notion of modernity, an umbrella term associated with French theories of art that denotes the range of twentiethcentury "postrealist" cultural-artistic movements.
