ABSTRACT
The Dark Night (1924) is a remarkable book-length poem in free verse. It warrants a place in the canons of modernism as the culmination of Sinclair’s experiments in pushing the boundaries of fiction to realize the complex interior life of a woman. Yet it has been overlooked by critics, partly because it has been out of print and partly because Sinclair is known as a novelist rather than a poet.1 As poetry, it is worth investigating for its sustained combination of lyricism and imagistic condensation that accommodate Sinclair’s interests at the time in philosophy, psychology, and social determinism. She employs free verse and extended symbolism to convey the immediacy of primary consciousness, which she defined elsewhere in the paper “Primary and Secondary Consciousness,” delivered to her fellow members of the Aristotelian Society for the Systematic Study of Philosophy in the year prior to The Dark Night’s publication. Thematically, then, this work is best read in terms of her preoccupation with theories of sublimation that she had refined over several years, notably in her “Clinical Lectures on Symbolism and Sublimation” (1916), her works on Idealism (1917, 1922), and her novels Mary Olivier: A Life (1919) and Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922). Like her prose fiction, the poem investigates the harm that men and women cause each other in relation to the constitution of marriage and their attempts to break from repressive social conditions. In The Dark Night, Sinclair revisits key questions from her fiction: whether the freedom found through self-sacrifice is fulfilling and whether mystical epiphanies wrought from sublimation pertain specifically to women.
