ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the materialist function of clothes in forming feminist subjectivity in two unfinished modernist texts, Rebecca West’s The Sentinel (c.1909–1910; published 2002) and Jean Rhys’ unpublished “Triple Sec” (c.1913–1924). It argues that in their shared frustration with women’s entrapment in images, and their mutual (though very differently expressed) concern for women’s agency, West and Rhys use fashionable and everyday clothes in ways that signal the insufficiency of representation for some feminist ends. In these novels (both authors’ first full attempts at writing), dress exceeds the inhibiting realm of spectacle, becoming instead an emphatically material phenomena that stresses moving bodies, bodies that can be moved emotionally, and which connect with other bodies. In this way, clothes help West and Rhys go beyond the stasis of femininity towards autonomy, the feeling, desiring, relating subject, and the production of feminist subjectivity. The chapter also argues that, just as clothes in these novels help form their characters’ feminist subjectivity and emphasise that formation as a process, these unfinished texts underscore the formation-in-process of their authors’ feminism. It suggests that the novels, like the clothes in them, constitute material feminist actions.
