ABSTRACT
Is modernism merely another movement in literary history or the advent of a new feminine writing obscured by a masculine construction? For some early modernist writers and their readers, "making it new" was synonymous with making it feminine. In one of the epigraphs to No Man's Land, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar quote from a 1917 New York Evening Sun the statement: "Some people think that women are the cause of modernism, whatever that is" (n.p.), and their own study connects the reactions against the early women's movement to the origins of modernism. As Bonnie Kime Scott notes, the idea of a gendered modernism originates in the modernists themselves, who "attached labels such as 'virile' and 'feminine' to the new writing as they reviewed it" (3). The work of the longneglected modernist writer Dorothy Richardson indicates that it is no coincidence that the innovations of modernism resemble the features of an ecriture feminine, or feminine discourse, inscribed and advocated by contemporary feminist theorists such as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray. The thirteen volumes of Richardson's Pilgrimage (1915-67) may be read as an experimental novel which embodies the correlations between modernist style and a feminist aesthetics as well as a manifesto for femimodemism-a declaration of Richardson's aesthetic intentions as a woman writer who rejects a literary tradition she perceives as masculine.
