Review | #MeToo and Modernism
Reviewed by Laura Hartmann-Villalta, Johns Hopkins University
In recent years, the field of modernist studies and the community of modernist scholars have faced a reckoning with the sexual abuse and sexist discrimination tolerated, ignored, or whisper-networked about in the academy for far too long. One clear recent example has been in James Joyce studies, where a 2018 editorial entitled “An Open Letter to the James Joyce Community,” published in The Modernist Review on January 15, 2019, confronted the broader scholarly community with the #MeToo problems manifested at academic gatherings within Joyce studies. Since the Open Letter, the James Joyce Society has been leading the way in “Making Joyce Studies Safe for All” (the title of the online-only roundtable and open forum held on September 15, 2023, moderated by Joyce Society ombudsperson Celia Marshik), setting the example for other modernist associations and author societies for examining their own academic climates and establishing protocols for addressing harassment and worse—and, ideally, preventing the abuse in the first place. As the authors of the Open Letter write, “this is not just a Joyce [Studies] problem, and we sincerely hope that other academic communities will take heed of the success of the James Joyce Open Letter and work to make academia a safer place.”
It is within this context that Robin E. Field and Jerrica Jordan’s edited collection #MeToo and Modernism appears, to continue these vital efforts and conversations. As a collection about modernism, this cogent volume draws attention to surprising critical subtleties generated through a #MeToo lens. There are essays devoted to well-known authors such as Virginia Woolf, Ford Maddox Ford, Langston Hughes, and James Joyce, as well as chapters addressing newer scholarly subjects like Ann Petry’s The Street (1946). As a collection that takes up the feminist prompt of examining modernist texts for #MeToo moments, this volume is a revelation, in which contributors demonstrate how to write critically and deftly about #MeToo incidents, which are not always apparent in deliberately obfuscating modernist prose and its gaps. Contributors offer meticulous and sophisticated readings that still honor the pain that women—and some men—have endured at the hands of men and others.
One welcome surprise is the scope of authors and texts covered. Using the lens of #MeToo, these scholars provide compelling intersectional analyses. For example, Emma Heaney’s “Modernist Memoir and the Social Structures of Sexual Violence” thinks through the “social structures of gender, age, class, and race as constitutive factors that both expose individuals to sexualized harm and shape the tactics that they employ to endure the harms of rape and sexual abuse” (143-44). Heaney deftly navigates these themes across four texts by diverse authors—Jennie June, Hughes, Djuna Barnes, and Zora Neale Hurston—to interrogate “the embeddedness of queerness in working-class, immigrant, and BIPOC communities” in relation to the systematic nature of sexual violence. Heaney’s essay is enhanced by the comparisons and connections in the other essays, including Candis E. Bond’s essay, “Street Harassment in Wells, Joyce, and Woolf.” Bond connects public masturbation and the threat of sexual assault in the work of each author to systems of patriarchal power, demonstrating that “modernist authors were in the early stages of recognizing” concerns about the lasting traumatic consequences of street harassment for its victims (124).
In the context of this collection, #MeToo serves as an effective thread binding the individual chapters, but the exact meaning of this thread remains somewhat elusive until one has read the entire collection; the editors offer no explicit definition up-front—an absence that further enriches the scholarship. That is to say, although many of the contributors of the volume describe writing in a “#MeToo moment” or acknowledge that there are “modernist #MeToo stories,” the slippage around what exactly #MeToo means across these instances leads to generative openings for scholars and readers alike to consider how patriarchal power dynamics work. The variety of the essays in the collection illustrate the wide range of behaviors, criminal acts, and consequences for which the hashtag #MeToo stands in as shorthand: rape and other types of sexual assault, of course, but also street harassment and other unwanted and unsolicited sexual attention, male creepiness, objectification, whisper networks, female vigilance against surveillance that leads to violence, fighting back against assault, gaslighting, silences and breaking them, etc. Beci Carver, in her essay on Ford Madox Ford, perhaps best captures what a #MeToo moment is for this collection: “the enactment of a felt right” by a man (and, rarely, others) based on desire and power over/for another (75).
By providing space for the definitional slippage around #MeToo, the editors are able to gather essays examining a variety of texts and even objects of study. Zan Cammack’s innovative essay, “The Phonograph as Witness: New Media’s #MeToo Evolution,” for example, reads phonographic objectification through T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Additionally, the editors do not insist on specific types of scenes in texts or historical transgressions as an organizing principle, and thus Field and Jordan have collected essays that “showcase how authors, whether purposefully or not, identified ways to challenge patriarchal viewpoints regarding sexuality and gender and allowed readers different methods of interpretation” (8). #MeToo is an exceedingly complex prompt considering the scope covered, and the editors have done well to assemble a collection of essays that come together powerfully to address this prompt.
The volume is organized into four sections: “Questioning Modernist Misogyny,” “#MeToo, Modernism, and Trauma,” “Aftermath: Outrage and Its Reactions,” and “#MeToo Modernist Pedagogy.” The editors explain that each section examines moments of #MeToo in proto- or early modernist writers, moving along an arc from dealing with the victim-survivors of inappropriate sexual behavior, to seeking opportunities for redress, and then the conflicts between these efforts and modernist notions of progress and individualism. As the collection moves forward chronologically, the essay writers move toward claims of survivorship, resistance, and reprisal.
The last section addresses how educators can approach frequently taught modernist writers such as W. B. Yeats, E. M. Forster, and Woolf. Cara L. Lewis, in “#MeToo vs. Modernism in the Classroom,” succinctly summarizes the challenge #MeToo’s aftermath has posed for instructors, and indeed, for perhaps the entire edited collection: “What the #MeToo movement wants—simple declaration, knowability, transparency, retribution and repair—modernist literature will seldom provide. To expect these outcomes is even perhaps to make a category error: literary texts are not legal testimony” (220). Lewis’s defense of the pedagogically productive nature of ambiguity and the power of speech acts—as Lewis explains in an analysis of Forster’s A Passage to India—is inspired. Lauryl Tucker’s essay “A Room of One’s Own in the #MeToo Classroom” provides a useful set of questions for engaging students in rhetorical strategies interrogating Woolf’s humor. Tucker’s piece, and Lewis’s, are a brilliant blend of literary analysis, pedagogical guidance, and personal reflection that end the collection on a high and hopeful note.
Field and Jordan have gathered a balanced selection of scholars as contributors. This collection reflects the reality of employment in the profession, and it points to the ways #MeToo presents in varied academic environments. Contributors range from established professors at Research 1-classified universities to community college professors, from experienced faculty to recently graduated PhDs, with relative balance between teaching faculty and tenured professors.
In sum, this edited collection is a must-read for those working in modernist studies more broadly, as the contributors guide us through new frameworks for critically approaching established authors and texts. It is especially relevant to those working in women’s studies, queer studies, and sexuality studies. Although its critical lens may be defined in vague terms at first, what #MeToo and Modernism gives us are methodological models for evaluating modernist texts, acts, and authors for what are ultimately crimes of the patriarchy.