Review | Modernist Short Fiction and Things
Reviewed by Ashley Maher, University of Groningen
Though Aimée Gasston’s Modernist Short Fiction and Things may take as its focus the small and seemingly frivolous, its argument is refreshingly ambitious in its scope and its stakes. Its choice of authors—Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Elizabeth Bowen—does not present any surprises, but the monograph shines in generating novel connections between the short story, women’s writing, and everyday objects. These different entities are often treated as parallels, via their shared ability to generate new perspectives on the literary and cultural center from their position of marginality. Modernist Short Fiction and Things considers how each writer’s approach to the short story form and to practices of reading took direct inspiration from objects that appear repeatedly in their fiction. As Gasston puts it, “In addition to functioning as accessories to the practice of everyday life, the objects explored here also work as accessories to the processes of reading and to thinking about reading,” and that correspondence reveals “a profound resonance between the form of the stories and the ideas they promote, where objects become emblems of a radically alternative aesthetic” (14, 15).
Gasston’s book frames itself as a rejoinder to studies of modernism that have marginalized the short story (and the women writers who frequently published in that genre) as well as a corrective to what Gasston characterizes as overly formalist approaches to the short story in this period, namely Dominic Head’s The Modernist Short Story (1992). While the argument of Modernist Short Fiction and Things is primarily about genre, it also deploys an impressive range of archival, theoretical, and contextual sources. For instance, Gasston navigates between such diverse material as Woolf’s specially designed standing desk, which drew upon the model of creativity presented by the artist standing at the easel, and Heidegger’s Dasein with ease, but even in the midst of that wide range of inquiry, the book’s commitment to the small detail, whether in object or literary form, is honored through the strength of its close readings.
Chapter one focuses on the significance of the armchair to Woolf’s short fiction, arguing that the armchair critic’s “amateurism” presented “a key challenge and counterpoint to the stultifying effects of professionalism and tradition” (29). The sitting reader’s physical relation to the world becomes a means of thinking about the mental states that the armchair encourages. Gasston thereby emphasizes “how important just sitting and looking at objects is to Woolf’s own world-view,” with the freedom of the wandering, reflective mind perfectly represented in the narrator of “The Mark on the Wall,” whose interest in the material world and eschewal of traditional hierarchies of value Gasston links to her “oblique, armchair perspective” (27, 50).
In chapter two, Gasston turns to Mansfield’s “incorporative literature” (82), including such stories as “The Garden Party” and “Prelude,” wherein snack food features prominently. Like the short story and the magazines in which they were published, the snack is marked by its ease of consumption and its disposability. Gasston links snacks to the nourishment sought by women burdened with a host of domestic tasks and describes them as transgressive consumption flouting the structure of mealtimes. Most significantly, snack food presents a new understanding of the importance of the fleeting moment to modernist aesthetics. While it is indeed eaten and digested quickly, it transforms one’s very being over time as its nutrients become incorporated into the body, much like the modernist short stories that aim to capture the “intensity of the moment”: “Reading, like eating, can change bodies, minds. . . . The paradox of brevity is modelled by the fact that consumption of a good short story may be a brief encounter but one with lasting effects” (106). In other words, what is important about these moments in Mansfield’s fiction is not their transience but their endurance.
Chapter three traces Bowen’s longstanding interest in accessories, with her short stories often appearing in magazines dedicated to fashion (143). By focusing, in stories such as “Ann Lee’s” and “Coming Home,” on items like gloves and hats, Bowen puts weight on the “peripheral detail,” and this reversal of value in her stories “encourages readers to rely on inverse and disrupted systems of logic” (144). A particular strength of this chapter’s investigation of the “eccentricity” of Bowen’s short stories (152) is that it provides a new explanation for her famously unbalanced sentences: these sentences delay revealing their subject in order to let the “‘beholding eye’” instead chase the seemingly insignificant detail (158).
With all the moving parts of this book’s argument, it is not possible for Gasston to interrogate modernism, the short story, and things equally. Modernism is important to the construction of the overall argument, via these stories’ investment in the momentary and the quotidian, but that literary historical element is left largely implicit in the body of the monograph, and the shifts in modernist writing over time do not receive substantial examination. The book’s more limited attention to modernism’s chronology has an impact on its treatment of Bowen. By relying on sources from 1999 and 2003 to make the case that studies of modernism have tended to exclude Bowen, Modernist Short Fiction and Things does not account for her centrality to the emergent field of late modernism, with her wartime short stories often drawing more critical attention than her novels. In addition, through its tendency to create neat parallels between the terms of its argument and its commitment to the perspectives enabled by dwelling at the periphery, Gasston does not fully address these writers’ complicated relation to the cultural center, as witnessed in Woolf’s famous description of herself in Three Guineas as one of the “daughters of educated men.” One might instead argue that it was these writers’ simultaneous inclusion and exclusion from the intellectual circles of their day that made their representation of marginality so powerful.
Those comparatively less fleshed-out ideas do nothing to undermine the many strengths of the book. If the short stories by Woolf, Mansfield, and Bowen present to readers an exercise in engaging with the world anew by inducing alternative patterns of thought—free-ranging, incorporative, and attentive to the peripheral—Modernist Short Fiction and Things instills the same habits of mind in its readers.