Resonance and Resistance: The Politics of Aurality and Orality in Interwar Women's Writing

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This study will draw a connection between the sonorous work of three unique female modernists: Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen and Jean Rhys, to analyse the literary, cultural and political implications of their 'sonic modernity' (Halliday, 2013). Its argument is twofold: first, that sound offers a vital modality for thinking through gender and subjectivity in literary texts, and second, that not only do these authors manifest historical and cultural developments of gendered sound in their work, but that in so doing, they develop a new form of sonorous meaning-making. This meaning is built upon resonance, the relationship developed between objects as they vibrate with sound, which when employed in literature, draws connections between characters, objects, places and times. By looking to female writers of the interwar period, this study will consider how war brought about altered understandings of sound and noise, as well as gender, alongside technological advancements that will be key to understanding the socio-political implications of a modernist literary sound.In recent years, there has been an explosion of work in sound studies, most notably collated in Jonathan Sterne's Sound Studies Reader (2012), that has established new critical approaches and interdisciplinary methods, but the field remains relatively silent on two vital lines of enquiry: the connection between feminism and sound, and the consideration of sound in literature. This study will address this by building on work by Anne Carson and Marie Thompson on the historical depiction of female sound, exploring its ideological associations from 'disorder and death' (Carson, 1992), to the frivolous and 'unintelligible' (Thompson, 2013), arguing for women's literary intervention in these ideologies. It will foreground authors yet to be approached through this lens, who are often forsaken for their middlebrow form, periphery to popular movements and cultural or textual nonconformity.This study will be divided into three chapters, exploring the resonance of literary sound in the technological, social and political realms. The first chapter will analyse the significance of sound technologies in each author's literary work, building on work by Kate Lacey to argue for the connection between gender, the middle brow and the radio, as 'the perceived characteristics of private female discourse - chitchat, gossip, and the heart-to-heart - were publicly manifested on the radio', (Lacey, 1996) and in turn, in literary form by these authors. It will analyse the disciplinary implications this new medium had for their work, by looking to Bowen's radio work collected in Listening In (2010), alongside Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets (1936) and Rhys' Good Morning Midnight (1939), both dramatized for radio. The second chapter will build on Sam Halliday's concept of 'sound space' (2013) to argue that the sonorous threads these authors draw between characters raise questions about interwar women's developing relationship to the family, the self and to society. In looking to an early draft of Lehmann's The Echoing Grove (1953) for instance, which is preserved in her archives at King's College, Cambridge, it will consider how she draws 'echoes' between characters, and in them social and psychological bonds, through vocal practice. Dissonance, 'inseparable from resonance' (Dimock, 1997), will be the focus of the final chapter which will argue for the subversive potential of a sonic anti-sociality. For instance, by studying Rhys' sounding of a postcolonial voice in Voyage in the Dark (1934) and referring to work by Sandra Pouchet Paquet on Carribean music and resistance (2007), it will analyse what makes sound music, culturally accepted, or 'noise', culturally alienated as it poses a 'threat to the social order' (Sterne, 2012).