Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890–1930 (review)

Reviewed by: Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890–1930 Paul Delany Morag Shiach. Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. x + 291 pp. $65.00. Morag Shiach undertakes to "discuss a wide range of writers […] and consider a great variety of texts, including philosophical writings, novels, poetry, journalism, political theory and visual arts" (14). The wide range signifies an ambitious approach to the question of labour and Modernism, although it also makes it difficult to discern either temporal or thematic coherence in this study. Shiach begins with a long march through three centuries of thinking about labour. Locke argues that labour legitimizes individual claims to property; Marx, that labour is the sole source of value; Ruskin, that "life without industry is guilt" (42). So far, we can see a consensus that labour is not the curse of Adam but a founding virtue of any productive society. But by the end of the nineteenth century a labour-centric view of human existence is under attack from Modernism, and from other quarters as well. Shiach's challenge is to chart the emergence around 1900 of cross-currents which render problematic the status of "labour" as a stable, unitary concept. Modernism, in its masculinist aspect at least, tends to see mass production as a threat to heroic manhood. What is taken from us by the machine needs to be restored through sexual, ritual, or primitivist self-assertion. Woman suffers too, like Eliot's typist who loses her femininity as she "lays out food in tins." Nor is mechanical sex any cure for the ills of mechanical labour. Yet, a generation earlier, novelists like Gissing or [End Page 240] Grant Allen had made the "Type-writer Girl" a plucky symbol of female emancipation. Feminist thinkers, notably Olive Schreiner and Emmeline Pankhurst, became relentless critics of "parasitism." The separate sphere had confined middle-class women to merely idle or ornamental roles; they could only gain respect, and self-respect, by taking on their share of the world's labour. Andreas Huyssen has presented Modernism as an attempt to shore up masculinity against the threat of feminization. In the nineteenth century, women had used the privileges of their separate sphere to become the patrons and even the controllers of culture. Muscular Modernists like Pound or Wyndham Lewis proclaimed that they were not the lapdogs of feminine salons. The contested association between art and feminization stands out in Shiach's account of the erratic career of Sylvia Pankhurst. Originally trained at the Royal College of Art, Pankhurst wrote poems celebrating working women and painted them at their factory workbenches. Her art was in a traditional style, closer to Socialist Realism than to Cubism or Surrealism. Later, though, she denounced even her own art practice. "As an artist," she said, "the world has no real use for you; in that capacity you must fight a purely egotistical struggle" (148). Instead of art, Pankhurst chose a feminist calling based on collective experience in the workplace. Both she and her mother Emmeline were deeply suspicious of identities based on female sexual experience. Labour, rather, was the necessary and defining activity for women, and labour protected them from "the damaging and disabling charge of 'parasitism'" (105). For Pankhurst, labour created identity, whereas Modernism typically decried the Taylorist regime of mass production as identity's destroyer. It is disappointing that Shiach repeatedly frames such contradictions in the role of labour but then slides away from telling us how to resolve them. Her discussion of the "Type-writer Girl" is one of the best sections in the book, because it deals with a well-defined moment in the emergence of feminized labour, one that was represented and debated in contemporary novels. These novels give a specific sense of how people actually lived with the problem of labour. Conversely, Shiach's opening chapter suffers from trying to do justice to vast realms of speculation about labour, from Locke to Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche. Shiach's chapter on D.H. Lawrence considers "the role that labour plays in his models of history and of selfhood" (149). She looks for these models first in...

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