"Go for the Failure": Modernist Feminist Failure and the Fiction of Vita Sackville-West, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Jean Rhys
Bibliographic record
Abstract
contradictory representations of women's failure in the fiction of Vita Sackville-West, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Jean Rhys who, I argue, each critique and expand the possibilities of modernist aesthetics and feminist expression through their depictions of the politics and pleasures of women's failure. I bring these authors together because they differ significantly in their aesthetics, feminist interventions, and relationship to "high" modernism. These differences enable them to challenge the modernist canon in distinct ways, and reveal how the institutional formation and biases of "modernism" have failed them. My reading of failure takes up Jack Halberstam's recuperative reading in The Queer Art of Failure (2011), where failure is re-read as a queer and feminist subversion of heteropatriarchal expectations. However, I problematize a purely affirmative ideal of failure by examining narratives of both liberating and oppressive failure. Sackville-West and Warner create protagonists who enthusiastically embrace failure as an alternative source of identification that is less bound to patriarchal ideals and norms of domination; as such, these protagonists carve out their own livable spaces-no matter how fleeting or compromised-within oppressive structures. In contrast, Rhys depicts failure as a decisively destructive social identifier thrust upon marginalized women who lack the social power to recuperate that label into a feminist identification. By putting constructive and devastating accounts of "failed" women in dialogue, I assert that embracing failure is a privileged form of feminist resistance. In turn, these authors critique the material conditions of women's subjugation in the early twentieth century at the same time that they challenge literary modernism and early feminism. These authors willfully "fail" literary conventions for Table of Contents Abstract..ii Acknowledgements......
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".