Bodily Topography in Rebecca West’s “Indissoluble Matrimony”
ESSAY by Emma Brush
Rebecca West’s short story “Indissoluble Matrimony” presents a unique contribution to the first edition of Blast, both West’s first published work of fiction and the journal’s sole inclusion to be written by a woman [1]. Its presence in Wyndham Lewis’s polemical publication of 1914 has attracted critical attention to West’s feminism on the one hand, and to Lewis’s inclination for sheer conflict on the other. Michael Hallam, for one, understands Lewis to have counterposed the literary content of Blast for the sake of “a provocative and comical duality” (Hallam 62); indeed, “We start from opposite statements of a chosen world,” Lewis’s manifesto begins, “Set up violent structure of adolescent clearness between two extremes” (Blast 30) [2].
“Indissoluble Matrimony” undoubtedly both poses and partakes in this dualistic duel-ism; specifically, it undertakes a battle of the sexes central to the British turn of the century, both at play in the misogynistic tenets of the era’s Vorticist avant-garde and in its women’s movement for suffrage [3]. Especially attentive to the joint concerns of male impotence and female political power, the narrative of the story charts an escalation in marital discord between a highly exoticized woman, Evadne, and her weak and frustrated husband, George Silverton. Culminating in an underwater death struggle, the story ultimately unravels George’s perceived triumph; believing himself to have drowned his wife, George limps back to his house to find Evadne sleeping peacefully, unrepentant and to all appearances indestructible.
The pivotal role the body plays in this staging of gender and aggression, however, remains critically unexplored, both in the context of pre-World War I British anxieties and of West and Lewis’s own preoccupations. While the exceptional melodrama of the piece lends itself to easy allegory, the story nevertheless grounds itself in persistent corporeal details that, as with Lewis’s opening oeuvre Enemy of the Stars, complicate a simply metaphorical reading. Take Evadne’s final pose, for instance, steeped in literal moisture: “Her wet hair straggled across the pillow on to a broken cane chair covered with her tumbled clothes. Her breast, silvered with sweat, shone in the ray of the street lamp that had always disturbed their nights” (116). Evadne’s omnipresent body thus not only stands in for her intransigence but also confirms in physical terms, for both George and for the reader, the reality of the pair’s aqueous confrontation and of Evadne’s physical victory. Both a signifier for Evadne’s “primitive” power as contrasted with George’s frailty, and also the primary site of contact and contest for the characters—with respect to one another and to the strange environment they inhabit—the body thus features as an objective and objectified (i.e., gendered) surface that bears the burden of confrontation between self and other. As such, a reading of the body not only provides access to the story’s physical realm, which remains otherwise obscured in lush and phantasmagoric description, but it also speaks to the threat of corporeal subjectivity, and thus the inclination toward the body as object, that would prove formative for Lewis’s Vorticism and West’s The Return of the Soldier in the war years to come.
The early twentieth century witnessed heightened attention to the male and female body, respectively, for two distinct if related historical phenomena: the declining physical fitness of the British male population on the one hand, and the escalating political status of the female body, as both sovereign subject and reproductive vessel, on the other. With regard to the latter, as Anne Middleton Wagner argues in Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture, “the contested, even embattled, place of the female body” (6) would emerge among a constellation of forces—primarily, the movement for suffrage, the rise of birth control, and the efforts of the biopolitical state to regulate and ensure reproduction (Wagner 4-7). Essentially, Wagner posits, the “visible ‘spectacle of women’” (45) that accompanied the feminist political campaign signified for the fin de siècle British public the threat of both excess and emptiness – political presence married with maternal absence. This dual anxiety presented itself in starkly physical terms: While the insistence and often militancy of the suffrage movement bore witness to the mobilized and abundant female body on the one hand, its manifest dereliction of the “reproductive duty” fed both national and racial anxieties around the barren female body on the other [4].
Evadne Silverton, of course, fully embodies this multivalent threat, “one of those women who,” in George’s eyes “create an illusion alternately of extreme beauty and extreme ugliness” (98). Evadne, that is, connotes the threat of female presence in political, sexual, and ethnic registers that George quite readily navigates and conflates; for instance, “His eyes blazed on her and found the depraved, over-sexed creature, looking milder than a gazelle, holding out a hand-bill to him” (102) upon which, a page later, “She became ugly. Her face was heavy with intellect, her lips coarse with power … With movements which terrified him by their rough energy, she folded up the bills and put them back in the envelope” (103). Not only does George understand Evadne’s transgressive potential in the terms of her body – her face, her figure, and her movements – but he also figures it in terms of an abundance that may house the polyvalent danger she poses, in terms of her intellectual prowess, apparently excessive sexuality, and ambiguous ethnic origins (imbued as she is both with “black blood” (98) and “Oriental crudities” (102)). Collapsing the three within her “heavy” face and “coarse” lips, George experiences an anxiety fundamentally driven by “her fleshiness” (103) – her physical plenitude that threatens to debase his Anglo-Saxon “pure soul” (103) (“‘Have I gone to the Unitarian chapel every Sunday morning and to the Ethical Society every evening for nothing?’ his spirit asked itself in its travail. ‘All those Browning lectures for nothing . . .’” (106)).
At the same time, however, Evadne’s physical excess also bespeaks the failure to bear children that recurs as a plot point directly prior to the story’s two confrontations, the first verbal and the second physical. “‘O George!’ She was yawning widely,” begins the first:
“What’s the matter?” he said without interest.
“It’s so beastly dull.”
“I can’t help that, can I?”
“No.” She smiled placidly at him. “We’re a couple of dull dogs, aren’t we? I wish we had children.” (101)
Transacting in motifs of animality (“beastly,” “dull dogs”) and caricatured descriptors (Evadne’s wide yawn and placid smile), the passage highlights the racialized figurations that the story couples with her infertility. Reproductive failure thus complicates a straightforward reading of Evadne’s power as sheer (female and “primitive”) presence, for it underscores an absence that equally threatens the patriarchal and imperial order George represents.
On the other hand, George partakes in this failure to reproduce for his “unnatural pride of sterility” (109-110) and physical impotence, a motif that gestures toward the anxieties of the male body circulating in Britain after the Boer War and throughout the first half of the century. As Joanna Bourke emphasizes in her Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War, the Boer War attracted attention at the turn of the century to the general decline of the “male physique,” and thus by extension to the degeneration of the “British race” (Bourke 171), an anxiety that would continue to intensify through World War I [5]. Bourke outlines the measures taken in the first decade of the century to increase physical fitness through government and education programs “infused with the military ethos” (182), and this anxiety around physical adequacy manifests itself not only in the figure of George but also across Blast itself. Both the publication’s opening manifesto and Lewis’s Enemy of the Stars, for instance, disclose an emphasis on the hardened exterior in the face of physical decay (an emphasis made material by the bold and industrial font choice): “BLAST First … ENGLAND / CURSE ITS CLIMATE FOR ITS SINS AND INFECTIONS / DISMAL SYMBOL, SET round our bodies, / of effeminate lout within” (11), the “Manifesto.” opens. “CURSE / the flabby sky that can manufacture no snow” (12); “CURSE / WITH EXPLETIVE OF WHIRLWIND / THE BRITANNIC AESTHETE / CREAM OF THE SNOBBISH EARTH” and finally, the “SINS AND PLAGUES / of this LYMPHATIC finished / … VEGETABLE HUMANITY” (15). And in the wake of these various iterations of flaccidity, “BLESS this HESSIAN (or SILESIAN) EXPERT / correcting the grotesque anachronisms / of our physique” (25). However ironic, this last statement nevertheless reflects the German influence on British physical training regimens in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Bourke 179-180).
“Enemy of the Stars,” moreover, would counterpose the “Britannic Aesthete” with its two “CYNICAL ATHLETES,” the ostensibly primeval and Germanic Arghol and Hanp: “Enormous youngsters, bursting everywhere through heavy tight clothes, laboured in by dull explosive muscles, full of fiery dust and sinewy energetic air, not sap. Black cloth cut somewhere, nowadays, on the upper Baltic” (55) [6]. Not only do these characters exude a vitality devoid of “sap,” but Lewis’s language equally pulses with an energy stripped of fluidity; its blunt syntax and elision of articles make for stubbornly dense and vigorous reading.
The vital solidity of both characters and language in Lewis throws into relief the lush verdancy in West that especially proliferates in passages describing Evadne and the story’s nocturnal landscape. With Evadne, for instance, “blood was coursing violently under her luminous yellow skin, and her lids, dusky with fatigue, drooped contentedly over her great humid black eyes” (99); similarly, the “night was flooded with yellow moonshine of midsummer: it seemed to drip from the lacquered leaves of the shrubs in the front garden” (105). This narrative emphasis on the liquid organic with regard to Evadne’s body and to the surrounding environment binds the two together, rendering them jointly exotic and primitivized, powerfully feminized and thus a composite threat to George’s desire for masculine domination.
Indeed, the lubricious viscosity of both Evadne’s body and the story’s environmental domain renders George physically inept, functionally incapable of managing either with much skill or grace. Upon Evadne’s dramatic exit from the house after their first altercation, and throughout the ensuing pursuit across the surreal layout of Sumatra Crescent, George’s path is riddled with painful stumbles and awkward slips that bespeak his physical incompetence; first twisting his ankle and struggling with the door Evadne handles with powerful ease—“It was jammed now and he had to drag at it” (105)—George loses a carpet slipper to “a shining pool of mud: he raised one with a squelch, the other was left. This seemed the last humiliation. He kicked the other one off his feet and padded on in his socks, snuffling in anticipating of a cold. Then physical pain sent him back to the puddle to pluck out the slippers; it was a dirty job” (105). The comic absurdity of his physical incapacity lends a strange pathos to the scene as George hobbles along, working himself into a psychic fervor only to fling “wide his arms in ecstasy: the left struck against stone. More pain than he had thought his body could hold convulsed him, so that he sank on the ground hugging his aching arm” (106). This anticlimax forced on him by the physical realm will, of course, play itself out in magnified form in the story’s denouement, in which George confronts his own impotence in the face of Evadne’s evident triumph:
It must have been that when he laid his murderous hands on her head she had simply dropped below the surface and swum a few strokes under water as any expert swimmer can. Probably he had never even put her into danger, for she was a great lusty creature and the weir was a little place. He had imagined the wonder and peril of the battle as he had imagined his victory. He sneezed exhaustingly, and from his physical distress realized how absurd it was ever to have thought that he had killed her. Bodies like his do not kill bodies like hers. (117)
George’s sneeze, anticlimactic in itself, encapsulates the plight of “bodies like his,” both physically diminished and impotent, much like the British soldier of the Boer War and, later, the incapacitated soldier of World War I. Indeed, West’s The Return of the Soldier of 1918 emphasizes this point; as Kitty remarks upon Chris’s fall down the stairs, “a failure of physical adjustment is the worst indignity she can conceive” (26-27). Whereas Chris’s “loose-limbed” regression is finally converted into “the soldier’s hard tread upon the heel” (90), however, George’s physical incompetence persists throughout, in the face of the easeful abundance of Evadne and the perseverance of “bodies like hers.”
Specifically, Evadne’s body bespeaks a literal and figurative slipperiness that reinforces the slickness of the physical environment that George encounters and fails to traverse. Upon reaching the climactic and primordial scene of confrontation, George’s experience revolves around the “sinister green slime” (107) that he observes along the sides of the channel and that comes to define his experience in the water: “Above him the slime of the rock was sticky with moonbeams, and the leprous light brought to his mind a newspaper paragraph, read years ago, which told him that the dawn had discovered floating in some oily Mersey dock, under walls as infected with wet growth as this, a corpse” (112). The slick surface of the walls, as he perceives them in his phantasmagorical state, prefaces his understanding of Evadne’s body: “A certain porpoise-like surface met his left foot. Fear dappled his face with goose flesh. Without turning his head he knew what it was. It was Evadne’s fat flesh rising on each side of her deep-furrowed spine through the rent in her bathing dress” (112). This emphasis on her flesh echoes his view of her as creaturely and exoticized, but it also parallels the “seal-smooth” (113) surface of her body with the slick surface of the environment – both eerie and, as he will discover, difficult to keep hold of. To further this equivalence, George, upon re-entering the house, attempts to grab at a rock, and “instead his fingers touched a slug, which reminded him of the feeling of Evadne’s flesh through the slit in her bathing dress. And suddenly the garden was possessed by her presence” (116). The slug of this final passage epitomizes the slickness of both the scene and Evadne, as well as George’s clumsy mishandling of each that physically belies his impression that “I must be a very strong man” (113).
Insofar as these passages render the complicity of Evadne and the environment in wrong-footing George (even after “drowning” Evadne, for instance, “[h]is hands, with nothing to resist them, slapped the water foolishly and he nearly overbalanced forward into the stream” (113)), they also register Evadne’s body as an object appropriate to that “phantasmic” (114) environment. Grotesque in George’s eyes for her seductive and powerful abundance, Evadne is boiled down in his moment of decision to pure signifier of bodily excess, “as the curtain of flesh between him and celibacy” (112). And through this understanding, George is finally able to (attempt to) dispose of her, surveying her as a composite of body parts—“strong arms, covered with little dark points where her thick hairs were clotted with moisture,” “her face under water,” “the bubbles that rose to the surface from her protesting mouth and nostrils, and the foam raised by her arms and her thick ankles” (113)—until finally she “dropped like a stone” (113). The chauvinistic fantasy of the British male lies in the conversion of Evadne’s powerful bodily presence, reminiscent of both foreign and female threat, to sheer objectified matter, a symbol that may be discarded once materialized. Indeed, in the paragraph following Evadne’s “death,” George experiences full release from the physical weight of “her fleshiness” (103): “For the world became nothingness, and nothingness which is free from the yeasty nuisance of matter and the ugliness of generation was the law of his being. He was absorbed into vacuity” (113).
George’s experience of an immaterial world, however, soon encounters the reality of the material one as he stumbles home, wet, cold, and with bleeding feet. Thwarted once more by his own debility when confronted with the treacherous plane of the physical world, he begins to understand his own body as object: “He saw his corpse lying in full daylight, and for the first time knew himself certainly, unquestionably dignified” (114). It is not until he concludes his journey, of course, that he recognizes the loss of even this dignity as Evadne’s resurrected body supplants his own “on his deathbed” (116), relishing its victory in its luxurious repose. Where he imagined his thin and noble corpse would lie, he finds:
But Evadne lay on his deathbed. She slept there soundly, with her head flung back on the pillows so that her eyes and brow seemed small in shadow, and her mouth and jaw huge above her thick throat in the light … The counterpane rose enormously over her hips in rolls of glazed linen. Out of more innocent sleep her sensuality was distilling a most drunken pleasure” (116).
As this passage demonstrates, most striking is not only the power of Evadne’s body but also its sheer persistence, its unshrinking and abundant presence. Thus, “bodies like his do not kill bodies like hers,” the story maintains, not solely for her “modern-primitive-feminist” strength (Seshagiri 587), as has been suggested, but more prominently for her objective plenitude that abides through its apparent omnipresence. Much like Deleuze’s notion of the fold, the “rolls of glazed linen” encompassing Evadne’s body in this passage evoke an excess that tends toward, if not infinity, a qualitative surplus that renders her indisposable.
If Evadne oscillates between political subject and fleshy object throughout the course of the short story, the narrative turns upon this oscillation, locating in her malleability an “excess of the object (a capacity to be other than it is),” as Bill Brown theorizes the “thing,” that contributes to her durability. The thingness that emerges at the site of Evadne’s body, which “appears as the vivacity of the object’s difference from itself” (Brown 2), presents itself in “her voluptuous presence” (104), and the surplus that issues from its “misuse” in her marital position, the “multiple objectifications” (Brown 3) to which George submits her. The narrative maps this surplus in physical terms; for instance, observing “a strange bluish light,” George discovers:
It was the moonlight reflected from Evadne’s body. She was clad in a black bathing dress, and her arms and legs and the broad streak of flesh laid bare by a rent down the back shone brilliantly white, so that she seemed like a grotesquely patterned wild animal … The moonlight made her the centre of a little feathery blur of black and silver, with a comet’s tail trailing in her wake. (107-8)
Between George’s recognition of Evadne as a human subject and his objectification of her as wild animal and (literal) piece of flesh, Evadne leaves a trace, a bluish “comet’s tail trailing in her wake,” that testifies to her exception to either, and to her material quality that remains in the difference.
Of course, the greatest “misappropriation” Evadne’s objectified body undergoes, in light of the concurrent historical discourse surrounding maternity and reproduction, lies in the thing that is barely mentioned—the absent child, the dark matter of the story that bears witness to George and Evadne’s failures to one another:
It trailed behind this intense event as the pale hair trails behind the burning comet. They were pre-occupied with the moment. Quite often George had found a mean pleasure in the thought that by never giving Evadne a child he had cheated her out of one form of experience, and now he paid the price for this unnatural pride of sterility. For now the spiritual offspring of their intercourse came to birth. A sublime loathing was between them. (109-10).
The reappearance of the comet’s afterimage reinforces the extent to which an indelible, and perhaps unnamable, otherness persists at the heart of the story and of their relationship, and this passage suggests that the thingly alterity stems from their joint inability to reproduce. Thus Evadne functions quite literally as the story’s “unconsummated metonym” (Brown 22), the female signifier in excess of her maternal function. As such, her objective/objectified body bears the “offensive obtrusiveness” of the female body that Wagner highlights in the early 1900s, but not the “sheer self-sufficiency” of the pregnant figure (Wagner 43-5). Vitally abundant and yet excessive in her infertility, Evadne’s body requires an object, which she finds in George. “Her vitality needed him as it needed the fruit on the table before him” (101), and indeed, unable to bear fruit, Evadne’s vital body latches onto George in the novel’s final line. “Still sleeping, Evadne caressed him with warm arms” (117), forging the bonds of their “indissoluble” and yet unconsummable matrimony.
If the vital, objective, and slightly sinister otherness of Evadne will persist, as the story suggests, this conclusion gestures toward West’s relevance for Lewis, Vorticism, and Blast [7]. But if “deadness” would come to constitute “the first condition of art” (Tarr, 265) for Lewis, the indifferent exteriority within “Indissoluble Matrimony” surfaces paradoxically at its most organic – the vital body and verdant environment that suffuse the narrative with their exuberance. “Vegetable humanity” thus takes on new meaning in West; if it defines the weakened state of the male body on the one hand, it explodes with potential for the female body on the other, at its most dangerous when most primal and luxuriant. Rather than to figure Evadne as a Vorticist champion, however, the story situates her in terms of her infertile relationship with George, rendering her functionally obsolete, as dynamically unproductive as her husband.
As George resigns himself to his own limitations, then—“He was beaten. He undressed and got into bed: as he had done every night for ten years, and as he would do every night until he died” (117)—and as Evadne rests in her object-like splendor, both characters face a forfeiture of subjectivity that foreshadows the losses to come during World War I. As Jenny describes the war in The Return of the Soldier, the “flooded trench[es]” (Return of the Soldier 90) will render bodies objects; Chris will “trod upon a hand, not even looking there because of the awfulness of an unburied head” (8). Both a signifier of excess and of impotence, by 1918 the body has fully transformed into object by virtue of the war’s brutality, inert matter that persists to remind those who remain of their own objecthood. Threatened as a subject, the “modern subaltern” figure (The Return of the Soldier 8) in West will turn to the body as the material source for its capacity as an object—malleable, vulnerable, and aborted in purpose.
With Lewis, too, apocryphal clashes between bodies will beget death and dissolution, as with Argol and Hanp in the final scene of Enemy of the Stars, and in the bathetic duel between Kreisler and Soltyk in Tarr. These confrontations between bodies defined by their hard exteriors and directionless energy suggest the collision of objects rather than subjects. “Lewis threatened [the novel] with too much body,” as David Trotter has argued; “according to Lewis, all that can be represented is the sound of collisions, the impact made by one comic effigy upon another” (Trotter 72). And indeed, the figure of Tarr literalizes this understanding in the pendulum of his affections, delineated by the penultimate sentence of the novel: “But yet beyond the dim though solid figure of Rose Fawcett, another rises. This one represents the swing back to the swagger side” (Tarr 320). Rebounding amidst various women, Tarr embodies the futility of unconsummated and objectified movement, as unceasing and unproductive as the elliptical encounters of Evadne and George.
“Indissoluble Matrimony” thus offers up the shape for these objectifications, to be realized in wartime, in the moonlit and muddy confrontation of George and Evadne Silverton. Face to face above the channel of water, George strikes first: “Sweating horribly, he had dropped his head forward on his chest: his eyes fell on her feet and marked the plebeian moulding of her ankle, which rose thickly over a crease of flesh from the heel to the calf. The woman was coarse in grain and pattern” (111). Understanding Evadne as material object by virtue of her corporeal parts, George “found himself striking her in the stomach … But the rage was stopped on his lips as her arms, flung wildly out as she fell backwards, caught him about the waist with abominable justness of eye and evil intention. So they fell body to body into the quarrelling waters” (111). Body to body—head to chest, eyes to feet, arms to waist—George and Evadne fragment one another into material parts, understood as tools for physical manipulation. Falling into the water, George stumbles into an even harsher world that recognizes him in a similar fashion, as matter:
The feathery confusion had looked so soft, yet it seemed the solid rock they struck. The breath shot out of him and suffocation warmly stuffed his ears and nose. Then the rock cleft and he was swallowed by a brawling blackness in which whirled a vortex that flung him again and again on a sharp thing that burned his shoulder. All about him fought the waters, and they cut his flesh like knives. (111)
In this insentient and yet deeply felt underworld, George experiences a vortex not “pregnant” with possibility as in Pound’s formulation (Blast 153) but merely indifferently persistent. As George rises from the water and Evadne “drop[s] like a stone” (113), that which reemerges from the vortex is primarily the body—“as he slowly climbed the steps. ‘I must be a very strong man,’ he repeated, a little louder, as with a hot and painful rigidity of the joints he stretched himself out at full length along the stone shelf” (113). Suffused in a disorienting world, “Indissoluble Matrimony” insists on the object-like quality of its bodies—the debased body of George and the revitalized body of Evadne—that reflect gendered histories but equally insist upon their own material quality, mere object members struggling with and within the no-man’s-land of an alienating modern world.
[1] See Morrisson, “BLAST: An Introduction.”
[2] See Gilbert and Gubar 100 for one such feminist reading; in their words, the story “marks a key moment in the female story of sexual battle, a moment when the woman is seen as unequivocally victorious.”
[3] See Hickman 87 for more on the “Vorticist campaign against effeminacy.”
[4] See Wagner 7 on the decline of the British birth rate in the first quarter of the century and the corresponding eugenicist fearmongering around “the ‘native’ fertility of the working class.”
[5] Douglas Mao also points to the Boer War in his chapter in Solid Objects on the discourse surrounding the “poorly fed Boer War Soldier” (33) as it pertains to the nonproductive aesthete of Bloomsbury; see Mao 31 for more on pertinent literature of the time, including the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Degeneration of 1904.
[6] See Hickman 79 for an alternative reading to that of Arghol as “Vorticist Übermensch.” Whether Arghol stands in for the Wildean aesthete or for Lewis’s antihero, however, my argument emphasizes merely Lewis’s attention to the hardened and vital masculine physique.
[7] See Seshagiri 587 for a reading of Evadne’s final act as “a feminist précis of Pound and Lewis’s Vortex, where maximum energy can be found at a still center.”
Works Cited
Blast. Ed. Wyndham Lewis. London: Bodley Head, 1914. Print.
Brown, Bill. “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism).” Modernism/modernity 6.2 (1999): 1-28. Web.
Bourke, Joanna. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1996. Print.
Hallam, Michael. “In the ‘Enemy’ Camp: Wyndham Lewis, Naomi Mitchison and Rebecca West.” Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity. Ed. Andrzej Gasiorek, Alice Reeve-Tucker, and Nathan Waddell. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 57-76. Print.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988. Print.
Hickman, Miranda B. “Wyndham Lewis, Vorticism, and the Campaign against Wildean Effeminacy.” The Geometry of Modernism: The Voricist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D., and Yeats. Austin: U of Texas, 27-89. Print.
Kafka, Franz. “The Cares of a Family Man” (“Die Sorge des Hausvaters”). The Complete Stories. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken, 1995. 473. Print.
Lewis, Wyndham. “Enemy of the Stars.” Blast 1 July 1914: 51-86. Print.
Lewis, Wyndham. Tarr. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.
Mao, Douglas. “Wyndham Lewis.” Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. 90-139. Print.
Morrisson, Mark. “BLAST: An Introduction.” Modernist Journals Project. Brown University and University of Tulsa, n.d. Web. 2 June 2015.
Seshagiri, Urmila. “Racial Politics, Modernist Poetics.” Modernism. Ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2007. 573-590. Print.
Trotter, David. “The Modernist novel.” The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Ed. Michael Levenson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 69-98. Print.
Wagner, Anne Middleton. Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Print.
West, Rebecca. “Indissoluble Matrimony.” Blast 1 July 1914: 98-118. Print.
West, Rebecca. The Return of the Soldier. New York: Penguin, 1918. Print.
Emma graduated from MAPH in 2015 with an emphasis in English literature. Emma’s research is currently positioned at the intersection of the literary and the environmental; specifically, she is interested in exploring the ways in which literary texts understand, disclose, and are shaped by the natural world. In the summer of 2016, she expanded upon this focus as a research fellow at the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, CA.