Gender wars in hell

pp. 199-208

in: Jane Goldman, Modernism, 1910–1945, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

Abstract

Readings of modernist gender wars in Hell continue in this chapter with a discussion of the treatment of the Penelope myth in Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's To the Lighthouse, examining images of monstrous femininity and affirmative wives in the figures of Molly Bloom and Mrs Ramsay. Joyce's collage technique and his creation Molly Bloom are then compared with the collage technique and the heroine of Schwitters' famous (failed) avant-garde poem "An Anna Blume". Further exploration of gender wars and hell, in brief samplings from Stein, William Carlos Williams and Woolf, bring to a close the chapter and Part II, the middle passage of this book. Apocalypse follows.