The Dawn of Modernism

A Literary Companion: Dena Merlino Scott

I have selected readings to pair thematically with Mr. Perthes syllabus to explore intersections & parallels in the Modernist literary & visual artists’ interest, in conjunction with the Barnes collection & philosophy.

Dena Merlino Scott

Fall 2019

1.  Introduction and Overview and Degas and photography

      Cambridge Companion to Modernism, Introduction + Metaphysics.  

      Mallormé. Baudelier.

2.  Background: Courbet, Manet, Impressionism, Seurat, and Cézanne

      Oscar Wilde “The Decay of Lying” 

3.  Background: Symbolism, Puvis, Redon, van Gogh, and Gauguin

       W.B. Yeats “Symbolism of Poetry”.  "Leda & The Swan".  "Cap & Bells".

4.  Background: African Sculpture, Asian, Persian Miniatures, and Byzantine  

       Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”

5.  Matisse: Early Period (1898 – 1907)

      F. Scott  Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”

6.  Matisse: Middle Period (1907 – 1932)

     James Joyce, from "Dubliners" & "The Dead" to  "A Portrait of the Artist"

7.  Matisse: Late Period (1932 - 1954)

       James Joyce "Ulysses"

Syllabus Overview

8.  Picasso: Early Period (1900 – 1906)       

Gertrude Stein, “Tender Buttons” 

9.  Picasso: Middle Period (1907 – 1918)       

Virginia Woolf, "To the Lighthouse" 

10.  Picasso: Late Period; Matisse Picasso Considered       

TS Eliot, "Tradition & The Individual Talent".  "The Wasteland".  "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

 11.  Cubism Beyond Picasso: Braque, Lipchitz, La Fresnaye, and Marcoussis

Ford Ford Maddox Ford, “The Good Soldier”

12.  Modernism’s European Repercussions: Modigliani, Klee, Rouault, Wols, de Chirico, Miro, and Afro        Ernest Hemingway, “A Movable Feast” 

13.  Modernism’s American Repercussions: Demuth, Hartley, Maurer, Prendergast, Church, and Avery             Edith Wharton, "The Custom of the Country" 

14.  Modernism and “Primitivism”: Rousseau, Kane, Hugo, and Pippin

Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”

1.  Introduction, Overview,Degas, Photography

Course Suggested Reading:  Cambridge Companion to Modernism, Introduction + Metaphysics

Charles Baudelaire,  “The Flowers of Evil”  (“Les Fleurs du Mal”) 1857   French lyric poet whose ideas served as a precursor to inspire both the literary & visual artists, as well as interest, attitude, & lifestyle, of the next generations of Modernists.

Literary Style Notes, Modernism Precursor:    Baudelier’s  “The Flowers of Evil” is thematically organized & has a complex literary framing device,  both the narrative structure & complete day/life time cycle. He encourages artists to represent modern life, similar to the literary Realism of the time, & created scandal with sexually explicit writing.  

Barnes Pairing: 

Courbet, “Woman With White Stocking”,  1864

1.  Introduction, Overview, Degas, Photography

Stéphane Mallarmé, from “The Impressionists & Edouard Manet” 1876 (1.)  

"Literature often departs from its current path to seek for the aspirations of an epoch of the past, & to modernize them for its' own purpose, & in painting Manet followed a similarly divergent course, seeking the truth, and loving it when found, because being true it was so strange, especially when compared with old & worn-out ideals of it.  Welcomed on his outset, as we have said, by Baudelaire, Manet fell under the influence of the moment... The painter's aim... was not to make a momentary escapade or sensation, but by steadily endeavoring to impress upon his work natural & a general law, to seek out a type rather than a personality, & to flood it with light & air: & such air! air which despotically dominates over all else... It is deluged with air.  Everywhere the luminous & transparent atmosphere struggles with the figures, the dresses, & the foliage, & seems to take to itself some of their substance & solidity; whilst their contours, consumed by the hidden sun & wasted by space, tremble, melt, & evaporate into the surrounding atmosphere, which plunders reality from the figures, yet seems to do so to preserve their truthful aspect… " 

Barnes Pairing: Manet, “Laundry”, 1875

 2.  Background: Courbet, Manet, Impressionism, Seurat, & Cézanne

Karl Beckson,  “Aesthetes & Decadents of the 1890’s” (2.) 

"To most students of the period, the 1890’s in England - & more specifically London - are less a chronological designation than a state of mind.  For some, the decadence conjures yellow visions of Decadence, of putrescence in life & art, with its loss of the ‘complete view’ of man in nature, perhaps best symbolized by fetid hothouses where monstrous orchids, seemingly artificial, are cultivated as a challenge to nature & assertation of man’s cunning.  For others, the 1890’s suggest the artist’s protest against a spiritually bankrupt civilization, his imagination striving for the unattainable to restore his “wholeness".  

Limited as the phenomenon of Decadence was - one writer has rightly referred to it as but a single stone in the mosaic of the Nineties - in recent years it has attracted the attention of critics who see in its curious posing, the desire to shock with excursions into perversion, its devotion to artifice, & its desire to pull down the decaying temples of Victorian respectability, not only an absorbing chapter in literary history & taste but also a significant prelude to & major influence on contemporary literature, one encounters a similar quest for new experiences & new forms of expression in a world bereft of unassailable truths. " 

 2.  Background: Courbet, Manet, Impressionism, Seurat, & Cézanne

Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying:  An Observation”, 1889 (2.) 

A Dialogue  |  Persons: Cyril & Vivian. |. Scene: the library of a country house in Nottinghamshire.

Cyril (coming in through the open window from the terrace):  My dear Vivian, don’t coop yourself up all day in the library.  It is a perfectly lovely afternoon. The air is exquisite. There is a mist upon the woods, like the purple bloom upon a plum.  Let us go & lie on the grass & smoke cigarettes & enjoy Nature. 

Vivian:  Enjoy Nature!  I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty.  People tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we loved her before, that it reveals her secrets to us; & that after a careful study of Corot we see things in her that escaped our observation.  My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinar monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition...Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place…If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would have never invented architecture, & I prefer houses to the open air.  In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. 

 Literary Modernism Notes:  The rise in literacy & availability of art evolves in a rift in high & lowbrow literature.   The use of old mode didactic format to discuss the turning away from Realism in the stoic, pessimistic, existentially lonely, chaotic, ennui of the era introduces a returned interest in formulaic writing,  satire & irony . 

 Barnes Pairing: Compare Corot, “Italian Landscape”, 1838 +

                                                          Cezanne, "Mont Sainte - Victoire" 1892 - 95

3.  Background: Symbolism, Puvis, Redon, van Gogh, & Gauguin

William Butler Yeats,  “Symbolism of Poetry”,   1900 (3)

II

… take some line that is quite simple, that gets its beauty from its place in a story, & see how it flickers with light of the many symbols that have given the story its beauty, as a sword-blade may flicker with the light of burning towers.  All sounds, all colours, all form, either because of the preordained energies or because of long association, evoke indefinable & yet precise emotions, or as I prefer to think, call down among  us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions; & when sound & color, & form are in musical relation, a beautiful relation to one another, they become, as it were, one sound, one color, one form, and evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations & yet is one emotion.  The same relation exists between all portions of every work of art, whether it be an epic or a song, & the more perfect it is, & the more various & numerous the elements that have flowed into its perfection, the more powerful will be the emotion, the power, the god it calls among us. 

V.

..we should come to understand that the beryl stone was enchanted by our fathers that it might unfold the pictures in the heart, & not to mirror our own excited faces, or the boughs waving outside the window… The form of sincere poetry, unlike the form of the popular poetry, may indeed be sometimes obscure or ungrammatical as in some of the best of Blake’s “Songs of Innocence & Experience,” but it must have the perfections that escape analysis, the subtleties that have a new meaning every day, & it must have all this whether it be but a little song made out of a moment of dreamy indolence, or some great epic made out of the dreams of one poet & of a hundred generations whose hands were never weary of the sword.  

3.  Background: Symbolism, Puvis, Redon, van Gogh, & Gauguin

William Butler Yeats

Literary Modernism Notes:  Meaning is subjective & meant for personal interpretation, but can be guided by our personal, ever shifting,  emotional, mystical, & traditional/cultural intellectual inferences that occur beyond thought - a philosophical exploration in which a man can form a synthesis with the collective unconsciousness to reach abstract meaning.  

Barnes + Yeats' Poetry Pairings 

‘The Cap & Bells’, from “The Wind Among the Reeds”, 1899 +

Picasso, “Acrobat & Young Harlequin”, 1905

'Leda & the Swan’, from “The Tower”, 1928 +

Cezanne, “Leda & the Swan”, 1880

4. Background: African Sculpture, Asian, Persian Miniatures, & Byzantine  

Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”, 1921.  (4)

"I had made a strange discovery that I had never imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing.  I didn’t say to myself, ‘Now I will never see him’, or ‘Now I will never shake his hand’, but ‘Now I will never hear him.’ The man presented himself as a voice.  Not of course that I did not connect him with some sort of action. Hadn’t I been told in all the tones of jealousy & admiration that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all the other agents together?  That was not the point. The point was in his being a gifted creature & that of all his gifts the one that stood out preeminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words -- the gift of expression, the bewildering,the  illuminating, the most exalted & most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness."

Barnes Pairing:  The African objects & artifacts including Dogan Peoples Seated Couple by "Barnes Master" 

Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness"

Ross C. Murfin,  “Biographical & Historical Contexts” (4) 

 "... Kurtz is a marvelously mysterious imaginative creation, a kind of Everyman, like Marlow (“All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz”...), but a mythological demon figure as well.  Critics have often compared him to Faust or Satan.  Kurtz is, then, someone who exceeds the dimensions of anyone Conrad met in the Congo, just as the Africa in “Heart of Darkness” is far more than a continent -- it has universal dimensions.  There are minor characters too, who testify to Conrad’s ability not just to transcribe reality but to invent a world full of powerful significances… Even more fascinating is the Russian mindlessly loyal to the murderous Kurtz, a HARLEQUIN figure... These characters are not part of any diary of historic record; rather, they are masterful touches in a great work.  

Part of the creative complexity of the work lies in the form Conrad’s narrative takes.  We are not told the tale of a trip to Africa by an omniscient authorial narrator. Instead, we find ourselves reading a story within a story… Thus, part of the meaning of the story is the way we learn about “reality” through other people’s accounts…  & the possibly unreliable nature of our teachers; Marlow is the source of our story, but he is also a character within the story we read, & a flawed one at that… 

Because we occasionally judge Marlow negatively, we find ourselves having to take certain passages ironically, & the ironic distance we experience between ourselves & the narrator...irony causes us to apprehend something profound about the human self:  namely, its capacity to understand or “see through” others while remaining self-destructively ignorant about our own identity."

4. Background: African Sculpture, Asian, Persian Miniatures, & Byzantine  

5.  Matisse: Early Period (1898 – 1907)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”, 1925

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Literary Modernism Notes:  Fitzgerald’s green lights beckon the reader throughout the novel from across the lake at Daisy’s dock, representing a metaphoric array of unattainable desires &  the exploration of the reality of the expansive American dream: a luminous, symbolic color. 

 Barnes Pairing:  Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life) 05-06 

6.  Matisse: Middle Period (1907 – 1932)

James Joyce, from Dubliners & The Dead to  Portrait of the Artist 

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.” ― James Joyce, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"

Virginia Woolf,  “Modern Fiction” (5).

"Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad of impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel … Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged, life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.  Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown & uncircumscribed spirit … Mr. Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of the innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, & in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any of these signposts which for generations have served to support the imagination of the reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch or see."  

Literary Modernism Notes:  Like Matisse, James Joyce is highly regarded because of his style & progression as an artist, creating a masterwork in each literary genre & moving onto the next, while maintaining touches of continuity between: poems, short story, memoir novella, novel, & concluding with “Finnegan’s Wake” breaking all linguistic & stylistic barriers.  

7.  Matisse: Late Period (1932 - 1954)

James Joyce, “Ulysses”

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

"...and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”  Molly Bloom final soliloquy

Gabler Edition, Introduction  (5) “Joyce’s them in Ulysses was simple.  He invoked the most elaborate means to present it.”

Abrams & Greenblat, from “ Introduction, James Joyce ” (6)

"On the level of realistic description, “Ulysses” pulses with life & can be enjoyed for its evocation of early twentieth-century Dublin.  On the level of psychological exploration, it gives a profound & moving presentation of the personality & consciousness of Leopold Bloom & Stephen Dedalus.  On the level of style, it exhibits the most fascinating linguistic virtuosity. On a deeper symbolic level it explores the paradoxes of human loneliness & sociability… & it explores the problems posed by the relations between parent & child, between the generations, & between the sexes.  … themes of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, literature, philosophy, history, the book weaves a subtle pattern of allusion & suggestion that illuminates many aspects of human experience. The more one reads “Ulysses” the more one finds in it, but at the same time one does not need to probe into the symbolic meaning to relish both its literary artistry & its human feeling… Joyce presents the consciousness of his characters directly, without any explanatory comment …"  

7.  Matisse: Late Period (1932 - 1954)

James Joyce, “Ulysses”

Literary Modernism Notes:  “Ulysses” is organized into a highly controlled schema, which allows the author other literary freedoms.  “The Bloomsday Book, A Guide Through Joyce’s Ulysses”, is the recommended companion. 

Barnes Pairing: The Main Gallery Ensembles

Dr. Barnes arranged his collection in ensembles to encourage discourse on a variety of levels.  The Main Gallery Ensembles represent larger themes that echo throughout the collection.

The prominent South Wall features  Matisse’s “The Dance” permanent installation & “Seated Riffian”, which demonstrate the progression in the artists style, Picasso’s  “Composition: The Peasants” as well as the architectural decisions to include windows for the “garden in a gallery” motif & exquisite natural light.   

8.  Picasso: Early Period (1900 – 1906)

Gertrude Stein, “Tender Buttons”, 1914.  (7.)

Stein’s Philosophy:  “The painters naturally were looking … & they too had to be certain that looking was not confusing itself with remembering.  Remembering with them takes the form of suggesting in their painting in place of having actually created the thing in itself that is actually the painting…”

A BLUE COAT 

A blue coat is guided guided away, guided & guided away, that is the particular color that is used for that length & not any width not even more than a shadow

From Dover Editions “Note” 

Stein was interested in automatic writing which shaped her theory of composition…  Stein had been trying to create portraits of people, portraits rooted solely in the present moment...then portraits of of rooms & food.   It was a shift in focus influenced in part by her many artist friends, Picasso & Braque among them, who were attempting to accomplish in their mediums what Stein was striving for in hers.

Barnes Pairing:  “Young Woman Holding a Cigarette”, Picasso 1901

9.  Picasso: Middle Period (1907 – 1918)

Virginia Woolf, “To the Lighthouse”,  1927

...she turned to her canvas.  There it was -her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something.  It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again.  She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intesity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre.  It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue. I have had my vision.”  THE END

Joan Bennett, “The Form of the Novels”, (8)

“On the other plane the lighthouse is a poetic symbol with an uncircumscribed power of suggestion...the alternating light & shadow of the lighthouse beam symbolizes the rhythm of joy & sorrow of human life & the alternating radiance & darkness of even the most intimate relationships…The structure of the book itself reproduces the effect of the lighthouse beam, the long flash represented by the first movement (The Window), the interval of darkness & time folding in on itself  represented by the second movement (Time Passes) and the second & shorter flash by the last movement (The Lighthouse)... Two themes stand out, the isolation of the individual human spirit & the contrast between the disordered & fragmentary experience of living & the ideal truth or beauty to which the human mind aspires.”

Barnes Pairing:  “Violin, Sheetmusic, & Bottle”, 1914

10.  Picasso: Late Period; Matisse Picasso Considered

T.S. Eliot, from  “Tradition & The Individual Talent” 1919 -1920 (6)

"One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else.  In these aspects we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man… Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously…Tradition is a matter of much wider significance.  It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour…Someone said:  “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did."  Precisely, and they are that which we know."

Recommended Poetry:  “The Wasteland”, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”  

Barnes Pairing:  “Three Figures”, 1921

11.  Cubism Beyond Picasso: Braque, Lipchitz, La Fresnaye, & Marcoussis

Ford Maddox Ford, “The Good Soldier”, 1927

"Is all this digression or isn’t it digression?  Again, I don’t know. You, the listener, sit opposite me.  But you are so silent. You don’t tell me anything. I am, at any rate, trying to get you to see what sort of life it was I led wit Florence and what Florence was like.  Well, she was bright; and she danced. She seemed to dance over the floors of castles and over seas and over and over the salons of modistes and over the plages of the Riveria - like a gay tremulous beam, relfected from water upon a ceiling.  And my function in life was to keep that bright thing in existence. And it was almost as difficult as trying to catch with your hand that dancing reflection. And the task lasted for years.

Florence’s aunts used to say that I must be the laziest man in Philadelphia... the first question they asked me was not how I did but what did I do.  And I did nothing. I suppose I ought to have done something, but I didn’t see any call to do it. Why does one do things? I just drifted in & wanted Florence."

Mark Schorer, “An Interpretation” (9)

"As a novel, “The Good Soldier” is like a hall of mirrors, so constructed that, while one is always looking straight ahead at a solid surface itself, but the bewildering maze of past circumstances and future consequences that - somewhat falsely - it contains.  Or it is like some structure all of glass and brilliantly illuminated, from which one looks out upon a sable jungle of ragged darkness."

Barnes Pairing:  Lipschitz “Harlequin With Mandoline”, 1920

12. Modernism’s European Repercussions: Modigliani, Klee, Rouault, Wols, de Chirico, Miro, & Afro

Hemingway, “A Movable Feast”, (Worked on 1957 Cuba, ‘58 Idaho, ‘59 Spain, ‘60 Cuba.)  Concerns 1921-1926 in Paris.  

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, them wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.”  Hemingway, to a friend, 1950 

Chapter Titled, “Miss Stein Instructs”

"...I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Museé du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jew de Paume.  I went there nearly every day for the Cézannes and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute of Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enought to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them.  I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret. But if the light was gone in the Luxembourg I would walk up through the gardens and stop in at the studio apartment where Gertrude Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus… It was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries."

Chapter Titled, “Scott Fitzgerald”

"Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do. But it was very difficult, and I did not know how I would ever write anything as long as a novel.  It often took me a full morning of work to write a paragraph."

13.  Modernism’s American Repercussions: Demuth, Hartley, Maurer, Prendergast, Church, & Avery

Edith Wharton, “The Custom of the Country”, 1913. 

"I want to get a general view of the whole problem of American marriages”.

Mrs. Fairfield dropped into her armchair with a sigh.  “If that’s what you want you must make haste! Most of them don’t last long enough to be classified.” 

…“It’s normal for a man to work hard for a woman - what’s abnormal is his not caring to tell her anything about it.”

“To tell Undine? She’d be bored to death is he did!”

“Just so, she’d even feel aggrieved.  But why? Because it’s against the custom of the country.  And whose fault is that? The man’s again … the genus he belongs to:  homo sapiens, Americanus. Why haven’t we taught our women to take an interest in our work?  Simply because we don’t take enough interest in them… To slave for women is part of the old American tradition; lots of people give their lives for dogmas they’ve ceased to believe in.  Then again, in this country the passion for making money has preceded the knowing how to spend it, and the American man lavishes his fortune on his wife because he doesn’t know what else to do with it…  The emotional center of gravity is not the same in the two hemispheres. In the effete societies it’s love, in our new one it’s business. 

13. Modernism’s American Repercussions: Demuth, Hartley, Maurer, Prendergast, Church, & Avery

Edith Wharton, “The Custom of the Country”

"Ralph seemed to have money on the brain:  his business life had certainly deteriorated him.  And, since he hadn’t made a success of it after all, why shouldn’t he turn back to literature and try to write his novel?  Undine, the previous winter, had been dazzled by the figures which a well-known magazine editor whom she had met at dinner had named as within reach of the successful novelist.  She perceived for the first time that literature was becoming fashionable, and instantly decided that it would be amusing and original if she and Ralph should owe their prosperity to his talent.  She already saw herself as the wife of a celebrated author, wearing ”artistic” dresses and doing the drawing room over with Gothic tapestries and dim lights in altar candlesticks. But when she suggested Ralph’s taking up his novel he answered with a laugh that his brains were sold to the firm - that when he come back at night the tank was empty … And now he wanted her to sail home [from Paris] in a week.” 

- 

“It was natural that the Americans, who had no homes, who were born and died in hotels, should have contracted nomadic habits; but the new Marquise de Chelles was no longer an American, and she had Saint Désert and the Hôtel Chelles to live in, as generations of ladies of her name had done before her."

13. Modernism’s American Repercussions: Demuth, Hartley, Maurer, Prendergast, Church, & Avery

Edith Wharton, "The Custom of the Country" 

Diane Johnson, From Introduction (10)

"Her target here is the basic deformation of relations between men and women in America, especially for formation of the American female mind - its education and interests, or lack of them, and the consequent dysfunction of marriage…American marriage is contrasted with Continental customs….Do any of us know really what we want?  Freud most famously put the question as:  What do women really want? Up to a point, Undine knows what she wants without having to ask; she wants what she is taught by the custom of the country to want, without any reference to her own nature or the verities of human nature.  She wants to make it - to be rich and admired, to have everything and not be scorned. Wharton’s real punishment of Undine is to make her always unsatisfied, and clever enough to be vaguely aware that she is missing out on the things that really matter."

Barnes Pairing:  Demuth “Lulu and Alva Schön at Lunch”, 1918.  “The Masque of the Red Death” 1918

14.  Modernism & “Primitivism”: Rousseau, Kane, Hugo, & Pippin

Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” 1937

“But Mrs. Turner’s shape and features were entirely approved by Mrs. Turner.  Her nose was slightly pointed and she was proud. Her thin lips were an ever delight to her eyes.  Even her buttocks in bas-relief were a source of pride. To her way of thinking all these things set her aside from Negroes.  That was why she sought out Jamie to friend with. Janie’s coffee-and-cream complexion and her luxurious hair made Mrs. Turner forgive her for wearing overalls like the other women who worked inthe fields… Her disfavorite subject was Negroes…

“They don’t worry me atall, Mis’ Turner.  Fact about de thing is, they tickles with wid they talk.” 

Sherley Anne Williams, From Forward  (11)

Hurston’s evocations of the lifestyles of rural blacks have not been equaled; but to stress the ruralness of Hurston’s settings or to characterize her diction solely in terms of exotic “dialect” spellings is to miss her deftness with language…  

Literary Modernism Notes

Hurston’s grandparents were slaves & while she was educated her timeline took

considerably longer to achieve:  she graduated Highschool at 27, Columbia &

Barnard when 37 (the sole African American student) with BA in Anthropology. 

Hurston then travelled the American South & tropics for anthropological study.

Barnes Pairing, Pippin “Giving Thanks” 1942

Footnotes

1.  Mallarmé, S. (1876). The Impressionists & Edouard Manet. [online] Msu.edu. Available at: https://msu.edu/course/ha/446/mallarmemanet.pdf [Accessed 19 Dec. 2019].

2.  Beckson, K. (1966). Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890's. New York: Vintage Books, p.Preface.

3.  Yeats, W. and Pethica, J. (2000). Yeats's Poetry, Drama, and Prose. New York: W. W. Norton, pp.27, 96, 273 - 275.

4.  Conrad, J. and Murfin, R. (1996). Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. New York: St. Martin's Press, pp.14, 62 - 63.

5. Joyce, J. and Gabler, H. (1986). Ulysses. New York: Garland.

6.  Abrams, M. and Greenblatt, S. (1999). The Norton Anthology of English Literature/7th Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, pp.2150 - 2151.  2233 - 2234. 2396- 2397.

7.  Stein, G. (1997). Tender buttons. Mineola (N.Y.): Dover.

8.  Shorer, M. and Bennett, J. (1961). Modern British Fiction: Essays & Criticism, "The Form of the Novels. London: Oxford University Press, p.426.

9.  Schorer, M. (1961). An Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wharton, E. (1913.  2001). The Custom of the Country. New York: Modern Library. pp.  128.  176.  314.

11.  Hurston, Z., Williams, S., Pinkney, J. and Dee, R. (1991). Their Eyes Were Watching God. Urbana: University of Illinois Press