Georgia JOHNSTON, The Formation of 20th-Century Queer Autobiography. Reading Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Hilda Doolittle, and Gertrude Stein, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 216 p.
ISBN 1-4039-7618-X
SUMMARY
In their literary autobiographies, modernists Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) challenge the scientific figures of the perverse lesbian, particularly those promulgated by Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud. By multiplying their “I”s, manipulating subject and object divisions, undermining boundaries between writer and audience, and using repetition to code erotic moments, these writers queer the terms of autobiography. That queering requires understanding autobiography as more institutional than introspective, and the autobiographies themselves question the very theories that determine them: theories of lesbianism, female development, and memory.
CONTENTS
Queering the Subject of Modernist Lesbian Autobiography
Wholes in the Dykes: Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud Figuring the Lesbian
Counterfeit Perversions in Vita Sackville-West's Portrait
Virginia Woolf's Subjectivities and (Auto)Biographies
Hilda Doolittle's Lesbian Visions
Lesbian Textualities in Stein's Lifting Belly.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Georgia Johnston is Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at Saint Louis University.