Streams of Consciousness

Dorothy Richardson began working on what became Pointed Roofs -- the first of what would eventually be the thirteen volumes of her Pilgrimage -- in 1911.  James Joyce was still struggling to find a publisher for Dubliners, and was at work on revising his early novel Stephen Hero into Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, which would not appear until 1914; his Ulysses -- which many assume to have been the first novel to make use of "stream of consciousness" -- came out in 1922, by which time Richardson was on her sixth volume.  The very term was coined by May Sinclair, in her review of Richardson's novels, which appeared in The Egoist in 1918.  And yet today, when it comes up, it's nearly always associated with Joyce.

Richardson herself was not fond of the term; she preferred "interior monologue."  And to be sure, her version of this approach was not overtly experimental; it did not do away with punctuation, nor did it frame itself in terms of the random jumble of thoughts that mark the mental pathways of Joyce's Leopold Bloom.  No, it was a much more centered, clear, and thoughtful interior -- indeed, it was based upon Richardson's own life, with a delay of about five years from lived experience to novelization.  Of course Joyce's characters, too, were plainly autobiographical, although Stephen Dedalus eventually evolved into a less central character -- but somehow, when a man, even today, draws from his own life in his fiction, it's fine -- but if a woman does it, it makes it somehow less "serious," as the British novelist Jeanette Winterson recently noted in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

For decades, the gender double-standard of modernism relegated women -- Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, and Katherine Mansfield -- to a second tier -- while enfolding men such as Joyce, Kafka, Forster, and Fitzgerald in canonical vestments.  Perhaps the only woman of the period to escape this phenomenon was Gertrude Stein -- but then, her modernism was quite unlike anyone else's, and she was at the center of an artistic circle filled with male writers and artists.  But now, at last, there does seem to be a correction, and many now see Virginia Woolf as the pre-eminent novelist of the period, while Arnold Bennett -- whom she took to task in "Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown" -- has fallen into complete obscurity.  Another beneficiary of our corrected hindsight is Katherine Mansfield, whose short stories are perhaps the finest of the entire Modernist movement, including one -- "Prelude" -- which became the second publication of Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press.