MFS Modern Fiction Studies

Political candidates on the campaign trail all too often distill their stump speech to the reductive question: are you better off now than you were four years ago? Jesse Wolfe’s ambitious monograph poses a similar question with vastly more nuanced ramifications: has the quality of intimacy improved over the century since the heyday of Bloomsbury? “Do things improve over time, Bloomsburian modern-ists wondered, for friends, lovers, spouses, and families?” (4). Wolfe investigates the works of modernism’s “legatees” (3) to explore a range of literary answers and examine whether today’s “citizens, on balance, [have] been happier than their forebears because they have been freer to love whom, how, and if they want to?” (4). This study of literary representations of intimate relationships draws from expected but also surprising sources to trace thematic and formal continuities between three “Bloomsbury-related figures” (3) and six “contemporary Anglo-American novelists.” Following a comprehensive introduction framing and contextualizing his choices, Wolfe proceeds with mostly fruitful pairings, such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway with Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park, and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India with Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, among others. The overarching trajectory of the book’s argument, in answer to the broad question of improvement over time, moves from pessimism to skepticism and ends with (cautious) optimism. [End Page 629]

I describe Wolfe’s volume as ambitious because it demonstrates clear erudition, breadth, and depth in its nuanced readings of a range of literary texts, and impressive fluency with historical discourse and recent scholarship on intimacy. At times, Wolfe’s evident enthusiasm for his subjects extends to unexpected choices, such as placing Sigmund Freud’s case studies under the Bloomsburian category alongside Forster’s Howards End and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, or including D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce in sections supposedly focused on Bloomsburian influences because “each connects Bloomsbury’s concerns to [modernism’s] psychosexual and aesthetic zeitgeist” (12). Perhaps most surprisingly, and least convincingly for this reader, the book’s closing chapter abandons literary analysis altogether to argue for recent polyamorous trends as the “Bloomsburian love that dared not speak its name” (196), the endpoint of practices initiated in early-twentieth-century bohemian circles.

Following the introduction, chapters are organized around authors’ attitudes toward progress, starting with Cusk’s and Ian McEwan’s pessimism, continuing with Pat Barker’s and Rushdie’s skepticism, and culminating with Zadie Smith’s and Michael Cunningham’s optimism. Informed by Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism and Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness, Wolfe’s reading of Cusk’s Arlington Park argues that Cusk “extends Woolf’s inquiries into privileged women’s disappointments in intimacy” (51), thus representing a more pessimist modernist legatee. For Wolfe, Cusk’s portrayal of suburban housewives and mothers of young children engaging in “daily drudgery” (70) demonstrates how she “sees Victorian oppression and conformism stretched out into the the twenty-first century.” For his chapter on Atonement, Wolfe turns to what he describes as McEwan’s debt to Freud’s case histories to suggest that the character Briony’s writing of her novel “might be seen as an attempted catharsis, or writing cure” (81), recalling Freud’s experience with his “talking cure” of Dora. Atonement demonstrates McEwan and Briony’s belief in the value of literary expression on aesthetic grounds, but Wolfe sees this “defense of art” (93) as “beset with doubt,” a sign of McEwan’s pessimistic outlook on progress.

Wolfe argues for Barker’s debt to Freud in her Regeneration trilogy, with Freud’s “depictions of therapeutic sessions” (99) modeling the subject and method of the novelist’s work. Wolfe glosses key Freudian texts, including Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria and Analysis Terminable and Interminable, to frame his examination of intimate doctor-patient relationships in Barker’s novels, suggesting that in her depiction of real-life psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, the doctor “takes the best of Freud’s interpretive paradigm and discards the [End Page 630] worst” (107). The ending of the trilogy’s final volume, Ghost Road, reminds us that “violence [is] endemic to human society, and that metanarratives” (101) hoping to assimilate “this grim truth in a grand synthesis are foolish.” In the chapter on Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Wolfe suggests that Forster’s A Passage to India ends on a potentially hopeful note, one that “hints at a queer futurity, daring future novelists to ask the follow-up question What about now and here?” (127). His analysis of The Satanic Verses argues that Rushdie holds no hope for connection across East and West, in part because of Rushdie’s “anti-teleological and anti-rational attitude toward history” (128), and also due to the persistence of “racism and misogyny, even in the supposedly enlightened and feminist West.” Rushdie’s novel recalls Forster’s through its weaving of “homoeroticism—with all its ambiguous manifestations—into its picture of human intimacies” (130), but Wolfe ultimately centers Rushdie’s “skepticism” (129) about progress in personal relationships.

The chapters on Smith and Cunningham explore familiar ground, as both On Beauty and The Hours have received extensive scholarly attention in recent years. For Wolfe, Smith’s novels and essays explore the “possibilities for intimacy in a changing transnational world” (151), and On Beauty more centrally imparts “happy news: that things are getting better” (152). The novel goes beyond Forster’s “schematic premise” (151) in Howards End with a cast of characters “from different classes and espousing different feelings about national and international identity.” On Beauty crucially revises Forster’s novel with its “more hopeful attitude toward history” (166), without downplaying the “serious challenges” posed by “class differences” or its “liberal self-critiques” (152). Cunningham’s novel, in Wolfe’s generous reading, displays its immense debt to its “precursor” (177) Mrs. Dalloway, and “preserves its inspirational, or historically optimistic, qualities . . . with its linear narrative momentum” (182). Wolfe’s discussion of cautious optimism in The Hours’ treatment of women’s lives across the twentieth century provides a fitting endpoint in his schema tracing the treatment of intimacy in the works of Bloomsbury legatees. Wolfe sees hope, “however qualified” (192), in the novel’s depiction of queer intimacies, which suggests that “social progress can play dividends in the deepest recesses of our emotional lives.”

This volume belongs to a recent and welcome trend, in scholarship by David James, Urmila Seshagiri, and Monica Latham, among others, of exploring contemporary reinventions of modernist texts. This strand of scholarship not only rejuvenates modern classics but provides fresh ways of developing curricula and engaging twenty-first-century [End Page 631] students increasingly unfamiliar with those classics. Wolfe’s careful readings and comprehensive contextual framework model generative ways of doing literary scholarship in a changing higher-education landscape. Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury offers a rich tapestry of interpretive strategies for scholars of modernism and of contemporary fiction inspired by Bloomsbury members’ hope “for a future in which lovers and friends on the one hand, and society on the other hand, will make strides toward more perfect unions” (14). In our current times of cruel backlash against hard-fought battles for bodily autonomy and queer rights, however, such hopefulness may strike some readers as poignantly naïve.