Pen-is-envy: psychoanalysis, feminism, and the woman writer in May Sinclair's Mary Olivier

Abstract

May Sinclair took the risk of using psychoanalysis and the modernist technique of ‘stream of consciousness’ to revise and explore the Victorian world that had shaped her childhood and early youth. This article examines psychoanalysis as Sinclair's instrument to achieve self-realization: in writing her female self through fiction, Sinclair came to terms with the conflicts of her childhood, while redefining herself as a writer and as a woman.

The act of writing as a form of sublimation as presented in Sinclair's novel Mary Olivier (1919) will be explored along with Sinclair's own development of the ideas of Freud and Jung. Although it might seem anachronistic to look at the novel in the light of scholars such as Luce Irigaray or Julia Kristeva, this essay would be incomplete if feminist psychoanalytic theory and more recent feminist criticism were not also taken into account. In view of this methodological approach, this paper will attempt to illustrate how Sinclair's inner quest towards adulthood challenged (and succeeded in escaping) domestic imprisonment without actually leaving the home.

Keywords:

• May Sinclair
• psychoanalysis
• feminism
• repression
• sublimation
• literary creativity

Notes

1. According to various sources (see, for instance, Finn 2007, p. 196, and Raitt 2000, p. 218), Sinclair seems to have inspired in William James' The Principles of Psychology: ‘consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is more naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective thought’ (James 1890, p. 239, cited Friedman 1955, p. 2).

2. Katherine Mansfield's review of the novel, especially her opinion about Sinclair's experimental technique, was far from flattering: ‘Why should writers exist any longer as a class apart if their task ends with a minute description of a big or a little thing? If this is the be-all and end-all of literature why should not every man, woman and child write an autobiography and so provide reading matter for the ages?… [A]s B's papa's whiskers and B's mama's funny little nose are bound to be different again, and their effect upon B again different – why there is high entertainment forever! It is too late in the day for this new form, and Miss Sinclair's skilful handling of it serves but to make its failure more apparent’ (Mansfield 1930, p. 41).

3. The French theoretician Julia Kristeva elaborates on Lacan's theories of the symbolic and the semiotic by arguing that they are not binary opposites but flow into each other as part of a continuum in the process of constructing meaning. The body of the pregnant woman and the communication between the mother and the foetus is regarded by Kristeva as an example of a semiotic space of ‘otherness within the self’ which resists the symbolic: a pregnant woman has bodily experiences that she cannot understand but which she nevertheless knows. For further references on Kristeva's work, see Robbins (2000, pp. 120–33).

4. For further references on this topic, see Robbins (2000, pp. 103–85) and Weedon (1999, pp. 77–99).

5. Philips (1996, p. 133) posits that ‘indeed sexual elements in the desire for the mother may be suggested by the trail of blood on the hem of the sheet. The immediate cause of the little girl's willingness to drag the heavy sheet and to prick her fingers is the reward of the dolls’ tiny clothes. Dolls have a special significance in the mother-daughter relationship. Often given as a mark of affection by mother to daughter, they might as a gift be seen as parallel to a new-born child, the gift in one sense of man to woman, and implying a pre-oedipal affinity between mother and daughter.' Philips's interpretation coincides with Freud's account for the symbolic meaning of dolls in ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931 cited in Philips 1996, p. 29): ‘the little girl's preference for dolls is probably evidence of the exclusiveness of her attachment to her mother, with complete neglect of her father-object’.

6. The French feminist theoretician Luce Irigaray elaborates on the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan and celebrates women's difference, thus revaluing the label of ‘otherness’ assigned to women by psychoanalysis. She argues there is a repressed female psychosexual economy that disrupts phallocentrism, which she calls écriture féminine. For a brief introduction to Irigaray's theory, see, for example, Belsey and Moore (1997, pp. 1–15). For further references see Irigaray (1985).

7. As Raitt (2000, p. 120) states in Sinclair's biography, Sir Almroth Wright was Professor of Experimental Pathology at the University of London. In March 1912, he wrote a three-column letter to The Times arguing against the suffrage movement, dismissing suffragettes as frustrated spinsters releasing their sexual energies. Wright's argument was based in women's natural inferiority and their proneness to ‘phases of hypersensitiveness’ and ‘serious and long-continued mental disorders’. In the same month, Sinclair wrote her work Feminism discrediting Wright, although, according to Laurel Forster, she showed a certain level of complicity with his views. See Forster (2003).

8. For further discussion on the term ‘masquerade’ to which Irigaray (1985) refers, see Riviere, (2000). Irigaray's and other feminist arguments against Freud, however, are thoroughly discussed in Juliet Mitchell's (1986)ground-breaking work Psychoanalysis and feminism: a radical reassessment of Freudian psychoanalysis.

9. Lacan (1982). Lacan argues that women experience a ‘jouissance which goes beyond’, which can be regarded as analogous to the jouissance of the mystic (1982, p. 147).