Modernism, Metaphysics, and Sexuality

by Debrah Raschke

The early twentieth century inherited from its Victorian predecessors a series of Copernican jolts, which in redefining conceptions of time, space, theology, and linguistics, reshaped notions of subjectivity-and the discourse of philosophy itself. Literary modernism, in effect, has been haunted by these vestiges, by these fragments of knowledge and subjectivity cast among ruins. Ian Watt mourned this loss of certainty as the demise of God and the loss of the omniscient author, while Nietzche cheered it as a long-overdue deauthorization of his precursors.

Without question, modernist texts have been captivated by hat can be known or, more aptly, what cannot be known. This position was foundational to one of the pivotal readings of modernism. Simultaneously, economic, legal, and political shifts that occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced real material changes pertaining to the status of women. Thus, as many others have adeptly argued, modernism is also a crisis in gender. Modernism, Metaphysics, and Sexuality keenly suggests that these narratives, the rethinking of what constitutes truth and the rethinking of gender, are intertwined. Interpreting modernism through Luce Irigaray’s re-reading of Western metaphysics, Raschke suggest that where there is a crisis in knowing there is also a crisis in the sex/gender system.

Western metaphysics throughout its history repeatedly relays a cultural narrative in which the masculine becomes aligned with truth and enlightenment while the feminine is relegated to realms characterized by untruth, darkness, and chaos. As Plate suggests in the Timaeus, the punishment for men who do not live honorable enough lives may well be to return to life as a woman. The structure of metaphysics, as Irigaray and others have illustrated, is dependent on this primary structuring: the movement from the cave to sun, from a site of deception to the realm of philosophical discourse, from the feminine to the masculine. When the parameters of metaphysical certainty are tested, as they are at the turn of the twentieth century, so too are the constructions of masculinity and femininity. Scrutinizing the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, Raschke finds the repressed sexual tension that demarcates postmodern discussions of Western\n metaphysics already envisioned in modernist texts. Thus, in the works of Conrad, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf, the wrestling with epistemology is inextricable from the querying of sexuality. One invariably accompanies the other. Raschke provides not only a provocative reading of modernism, but also unveils how metaphysical narratives from interpretation and influence genre.

Modernism, Metaphysics, and Sexuality will appeal most clearly to readers of modernism, but it will also find an audience with those interested in narrative theory, gender theory, cultural studies, and revisionary philosophy.

ISBN 1-57591-106-X

Printed in the U.S.A.