Date of Award
5-2016
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
College/School
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Department/Program
English
Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair
Jonathan Greenberg
Committee Member
Lee Behlman
Committee Member
Michael Robbins
Abstract
This thesis works to question the peculiar relationship between form and subject in the intimate poems of the undeservedly forgotten voice of Sylvia Townsend Warner. We will engage with feminist, lesbian, and modernist criticism to help explain why a writer placed so richly in the prime of modernism and with a revolutionary Communist spirit sometimes depicts in her verse a conservative, domestically repressed female speaker who is often silenced, subdued, and controlled by her female lover—and why Warner choses to construct these subjects using more formal poetic strategies.
Sylvia Townsend Warner is an important figure to examine, as there is rich discourse to be had about how women writers - and especially lesbian writers - of the time were still so often confined to a particular literary space, both in mode and matter, and how they worked to challenge that space. In the three chapters of this thesis, we explore how Warner employs strategies of subtle coding in order to form an open dialogue about lesbian love—creating poems riddled with heterosexual play, gender blurring, overt power dynamics, the inversion of Romantic tropes, and discourse on the creation of poetry, all which speak to the double-bound nature of the lesbian existence in the early twentieth century.
File Format
Recommended Citation
Milazzo, Giana, "Bridging the Gap Between Manner and Matter : The Friction of Reticence and Resistance in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Intimate Poems" (2016). Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects. 518.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/etd/518