Transgressing Boundaries; Transcending Bodies: Sublimation and the Abject Corpus in Uncanny Stories and Tales Told by Simpson

This chapter traces an early-twentieth century cultural change in perceptions of the nature and representation of reality, the breakdown of the dominant Victorian discourses of humanism and realism and the concurrent Modernist reconstitution of the human subject. I examine this epochal shift through a consideration of May Sinclair’s engagement with contemporary philosophical and psychoanalytical discourses, her personal crisis of Anglican faith and her growing interest in philosophical Idealism. The theme of guilt, this chapter will claim, is closely associated in Sinclair’s writing with the Modernist re-examination of both physical and textual bodies in the light of burgeoning contemporary discourses – both philosophical and scientific – surrounding subjective identity. Guilt is constantly evoked through an emphasis on spirituality and mystical themes and their frequent juxtaposition with psychoanalytic theories of sublimation.

Why British Society Had to ‘Get a Young Virgin Sacrificed’: Sacrificial Destiny in The Tree of Heaven

In May Sinclair’s fiction, images of sacrifice abound. From the self-abnegating Katherine Haviland in Audrey Craven (1897) to the eponymous antiheroine of The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), Sinclair’s central characters seem to be eternally struggling with the issue of renunciation. The treatment of the theme is heterogeneous in many of Sinclair’s texts, not least in the novel The Tree of Heaven, which both condemns and praises personal sacrifice for a higher or communal purpose. This displays a fundamental insecurity about the nature, function and value of sacrifice. It is this ambivalence, which underlies so much of Sinclair’s fiction, in combination with the individual mixture of philosophies in her work, that will be explored here. This chapter investigates the concept of sacrifice in the war novel The Tree of Heaven and how it is connected to community and feminism. In order to find an understanding of sacrifice as proposed by Sinclair, and its meaning in the lives of both women and men in the context of early 20th century England, the chapter discusses the crossroads in the text between sacrifice, idealism, feminism, and the nation-wide feeling of community that appears to be required in wartime.

Architecture, Environment and ‘Scenic Effect’ in May Sinclair’s The Divine Fire

Published in 1904, The Divine Fire was May Sinclair’s third novel and the one that was to make her name. Ironically, as Suzanne Raitt notes, ‘The novel which made her both famous and relatively wealthy [is] a critique of the bookselling industry in which she was now earning her living’. Sinclair’s novel is, in fact, an astute engagement with the commercialisation of modern life and consumer culture. In this chapter I examine how Sinclair uses carefully staged representations of architectural space in order to highlight the play between illusion and reality, exterior and interior, and the commercial versus the domestic. Throughout The Divine Fire Sinclair wants us to look beneath the surface of her textual realism, to realise that what is seen should not necessarily be believed. Sinclair was writing at a time of rapid change, and in her use of the imagery of modernity – the commodities, the dazzling lights, the decor – Sinclair reveals society’s growing obsession with surface illusion and ‘the new’. But alongside this, Sinclair also reveals an alternative world that holds art, and the spiritual values it represents, in high esteem; a world she hopes can survive the bright lights of commercialisation now dominating modern life.

Feminism, Freedom and the Hierarchy of Happiness in the Psychological Novels of May Sinclair

May Sinclair, in her psychological novels The Three Sisters (1915), Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), and The Life and Death of Harriet Frean (1919-1921), develops a concept of happiness which critiques the social, psychological, and physical constraints that are placed upon women due to their emotional labour. For Sinclair, some forms of happiness are better than others, creating a hierarchy of happiness across her work. Drawing on contemporary affect theory, this chapter offers an analysis of Sinclair’s complicated and deeply ambivalent representation of the feeling of happiness. The concept of happiness in Sinclair’s writing is protean. Certain forms of happiness must be resisted; for example the infantilizing contentment of Harriet Frean or the manipulative selfishness of Mary Cartaret. Still other forms should be actively pursued, for example Mary Olivier’s ecstatic and rapturous relationship with nature. Happiness can also become parasitic on suffering. Sinclair seems to be suggesting in both Mary Olivier and The Three Sisters that self-sacrifice, even self-abnegation, is the route to the “perfect” happiness. Affect can be dangerous in Sinclair’s work. To experience affect is to be affected and therefore the safest happiness is ecstatic: to be outside of the self, to be beyond the body.

Learning Greek: The Woman Artist as Autodidact in May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier: A Life

May Sinclair’s reimagining of the late-Victorian poet in Mary Olivier: A Life examines the obstacles facing the artist-heroine in her quest for intellectual freedom, self-definition and artistic autonomy at the turn of the century. Very much constrained by her life at home by her mother, who defends the ideals of the cult of domesticity, Sinclair’s artist-heroine spends the majority of the novel trying to escape the oppressive forces of Victorian society, and Mary specifically challenges many of the period’s patriarchal standards concerning women’s right to an education as well as masculinist definitions of appropriate forms of female creativity. One of the main influences guiding Mary towards her artistic fulfilment is her desire for knowledge, and Sinclair questions the boundaries of acceptable female education in Victorian England by focusing specifically on Mary’s interest in Greek studies—a traditionally masculine subject. Crucially, this essay examines Sinclair’s presentation of Mary’s autodidactism and explores how education influences not only the development of the woman artist, but how it impacts her own understanding of her creative potential as Mary’s theories about language and the translation process shape her burgeoning Imagist style at the turn of the twentieth century.

Dolls and Dead Babies: Victorian Motherhood in May Sinclair’s Life and Death of Harriett Frean

This chapter examines representations of mothering, class, and maternal affect in May Sinclair’s 1922 novel Life and Death in Harriett Frean, paying particular attention to the critique of social constructions of motherhood articulated in the novel. The discussion focuses specifically on social and cultural constructions of femininity and class and the portrayal in Sinclair’s novel of mothering practices and the (in)visibility of maternal figures. As part of my investigation of Sinclair’s critique of the social construction of motherhood, I examine her portrayal of the maternal in relation to class and marital status. Here, my chapter focuses on what I see as Sinclair’s couched portrayal of the controversial practice of baby-farming. I argue that baby farming is implicitly referred to in Sinclair’s Life and Death of Harriett Frean, through the figure of Harriett’s maid, Maggie, and the fate of her baby born outside wedlock. My chapter demonstrates that Sinclair’s portrayal of this topic foregrounds the hypocrisy at the heart of Victorian constructions of femininity and motherhood, and forms a central part of her critique of class and social inequality for women.

May Sinclair and Physical Culture: Fit Greeks and Flabby Victorians

The Combined Maze, published in 1911, is an allegory about two possible futures for the human race. One possible future is to continue along Victorian lines, with working men and women either ‘weedy, parched, furtively inebriate’ like Ranny’s father, or with the ‘flabbiness’ of his father’s chemist assistant, Mercier.1 The alternative is for young people to throw off their Victorian shackles, to stride forth into the world, to run and jump, and to establish their lives upon the principles of moral and physical fitness. This chapter argues that Sinclair presents physical activity, strength training and joy in movement as the solution to moral, psychological and physical flabbiness. It makes explicit the similarities between Ezra Pound’s vortex and the vortex of Sinclair’s The Combined Maze, and Sinclair’s vision of the active modern woman with the discourses on race, fitness and eugenics (all inflected with classicist ideals) that were circulating in the early twentieth century.

Portrait of the Female Character as a Psychoanalytical Case: The Ambiguous Influence of Freud on May Sinclair’s Novels

When May Sinclair started to write fiction and read psychoanalytical papers in the 1890s, case histories were emerging as a crucial medium that helped Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer, as well as the other founding fathers of psychoanalysis to address the new and singular questions raised by their most puzzling patients. Indeed, the case proved to be a valuable tool in the epistemology of psychoanalytical research: writing case histories enabled pioneer psychoanalysts to challenge existing theories, set up new approaches and develop new discourses. But the case study is also a textual object that relies on dialogue, deixis, narrative and analysis, in ways that are quite similar to fictional writing. Sinclair’s key psychological research papers – “The Way of Sublimation” (1915), “Clinical Lectures” (1916) and “Psychological Types” (1923) – suggest that she favoured a more Jungian-based eclectic approach to psychoanalysis, which she also integrated into her two philosophical books A Defence of Idealism (1917) and The New Idealism (1922), over Freud’s sexual theory. Yet, even if she distanced herself from some (but not all) of Freud’s theses, as we shall see, his influence remained central to her fiction and non-fiction, and more particularly to her textual strategies and character depiction.

‘Dying to Live’: Remembering and Forgetting May Sinclair

For Sinclair, the past was a wound. She feared being unable to escape it, and she feared in turn her own persistence in a form that she could not control. Mystic ecstasy – what she called the “new mysticism” – was a way of entering a timeless realm in which there was no longer any past to damage her. But she was also fascinated by what could never be left behind – hence her interest in heredity, the unconscious, and the supernatural. However, the immanence of the future can also emancipate us from the past, in Sinclair’s view, and this is the key to why mystical experience was so immensely appealing to her. Mystical experience could take the self out of the body and thus out of past traumas and into the future. False dying – like that which creates ghosts – traps the psyche in its own pain and forces it to re-experience the suffering of its life; real dying – mystical dying – involves forgetting the self and the world.

‘Odd How the War Changes Us’: May Sinclair and Women’s War Work

Due to her experiences in Hector Munro’s Ambulance Corps in Belgium in 1914, Sinclair was able to comment both in her memoir and her war fiction on the ways in which middle-class women’s involvement in the new working opportunities offered by the war helped to revise ideologies of gender and sexuality, not least in terms of their occupation of the public sphere. However, her public endorsement of women’s work is at odds with contradictory attitudes to the woman worker in her fiction, who is often repositioned in the boredom of home in the final chapters. Developing critical discussions of Sinclair as a writer of spinster fiction (Pease 2012; Liggins 2014), I address the ways in which unmarried heroines negotiate their outsider non-combatant position. Narratives about the hierarchical structures of these new ambulance corps always focus on the activity of driving as a test-case for women’s fitness for war service; I argue that this can be read in terms of negotiations about gender and power. Sexual difference appears inescapable on the Front, even as Sinclair considers ways in which it might be transcended through war work.