Examining the particular, illuminating the singular: Gender, sexuality and desire in the lives and works of Marianne Moore and Bryher
Female figures of the literary modernist movement came of age in the early twentieth century. This was a time of significant changes to discourses of sexuality and gender identity as well as female agency and desire. The lives and works of modernist women exemplify the ways these evolving conceptions were received and practiced. Marianne Moore and Bryher (Winifred Ellerman) are of interest to this study because their lives resist a heteronormative frame while their texts (correspondence, personal writings, published poetry and prose) explore a range of possibilities. Modernist figures, such as Moore and Bryher, who privileged nonheteronormative lifestyles and same-sex companionship have been absorbed into the discourse of both queer theory and feminist theory. However, Moore and Bryher are among a group of women who actively refrained from identifying themselves according to terminology indicative of sexual desire and gender identification. This has complicated scholarly work intent on examining them within the critical discourses of queer studies. No one approach has produced a framework that accommodates modernist women’s various embodiments of nonheteronormativity, and which interprets them as viable alternative modes of engaging in affective samesex relationships while constructing nonheteronormatively-gendered conceptions of self. This project interrogates contemporary theories of gender and sexual identity and attempts to redress critical constraints by avoiding the application of a framework and taxonomy of female intimacy and gender identity which Moore and Bryher themselves avoided. My study considers the sociohistorical circumstances in which Moore and Bryher wrote, lived, and loved, for the ways they may have mediated their expressions of sexual identity and desire. I examine aspects of their lives and works which have hitherto garnered little attention, and discover their desires to seize uncompromised agency, to prioritise their artistic lives, and to find freedom from heteronormative discourses bent on confining them or defining them according to categories of identity.
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