Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity

by Erin G. Carlston

Thinking Fascism analyzes three works by women writers―Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936), Marguerite Yourcenar's Denier du rêve (1934), and Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas (1938)―that engage, directly or indirectly, with fascist politics and ideology. Through these analyses, the author explores the conjunction between fascism and other forms of modernity, and refines the discussion about the relationship between women intellectuals and the various aesthetic and ideological practices collected under the names of modernism and facism. Until recently, much theoretical work on fascism has represented fascist thought as radically different from and inimical to non-fascist thought, and feminist criticism has further assumed that women intellectuals―especially the sexually marginal women sometimes grouped as the "Sapphic Modernists"―were necessarily antagonistic to fascist ideologies. In contrast, the author argues that Western intellectuals of both genders and all political persuasions were preoccupied in the 1930's with the commodification of culture and sexuality, the erasure of liberal bourgeois concepts of the individual and the work of art in mass society, and the failure of social institutions to provide transcendence and immediacy in the face of these transformations. By demonstrating that women writers like the Sapphic Modernists and conservative or fascist male modernists often articulated very similar conceptions of these problems, this book suggests that fascism cannot be posed as the absolute other of non- or even anti-fascist politico-cultural discourses in the interwar period.

Genres: Nonfiction

232 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1998

Reviews

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carlston begins by warning against two opposing but equally false inclinations: the compartmentalization of fascism to an aberrant phenomenon of the 20th century, unconnected to modernity in general, on the one hand, and the reducing of fascism to a set of tropes under such expansionist terms that everything begins to fall within their scope, on the other. As such, Carlston insists on reading fascism as an element of both modernism and modernity such that each other modernist element finds itself in relation to fascism, a relation that requires further articulation/elaboration. She thus finds homosexuality as a general phenomenon radically ambiguous in its relation to fascism: male homosexuality, at the very least, is compatible with fascism's valorization of the virile male body, its denigration of the feminine, and for its ties to Hellenism. But Carlston's main research interest here is sapphism's relation to fascism, and she first turns to Barnes' Nightwood, where she finds that the Decadent movement, including a Decadent approach to sapphism, in its critique of the utilitarianism of capitalism (and heterosexual reproduction), joins fascism in its critique of modernity. Likewise, in her examination of Yourcenar's Denier du Rêve, Carlston finds that Yourcenar's attempted critique of Italian fascism, much like Arendt's denunciation of totalitarianism, itself relies on fascist critiques of capitalist modernity, especially in its fortification of liberal individualism against the forces of alienation, and that suspicion of mass movements in general quickly becomes a(n elitist) disdain of the masses in general. Finally, Carlston reads Woolf's Three Guineas as an attempt to appropriate the impulses undergirding fascism towards an anti-fascism, through tapping into the "oceanic feeling" of patriotism towards a universal humanism, and through mobilizing fascism's aestheticization of politics towards highlighting the victims of war. Woolf ties fascism, militarism, and patriarchy via a materialist reading of gender that draws on Engels and Reich, and Carlston finds in her excoriation of the vicious barbarity of sports hunting an echo of Reich's challenging of the animal/human divide in service of the repression of sexuality, though she also finds Woolf much more skeptical regarding sexual liberation as the means of overcoming the oppression of women. Throughout, I find Carlston's analysis particularly attentive to the vicissitudes of modernism, fascism, and sapphism, dialectical in its examination of imbrications and uncouplings, reversals, which I always find a breath of fresh air, an attunement to the fact that what is closest might be most dissimilar, while what is furthest away might bear the most likeness.