Dorothy Richardson discussion

For discussion of Honeycomb, London: Duckworth, 1917

There is much that is wonderful here, but I found most impressive to be the detail of the development of a young, proto-feminist mind - a young woman slowly teasing out what she could feel to be wrong in the way women were treated, and in the attitude of men, and slowly growing in confidence - the first few times she begins to stand up for herself are marvelously done.

What is so fantastic about DR's technique is that we get to see these ideas forming, see them contradicting themselves, getting confused, then breakthroughs of understanding coming faster and faster...

Honeycomb at The Neglected Books Page ::
http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=3965

Wonderful - thank you. I certainly agree that her mother's suicide was something she simply had to leave unspoken

Wonderful - thank you. I certainly agree that her mother's suicide was something she simply had to leave unspoken

Yeah, I certainly had wondered after finishing this book if a reader at the time would have been privy to the information about her mother's suicide, as I can't in any way think that you could figure out what had occurred within the text itself. I mean, I'm pretty sure it's at least a few more books before it is spoken plainly that her mother is dead, and it's basically a single line.

It's another one of the threads I've been following: that DR at times appears to be willfully obscure in her writing - in some places this muddles really significant events, but for the most part it just kind of makes it difficult to figure out who she is referring to within the text for long stretches.

Today's reading left me on the very edge of beginning this section, so I'll be getting into it properly during the next few days. I see myself finishing it in a week, and then I'll be taking a break with non-Pilgrimage material until February.

That was feminine worldliness, pretending to be interested so that pleasant things might go on. Masculine worldliness was refusing to be interested so that it might go on doing things. Feminine worldliness then meant perpetual hard work and cheating and pretence at the door of a hidden garden, a lovely hidden garden. Masculine worldliness meant never really being there; always talking about things that had happened or making plans for things that might happen. There was nothing that could happen that was not in some way the same as anything else. Nobody was ever quite there, realizing.

p. 388

Thanks for that Aubrey. What I particularly love about what DR is doing is that you can almost feel that these are Miriam's developing thoughts about these issues, that she is slowly putting a sense of something into words...rigid gender roles forcing women to self-suppress and listen to men droning on and on...

Interestingly, some of the most vitriolic male criticisms of her in reviews complained that she was just writing about a bored woman, which was not worthy of "literature". Failing, of course, to realise that the whole reason she was "bored" was because of the bloody patriarchal society she lived in. Her fight throughout the books to be a "self", to be her own, independent, legitimate self, not bound by these structures is one of the main driving forces of the novel. Later on, when "lovers" start to make more of an appearance, there is some great stuff about the traps women often fell (fall) into with men - indeed, "The Trap" is called that for precisely that reason. She falls into some, of course, just as DR did (including, most famously with HG Wells (with whom she had an affair, got pregnant and wanted to raise the child on her own, but sadly miscarried) - who appears in later novels as Hypo Wilson in all his obnoxious, patronizing assholeness) and it is hard not to feel like yelling at her to watch out when you see her making "bad" decisions...

Her analysis and critique grows more sophisticated as she grows up through the books, and you can see her circling back to ideas and thoughts she had in earlier books but deepening and extending and critically engaging with them. It is, I think, one of the most impressive parts of the novel.

Cheers, Jonathan. I imagine those folks complaining about a 'bored woman' in their literature are the same who expect everyone to slog with nary a complaint through every iteration of the banal Anglo male bildungsroman till kingdom come (see: my current read of 'East of Eden'). They'll never be able to engage with the glory of works such as Beauvoir's extended autobiography, which I believe my ongoing reading of (alongside such behemoths as three of the four to six great Chinese classics and the usual Proust) prepared me well for this work. It also reminds me of a thought I had when looking at the current state of the Pilgrimage entries on this site: the fact that the work is part of the 1001 BBYD draws in some attention, but so much of that is from list bootlickers who get mad when their chosen work refuses to be painlessly checked off like all the others. It really does go perfectly well with the scenario I just went over in today's reading, where Miriam goes from fondly thinking of being 'kept' by a rich old man in nice domesticity to bloodthirstily contemplating all men getting their heads chopped off in a mere twenty to thirty pages. Can't live with them, can't live without them (I've fallen into some of my own 'traps' in the day...).

Oh god yes. And even worse those endless, purportedly fictional (snort), books about poor white male middle aged authors trying to write a novel. If I never read another it will be too soon...

Jonathan wrote: "Oh god yes. And even worse those endless, purportedly fictional (snort), books about poor white male middle aged authors trying to write a novel. If I never read another it will be too soon..."

Curating a collection of those would make for an interesting, if thankless, anthropological project.

First volume comprising the first three chapters finished, and I am fully committed to seeing the remaining ten chapters through (my edition may be cheap, but it does include that elusive thirteenth section). I'll be waiting on starting the next volume till the beginning of February, as that's a strategy that has served me well in mitigating burnout when reading works of comparable length.

Fantastic - so happy to hear. Am looking forward to reading your reviews!