Sexual subjects : discourses of sexuality, class and culture in selected works by Marie Stopes, Rebecca West, Dorothy L. Sayers and Storm Jameson in Britain in the inter-war period

Abstract

This thesis considers the interpenetration and relationship between discourses of sexuality and literary narratives in the inter-war period, focusing specifically upon the ways in which four educated, middle-class women writers, Marie Stopes, Rebecca West, Dorothy L. Sayers and Storm Jameson, responded to changing attitudes towards sex and negotiated emergent discourses of heterosexuality and femininity within their writing. One of the central concerns of the thesis is the way in which these writers explore and negotiate the sexual and emotional conflicts which emerge around the disjunction between dominant configurations of femininity, marriage and motherhood and socially and sexually 'aberrant' ambitions, desires and experiences.

Foregrounding the indissoluble relationship between class and sexuality in the constitution of heterosexual identities in the inter-war period, the thesis argues that the textual construction of working-class femininity, and the articulation of forms of class and cultural distinction open up a narrative space in which a range of emotional and sexual conflicts and contradictions within middle-class femininity are displaced, explored and negotiated as seemingly separate from the central middle-class figures within in the texts. Each chapter of the thesis considers the relationship between generic boundaries, literary form, demarcations of femininity and class identity, paying close attention to the ways in which the drawing and redrawing of textual boundaries at both a formal and thematic level operates to enable an exploration of the conflicts and values of middle-class femininity often at the expense of the lower, or working-class female subject. In addressing the constitution of heterosexuality upon a terrain of class differences, the thesis also argues that aesthetic criteria and notions of taste and cultural distinction play a significant role in the shaping and evaluation of heterosexual identities in this period.

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