Refiguring the Binary, Breaking the Cycle: Rebecca West as Feminist Modernist

Exploring adversity and the potential for growth among Iron[wo]man competitors

“…This directs attention away from structures that perpetuate inequality and toward the individual (Heinecken, 2020;McClearen, 2018;Toffoletti, 2016). These discourses are powerfully interpellated with the logics of neoliberalism (Rottenburg, 2014) and "add women and stir" liberal feminism (Banet-Weiser, et al, 2020;Hall, 2001;Scott, 1991), which are increasingly visible as public and popular practices (Banet-Weiser, 2015;Banet-Weiser, et al, 2020). The result is that through personal growth, self-care, and empowerment, "young women are encouraged to eschew collective feminist politics and coalition as a route to political change and focus instead on themselves as individual empowered entrepreneurs" (Banet-Wiser, 2015, p. 190;emphasis in original text).…”

Modernism's Handmaid: Dexterity and the Female Pianist

“…Bonnie Kime Scott notes the novel's 'violent potential for dualism', while Jane Marcus reads it as an extended analogy for the failure of the suffragette movement. 24 An obvious biographical reference-point for the novel is Cohen's affair with Arnold Bax, and Francesca Frigerio finds in Harriet Hume a heroine who 'powerfully resists some of the cultural and social stereotypes associated with women artists'. 25 Yet West's novel is perhaps more radical than this, as the remainder of this essay will show: in Cohen, West finds an ideal subject for unravelling the cultural understanding of the female pianist.…”