Androgynous imagination in Romantic and Modernist literature: From William Blake and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to D. H. Lawrence and H.D. .

摘要

Androgyny has often functioned as a conservative, if not a misogynistic, ideal of a dual-sexed imagination. Traditionally, androgyny is viewed as the embodiment of primordial totality and oneness, created out of a fusion of opposed forces, male and female, masculine and feminine. However, necessitated by the collapse of positivistic thinking and a new interest to the intuitive and the imaginative in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in the literary periods of Romanticism and Modernism, a different understanding of the androgynous creativity emerged.;The dissertation shows that Romantic and Modernist writers, in their creative literary attempts at myth-making, explore the artistic models of androgynous imagination not only to revise the traditional gender identities but also to offer new opportunities and ponder difficulties for artistic and/or personal self-realization. While Romantics tend to fantasize about the power of the differently gendered "other" as a source of creative impulse, yet fearing being dethroned by its omni-potency, Modernists seek the ways to engage in a borderless co-existence with the differently gendered "other," yet implicitly agonizing over the loss of self-integrity and self-identity.;The dissertation offers a new theoretical understanding of the concept of androgyny by proposing to view it as an artistic trope based on a dialogue between psychologically whole gender identities of male and female. It is an embodiment of dialogic imagination, a double-voiced discourse sustained by embracing, not unifying, the ontological, epistemological, sexual, and rhetorical differences between male and female in their search for psychological wholeness. The dissertation examines the notion of androgyny, the dialogized consciousness of gender differences, from the perspective of psychoanalysis (Jung), rhetorical (Bakhtin), and feminist/gender (Irigaray) theories. More specifically, the critical analysis juxtaposes two national literary periods, British/American Romanticism and British/American Modernism, and two gendered artistic representations, male and female. The literary works analyzed in the dissertation are William Blake's The Four Zoas, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, and H.D.'s Bid Me To Live: A Madrigal.