Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage: The Superficial or Profound?
INTRODUCTION
‘The reader is
not provided with a story; he is invited to embed himself in Miriam Henderson’s
consciousness’. Reviewers of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage were keen to highlight how consciousness was represented
in the thirteen individual books. In her review of the first of the volumes,
May Sinclair claimed that Richardson ‘get[s] closer to reality than any [other]
novelist’ by focusing on the ‘painfully acute senses’ of Miriam’s inner life.
Katharine Mansfield, in reviewing ‘The Tunnel’, described Richardson as having a ‘passion for
registering every single thing that happens in the clear, shadowless country of
her mind’. Richardson’s
writing ‘method […] demands attention’ because she created a new narrative
concept. She attempted to translate into words what William James termed
‘stream of consciousness’. Virginia Woolf, a contemporary of Richardson,
who was also experimenting with narrative technique, explains that Richardson’s narrative is
s ‘genuine conviction of the discrepancy between what she has to say and form
provided by tradition for het to say it in’.
Despite her
desire to produce an innovative text, there were difficulties, as John Merpham
notes, ‘partly from the unexpected lack of familiar narrative shape’. As a
result, Richardson
frequently used ellipses and omitted standard punctuation. However, many of the
reprinted versions of the volumes were typeset with punctuation and speech
marks which had been absent from earlier versions. It is interesting to
consider that, even though these changes were made against Richardson’s better judgment, the text
possibly coveys consciousness more successfully now, simply because it is more
accessible to readers. Nevertheless, despite an element of compliance to
tradition by the addition of punctuation, many more innovative aspects remain. Richardson abandons the
conventional approach to structure by her use of complex temporalities, writing
in continuous or perpetual present tense, even when she creates the past. This
can often result in confusion for the reader. Gillian Hanscombe explains that
the ‘thematic structure is always implicit and is given no explicit support
from the conventional devices of narrative, characterization, chronology or the
delineation of milieux’.
Richardson believed that the unconventional style and her narrative focus
represented a feminist consciousness. She explained in her Forward to Pilgrimage:
Since all this novelists happen to be men, the present
writer, proposing at this moment to write a novel and looking round for a
contemporary pattern, was faced with the choice between following one of her
regiments and attempting to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine
realism.
Clearly she
wished to present an alternative to what men had already written and did not
feel her writing could, or should, be less worthy than that of a masculine
text. Bronfen writes that Richardson
‘was inevitably concerned [about] the debates around femininity, with her
stream of consciousness technique a mode of self-creation that was explicitly
developed in opposition to the novels of H.G. Wells.’
Richardson thought that a feminine text should differ from a masculine text
because up to that point, women had been confined by the rules of the world and
writing created my men. Therefore her text deliberately broke away from that
confinement. Woolf testified to Richardson’s success in fulfilling her
intentions, describing her narrative as ‘a woman’s sentence, but only in the
sense that it is used to describe a woman’s mind by e writer who is neither
proud nor afraid of anything that she may discover in the psychology of her
sex.’ Conrad Aiken later suggested that Richardson
is ‘practically the first woman novelist to make an exhaustive serial study of
a single female character, and with entire, or almost entire, detachment and
honesty’. Although Aiken had conflicting thoughts about whether was subjective
or objective he nevertheless implied that Richardson
was thorough in her fictional creation of a female and her consciousness.
Hanscombe writes:
Feminism […] gives an opposing perspective, an
awareness of alienation between the sexes and it protests against such a
condition. It provides for women writers a focus of positive identification
which can replace what they feel they unjustly lack: intellectual training,
access to the world of public affairs.
Richardson’s belief in the need to obtain a voice could have stemmed from her
unsettled feelings when in society herself. She personally experienced what
Hanscombe described as ‘an alienation between sexes’ and the prevailing custom
of treating women as inferior. While fully realizing Miriam as an independent
character, there must inevitably be aspects of Richardson’s own personality in her, and this
is partially reflected by the author’s very particular mode of representing a
single perceiving subject. Most unusually, this subject alternates between
first and third person – another cause of confusion for readers. In Pilgrimage, social alienation, coupled
with loneliness and periods of isolation, reveals unusual degrees of perception
and sensitivity in Miriam Henderson’s personality, something I intend to
address in a later chapter.
While Richardson was happy to
see her narrative connected to a feminine voice she was less happy with the
phrase ‘stream of consciousness’. She saw it as a ’death dealing metaphor’.
Shirley Rose explains that the term was used to illustrate the ‘method of
depicting reality from within the character’. A clear example of this is when
she visits the church in ‘Pointed Roofs’ (1915). ‘Chilly and feverish and weary
Miriam listened…”the encircling gloo-om” … Cardinal Newman coming back coming
back from Italy in a ship… in the end he had gone over to Rome… high altars…
candles…’. Miriam’s internal world here is far more important than what is
happening externally. Her thoughts change quickly from one subject to another,
often with feminine connections:
[Richardson
attempts to] capture perceptual conscious experience as it occurs within the strict prism of Miriam’s attention and
understanding at any one time. Bergson himself made a similar distinction when
discussing the ways in which a novelist might represent a character’s psychic state
at a given moment.
All of us
experience internal lives, a stream of consciousness that has its own time
within the mind as opposed to a real time. This is identified by Bergson as
‘duration’. Parson’s explains Bergson’s theory:
[Bergson] argues that there are two kinds of memory:
“habit” memory, in which the mind consciously repeats to itself the scene of a
previous event of experience, and “pure” memory or “contemplation”, which is
unconscious, imageless and only revealed in dreams or moments of intuition. The
first is automatic and breaks up memory into separate observable instances, the
second instinctive and spontaneous, in which memory is continuous.
It is this
‘continuous’ memory that Richardson
intends to portrait.
Richardson gained recognition for ‘being the first, of getting closer to
reality than any other of our novelists who are trying so desperately to get
close’. However, ‘Richardson
regarded the stream of consciousness metaphor as a wholly inaccurate
description of the action of the consciousness […] “Interior Monologue […] at
least carries meaning”.’ Rose’s article appears to be responding to Kumar’s “Richardson and the
Dilemma of “Being versus Becoming”.’ Rose takes the idea of ‘fixed points’ and
suggests that ‘the whole movement of life depends upon an unmoving centre. The
centre is unaffected by what issues from it, but its issue is dependent for
existence on the changelessness of the core’. The idea of constantly becoming
and never being, like a stream of life, flowing indefinitely, appears to
unsettle Miriam. Her intellectual side ‘attempts to find some fixed points
lean[ing] towards “being” and an all-satisfying principle underlying reality.’
Despite Richardson’s
reservations, she was ‘hailed as one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer, of stream-consciousness
method’.
…
(HEATHER
MORRALL: “Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage:
The Superficial or Profound?” The University of Birmingham – Department of English/College of
Arts and Law; December 2010)
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