English, American Studies and Creative Writing research seminar:
Dr. Natasha Periyan (KCL), 'Jacob’s Room, Meritocracy and Manchester'
Venue: C1.18, Ellen Wilkinson Building
All welcome!
This paper examines Virginia Woolf’s March 1921 visit to Manchester University as a context for understanding her relationship to meritocracy. Woolf was accompanying her husband, Leonard Woolf, who was the Labour candidate for the Combined English Universities’ political seat. Leonard was standing for parliament as part of the system of University seats, where educational culture shaped the terms of a meritocratic political culture most potently. The visit took place as Woolf was writing Jacob’s Room, which has been interpreted as a bildungsroman of Jacob (Fleishman 1975; Little 1981).
If the bildungsroman is understood as genre that constitutes a gendered expression of social mobility (Castle 2006; Smith 1987), that maps onto an educational history of gendered access to the scholarship system, where do women, traditionally excluded from the institutions that facilitate this social mobility, stand in relation to this genre? To answer this question, the paper suggests that Woolf is interested in the intersection between two biopolitical agendas. Women are at once invested in a eugenic plot that viewed them in relation to marriage and motherhood, while also being increasingly measured against the meritocratic order in the public sphere, an order from which they were marginalised. Female intelligence is the hinge that links these two forces. It provided a means through which female suitability for marriage and motherhood was assessed (Thomson 1998), and through which women made their choice of a eugenically desirable partner (Richardson 2013). Female intelligence also provided access to the professional order in the public sphere. To explore some of these ideas, the paper argues that Woolf was a sophisticated critic of the imagery of meritocracy as it examines the figure of Mrs Plumer, the wife of a Cambridge academic in Jacob’s Room.
The paper is taken from Natasha’s second monograph 'Virginia Woolf, Meritocracy and Literary Impressionism: A Biopolitics of Mind and Feeling', which is under contract with EUP. The book argues that the biopolitical, via the early-twentieth century meritocracy of mind, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century meritocracy of feeling, was integral to Woolf’s social thinking. The book also makes a case for the biopolitical as having an investment in the perceptual distortion associated with literary impressionism by exploring the aesthetic implications of intelligence and impressibility in Woolf’s work.
Bio:
Natasha is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. This year she has been a Lecturer at Northeastern University and a Visiting Lecturer at Royal Holloway. Her first book was 'The Politics of 1930s British Literature: Education, Gender and Class' (Bloomsbury, 2018). She has published articles and book chapters on modernist-era writers’ and their relationship to educational culture, and co-edited a special issue of 'Women: A Cultural Review' on the style and politics of interwar women writers.
