Space and Spatial Formation of Subjectivity in Five Women Writers’ City Writings

This dissertation is a study of space and spatial formation of subjectivity in five renowned women writers’ city writings: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Anzia Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements, and Eileen Chang’s Chuanqi (Legends). Taking space as a point of departure, I engage in a close reading of the selected novels and argue that the city with its concrete streets and buildings does not simply serve as settings for their literary creations but is endowed with a constellation of conceptual forces under which the characters must negotiate between their internal selves and external social identities so as to form their subjectivities. As a result of this negotiation under combined forces, one’s subjectivity formation is registered within and defined by the city space. While the formation of subjectivity is often studied in terms of language, which constructs an individual’s subjectivity in accordance with the social and cultural discourses, my dissertation shifts the arch question in subjectivity formation from “who I am” to “where I am” and conducts an examination of the dynamic relationship between space and self in the literary representations of several modern metropolises, including the post-war London, roaring New York, colonial Hong Kong, and semi-colonial Shanghai in the first half of the twentieth century. My central argument is that space plays a constitutive role in the formation and transformation of self, identity, and subjectivity among the five women writers’ city writings. Specifically, Woolf’s city street gives rise to a street-consciousness that breeds a dispersed self in resistance to state’s spatial interpellation; Rhys’s city accommodation addresses the formation of a displaced self within a rented space which operates culturally, physically, and psychologically; Larsen’s depiction of the spatial movement between up and down reveals the self-divided subjectivity shaped by one’s racial passing; Yezierska’s portrayal of the movement through the urban ghetto traces the formation of a self-fashioned subjectivity; Chang’s location of the uncanny spaces within the semi-colonial Shanghai and colonial Hong Kong captures the liminal subjectivity among the Chinese urbanites. Moreover, my dissertation also argues that these novels highlight the way in which characters’ experiences of the spaces they occupy shape their sense of self and subjectivity, which in turn changes their perceptions of the spaces around them. Thus, by analyzing how one constructs and reconstructs one’s subjectivity through spatial changes in historically specific and culturally different metropolises imaginatively mapped by Woolf, Rhys, Larsen, Yezierska, and Chang, this dissertation has uncovered a neglected dimension of the five women writers’ fictional works: the formulative as well as transformative impact of space upon the process of subjectivity formation. It offers a new perspective on the representation of city space in addition to those of gender, race, and class in our understanding of who we are and why we are what we are in modern times.