FEMINIST AESTHETICS AND THE POLITICS OF MODERNISM

In studies of Western modernism and modernity we encounter an unresolved and endlessly replicated contradiction between “revolutionary” and melancholic politics and art. How should we interpret this contradiction rather than reproduce it by privileging either the revolutionary or melancholic side of modernism? How is the divide between revolt and melancholia implicated in gender and race politics? And what are its implications for the status of women’s literary practice in modernism? I argue that the exclusive focus on melancholia is a symptom of the forgetting of the revolutionary tradition in modernity. By contrast, the celebratory insistence on revolution and subversive art forgets loss and domination, which persist despite ongoing particular struggles for freedom. Consequently, the oscillation between revolution and melancholia reveals the unresolved political contradiction between particular struggles for freedom coexisting with multiple forms of domination—what feminist theory has theorized as the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

In this chapter I offer a new interpretation of the revolutionary side of modernism by reconstructing the import of British suffrage militancy for political and aesthetic theories of modernity. In particular I analyze suffragettes’ insistence on the female right to revolt in the context of Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy and Theodor Adorno’s modernist aesthetics. By reconstructing the political discourse of female revolt in the first section of the chapter, I develop its implications for rethinking women’s literary practice in the second section. This juxtaposition of suffrage militancy with aesthetic and political theory allows us to rethink the pervasive modernist preoccupation with the new beyond mere formal experimentation for innovation’s sake and address it instead in the context of political struggles. Without this intersection between political and aesthetic struggles, it is all too easy to dismiss the rhetoric of the new as a symptom of either the aestheticization of politics or the commodification of art instead of recognizing it as the transformative political and aesthetic force.

Right to Vote or Right to Revolt?: Arendt and the British Suffrage Militancy

Although the feminist reception of suffrage has moved beyond Elaine Showalter’s dismissive claim that “the suffrage movement was not a happy stimulus to women writers” because it failed to produce a “real manifesto of female literature,”¹ British suffrage militancy (1903–1914) still remains marginalized in feminist political and aesthetic philosophies of modernity, and it seems that feminist theory has yet to catch up with this unprecedented female militancy. As a result, suffrage militancy remains a crucial event in the history of feminism without an extensive philosophical or aesthetic elaboration and as such demonstrates a certain failure of thinking and remembrance. As far as political theory is concerned, the role of suffrage militancy is still confined primarily to a historical and controversial intervention. Regrettably, there is little discussion of the contributions of suffrage militancy to feminist political philosophy, ranging from Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Denise Reily’s and Joan Scott’s works are notable exceptions because they underscore the implications of suffrage movements for the unsolved dilemmas of feminist theory today. Reily’s “Am I That Name?” analyzes the British nineteenth- and twentieth-century suffrage movement through her account of the theoretical implications of the unstable collective category of “women” for feminist politics, whereas Scott’s Only Paradoxes to Offer inquires into the implications of the French suffrage movement for the still unreconciled contradiction between the feminism of equality and the feminism of difference.²

The most important work on the British suffrage militancy has been produced by feminist historians and cultural and literary scholars of modernism.³ Socialist historians, such as Sheila Rowbotham or Jill Liddington,⁴ have reconstructed the initially neglected or forgotten contributions of working-class and labor women to the suffrage movement both on the regional and national levels. Feminist cultural critics, like Jane Marcus, Lisa Tickner, Janet Lyon, and Barbara Green, have moved from a reconstruction of the history of the suffrage movement in the twentieth century to the analysis of the forms of its political activism, its diverse artistic and literary productions as well as its visual iconography. In the context of modernist literature, Jane Marcus and Janet Lyon have revealed parallels between the suffragettes’ interruptions of male political discourse and the iconoclastic impulse of the artistic avant-garde movements.⁵ Building on these studies, I want to raise a new question, one that has not yet been addressed by feminist critics of modernity—namely, the question of the political and aesthetic implications of the suffragettes’ redefinition of the right to vote as the right to revolt. In other words, what is at stake in my analysis is a conflicting relation between women’s political and literary discourses of revolution and the inaugural force of innovation. In contrast to the studies devoted to the history of the movement, iconography, or artistic and literary activities, I want first of all to reconstruct the political theory of revolution produced by suffrage militancy. Such a redefinition means that suffragettes’ contributions to political modernity and modern aesthetics are not limited to the enfranchisement of women, although historically this has been an enormous victory. Equally significant is the suffragettes’ discourse of revolution, which, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt’s insights, reveals the inextricable connection between freedom, the emergence of female political and artistic subjectivities, and the creation of new forms of political life. It is only by reconstructing the political discourse of female revolt that we can develop the implications of suffrage militancy for rethinking the status of women’s literary practice in modernity.

In order to develop the suffrage political discourse of revolution, I will focus on the militant stage of the British suffrage campaign because it is the experience and justification of female militancy that propelled suffragettes to redefine the right to vote as a more fundamental women’s right to revolt. British suffrage militancy is mainly associated with the political activism of the Women’s Social and Political Union, a British suffrage organization founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, and, to a lesser degree, with the Women’s Freedom League, which emerged out of the split in the WSPU in 1907 over a disagreement about strategy, internal governance, and connections to the labor movement.⁶ As Rowbotham argues, although the militants were a controversial minority within the suffrage campaign, they nonetheless “set the pace” and “challenge[d] all the prevailing assumptions about womanhood.”⁷ The first militant protest organized by the WSPU occurred in 1905, when two of its leaders, Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst, interrupted the Liberal political meeting in Manchester and subsequently provoked an arrest on the charge of an “assault” on a policeman in order to end the press blackout on suffrage political agitation. Indeed, the first task of suffrage militancy was to break the “conspiracy of silence” and force an entry of women as speaking subjects into the political arena of discourse and action. In fact, such a forced entry and insistence on women’s active participation in the political can be seen as the first militant act of the suffragettes. In response to the British Liberal government’s continuing refusal to consider woman’s suffrage legislation and in protest of the increasingly violent repressions of the suffragettes, the WSPU’s militant tactics escalated from the “interruption” of male political discourse to large-scale demonstrations, deputations to the prime minister, hunger strikes,⁸ window-smashing campaigns, the destruction of letter boxes, property, commodities, and shopping windows, the slashing of paintings in museums, and finally, to isolated acts of arson.⁹ After having claimed access to political space through their street demonstrations and marches, the suffragettes responded to the refusal of the vote by contesting and destroying the public circulations of letters and commodities that blocked their access to citizenship. As their window-smashing campaign in London’s fashionable shopping districts suggests, they also turned against the new techniques of advertising, display, and consumption, techniques that positioned middle-class women primarily as commodities and consumers rather than political subjects of speech and action. At the same time, in order to justify their militancy, suffrage activists produced in their numerous speeches, letters, manifestos, and journalism unprecedented redefinitions of femininity, revolution, and politics. In skillful quotations of historical precedents of militant protest and revolutionary struggle in the formation of British law and constitutional reforms, from the Magna Carta to male suffrage campaigns in the nineteenth century, suffragettes not only drew upon the tradition of male political radicalism asserting the right to oppose a despotic government, as Laura Mayhall points out,¹⁰ but through this practice of citationality produced an original notion of women’s revolutionary politics, the implications of which have yet to be fully appreciated and articulated by feminist political theory today.

Emerging from the practice and justifications of female militancy, the centerpiece of suffrage political praxis lies in the redefinition of women’s right to vote as the right to revolt. As Teresa Billington-Greig (who refers to herself as TBG), the founder of the Women’s Freedom League,¹¹ eloquently puts it, “our revolt itself was of very much greater value than the vote we demanded.”¹² Contesting the opposition between militant and constitutional methods (that is, the methods of protest that either respect or break the law), Billington-Greig’s defense of “the duty … to rebel” (TBG, 116) or “the right to rebellion” (TBG, 147) finally culminates in the claim that the deeper meaning of militancy lies not in the fight for the vote but in the defense of women’s right to revolution: “Militancy,” she writes, is not “the mere expression of an urgent desire for the vote, but … an aggressive proclamation of a deeper right—the right of insurrection” (TBG, 147). Despite all the differences between the two main British militant suffrage organizations, the WSPU and WFL, and despite all the internal debates about militant tactics, internal governance, and relations to the labor movement within both these organizations, “the right to insurrection” is in fact the paradigmatic expression and legitimation of suffrage militancy. We see the same definition of militancy as revolution again and again in numerous suffrage speeches and manifestos. In her 1908 speech at St. James Hall, “The Militant Methods of the N.W.S.P.U.,” Christabel Pankhurst proclaims that suffrage militancy “is seeking to work the most beneficent revolution in human affairs that the world has yet seen.”¹³ Similarly, Emmeline Pankhurst, in her 1913 New York speech “Why We Are Militant,” skillfully appeals to the ideals of the American and the French Revolutions in order to claim legitimacy for suffrage militancy as a new revolutionary movement: “I want to ask you whether, in all the revolutions of the past, in your own revolt against British rule, you had deeper or greater reasons for revolt than women have to-day?” (SP, 159).

How should we understand this revolutionary supplementation of women’s right to vote—a signifier of gender equality and female autonomy—with the right to insurrection? What kind of revolution is implied in suffrage proclamations? This appeal to the revolutionary tradition takes us beyond the logic of identification with the nation-state suggested, for instance, by Julia Kristeva, who associates the first generation of feminism with the feminism of equality.¹⁴ On the contrary, the redefinition of the women’s right to vote as revolt announces women’s participation in a transformative, creative praxis, its inaugural temporality, and the plurality of political agents. As Arendt argues in her book On Revolution, “the modern concept of revolution, inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold…. Crucial, then, to any understanding of revolutions in the modern age is that the idea of freedom and the experience of a new beginning should coincide.”¹⁵ That is why she argues that in order to understand the role of revolution in modernity we need, together, to think political freedom, the creation of the “new story,” and the institution of a new beginning in history.

This convergence of freedom, novelty, and revolution changes the meaning of all three of these terms. First of all, revolution in Western modernity has to be distinguished from historical change, resistance, or the restoration of lost liberties, as it refers to the occurrence of an unprecedented event, inaugurating a new course in history. The “revolutionary pathos of the absolutely new” (OR, 37) distinguishes modern revolutionary struggle from previous forms of protests. As Arendt writes, “only where this pathos of novelty is present and where novelty is connected with the idea of freedom are we entitled to speak of revolution” rather than the struggle for the restoration of lost liberties (OR, 34). Second, novelty also acquires a new sense in the context of the eighteenth-century revolutions. Prior to the revolutions of the eighteenth century, novelty was associated with discoveries in science and with new ideas in philosophy. It is the migration of the “new” from the realm of scientific and philosophical thought to the public realm of political action that radicalizes this notion and links it with the praxis of the multitude rather than with the achievements of a chosen few. Likewise, the revolutionary novelty has to be distinguished from the modern desire for consumption of commodities. It is precisely this revolutionary, collective sense of novelty that is critical for rethinking the status of women’s innovative literary practices in modernism.

Finally, revolutionary struggles change the meaning of freedom itself. Political freedom in the contingent historical world is different from liberation, even though liberation is its necessary precondition (OR, 33–34). Liberation is primarily negative—it is the struggle to end oppression—while freedom is positive, implying the creation of a new way of life. Furthermore, freedom is neither given by nature nor is it the property of the individual subject, but is relational, contingent, and created by acting with others in the polis. As a modality of being with others, freedom, Arendt argues, implies a participation in public speech, action, and government. And, most importantly, freedom in the positive and revolutionary sense reveals for the first time the capacity to create with others new forms of political life: revolutionaries are “agents in a process which spells the definite end of an old order and brings about the birth of a new world” (OR, 42, emphasis added). This configuration of revolutionary freedom as an intersubjective, relational, political agency to create new political structures with others—to enact the “birth” of a new world—is even more shocking and unprecedented when claimed by femininity, which is associated in Western modernity either with reproductive necessity and commodified objects of sexual exchange, in the private sphere, or with consumerism, labor, and philanthropy in public life, but never with political agency or revolutionary praxis.¹⁶ Because such agency is relational, created through and for action, it does not require or presuppose a common gender identity.

At the same time, Arendt stresses the fragility of the convergence of revolution with positive freedom, collective praxis, and the inauguration of new forms of political life. It is this fragility that links revolutionary hopes with melancholy. She shows how, in the course of the nineteenth century, the notion of revolutionary freedom was divorced from political action and novelty and associated instead either with the concept of historical necessity (of which the Hegelian dialectic of necessity and freedom [OR, 53] is the most famous philosophical articulation) or with its opposite, with the liberation of natural, prepolitical equality and liberty. When freedom is transformed into historical necessity or displaced into the realm of natural violence or evolutionary force, revolution falls under the “sign of Saturn” (OR, 49) and gives rise to melancholic despair: “‘The revolution devouring its own children,’ as Vergniaud, the great orator of the Gironde, put it” (OR, 49). This connection between revolution and melancholy shows the loss of freedom and the abdication of agency—that is, the power to inaugurate the new beginning—to historical necessity, natural development, or systemic contradictions in the capitalist mode of production. Melancholy is an effect of forgetting that revolution was not a historical necessity or organic development, but rather an inaugural act, “the foundation of freedom.” (216).

When suffragettes reinterpret the right to vote as the right to revolt, they not only contest their exclusion from existing liberties but also demand a positive right to freedom understood as the engagement in transformative praxis inaugurating new gender politics. Although dependent on the struggle against women’s exclusion from the political, the freedom implied by the right to revolt exceeds negative contestation because, according to Arendt, it manifests itself primarily as the capacity to create new relations in political life. Thus, in order to understand the implications of suffragettes’ redefinition of the vote as the right to revolt, we have to analyze the double aspect of their militancy: its iconoclastic side, negating women’s exclusion from the political, and its creative side, inaugurating the unforeseeable. Associated more frequently with suffrage militancy, the iconoclastic side manifests itself, in a manner evocative of the iconoclastic impulse of the artistic avant-garde, as destruction and disruption: as the “breaking” of silence (in particular, the press blackouts of suffrage coverage); as the contestation of derogatory signs of femininity (the political activist as a hysteric); as the interruption of male political discourse; as the shattering of the shopping windows, the destruction of private property and fetishized and commodified art objects; as the self-starvation of the hunger-striking suffragettes exposed to the extraordinary brutality and violence of forcible feedings; and, finally, as the jamming of the circulation of letters, commodities, and signifiers. Yet the escalating destructive force of the suffrage campaign is inseparable from the creation of the new, unprecedented changes in political life and from positioning women as political subjects. Indeed, as the historians of the militant suffrage movement document, suffrage activism launches into the public space new representations and signifiers of femininity, new theories of the political, new rhetoric of public persuasion (enacted, for instance, through its spectacular marches, processions, advertising, and journalism), and, finally, new modes of circulation of bodies, signs, and images between and within public and private spaces.

The destructive aspect of suffrage militancy is intertwined with the contestation of women’s exclusion not only from the vote and human rights but more fundamentally from political subjectivity. Given the tenacity of this exclusion, which failed to be redressed by the rational arguments of the constitutional suffrage societies in the nineteenth century, suffragettes could not merely identify with the democratic principles of equality without a prior “act” negating women’s exclusion from the public sphere and the limited political system of representation constructed on the basis of this exclusion. As suffrage activists frequently point out, the exclusion of women from political rights deprives them of agency and de facto puts them in a position of “outlaws” in the existing political order. In her 1906 essay written in Holloway prison, “The Militant Policy of Women Suffragists,” TBG declares that in order to remove “the bar” to women’s citizenship, one needs first “expose the outlawry to which women were subjected” (TBG, 111). In an ingenious reversal of the law/outlaw opposition, suffragettes claim that it is by obeying the law that they perpetuate “the outlaw” position of women, whereas militancy, by contesting the law, can give women the status of a legitimate political subject. The “outlaw” status of women is limited not only to the public sphere of politics and work but is even more pronounced in the private sphere. In fact, the most frequently cited evidence of women’s exclusion from political rights is taken from marriage, divorce, and family law regulating the private sphere. For strategic reasons, suffragettes especially stress the paradox that even the most idealized social vocation of femininity—motherhood—does not give women parental rights over the future of their children: “Our marriage and divorce laws are a disgrace to civilization,” proclaims Emmeline Pankhurst in her New York speech “Why We Are Militant.”¹⁷

As suffragettes never tire of pointing out, the unacknowledged consequence of the exclusion of women from political equality signified by the vote is the loss of the status of the subject as such. According to TBG, “there is not consciousness in the mind of many men that women are human beings. They are regarded merely as sex-beings, segregated wholly, and not always honorably, for sex uses” (TBG, 115). Or, as Emmeline Pankhurst puts it, “[a] thought came to me in my prison cell . . : that to men women are not human beings like themselves” (SP, 160). Whether idealized or denigrated, women, as long as they are excluded from the political, do not have the status of the human, are not treated as ends in themselves, but merely as means of sexual exchange or as sexual commodities. And this is a significant shift in the argument for human rights—such rights do not depend on a presupposed human nature or particular attributes of that nature, but, on the contrary, constitute the possibility of political subjectivity for women.

The suffragettes’ struggle against women’s exclusion from subject-hood and citizenship can be read, as Joan Scott, for instance, argues, as the exposure of the unacknowledged “paradox” of liberal democracy, which guarantees universal equality to all “persons” while excluding women and other subjugated groups from the status of the subject on the basis of “difference” construed as inequality or inferiority. This contradiction between universal equality and the exclusionary gender difference is doomed to be repeated in suffrage struggles for equality. Emerging at the site of this contradiction, suffrage, according to Scott, not only exposes but also reproduces this contradiction in the very demand for human rights (universal equality) for and in the name of women (gender difference). Furthermore, contemporary Western feminism, split between the feminism of equality and the feminism of difference, is still caught in the historical legacy of this performative contradiction. In her account of the British nineteenth- and twentieth-century suffrage movement, Denise Reily analyzes a similar instability of the collective category of “women,” vacillating between the claims of sexed particularity and sex-blind humanity. Deployed by the proponents as well as the conservative opponents of the vote alike, this vacillation had been used as either the disqualification of or a support for women’s political aspirations.¹⁸

However, by redefining the equality symbolized by the vote as the right to revolt, suffrage militants also reformulate this contradiction, or the “abyss” between the sexed particularity and universal equality inherited from liberalism, as an enabling condition of revolutionary practice. In suffrage agitation, the contestation of women’s exclusion from the political and the very instability of the signifier of “women” leads to the reclaiming of the right to an ongoing revolt, without which the vote loses its political value and becomes a “banal,” “respectable little thing” (TBG, 142) or, even worse, another commodity. By redefining the vote as the right to revolt, suffragettes reinterpret the contradiction between equality and difference as the justification of transformative political struggle. Through their contestation of gender inequality, suffragettes discover that “difference” can be linked not only with the exclusion and subjugation of women but also with positive freedom, with women’s capacity to make a difference in political life, with the inauguration of what Hannah Arendt calls “an entirely new” and, therefore, entirely different “beginning” (OR, 37). In other words, the crucial implication of suffrage militancy is the redefinition of the logical contradiction between universality and difference in terms of the creative novelty of positive freedom.

The unpredictable novelty of revolutionary struggle is strongly emphasized in suffrage writings. In her 1908 speech at St. James Hall, Christabel Pankhurst proclaims that suffrage militancy is “the most beneficent revolution in human affairs that the world has yet seen” (SP, 42, emphasis added) and links this emergence of the unprecedented novelty of female militancy with the irrepressible movement of freedom: “did you ever know a great movement for human freedom that could be crushed by repression and coercion?” (SP, 50). Suffragettes themselves are struck again and again by the “strange” novelty of the new historical beginning their activism created. For instance, in 1903 Anne Kenney, a mill worker, Labour activist, and later one of the leading members of the WSPU, stresses the overwhelming sense of the new when she for the first time agrees to organize a meeting of the factory women of Oldham and Lees to discuss women’s suffrage: “The following week I lived on air…. I instinctively felt that a great change had come.”¹⁹ When in 1905 Emmeline Pankhurst comments on the tactics of heckling Liberal politicians, she, like so many other suffragettes, stresses the sense of an unprecedented beginning not only in the suffrage movement but in history itself: “This was the beginning of a campaign the like of which was never known in England, or, for that matter, in any other country.”²⁰ TBG captures perhaps the most essential aspect of the new revolutionary beginning when she connects militancy with the emergence of new thought and compares revolution to a new political birth: “[A] great rising of new thought, a great seeking after freedom, has manifested itself around the suffrage agitators wherever they have worked…. ‘We have been born anew’ said one to me—a suffragist of thirty years standing—‘It has been a revolution’” (TBG, 116, emphasis added).

The creative freedom of women’s militancy both evokes and redefines another paradox of revolutionary action, namely, the incommensurability between constituted and constituting power, articulated for the first time in the course of the French Revolution by Sieyès in terms of “his famous distinction between a pouvoir constituant and a pouvoir constitué” (OR, 163). The problem this distinction presents for political theory in general and for feminist politics in particular is double: As both Agamben and Arendt argue in different ways, one has to differentiate constituting power from national sovereignty, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, from the existing political order (Agamben) and various forms of historical determinism (Arendt).²¹ If constituting power is identified with national sovereignty, then its excess is interpreted, as has been historically the case, with the transcendence of the sovereign will and disconnected from the multiplicity of contingent political struggles. If constituting power is confused with the constituted order, or with historical development, then it falls under the provenance of historical necessity and is disconnected from political freedom. Although Hannah Arendt shares with Agamben the critique of sovereignty and historical necessity, she distinguishes constituting force both from sovereign will and historical necessity by focusing directly on the “grammar of action” and the “syntax” of political power. Such grammar and syntax underscore the multiplicity, plurality, contingency, and intersubjective character of political praxis. For Arendt, constituting power emerges when divergent actors come “together for the purpose of action,” and it disappears with their dispersion: “The grammar of action: that action is the only human faculty that demands a plurality of men; and the syntax of power: that power is the only human attribute which applies solely to the worldly in-between space by which men are mutually related” (OR, 175). The only possible legitimation of such relational capacities stems from the very act of beginning, which contains its own principle.

It is in the context of the relational character of political action that we see the greatest limitations as well as the deepest class and race divisions within the British suffrage movement. Both the constitutional and militant campaigns were shaped by the class and empire discourses structuring British citizenship and the right to vote in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Despite the diversity of the suffrage movement emphasized in street demonstrations, suffrage militancy, as many the suffrage historians point out, was dominated by white middle-class women, although, as Liddington, Norris, and Rowbotham show, contributions of working-class women to both constitutional and militant organizations were significant. Conflicts over the coalition with the labor movement, which was reluctant to grant women’s suffrage priority, as well as the debate over adult (that is, universal) suffrage versus women’s suffrage on the same terms with men, not only was a dividing issue between the Pankhursts and Charlotte Despard, a socialist and cofounder of the Women’s Freedom League, but also one of the reasons Sylvia Pankhurst, also a socialist, left WSPU in 1913.²² Nonetheless, despite these persisting class conflicts and divisions, there were significant, if limited, instances of collaboration and solidarity among British middle-class and working-class women. As Rowbotham puts it, “in the context of the British class structure the very existence of such cross-class collaboration [in the suffrage movement] was extraordinary.”²³ Such collaborations have been far more difficult if not impossible in the colonial context of the British Empire. As Antoinette Burton points out, “like contemporary class and gender systems, imperialism was a framework out of which feminist ideologies operated and through which the women’s movement articulated many of its assumptions,” just as the vote “represented the conferring of formal political power in the imperial nation-state.”²⁴ Although far less frequently analyzed by suffrage historians, the imperialist discourse was not only a legacy of the Victorian feminism coming to age at the height of the British Empire and not merely a response to the imperial anxieties, skillfully used by antisuffrage propaganda, which implied that granting the vote to British women at home would instigate revolts in the colonies.²⁵ The imperialist framework of the Edwardian suffrage movement also was symptomatic of its implicit or explicit sense of British cultural and racial superiority and the expression of its civilizing mission with respect to “Oriental” women. In particular, the constitutional suffrage organizations, as Burton argues, represented Indian women as “helpless victims awaiting the representation of their plight and the redress of their condition at the hands of their sisters in the metropole.”²⁶ Although militant suffragettes constructed “an ‘Oriental woman’ who was less passive than the suffragists version of her,” and although they might have had some influence on Gandhi’s struggle for independence,²⁷ they still saw themselves as the center of the women’s revolutionary movement around the world. The “Oriental woman” was therefore not granted the same right to insurrection and was not seen as an equal partner in suffragettes’ revolt.

Antoinette Burton’s analysis raises a larger question of the role of race in suffrage political discourse. In addition to the colonial context, suffrage agitation in Britain had adopted the liberal rhetoric of slavery and used it to generate feelings of moral outrage and public sympathy for the suffrage cause. That rhetoric underscores the subjection of women in the family and represented prostitution as the white slave trade. Laura May-hall traces the genealogy of the rhetoric of slavery in suffrage struggle all the way to John Stuart Mill’s 1869 The Subjection of Women as well as to Guiseppe Mazzini’s (who was a proponent of Italian nationalism and the emancipation of working-class men) 1858 The Duties of Men.²⁸ Both these texts were widely read by suffrage political activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, John Stewart Mill underscored a double analogy between slavery and women’s subordination in the family and political despotism in the state. Despite the changing ramifications of the rhetoric of slavery, this persisting analogy emphasized the outrage of women’s oppression at home and subjugation in the political sphere but did not see enslaved peoples’ struggle for freedom as a model for women’s liberation. Consequently, the rhetoric of slavery implicitly emphasized the whiteness of suffragettes’ rebellion, as it associated blackness and colonized people merely with subjugation and not with political struggle or agency. Not surprisingly, such rhetoric failed to create interracial solidarity among white British militants, colonized women, and black women. And this failure to see an interconnection between gender, class, and race oppression as well as between different struggles for liberation continues to haunt Western feminist theory today.

In the context of Arendt’s work on revolution, the suffragettes’ demand for inclusion within the British state and the gendered, class, and imperial power of its institutions—the demand for the vote—challenges and reproduces the constituted power of the law. At the same time, the more fundamental political right to revolt reclaims for women constituting power and the capacity to create a new beginning that would exceed established power structures. In fact, suffragettes’ justifications of militancy reclaim constituting power on the two fundamental levels of political praxis, namely, as “deeds” and “words,” as political discourse and action. As Emmeline Pankhurst explains in her summation to the jury during the 1912 “conspiracy trial” following her arrest after a window-smashing campaign, “we did not content ourselves merely with discussion … we were not merely content with words … but we felt that we were distinct as a militant class … determined not only to talk about our grievances but to terminate them…. In fact we adopted a motto, ‘Deeds, not words.’”²⁹ Pankhurst implies that women’s political agency and subjectivity depend not on their common gender identity but on their capacity to act in the public sphere, on their “deeds” in relation to words. Such a relative priority of action suggests that the identification with the inherited structures of the democratic discourse of equality is an insufficient basis for female political subjectivity and transformative political practice. In the case of excluded groups, political action only negates their exclusion but also inaugurates new forms of political power and language. Consequently, to inscribe themselves within the institutional structures of parliamentary democracy as political subjects, suffragettes claim for themselves the novelty of revolutionary power that exceeds existing political and linguistic frameworks.

Despite their famous rallying cry, “Deeds, not words,” suffragettes’ “deeds” never cease to contest and reinvent words themselves so that the domain of political and public speech becomes an important area for suffrage militancy. Paradoxically, the collective organization of the suffrage movement as “a militant class” cannot proclaim the priority of deeds over words without the prolific creation of political discourse, that is, without creating new speech acts. Consequently, political speech, in its performative and innovative dimensions, is itself characterized by the tension between constituted/constituting power from within, as it were. Whether it is the brilliant rhetorical tactic of quotations, which wrestles and reappropriates the words from the “mouth” of liberal politicians advocating male militancy (as Christabel Pankhurst puts it, “we are prepared to take the words of one Cabinet Minister from his own mouth, and apply them to our agitation” [SP, 42]) or the strategy of “heckling” and ridiculing liberal candidates or the making and publishing of their own numerous public speeches, suffragettes transform speech acts into militant acts, which, in the domain of language, reappropriate old words and create new explosive significations. Indeed, the law recognizes this militant transformation of political speech, as the suffragettes are frequently charged and sentenced for “incitement to riot.” Consider, for instance, the suffrage stone-throwing campaign, mostly at the windows of parliamentary buildings, in response to the Liberal government’s refusal to receive women’s deputations and hear their grievances. In one of the most symbolic gestures of protest against the government’s violation of the Bill of Rights, in 1909 Lady Constance Lytton threw stones at a government car (aiming low to avoid injuries to the passengers) wrapped in paper on which she wrote quotations from one of Lloyd George’s speeches. One of the inscriptions on the stone that hit the car was as follows: “To Lloyd George—Rebellion against tyranny is obedience to God—Deeds, not words.”³⁰ In this militant act of protest against the suppression of women’s public speech, the stone is both a missile and a political letter, aimed at liberal politicians with their own words reappropriated for the suffragettes’ ends.

Such militant redefinition of language for the purposes of a new revolutionary act is especially striking in the rhetorical war over the meaning of politically charged words, such as “revolt,” “conspiracy,” “rush,” or “militancy.” In a characteristic gesture, Emmeline Pankhurst, charged with conspiracy, begins her address to the jury with a stunning linguistic reinterpretation of the very word militancy: “I want to call your attention to some of the definitions of the word ‘militant.’ It is a word which is liable to be misunderstood, my lord…. I find in Webster’s dictionary militancy defined as ‘a state of being militant, warfare.’ Well, that sounds like violence, doesn’t it? … Then, again, it is defined as meaning ‘a conflict, to fight.’ In Nuttal, I find it is ‘to stand opposed, or to act in opposition.’ In the Century dictionary I find a quotation … which refers to a ‘condition of militancy against social injustice.’ … And so I could go on showing you that the word ‘militant’ is not necessarily interpreted to mean only violence.”³¹ In these twists and turns of various definitions, the word militancy itself becomes militant, indeterminate, giving rise to new conflicting interpretations.

Pankhurst’s militant legitimation and deployment of “militancy”—that is, of the signifier of suffragettes’ political action—reveals two different performative effects of militancy. On the one hand, militancy is intertwined with opposition or taking a stand against social injustice—in this case, with the contestation of class and gender inequalities. This is a negative and iconoclastic meaning of militancy, closely related to the negative struggle for liberation. On the other hand, militancy, though feared as violence, is a new event, the inaugural act of revolutionary struggle. It is a force of invention that exceeds positionality, agency, articulation. The transformative force of such an act cannot be integrated without a remainder either into the constituted framework of power or into the notion of negation. In this sense militancy does not have a clearly defined agent: it vacillates between activity and passivity, it is a transitive force that women as much undergo as put into practice. As a verbal deed exceeding the letter of the law, militancy in fact undoes the classical opposition between the political act and speech—it makes uncertain whether the origin of the political lies in words or in acts. Such contradictory meaning of militancy as both the negative and transformative force, articulation and inaugural act, embodies what Julia Kristeva aptly calls the “sense” and “non-sense” of the revolt.³²

The suffragettes’ defense and legitimation of both the negative force and creative novelty of revolutionary praxis, of its destructive and constituting power, lead them to reflect on the relation between such acts and their institutionalization into law. Implicitly, such reflection posits revolutionary action rather than the juridical notion of social contract as the origin of law and the cause of its historical transformations. As TBG eloquently argues, every law, every political right, originates in the constituting power of revolt and is only retrospectively transformed into an institutionalized articulation of human rights and liberties: “all history is full of examples of the fact that liberty is only won by revolt. The political liberty of men, religious liberty, liberty of speech have all been finally obtained by conflict with existing authority” (TBG, 114). Thus, the split between words and revolutionary acts characterizes not only women’s militant action but law itself. Revolt and conflict threaten the law and the specific form of political power embodied in it not from the “outside,” as it were, but, in fact, reveal the forgotten, disavowed origins of the law and the source of its historical transformations. This is the great “historical lesson” suffragettes draw from previous revolutionary struggles by excluded groups, in particular, the militant struggle for male suffrage, in order to justify their own revolt against the government. The emphasis on the role of revolutionary struggle in the constitution and the history of the law not only challenges its neutrality but opens the possibility of its transformation. Thus, what provokes women’s insurrection is indeed their historical exclusion not only from the vote and citizenship but even from the negative status of political offenders; yet what enables and legitimates their revolt in the first place is the fact that revolutionary struggle, always already inscribed within the law as its origin and principle, makes the law open to further transformations. Thus militancy is not a purely external opposition to the law but rather a new reactivation of its founding revolutionary principles (and I use the term principle in Arendt’s sense of principium, that is, in the sense of a beginning giving rise to its own rule) in service of the ongoing struggle for the transformation of the legal system and the realization of a more expansive notion of freedom (OR, 212–214).

By stressing the revolutionary foundation and the ongoing transformations of the law from the Magna Carta to the nineteenth-century reforms bills (1832, 1867, 1884) that expanded male freedoms and suffrage, suffragettes argue that the seeming neutrality of the law, misrepresented as the social contract, represents an unstable compromise between two kinds of power: between the insurrectionary forces struggling for a new and more expansive conceptions of freedom and the conservative force of the government aiming to subjugate these forces in order to reproduce the already constituted political order and its imperialist, gendered, and class hierarchies. In other words, it is a struggle between the constituting, inaugural force of the revolutionary act—the capacity to create a new beginning—and the constituted, conserving power of law.³³ According to TBG, “Government authority and the law represent at any given time not the progressive ideals of liberty of which the people are capable, but the amount of liberty the forerunners of the people have been able to wrest from earlier and equally unwilling governments” (TBG, 114–115). TBG refers here to the forgetting of what Hannah Arendt describes as the two sides of every revolutionary event—the act of founding the new beginning and the task of the preservation of this new structure of freedom. On the one hand, there is “exhilarating awareness of the human capacity of beginning … the birth of something new on earth;” on the other hand, “the act of founding the new body politic, of devising the new form of government involves the grave concern with the stability and durability of the new structure” (OR, 223). In the revolutionary “act of foundation” these two aspects of power “were not mutually exclusive opposites but two sides of the same event, and it was only after the revolutions had come to their end … that they parted company” (OR, 223). The two sides of praxis are repeatedly disavowed in order to preserve social stability and to prevent the irruption of new revolts in the present. The fetishistic disavowal of the ongoing struggle for a more capacious freedom aims to obliterate the gap between words and acts, between the constituted power of the law and the constituting, inaugural force of revolt.

To prevent this forgetting of the revolutionary spirit, and to legitimate their militant activism, suffragettes not only assert their right of revolt against the despotic government—the right, as Laura Mayhall points out, well established in British political radicalism³⁴—but, in more radical ways, justify the necessity of women’s ongoing revolutionary struggle by stressing the temporal delay, or disjunction, between revolutionary acts and their belated political institutionalization.³⁵ In other words, women reclaim the right to militant revolt not only because the despotic government has overstepped the bounds of the social contract but because the law itself is disconnected from its past revolutionary conditions and from the new aspirations of freedom of current and future generations. As TBG argues, current laws are the institutionalized effects of forgotten male struggles for liberty in the past, and therefore their articulation is limited, belated, and insufficient for the political aspirations of the new generation, in particular for women’s aspirations of freedom and equality. Because the law articulates and preserves the historical victories of past generations, there is an irreducible temporal lapse between institutionalized rights and new demands for freedom: “Government … rests upon and acts in accordance with the limited foundations of liberty which have already been laid. These foundations have been laid by the rebels of the past. The wider foundations of greater liberty must be laid by the rebels of the present” (TBG, 115). The conservative force of preservation of the status quo separated from the principle of a new beginning, the belatedness and nonsynchronicity of the law with new aspirations for freedom, show the necessity of an ongoing struggle to expand the outdated formulations of political rights. It is this temporal belatedness of the law vis-à-vis new demands of liberty that justifies Billington-Greig’s seemingly aporetic association of “duty,” usually understood as the respect for the law, and “rebellion,” usually understood as the contestation of the law. Rather than leading to anarchy, or apolitical violence, suffrage militancy reenacts the democratic duty of revolt in order to reactivate its own revolutionary principles and thus save the law from ossified obsolescence. In so doing, suffrage militancy also protects the future of freedom, which cannot be limited to contemporary political forms created by former male generations.

The final complication that suffragettes introduce, albeit very cautiously, to their justification of revolt refers to the libidinal, sexual aspects of the law and revolt itself. The caution and reticence regarding the politics of sexuality was no doubt partially an effect of hostile stereotypes of suffragettes as uncontrollable hysterics, fanatics, repressed spinsters, or “masculine” women as well as the persisting Victorian legacy of the “sexual purity” arguments used to legitimate women’s citizenship. Nonetheless, despite this reticence about sexuality and politics, suffragettes manage, on the one hand, to expose the brutal violence of sovereignty as an obscene, “savage” passion and, on the other hand, to admit the joyous passion of revolt. In the most provocative section, “Man Still a Semi-Savage,” of her article “The Woman with the Whip,” TBG diagnoses the “savage,” “primal passions” of the guardians of the law—passions barely hidden by “an artificial garment of culture” (TBG, 127). And she adds that “party passion is itself a strong unreasoning force” (TBG, 127). Emmeline Pankhurst, by contrast, affirms the joy and “exultation” of the rebellion directed against this irrational force of law: “If there are any men who are fighters in this hall … I tell you, gentlemen, that amongst the other goods that you, consciously or unconsciously, have kept from women, you have kept the joy of battle. We know the joy of battle” (SP, 162).

What is the libidinal nature of “the exhilarating awareness” of creative capacities and “the joy of battle and the exultation of victory” that women have been excluded from? And how to explain the libidinal, “savage” irrational force of the law unleashed by the militants? These questions about the libidinal aspects of revolt and political authority reveal the limitations of Arendt’s theory and the necessity of its supplementation through feminist interpretations of psychoanalysis. In particular I would like to refer briefly to Carole Pateman’s and Julia Kristeva’s critical revisions of Freud’s theory of the son’s revolt against the primal father, the figure of unlimited phallic power and enjoyment, in Totem and Taboo. This text famously diagnoses how the libidinal aspects of paternal power and filial revolt—the originary crime of parricide—are transformed into moral law and symbolic authority, which is nonetheless haunted by the specter of the “savage” libidinal passions of its origins.

How should we read Freud’s narrative of the origin of the law in sons’ revolt against the primal father and suffragettes’ justification of female joy in revolt against equally “savage,” unbounded violence represented by the patriarchal figure of the “Tzar”? Despite the fact that Freud is writing his story of filial rebellion at the height of the militant phase of the suffrage movement, that is, in the very midst of female rebellion against the “savage,” primal passions of the law, Freud, as Kristeva notes, fails to analyze the role of femininity, which could have provided an alternative for or modification of the phallic logic of revolt.³⁶ As she points out, the social bond formed through the transformation of the patricidal violence into political authority forms a homosocial order, predicated on a double renunciation of femininity, evident not only in the exchange of women but also in the repression of brothers’ homosexual erotic desires.

Kristeva not only diagnoses the repressed origin of the law in the unlimited phallic jouissance of the primal father that still haunts sovereign power but also the possibility of the reactivation of the jouissance of the revolt—“the joy of the battle”—whenever a group finds itself excluded from the libidinal/symbolic profits of the social bond under the weight of oppression. In her revision of Freud, Kristeva associates femininity not only with the reactivation of the jouissance of revolt but also with the demystification of the fixity of the law and “a cult of the phallus.”³⁷ The revolutionary potential of femininity in Kristeva’s account thus is intertwined less with the reactivation of the oedipal rebellion, which, sustained by phallic jouissance and violence, contests exclusions in order to reconstruct a new figuration of the symbolic paternal authority, but more with an ironic exposure of the persistence of the infantile, phallic illusion in various forms of authority and revolts against this authority. Consequently, as the suffragettes’ parodic tactics of citationality and ridicule of liberal politicians suggests, feminine logic is associated both with jouissance and the ironic adherence and nonadherence to any form of authority, with the refusal of the fetishistic fixity of the law.

As my interpretation of suffrage militancy in the context of Arendt’s theory of revolution shows, suffrage writings, far from being merely a historical precedent, make a significant theoretical contribution to current feminist discussions of agency, gender, human rights, and power. Despite all the limitations of the suffrage movement, its reinterpretation of the right to vote as the right to revolt reclaims and redefines, in the context of gender politics, an important legacy of the revolutionary tradition, namely, the productive tension between the constituted, institutionalized character of power and its inaugural, constituting force. This split (as well as its libidinal character) is either forgotten or reproduced in contemporary discussions without a clear awareness of its origins in revolutionary praxis. Because of this separation from praxis, the constituted/constituting power appears more frequently as the opposition between historical determination and contingency. As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Joan Scott, and other poststructuralist theorists argue, the historical relations of power/knowledge constitute political identities, discourses, and institutions in a contingent and indeterminate manner and therefore do not preclude possibilities of political transformation. Yet the emphasis on the incompleteness and contingency of historical reality is not necessarily and not always linked to agency and freedom. That is why we observe so many misinterpretations of these theorists in terms of either determinism or voluntarism. By contrast, Arendt’s theory of revolution and suffrage militancy demonstrate that the split between constituted power and constituting, transformative capacities emerges from praxis itself and reveals, therefore, not only the contingency of political relations but also intersubjective, relational agency and its unpredictable force of radical novelty.

Suffrage Militants and Modernism: Toward a Feminist Theory of Heteronomous Autonomy of Art

I have argued that suffrage militancy’s redefinition of the right to vote as the right to revolt makes a significant contribution to feminist political theories of agency, praxis, and freedom. Most important, it redefines the meaning of femininity from the sex object, reproductive body, or the nonhuman being to the political subject, the bearer of political innovation, and the new beginning in the political life. Yet what are the implications of the suffrage militant movement for feminists’ theories of aesthetics and modernism? In an answer to this question, feminist historians, cultural critics, and literary scholars of modernism have proposed three different approaches. Aiming to recover marginalized suffrage literature and art, the first, thematically oriented approach analyzes the propaganda function of suffrage literary and visual productions in support of the movement. Influenced by a cultural studies methodology, the second approach examines the role of suffrage and suffrage art in the revision of the broader cultural discourses of modernity and, in so doing, makes a crucial contribution to the “gender of modernity” studies. The third approach focuses more directly on the relation between suffrage activism and modern experimental literature. Yet none of these approaches goes far enough to address the political inventiveness of the suffrage movement, on the one hand, and its impact on the redefinition of feminist aesthetics and the status of women’s literary practice in modernity, on the other. The first of these approaches deastheticizes art altogether and subordinates it to instrumental political uses; the second subsumes both art and politics within the larger cultural discourse of gender in modernity; the third investigates analogies between experimental literature and suffrage contestation. The model of the analogy, however, does not account for the redefinitions of the status of the work of art in the light of the inaugural force of the new beginning in history and in art.

The effort of the recovery and analysis of the literary, theatrical, and visual production of suffrage artistic organizations (for instance, the Women Writers’ Suffrage League founded in 1908) has produced important collections of primary texts, such as Voices and Votes: A Literary Anthology of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign, edited by Glenda Norquay. These often propagandistic literary works, for example, Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert, adapt popular and conventional literary genres of melodrama, autobiography, conversion narrative, or more direct polemical tracts for the instrumental political purposes of persuading the audience, gaining new converts to the cause, and changing social structures.³⁸ Yet, though Norquay conceives of this anthology as a kind of supplementary literary “documentation” of the suffrage movement, she nonetheless points out that even within the confines of conventional genres the language of suffrage texts is “strikingly unstable,” marked by “the struggle to define and redefine terms such as woman, martyrdom, and the vote. Rejecting the “elite” notions of experimental writing, Wendy Mufford similarly privileges the representational and propagandist modes of writing to articulate sex and class oppression.³⁹ The instrumentalism of this approach is particularly evident in the claim of the priority of the political significance of literary production and literary organizations over the aesthetic value of the work of art.

By contrast, feminist critics, like Jane Marcus, Lisa Tickner, Janet Lyon, and Barbara Green have moved from a historical reconstruction of the suffrage militant movement and its artistic productions to an analysis of the new cultural discourses of femininity, political activism, and its visual iconography. Tickner’s groundbreaking study, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–1914, is primarily devoted to the visual iconography and artistry of suffrage activism and its elaborate street theater, such as the Women’s Coronation Procession of 1911, the largest of the suffrage marches.⁴⁰ Also concerned with the spectacle, Barbara Green’s work, Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905–1938, examines the diverse autobiographical and confessional writings of suffragettes. Green locates the intersection between modernism and suffrage—what she calls modernist feminism—in the new cultural discourses of femininity, spectacularity, advertising culture, and the discipline of females’ bodies. Both Tickner and Green recover the importance of suffrage visual and literary productions for feminist revisions of the culture of modernity and its obfuscated gendered mechanisms.

In turn, Jane Marcus and Janet Lyon focus more specifically on the similarities between the suffragettes’ contestation of male political discourse and the iconoclastic impulse of artistic avant-garde movements. In the introduction to her pioneering collection, Suffrage and the Pankhursts, Jane Marcus emphasizes the parallels between suffragettes’ interruptions of male political discourse and the textual interruptions practiced by experimental women writers. Interruption becomes for Marcus a key rhetorical strategy of obtaining a voice and assuming the position of the speaking subject in the political and aesthetic arenas.⁴¹ She finds a similar formal practice in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own : “Constructed brilliantly around the literary tropes of interruption and absence, A Room of One’s Own eloquently enacts the history of struggle.”⁴² While Marcus tends to deemphasize militancy, stressing instead the violence suffered by women, Janet Lyon examines the revolutionary rhetoric produced by suffrage and English avant-garde movements. Rejecting the thesis of a simple appropriation of the suffrage revolutionary energy by male experimental writers, she demonstrates instead many semantic links between suffrage and vorticism, both of which share an iconoclastic antibourgeois stance and the rhetoric of defamiliarization.

Yet, what is at stake in the discourse of revolt in suffrage militancy and modern aesthetics is more than shared rhetorical strategies; more fundamentally, the convergence and divergence between the struggle for freedom in the political and aesthetic praxis enables us to redefine the status of the work of art in Western modernity. As we have seen, suffrage militancy links women’s revolution both with negative freedom—that is, with the destruction of oppressive gender structures—and with “positive” freedom—that is, with the creation of new gender relations and forms of life. The juxtaposition of suffrage militancy and experimental literature by women writers allows us, first of all, to rethink the pervasive modernist preoccupation with the new and the “subversive” beyond mere formal experimentation for innovation’s sake and address it instead in the context of the struggle for freedom. Second, formal invention in experimental women’s literature radicalizes the function of freedom in politics by connecting freedom with the unforeseeable, inaugural force of the new beginning, which exceeds determined goals of liberation. In so doing, women’s experimental writing enables us to distinguish transformative freedom—the creation of the new and unforeseeable beginning—from the instrumentalism of politics. And, finally, the common question of freedom interrogates the autonomy of both literature and gender politics, exposes each of these activities to its other without abolishing important differences between them. Consequently, my approach to feminist aesthetics not only refocuses on the artistic production of modern women artists—in this study on Woolf’s and Larsen’s texts—but also revises the very concept of the autonomy of art in the context of women’s political struggles for freedom.

To analyze the struggle for freedom in suffrage militant and modernist texts, I would like to recall and revise Theodor Adorno’s theory of the heteronomous autonomy of modern literature.⁴³ Through this paradoxical concept, Adorno addresses both the irreducible specificity of art—that is, its autonomy—and its historical relation to the political—that is, art’s heteronomy. According to Adorno, the autonomy of modern art is heteronomous because art both depends on and is independent from oppressive social conditions. As “a productive force” “that originates in real history and is then separated from it,” art is both autonomous and a product of the unjust division of labor; it both reproduces and contests capitalist relations of production (AT, 228, 226). Heteronomous autonomy thus underscores the contradictory status of art in modernity: as both a commodified object and “the plenipotentiary of what is free from domination,” (AT, 227) modern literature is situated between political domination and the aesthetic promise of freedom. As I have argued in the introduction, the heteronomous autonomy of literature is a crucial term for my theory of feminist aesthetics because this approach avoids the instrumental subordination of art to gender identity politics or the collapse of artistic innovation into formalism.

Although essential for a nonreductive approach to the art/politics divide, Adorno’s theory of artistic practice’s heteronomous autonomy has nonetheless to be revised in the context of feminism for two reasons: first, and more obviously, because Adorno’s notion of the political is too narrow—it focuses on labor but ignores gender and race as categories of political and aesthetic analyses. Second, and more fundamentally, because he primarily stresses art’s contradictory relation to economic domination—its subversion and complicity with the structures of power—he does not address numerous political struggles for freedom by subjugated groups. Yet, once we take into account an emergence of new political and cultural movements, such as suffrage, labor unrest, decolonization movements, or the “black radicalism” of the Harlem Renaissance, all of which called for the liberation and political participation of women, African Americans, and colonized peoples, we are compelled to criticize the Frankfurt school’s thesis that administrated society is totally dominated by commodity exchange and instrumental rationality. Developed in An Ethics of Dissensus, my concept of the political is necessarily broader than Adorno’s because it stresses the emergence of new antagonisms and new political struggles against multiple forms of domination of marginalized groups.⁴⁴ Consequently, I argue that the importance of the suffrage campaign for feminist aesthetics is that women’s contradictory artistic production in modernism cannot be considered only as a utopian semblance of revolutionary practice, which is as yet impossible in reality, but also has to be analyzed in relation to existing political movements.

By contrast, Adorno’s famous thesis that the freedom of the Enlightenment reverses into its opposite, namely, the barbarism of domination, suggests that the promise of freedom is associated primarily with the aesthetic side of the art/politics divide. Thus, if the heteronomy of modernist literature reveals its complicity with domination, the autonomy of art, its separation from oppressive political and economic structures, is intertwined with the promise of freedom. From the first page of Aesthetic Theory Adorno reminds us that aesthetic autonomy is not a manifestation of indifference to the political but, on the contrary, a historic achievement of freedom understood, first of all, as the independence of art from religious values: “For absolute freedom in art, always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial unfreedom of the whole…. The autonomy it achieved, after having freed itself from cultic function and its images, was nourished by the idea of humanity” (AT, 1). Yet this principle of freedom in modern art arrives at a crisis in modernism not only because art’s autonomy depends on the unjust division of labor but also because the aesthetic principle of freedom “comes into contradiction with the perennial unfreedom” of capitalist society as a whole.

Because of this contradiction between art and political domination, for Adorno aesthetic freedom is primarily negative: it manifests itself first of all as the opposition to, separation from, or “revolt” against injustice. Modern art can maintain its contradictory relation to freedom only by negating capitalist structures of production on the level of aesthetic form. Second, art negates its own utopian promise of freedom as soon as this promise degenerates into an ideological consolation. Arts’ opposition to the “barbarism” of modernity thus turns into an internal negation of art’s promise of a better practice once this promise gains an affirmative essence: “The revolt of art, teleologically posited in its ‘attitude to objectivity’ toward the historical world, has become a revolt against art” (AT, 3). Even in its relation to aesthetic novelty, the freedom of the work of art is “destructive” (AT, 20) and is a privative rather than positive manifestation of a new beginning. “Historically inevitable,” the concept of the new in modernism is “privative; since its origins it is more the negation of what no longer holds than a positive slogan” (AT, 21).

Both Adorno and Arendt stress the historical authority of the new and its relation to aesthetics, yet they derive aesthetic novelty from different, contradictory traditions of modernity: revolution and commodity production. As we have seen, for Arendt political novelty in the public realm arises from the fundamental interrelation between the revolutionary struggle for freedom, language, and the emergence of the unprecedented event in history. However, her consistent but unexamined deployment of literary terminology—such as the invention of a “new story”—already implies a close relation between politics and aesthetics. By remarking this relation more explicitly in the context of suffrage militancy, we could say that one of the fundamental intersections between feminist aesthetics and gender politics in modernity focuses on the revolutionary discourse of the new. Indeed, the connection between the creation of the new and freedom is also pivotal to theories of modern aesthetics—the “new” and the “subversive” belong to the most familiar slogans of modernism. In twentieth-century Europe the only other discourse that could rival the revolutionary rhetoric of the new was modernist art associated with Ezra Pound’s famous dictum, “Make it new.” As Marinetti puts it in his “Manifesto of Futurism” (1909): “Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry…. We will sing of great crowds … we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals.”⁴⁵ The fact that modern artists and literary critics of modernism could so easily link aesthetic novelty with the discourse of “revolution” suggests an unacknowledged, and perhaps even unnoticed, debt of the modern avant-garde, in particular, futurism and vorticism, to the revolutionary tradition revived in twentieth century by new liberation movements such as the October Revolution and decolonization movements. Even less frequently, the modernist discourse of the new is examined in the context of the suffragettes’ militant struggle for the vote. And yet the intertwined rhetoric of the new and revolt in suffrage agitation is a crucial starting point for thinking through the possibilities of freedom in women’s aesthetic and political praxis. Without this intersection between political and aesthetic freedom, it is all too easy to dismiss the rhetoric of the new as a symptom of either the aestheticization of politics or the commodification of art, both of which, in Adorno’s words, “[bind] the new to the ever same” (AT, 22).

By contrast, Adorno derives the predominance of the new from the expansion of capital and increasing commodification rather than from the revolutionary tradition: “Since the mid-nineteenth century and the rise of high capitalism, the category of the new has been central, though admittedly in conjunction with the question whether anything new have ever existed” (AT, 19). It is because of art’s contestation of the character of commodity that the aesthetic concept of the new in modernism, according to Adorno, is in the first instance negative and destructive: “consumer goods [are] appropriated by art by means of which artworks distinguish themselves from the ever-same inventory … of capital” (AT, 22). Through privation, negativity, and “irritating” indeterminacy about its purpose and meaning, the work of art reappropriates and transforms the ever same “novelty” of consumption into an enigma of inassimilable otherness. Despite its uncanny similarity to commodity fetishism, aesthetic novelty maintains its promise of freedom by provoking shudder (AT, 20) rather than consumer satisfaction. Thus, unlike Arendt’s politics of natality—the birth of the new world through praxis—for Adorno, the violence of aesthetic novelty, in its break from the past, resembles the “ominous aspect” of death. Ultimately, the violence of the new is reflective of “the negative self-reflection of identification with the real negativity of the social situation” (AT, 21). The novelty of the work of art also contests subjective originality and imagination, since it arises from the demands of the art object, the experimental process of making, and the social relations embedded in the artistic materials: “The violence of the new, for which the name ‘experimental’ was adopted, is not to be attributed to subjective convictions or the psychological character of the artist. When impulse can no longer find pre-established security in forms or content, productive artists are objectively compelled to experiment” (AT, 23).

Nonetheless, if we read Adorno against the grain of his main argument as well as against the dominant interpretations of his work,⁴⁶ we are also able to detect the inaugural force of transformation in the violence of the new. This is especially the case since Adorno stresses the dynamic “processual” aspect of the artwork, which creates its own “force field” (AT, 178–179). The interconnection between freedom and aesthetic novelty not only negates capitalist structures of domination and explodes the “gapless continuum of tranquil development” (AT, 19) of history but also offers a utopian promise of a better praxis that is as yet impossible in reality. Thus, the inaugural force of the new enacted in the work of art exceeds the determinate negation of historical reality and the gendered, imperialist structures of power imbedded in it. Such a constituting force points beyond the “real negativity of the social situation” toward a new beginning. To be sure, the aesthetic presentation of such inaugural force is indeterminate because, in its radical alterity and nonidentity, the new resists symbolization, aesthetic judgment, and communicability: The modern experimental artwork “is unable to speak what has yet to be, and yet must seek it” (AT, 22). The new cannot be determined even through the negation of existing power relations; on the contrary, its constituting force and utopian promise manifest themselves in the cryptic and enigmatic character of experimental art.

The aesthetic configuration of novelty and freedom is defined by Adorno as a utopian promise of a better praxis: “Art is not only the plenipotentiary of a better praxis than that which has to date predominated, but is equally the critique of praxis as the rule of brutal self-preservation at the heart of the status quo and in its service…. [It] opts for a form of praxis beyond the spell of labor” (AT, 12). Despite its implication in economic and political domination, the negative autonomy of literature, achieved through separation from the social, initiates a new beginning. It offers, in Adorno’s terms, “the schema of social praxis: Every authentic artwork is internally revolutionary” (AT, 228). This “revolutionary” aspect of the artwork does not provide guidelines for political action but manifests itself “immanently” within the structure of the work of art. Respecting the autonomous aspect of art, an “immanent” interpretation of the work of art means that “social concepts should not be applied to the works from without but rather drawn from an exacting examination of the works themselves” (NT, 39). Such an immanent or aesthetic manifestation of revolution is reflected, on the one hand, in the experimental form of the work of art and, on the other hand, in the critique of aesthetic categories such as genius, beauty, aesthetic autonomy, or the death of art. Yet, in the context of the suffrage movement, we also have to investigate the heteronomous aspect of this “internally revolutionary” artistic praxis, namely, its relation to women’s political contestation of power.

If a feminist approach to Adorno’s aesthetic theory allows us to underscore the import of suffrage for the studies of modernism in a new way, feminist interpretations of suffrage also make a critical intervention in Adorno studies. As we can see, Adorno’s defense and redefinition of the autonomy of modern literature, based on art’s internal negation of political domination and its own complicity with oppressive power, in the last resort exceeds the negative. Nonetheless, Adorno’s redefinition of the autonomy of modern literature in the context of freedom fails to address the relation between “internally revolutionary” aesthetic praxis and political struggles for freedom. Because Adorno focuses primarily on the economic character of exploitation and on rational instrumentality, he does not investigate the question as to whether “the plenipotentiary of the better praxis” reenacted in art could be intertwined with the inaugural force of positive freedom—what Arendt calls the freedom of the new beginning—in revolutionary political praxis. Yet, as the political implications of suffrage militancy suggest, it is not only art that is a “plenipotentiary” of a better practice as yet impossible in reality but also women’s political revolt, similarly based on the contradiction between the inauguration of a new beginning in history and the reproduction of old patterns of domination, in particular, class and colonial domination. As the revolutionary struggle for a more expansive notion of freedom by militant suffragettes, “black radicals” of the Harlem Renaissance, or decolonization movements suggests, the heteronomous aspect of literary practice has to be considered not only in terms of art’s capacity to negate gendered, racist structures of domination but also in relation to the transformative force—as well as the grammar and syntax—of political praxis. That means that the heteronomous autonomy of modern literature has to be thought beyond the negative, even though the critical function of negation, just as the negative stage of the contestation of domination, is indispensable for any transformative practice. What feminist aesthetics has to address, therefore, is how aesthetic novelty and the promise of a better praxis in women’s writings is intertwined with the inaugural force of freedom in the political.

Through the juxtaposition of suffrage militancy and Adorno’s aesthetic theory, I propose to redefine the heteronomous aspect of aesthetic autonomy, that is, art’s relation to the political, in two new ways. First of all, the transformative capacity of art and literature, their ability to contest gender domination, imperialism, and the gendered division of labor on the level of form, is intertwined with the transformative modality of women’s political praxis. Conversely, art’s relation to the political reveals the destructive impact of gender domination on the very possibility of women’s art. Art might be internally revolutionary, but gender oppression can prevent it from coming into being at all. The main dilemma that Woolf and Larsen, the two women writers discussed in this study, confront is how to transform a persisting legacy of the destruction of women’s art into its revolutionary possibility. For Woolf, this transformation of the paralyzing effects of gender domination into the possibility of women’s literature is intertwined with women’s collective political struggles. For Larsen, it entails the communal transformation of the entire register of “cursed” racist and sexist language, a transformation supported by, as Alain Locke famously puts it, “a unique social experiment” of the New Negro.⁴⁷ The heteronomous autonomy of art presents, therefore, a far more complex relation between women’s art and gender, racial politics: the destructive effects of domination and the revolutionary possibilities characterize both the domain of literary and political praxis. Consequently, the feminist theory of modernist aesthetics I elaborate in this study not only refocuses on the artistic production of modern women writers but also revises the status of the work of art—its heteronomous autonomy—in the double context of persisting domination and women’s political struggles for a more expansive notion of freedom. Thus the main question I address is how aesthetic novelty and the promise of a better praxis in women’s writings can emerge from the destruction of women’s art and lives and the ways in which this emergence is intertwined with the inaugural, intersubjective force of freedom in the political.

Adorno is right to argue that “freedom in art, always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial unfreedom of the whole” (AT, 1). Yet the same argument can be advanced with respect to gender and race politics—here too freedom is limited to particular movements and particular events, and they come into contradiction with persisting unfreedom. We have seen this contradiction between the struggle for women’s freedom and the persistence of class and race inequalities among women within the suffrage movement itself. Consequently, the conflict between freedom and domination not only characterizes the relation between art and politics but also manifests itself within political and artistic practices. As we shall see, this conflict produces and reproduces a split in the studies of modernism between “subversive” and revolutionary aesthetics, on the one hand, and its diametrical opposite—the politics of melancholia and the aesthetics of mourning, on the other hand.

The feminist theory of aesthetics I propose refuses this uncritical either/or binary and thinks through the political and aesthetic implications of the unresolved historical contradiction between freedom and domination. In the context of women’s struggle for political and economic freedom, this contradiction exposes the inaugural possibility of a new beginning despite persisting racism, imperialism, and gender domination. One implication of my approach is the reinterpretation of the formal disruptions of aesthetic harmony, so frequently stressed by Adorno as “an immanent” expression of suppressed social antagonisms, as the aesthetic manifestation of the unresolved contradiction between particular struggles for freedom and diverse forms of domination. And, conversely, in the context of the gendered, racialized history of modern literature, the contradiction between freedom and domination threatens art’s promise of a better praxis with the destruction of the very possibility of women’s writing by class, gender, and racist domination. In other words, the “disaster” not only afflicts political life but destroys the possibilities of art itself. The Hegelian thesis of the death of art, which proclaims the loss of art’s social relevance in Western modernity, is therefore not merely the threatening end of art, but the impossible beginning of women’s writing. The main question Woolf and Larsen pose for the history and theory of Western aesthetics is how the possibility of women’s art can emerge from the site of its destruction and this destruction’s persisting legacy. Consequently, the heteronomous autonomy of women’s artistic practice means not only that art negates structures of domination, not only that it finds aesthetic means to express invisible social contradictions, including labor, gender, and race contradictions, and to offer alternative models of liberating political praxis. The decisive aspect of heteronomous autonomy, ignored by Adorno, is that the inaugural force of women’s political revolt might enable the transformation of the historical impossibility of women’s writing into its future possibility.