One of the first extended consideration of Pilgrimage from a feminist standpoint was in Penny Brown’s 1992 book The Poison at the Source: The Female Novel of Self-Development in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press). Brown looked at how the traditionally-male concept of the Bildungsroman was adapted to a feminine context by five writers: May Sinclair, Radclyffe Hall, Rosamond Lehmann, Antonia White; and Dorothy Richardson.
Among other things, Brown offered one of the best descriptions of Richardson’s style and the demands it makes on a reader.
Despite its often critical reception at the time and almost total neglect until recently, Pilgrimage is remarkable for the originality of its attempt to define the minutiae of feminine consciousness from a woman’s point of view, thus revising the stereotypes predominating in traditional, largely male, fiction and for the narrative technique she evolved. In her Foreword to the first collected edition of Pilgrimage (1938) Richardson describes how she sought to produce ‘a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism’. Like other women writers of the time she left alienated from the order of reality portrayed in traditional realistic fiction and consequently, since women not only experience but perceive reality differently from men, alienated I rom current narrative techniques also. To present an authentic female vision she uses to a large extent a highly subjective ‘stream-of-consciousness’ technique (though she herself disliked the term), filtering all aspects of external reality through the mind of her protagonist and recording in an impressionistic manner her reactions, whether intellectual, emotional or intuitive. May Sinclair, in the review article quoted earlier, pointed to the unique effect of this style:
By imposing very strict limitations on herself she has brought her art, her method, to a high pitch of perfection…. Miss Richardson has only imposed on herself the conditions that life imposes on us all. And if you are going to quarrel with these conditions, you will not find her novel satisfactory. … In identifying herself with this life, which is Miriam’s stream of consciousness, Miss Richardson produces her effect of being the first, of getting closer to reality than any of our novelists who are trying so desperately to get close. … It is as if no other writers had ever used their senses so purely or with so intense a joy in their use.
Virginia Woolf, herself an innovator, also paid tribute to Richardson’s originality:
she has invented … a sentence … of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes. … It is a woman’s sentence, but only in the sense that it is used to describe a woman’s mind by a writer who is neither proud nor afraid of anything she may discover in the psychology of her sex.
In her Foreword, Richardson goes on to describe the purpose of her experiment in moving away from the conventions of male discourse: ‘Feminine prose, as Charles Dickens and James Joyce have delightfully shown themselves to be aware, should properly be unpunctuated, moving from point to point without formal obstruction’. Although, fortunately, she does not allow her technique to reach quite this extreme in Pilgrimage, it does still present some problems for the reader, especially over such a wide canvas as the full novel presents. Her rejection of a linear time scale in favour of a subjective experience of time allows Miriam’s thoughts to move freely between past and present, memory and actual experience, the latter often illuminating and transforming the former. This reshaping of the past in recollection is an analogue of the way in which Richardson modified her own past in certain respects in recreating in fiction, occasionally also infusing it with her current preoccupations. The dividing line between what Miriam is recalling and what she is experiencing is, however, sometimes blurred so that the links between events become uncertain. There is little support from the traditional conventions of exposition, characterisation and description of locations in time and space, though details of Miriam’s different environments, the seasons and times of day and night are often very important. Thus, Miriam may reflect upon, or sustain a conversation with, another character for a number of pages before their identity is revealed to the reader by the dropping of a clue in the shape of an oblique reference or association. The reader must make connections, recall events and relationships and ‘experience’ Miriam’s responses as she does herself. Further possible difficulties are caused by the shifting between first and third person narratives, by the omission of direct narrative of important events the effects of which surface at a later date, and by the sheer intensity of the focus, for the reader is offered no alternative point of reference outside Miriam’s consciousness, an aspect which some contemporary reviewers and recent critics have found claustrophobic. Virginia Woolf complained about I he dangers of the domination of the ‘damned egotistical self’ which she felt spoilt Richardson (and Joyce). Certainly the success of her experiment in fiction must depend to a large extent on the credibility of the protagonist’s inner life and the degree to which the reader can maintain a sympathetic identification with her, as does the author. In spite of the circumscribed viewpoint, however, there are occasions when the reader is able to judge reality and read between the lines, especially in the early chapters when for example a degree of irony is implicitly directed at Miriam’s youthful interpretations of reality.