Gillian Hanscombe’s The Art of Life: Dorothy Richardson and the Development of Feminist Consciousness (Ohio State University Press, 1982) was the first book-length critical study of Pilgrimage from a feminist viewpoint and it’s still worth reading for Hanscombe’s insights into what she calls Richardson’s “bi-polar world-view’ [Hanscombe does not mean bi-polar in the psychological sense], torn between her rejection of men’s rationalist perspective and her own perception that most of the female roles open to her would require a denial of her fundamental sense of self. This excerpt from the Introduction offers a good summary of Handscombe’s argument.
The argument of this book … is that the psychological role conflict between ‘personhood’ and ‘womanhood’ suffered by Richardson gave rise to her bi-polar world-view, in which female consciousness is contradistinguished in nearly every particular from male consciousness. This perception of the distinctiveness of female consciousness in turn gave rise to the evolution of an experimental technique of fiction, and because Richardson held constantly to the validity of her perception and because, also, we can see how the perception shaped her technique, we may justifiably call it ‘feminist’. The technique itself is known to literary criticism as ‘stream of consciousness’ style, an appelation Richardson despised but which has been for so long an accepted umbrella term under which Joyce, Woolf and other experimentalists have been grouped, that it would seem pedantic now to deny its appropriateness to Richardson, who was, after all, its original practitioner in English. The force of Richardson’s feminist convictions was so great that she was led to challenge all the accepted stylistic conventions of the novel and to believe that the use and very fabric of language itself was an objectification of the dominance and, to her, inappropriateness of the male mode of perception. How men say things and how Miriam must defend against what they say, becomes an important focus in Pilgrimage of the alienation between men and women. Miriam’s arguments with [Hypo] Wilson, the writer, for whom scientific rationalism is an intellectual tool equally at the disposal of scientists, politicians and artists, effectively dramatizes this conflict.
But if Miriam cannot identify with men as a group because of the demands of her womanhood, nor can she identify with women as a group because of the demands of her personhood. Her intellectual needs are satisfied by men, but her romantic needs are not; in the end, all her romantic attachments to men break down because they threaten to violate the authenticity of her consciousness and she learns that for her, marriage based on romantic attachment is not a viable solution to her problem. From women, on the other hand, she cannot get the intellectual stimulation she craves, although her romantic needs can be fulfilled by women precisely because, since they share its configuration, they do not threaten the integrity of her consciousness. However, even close proximity to a woman is no final solution because the creative potential of such a relationship is unclear. First of all, some role must be found for men and a context must be found for relationships with men. Secondly, some way must be found in which relationships with women can be productive. But against all such involvements, Miriam’s need for psychological isolation persists: isolation may be lonely, but it is not loneliness she finds painful and, further, only isolation can give her the silence she demands in order to forge afresh the instruments of language which she needs for her own purposes. Because she is a woman, however, who ‘thinks flowingly, with her feelings’, relationships cannot be simply abandoned but must, instead, be modified. She is led, consequently, to bring together the man and the woman who have been of most romantic importance to her, in a symbolic union of the masculine and the feminine, as well as an actual union of male and female which is capable of fruition. In this extraordinary way, Richardson affirms, certainly to herself and potentially for readers of Pilgrimage, the supreme validity of her own consciousness as an index of reality, by the manipulation of living people as her material.
The implications for literature which may be drawn from Richardson’s stance are both startling and trivial: startling with reference to the general problem, facing all women with artistic aspirations, of the resolution of feminine role conflict which is dramatized in Pilgrimage; and trivial, with reference to the uncompromising individualism of Richardson’s personal universe. The balance between these two areas is, in a sense, the balance between Richardson’s achievement as a writer of fiction which, being art, necessarily generalizes, and her achievement as a writer of autobiography which, being an account of a life, necessarily personalizes. In Pilgrimage, the interdependence of the one with the other is compelling, offering, by any standard, a significant contribution to our understanding of the demands of art and of the processes inherent to its generation.
The representation of how consciousness recognizes reality is not Richardson’s sole aim; its corollary is the fact that this process is distinctly female; that is, that the representation of a woman’s consciousness is, for Richardson, a subject which has not previously received any significant treatment in the history of the English novel. Her prescription for female art — of which Pilgrimage is itself an enactment — entails the manipulation of reality in as conscious and assiduous a manner as the fictional subject-matter is manipulated. The female artist must accept and affirm her own egoism, assigning to it the highest degree of virtue and eschewing all other systems of ethics. She must separate, with the utmost scrupulousness, the component parts of her social personality – her sexuality, her emotionality, her professional persona, her intellectuality and her maternalism — but at the same time she must keep whole and coherent her synthetic, all-inclusive consciousness, which characterizes herself to herself in secrecy and isolation. She must guard her psychological autonomy with the utmost rigour, disdaining to endorse any structures of thought or of institution which are incompatible with her personal, intuitive perception of truth. She must consider real only what is real for her. She must accept total responsibility for her own life and none at all for any other life, even another life intimately connected to her own. She must accept, finally, when she has created her life and produced her art, that her vision may be judged an eccentric exercise in the annals of egotism.
Dorothy Miller Richardson’s Pilgrimage is testimony of this vision. For this reason, if for no other, it must stand in the first rank of those works which have brought to consciousness the particular dilemmas of the twentieth century.