Reconfiguring Untidiness: The Ethics of Remembering History in Novels by Virginia Woolf, D. M. Thomas, and Ian McEwan

Abstract

This dissertation examines representations of ideas about untidiness in modern and contemporary British novels. Reading works by Virginia Woolf, D. M. Thomas, and Ian McEwan as memory texts that engage historical atrocities, I investigate the ways in which the attention to small-scale violence of the everyday as manifested in the novels’ conceptualizations of the untidy is entwined with their articulation of violence perpetrated on a massive scale, the wars and the Holocaust. As both a thematic and a formal concern, the trope of the untidy illuminates paradigms established on exclusion, acts of boundary-setting that obliterate the face of the Other even as it puts into play literary elements that dispel such brutalizing operations. I make the case that the reconfiguration of untidiness as a form of relinquishing the self’s autonomy to relate to the Other is integral to how the novels explore the ethics of remembering history. This dissertation rethinks Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway as a historical novel that intervenes in the author’s contemporary discourse about remembering the recent past of the Great War. Disrupting dominant culture’s homogenizing affective economy, the novel’s thematization of untidiness through two women’s love figures a nonappropriative mode of relating to the Other that transfers onto the novel’s metacritical ruminations upon engaging a violent past in ways that preserve the unassimilability of the subject matter. Blatantly plunging into the matter of women’s untidy sexuality, Thomas’s The White Hotel puts under critical scrutiny culture’s dealing with the uncontrollable aspects of human existence to broach the barbarity of the BabiYar massacre. My discussion highlights the ways in which the excesses of sexuality and textuality are mutually constitutive in the novel’s configuration of a dialogic space in search of idioms to bear witness to the disempowered victims. Interpreting the subject of atonement in Ian McEwan’s Atonement as encompassing the private enterprise of Briony Tallis and the novel’s task of ethically remembering atrocities of the Second World War, I discuss the metafictional elements of the novel that break through the tidy narrative to elicit readers to partake in its concrete moments of deliberation upon past violence.