Metaphysical havens as sexual fantasy: Epistemological and sexual construction in the modern British novel

This study expands the definition of British Modernism by interweaving an epistemological analysis with issues of sexual construction in the following texts: Thomas Hardy\u27s Jude the Obscure, Joseph Conrad\u27s Heart of Darkness, E. M. Forster\u27s Passage to India and Maurice, and D. H. Lawrence\u27s Women in Love. My reading of Modernism illuminates how the epistemological concerns of the British modern novel both expose a collapsing patriarchal order, and conversely, how anachronistic epistemological systems become resuscitated through gender relations. Gender relations, in essence, become a substitute metaphysics. Hardy\u27s Jude, suggests that neither the Platonic/romantic nor the empiricist/realist episteme is a valid way of reading the world. In doing so, it collapses traditional notions about sexuality upon which these systems rely. The larger narrative structure, though, anchored in a romantic distancing attempts to revive a slipping patriarchal control. Conrad\u27s Heart of Darkness, subverting Descartes, empiricism, and Romanticism disrupts the possibility for mastery which challenge the traditional means of storytelling, upon which Marlow, in part, relies. Exposing the adventure and the romance as meconnaissance, Heart of Darkness links the exclusion of women from both action and knowledge as a mistaken fantasy of male autonomy. Yet like Jude, Heart of Darkness oscillates, attempting to preserve the status of the male community to whom Marlow relays his tale. Victory, Conrad\u27s last novel, continues this critique with less equivocation. The most radical of the selected texts, Forster\u27s Passage to India and Maurice, invoke Plato\u27s Allegory of the Cave and Phaedrus respectively. Connecting metaphysics to how one thinks about sexuality, Forster\u27s texts illuminate how a Platonic preoccupation with fixity and binary oppositions generate a misreading of the world and sexual relations. Lawrence\u27s Women in Love, the most conservative of this selection, resuscitates a Hegelian metaphysics under the guise of a supposed liberatory blood consciousness and philosophy of the body. In Lawrence most explicitly, the love relationship becomes haven not for its promises of love, but for its enticement into epistemological certainty