- Title
- Magic, Modernity, and Women at Work
- Creator
- Webb, Caroline
- Relation
- Modernist Work: Labor, Aesthetics, and the Work of Art p. 131-143
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501344046.ch-008
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Academic
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Webb examines Stella Benson’s Living Alone and Ronald Fraser’s Flower Phantoms, fantasies written soon after World War I. She argues that Benson deploys magic to provide an altered perspective on work traditionally accepted as suitable for middle-class women (the charitable committee) and on work newly acceptable for such women (agricultural labor). Benson further engages in fantasy to critique the values propagated as essential to the war. By contrast, Webb argues, Fraser foregrounds the tension between traditional expectations of women as destined for marriage and their participation in the intellectual work customarily reserved for men. Webb examines how Fraser uses fantasy to highlight the sensuous engagement of the female scientist with her work, placing the protagonist’s passion for her work in direct tension with her capacity for heterosexual romance. Webb demonstrates how both novels register English society during and after the war as the site of a re-evaluation of both work itself, and women’s relationship to it, in which only art retains transformative power.
- Subject
- Stella Benson; Ronald Fraser; fantasy; modernist fiction; modernity; World War I
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1460129
- Identifier
- uon:45872
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781501344015
- Language
- eng
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