Literary Criticism Of Stevie Smith's Novel

Literary Criticism:

Stevie Smith’s novel has limited criticism and literary scholarship however the variety of scholarship is intriguing. Smith herself has more criticism on her poetry, but the following are some selections of criticism about Novel on Yellow Paper and about Smith and her other work. Often times Smith is examined in the context of feminist theory because of her dealings with female characters and her involvement in confronting gender conformity: “…her novel’s meta-fictional commentary on not only ‘women in fiction’ but ‘fiction by women’, as Woolf might have put it – which for ages perpetuated images of female identity solely ‘in relation’, or dependently on man” (Huk 93). Critics also explore the anti-Semitic comments made

throughout the book, and discuss the intention of Smith behind those words. Most often, the conclusion is that Smith was attempting to appeal to her audience and through their own words and the outrageous behaviors of Pompey, force them to recognize the bigotry in their own words. The suburb, in relation to British nationalism is also a hot topic for critics. Critics often fall into the categories of feminism, nationalism, or modernist (intermodernist). This isn’t to say that there is no overlap, for instance Bluemel writes about nationalism, but she also addresses Smith as an intermodernist. Feminist critics, like the before mentioned Huk, includes Laura Severin, Catherine Civello, and Diana Austin. These critics address gender in Smith’s novel, including agency, gender is war, and identity. Most conclude, that in Novel, Pompey is unable to find an identity because of the repression of her gender. However, Pompey is able to find agency in other ways, like in writing a book and refusing to marry Freddy. In nationalism texts like Bluemel, she addresses the suburbs and the Jewish racism, and how those tie into the feelings of loyalty to England. As a modernist text, Bluemel also argues that Smith is an intermodernist, not quite fitting in to the first or second generation. She takes attributes of both and creates her own works. Other critics like James Najarian and Richard Nemsevari, focus on Smith as a modernist texts, because of discussion that she does not belong to those categories. However, majority of critics are sound in their belief that Smith does belong in the category of modernist. Below are summaries of a few of Novel’s critics.

“Recovering the Serious Antics of Stevie Smith’s Novels” – Laura Severin

Severin uses the framework of Stevie Smith being excluded from her female peers as a way to emphasize the importance of her work.

Severin argues that Smith, who breaks away from the traditional mold, is still a modernist writer and that her books are more important because in them she attempts to break free of social norms. The article focuses mostly on The Holiday by Smith, however the breaking of social norms is a familiar themes that runs throughout Novel on Yellow Paper. Severin explains, “Each of Smith’s novels marks an assault on the romance plot, although the techniques she employs are remarkably varied. Novel interrupts the romance first of Karl and heroine Pompey, then of Freddy and Pompey, with disruptive interludes – lists of quotations, fantasies, retold versions of the classics” (462). In The Holiday, Smith is taking an even more radical approach than her previous works, and in doing so she is shaking up the “social agenda” by breaking from narrative conventions and enabling her characters to not fall into romance, and instead come to terms with their own form of society: “According to Smith, a new world can only come about through the relinquishment of all forms of possessiveness, the psychological as well as the materials” (464). In Novel, Pompey is able to begin to break free from the societal norms because of her determination to be intelligent and her desire to avoid a marriage in which she would be merely a housewife. Smith allows her characters to

explore other possibilities and experience hardship and change.

“Stevie Smith’s Ecriture Feminine: Pre-Oedipal desires and wartime realities” - Catherine A. Civello

In Civello’s article, she focuses on the pre-oedipal and psychosexual development of the female characters in Smith’s novels: Novel on Yellow Paper, Over the Frontier, and The Holiday and examines them through a feminist lens. Her goal “is to encourage a more dialogical criticism” and she uses Novel to do this (1). In her analysis on Novel she argues that Smith uses Pompey as a vessel through which she can express her feminist views. Ecriture feminine is female writing, and in Novel we are not only given a female writer, Smith, but we are also provided a female character that is also a writer. By having a female writer as her protagonist, Smith is able to speak through Pompey and use her as a vessel in which to express her ideas on society. Civello examines “the novels themselves and on the way that their stylistic experimentation-like so much Modernist fiction by women – demands to be read as interactive with the culture from which they emerge” (1). In this case, Pompey shows that through her relationship with her mother she has “pre-oedipal attachments” which is expanded upon through Pompey’s feelings about her life and how it is formed by the post-war society. This idea of “pre-oedipal” then filters through to impact her “romantic relationships” and her desire for independence from the constraints of someone other than her aunt or mother – her refusal to marry Freddy is an indication of this. Civello goes on to discuss Pompey’s psychosexual development through Smith’s syntax and how it allows Pompey to avoid conforming to societal norms. Pompey’s language, “lays bare her dependence first upon her mother and then her aunt. More than that, it unmasks her conscious/unconscious resistance to going beyond that maternal dependence and forming an intimate relationship with another adult, at least this point in her life” (3). From her discussion of Novel, Civello goes onto analyze the other two Smith texts in the same format.

“Over the Frontier and into the Darkness with Stevie Smith: War, Gender, and Identity” – Diana Austin

While Austin’s piece focuses more on Smith’s novel, Over the Frontier, she does spend time discussing its predecessor, Novel on Yellow Paper. She explores the impact that war has on gender and identity in Smith’s novels. Austin explores World War I and World War II and the lack of agency women had in the war efforts, instead they were relegated to the sidelines, though the war had just as much impact on them. Austin argues that Smith’s novels – Novel on Yellow Paper and Over the Frontier – “tackle[s] the effects of war on society in general, and on women’s identity construction in particular, with an approach that is a risky as it is unusual,” (37-38). Pompey struggles with coming to terms with her identity and role as a woman in the society to which she lives. She is in this context the author, the narrator, and the heroine of her own story. Pompey resists the feminine construction of a housewife, by resisting her engagement to Freddy. “Pompey can find no role for herself as a woman in changing the public circumstances. As a result, she first bursts into tears, and then retreats into her female powerlessness…Unable to see how to define herself as a political activist, Pompey accepts her society’s gendered construction of her as merely a passive object of desire, a role reconfirmed when a stranger propositions her...” (38-89). There is a struggle within Pompey, after the first World War, women were forced back into the home, after they had been given liberties with jobs and living the life of a “man”. They had to find their place, and realize that war was a part of their identity, just as it was for men. Austin uses the phrase “binary struggle” which she explains as trying to find a significant identity and role in a masculine world (39). Pompey is unable to do this in Novel on Yellow Paper and that adventure continues into Over the Frontier: “In Novel on Yellow Paper, then, Smith allows Pompey to speculate about the many aspects of society of gender, but in the end the book is dominated by a quietism created by her sense of public powerlessness and private fragmentation,” (39). In Over the Frontier, Smith is able to continue Pompey’s journey to discover her identity in a man’s world, and join in the conversation – including changing her tune about anti-Semitism.
Nationalism:

“’Hurrah to Be a Goy!’: Stevie Smith and Suburban Satire” – Kristin Bluemel

Bluemel explores intermodernism by incorporating the importance of both the suburbs and the anti-Semitic themes that run through Stevie Smith’s novels, and in particular, Novel on Yellow Paper. Bluemel argues, “that both Jews and suburbs were integral to Smith’s self-conscious effort to imagine an English character that could stand up to the multiple threats to national identity posed by economic depression, Hitler’s domination of Europe, the losses of war, including the bombing of London and the postwar loss of superpower status to America” (27-28). Bluemel responds to Smith’s anti-Semitic character stating it was a plot to set up a national identity, and one which her readers my have related to. It was a representation of the national feeling amongst the English, and perhaps one that wasn’t often talked about. Smith, and intern Bluemel, justifies this ploy by explaining that the novel also mocks Hitler through language and context surrounding Nazi Germany: “The promise is the possibility that self-reflective characters like Pompey will prompt readers who recognize a part of themselves in her to realize the cruelty of their assumptions. Perhaps these readers will begin to scrutinize the danger their difference, understood as a difference of assumed racial superiority, poses to society rather than practicing the more socially accepted habit of scrutinizing a supposedly danger, inferior Jew” (31). The examination of the suburbs also becomes an integral part of Smith’s works. Bluemel relates this national identity to the suburbs, how Londoners and English identify themselves, and how the Jewish population was able to integrate themselves into these communities: “Smith’s writing uses the intermodern ‘Jewish problem’ and the intermodern ‘suburban problem’ to frame her construction of a new, nonrevolutionary, nonartistocratic, non-imperial ideal of Englishness, one that can defend against and ultimately overwhelm the politics, sympathies, and cruelties of Fascism or any other ‘-ism’…” (52). Bluemel argues that Novel on Yellow Paper “is more sophisticated suburban satire” where Pompey comments on the frivolous wives and ignorance, but she also retains a hint of jealously for their settled lives (63). Bluemel’s reading of Novel allows for an exploration of Smith’s intentions for the book – like understanding why Pompey is anti-Semitic and holds distain for the suburbs.

Modernism:

“’Work it Out for Yourself’: Language and Fictional Form in Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper” – Richard Nemesvari

Nemesvari explores the fact that even though Smith may have been considered “unconventional” in terms of the way in which she wrote, she still falls in line with most modernist writers because of her focus on “the role and efficacy of language…” (26).

In particular, Nemesvari uses Novel on Yellow Paper to explore the way Smith uses language to create interactions between Smith and her audience this “playfulness” Nemesvari names it (26). He goes on to state: “Clearly what Smith desires is the play between illustration and text, but such an interaction immediately subverts the ‘purity,’ the self-sufficiency of poetic language-in-itself” (27). This allows Smith to call attention to the “uncertainties and protean nature of language” (27). Nemesvari uses Smith’s poems as the format of examining her language, including the poem about Casmilus from Novel, which Nemesvari argues tells us how the text should be read. Nemesvari explores Smith’s word choice throughout this poem and other selections in order to encompass ideas of romance, social order, and the limitations of language. He focuses on how Novel forces “the recognition that language and the conventions of fiction are themselves artificial constructs” (30). Smith is aware of the limitations of language, but she is able to utilize it through Pompey by creating a stream of consciousness that allows

Pompey to express her opinions on anti-Semitism and provide an ambiguous understanding of what Smith is attempting to do. Nemesvari explains that the text is mean to be read by examining the various meanings and uses of words. Words can have more than one meaning, and as a reader, to only examine one definition is to limit oneself to the way the text is meant to be read, and to miss out on critical pieces that Smith has implemented through her word choice. It becomes important for Nemesvari to state that Smith’s abstract and new way of writing (in language and form) still equates her with the modernist writers of her day: “Smith’s exploration of the ways in which language and fictional form shape and are shaped by the interrelationship between author and reader clearly falls within the boundaries of modernism” (36).