Modernist whimsy: entertaining difficulty in the work of Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, and Stevie Smith

My thesis is interested in what happens when we centre whimsy in critical discourse and examine the writers and poetical forms it attaches to. This is in response to the note of embarrassment that whimsy has sounded in a literary-critical context: in the modernist period, it is often used as a dismissal, describing a poetic mood or literary device that is overly fanciful. My research proceeds from Will May's crucial observation that whimsy has also been an 'expedient' category for critics to use, particularly of women poets. I take his arguments as an invitation to centre the playfulness of modernist women's poetry and interrogate the ways in which this playfulness has been disparaged. My thesis thus looks both at the ways
whimsy works within texts and the ways it has moulded our critical understandings of texts as part of a feminist reframing of whimsy's aesthetic and critical value. Through analysis of the poetry of Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and Stevie Smith, my contention is twofold: first, that as a gendered aesthetic category, whimsy works unevenly to sabotage the reception of some poets and not others; and second, that an awareness of the structures that make whimsy a fraught mode figures prominently in the work of Stein, Moore and Smith, who organise these tensions into a complex form of self-fashioning.

Whimsy in the twentieth century arises as a category in contrast to difficulty, that hallmark of high modernism whose legacy continues to shape conceptions of art and professionalised literary criticism. As Leonard Diepeveen writes, difficulty has 'become the necessary condition for canonization'. Whimsy, as 'failed' art, might seem to be another means of policing this distinction between the serious and the throwaway. The contention of this thesis, however, is that the association of whimsy with critical in scrutability has given such texts and writers the licence to evade aesthetic and critical conventions. May writes in a gloss on an 1892 review of Emily Dickinson's poetry that '"whimsical" stands in for a term the
male reader cannot find for a poetics he cannot decipher'. In this formulation, whimsy replaces difficulty as part of a gendered reaction to a poem he finds challenging. My argument centres on the challenge whimsy here inscribes, considering whimsy as its own complex category, and not just a dismissive substitute. I proceed from the 'working definition' of whimsy that Deborah Bowman offers in her paper on the readymades, which drives towards its puzzling demands: 'something which makes you wonder, with all
possible tonalities: Imagine taking that seriously.' Staging whimsy as a double-minded invitation to dismiss something and to entertain it - in other words, less a quality of an object than it is an entreaty to do something with it - her definition parallels Diepeveen's emphasis on the experiential quality of difficulty, which he describes as an 'interaction between text and reader'. Rather than describing the aesthetic properties of an object, difficulty and whimsy therefore describe a relationship with an object, and the set of affects
this entails.

This understanding provides the terms of my interrogation of whimsy as a critical concept, and my use of it as a tool to read Stein, Moore and Smith, building on the limited scholarship that exists on the category. Where May, in separate essays, has addressed the question of whimsy's role in 'contain[ing] the intellectual role of women in society' (with reference to Dorothy Parker, Moore, and Sylvia Plath) and its use as ethical excuse (with reference to Ezra Pound), my PhD will bring these perspectives together to demonstrate that the risks of whimsy are fundamentally gendered.