Also by Suzanne Hobson THE SALT COMPANION TO MINA LOY (co-editor with Rachel Potter)

Angels of Modernism

Also by Suzanne Hobson THE SALT COMPANION TO MINA LOY (co-editor with Rachel Potter)

Angels of Modernism Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910 1960 Suzanne Hobson Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature Queen Mary, University of London

Suzanne Hobson 2011 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-27539-3 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-32474-3 ISBN 978-0-230-34964-3 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230349643 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hobson, Suzanne. Angels of modernism : religion, culture, aesthetics 1910 1960 / Suzanne Hobson. p. cm. Includes index. 1. Angels. 2. Angels in popular culture. 3. Angels in art. 4. Angels in literature. I. Title. BL477.H63 2011 202.15 dc23 2011030611 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

Dedicated to my parents, Kathleen and Terry

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements viii ix Introduction: Twentieth-Century Angelology 1 1 On the Side of the Angels : Historical Angels and Angels of History 34 2 The Angel Club : The Angel versus the Ubermensch 72 3 Angels on All Fours : The Third Sex and Angels with A Difference 112 4 The Necessary Angel of Earth : World War II and the Utopian Imagination 141 Notes 182 Bibliography 208 Index 223 vii

List of Illustrations 2.1 Mammon, 1885 (oil on canvas) by George Frederic Watts (1817 1904) Trustees of the Watts Gallery, Compton, Surrey UK/The Bridgeman Art Library. By permission of The Bridgeman Art Library. 91 2.2 To Overmen, The New Freewoman, 1 (1 September 1913), p. 120; and To Foreign Despots, The New Freewoman, 1 (15 August 1913), p. 98. By permission of Senate House Library, University of London. 92 2.3 The Last Judgement, altarpiece from Santa Maria degli Angioli, c.1431 (oil on panel) by Fra (Guido di Pietro) Angelico (c.1387 1455). Museo di San Marco dell Angelico, Florence, Italy/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library. By permission of the Bridgeman Art Library. 101 viii

Acknowledgements The idea of writing about the puzzle of modernist angels first occurred to me as a postgraduate student on the MA in Gender, Literature and Modernity at the University of Warwick. I owe a huge amount to the people who saw potential in this idea and guided me in the process of turning it into a research project: initially Emma Francis at Warwick and then Rachel Potter and Morag Shiach at Queen Mary, University of London. They were and are wonderful models as researchers and teachers and I continue to benefit from their expertise and support. Others who offered much-appreciated advice and constructive criticism along the way include Michèle Barrett, Cora Kaplan, Jacqueline Rose, Laura Marcus and Steven Connor. In recent years, my thinking about modernism has been refined and tested by a lively community of academics and students working on this topic in London and beyond. I am grateful to the Modernism Research Seminar at the Institute of English Studies, University of London for creating and maintaining a space in which to debate new research and to the audiences at Modernist Studies Association conferences in 2005, 2007 and 2009 for their helpful comments on work in progress. Céline Magot has discussed this project with me from the beginning and I would like to thank Céline and the organizers of the Women, Conflict and Power conference at the University of Toulouse II Le Mirail for inviting me to speak on angels of war. I owe a great deal to colleagues and postgraduates past and present in the English Department at Queen Mary, especially Julia Boffey, Santanu Das, Markman Ellis, Rachael Gilmour, Sam Halliday, Peter Howarth, Annie Janowitz, Chris Reid, Bill Schwarz and Adam Trexler. Paula Kennedy and Ben Doyle at Palgrave Macmillan have been unfailingly professional and supportive and I am grateful to Palgrave Macmillan s anonymous reader for detailed and exacting comments on drafts of the book. Finally, I would like to offer particular thanks to my friends Rowan Boyson, Molly Macdonald and Steve Goldup who lent their own skills as academics and readers to help me complete this book. They are very much on the side of the angels. An earlier version of the Introduction appeared in Literature Compass, 4:2 (2007), 494 507; sections of Chapter 2 appeared in Literature and Theology, 22:1 (2008), 48 63; and a much shorter version of Chapter 4 appeared in Miranda, 2 (2010), Voicing Conflict: Women and ix

x Acknowledgements Twentieth-Century Warfare, edited by Elizabeth de Cacqueray, Nathalie Duclos and Karen Meschia. I am grateful to the editors and publishers of these journals for allowing me to reproduce material from these articles. The Arts and Humanities Research Council offered a doctoral award which permitted me to undertake and complete a Ph.D. and the English Department at Queen Mary has supplied funds for conference visits and permissions. For their help with archives and author Estates, I would like to thank the librarians at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, the British Library, the Library of Congress and the Women s Library, London Metropolitan University. For permission to reproduce the cover image I am indebted to the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern and, for the other illustrations, the Bridgeman Art Library and Senate House Library, University of London. Permission to quote from the published and unpublished works of H.D. has been provided by the directors of her Estate in the UK (Pollinger Ltd.) and in the US (New Directions Publishing Corp.). Excerpts by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), from Collected Poems, 1912 1944, copyright 1982 by The Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Excerpt by H.D., from Hermetic Definition, copyright 1972 by Norman Pearson Holmes. Letters from H.D. to Bryher dated 29 April 1935 and 16 June 1944, Bryher Papers, Beinecke Library, by H.D., from New Directions Pub, acting as agent, copyright 2005 by The Schaffner Family Foundation; used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Excerpt by H.D. from Trilogy, copyright 1945 by Oxford University Press; copyright renewed 1973 by Norman Holmes Pearson. All reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Babette Bandler kindly allowed me to quote from the unpublished papers of Gustav Davidson. Davidson s Dictionary of Angels (1967) has been a valuable source of information and inspiration throughout this project.