The Blitz(ed) Body: Bodily Autonomy and Institutional Reform in Susan Ertz and Virginia Woolf

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-10-2022

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Abstract

Framing the argument in the wake of modernist discourse around the female body and fertility, this essay looks to two examples of interwar women’s literature – Susan Ertz’s Woman Alive (1936) and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) – to demonstrate how women were reprising and responding to interwar discourses around women’s reproduction and war. Both Ertz’s novel and Woolf’s polemic use textual surface-depth models to scaffold metaphors of the body alongside metaphors of ideological struggle. In so doing, they also imagine new ways of weaponizing the body towards producing a more egalitarian future, demonstrating their vital role as writers of speculation, futurity, and the body.

DOI

10.1080/24692921.2022.2047568


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