The Aesthetics of Escapade: Virginia Woolf, Dora Carrington and Asta Nielsen Contesting Gender in Life and Art

This thesis focuses on the life and work of three Modernist women artists:
an English literary icon Virginia Woolf; an English painter, Dora
Carrington; and a German film star of the Weimar years, Asta Nielsen. In
particular, it looks at their approach to presenting, performing and
publicising gender, taking each artist in turn as representative of the
mobility and independence afforded to women at the beginning of the
twentieth century. Each woman “performs” and “publicises” the
construction of a convention-defying gender identity in their own way but
they share a similar tendency towards the theme of escapade. This thesis
explores modes of life and distinct artistic preferences that animate each life
and bring together notions of objectifying and objectification. It examines
how these three women deploy the available cultural resources, or
technologies of publicity as a means of playfully claiming their personal
emancipation and/or to define and represent female subjectivity in way
different from what was conventionally understood and practised at the
time. In discussing how Woolf, Carrington and Nielsen both register the
influence of the dominant social forces by which they are surrounded and
disrupt the usual practices of female self-inscription of their moment, this
thesis is informed by Michel Foucault’s theoretical focus on the process of
subjectivation: the technologies of the self. As a backdrop to my analysis, I
situate Woolf, Carrington and Nielsen in the historical conjunctures of
interwar England and Germany (from the 1910s to 1930s). In a social and
political climate of uncertainty and complexity the blurring of traditional
gendered roles in the public sphere offered many women, particularly the
women of my selection, a hitherto unimaginable latitude and independence.
However, I take these artistic figures not as directly symptomatic of their
moment, but rather as conspicuous and hyperbolised expressions of a
broader cultural impulse that did have a larger currency in this period.