Material Spirituality in Modernist Women's Writing by Elizabeth Anderson (review)

Reviewed by: Material Spirituality in Modernist Women's Writing by Elizabeth Anderson Benjamin Bagocius Elizabeth Anderson, Material Spirituality in Modernist Women's Writing. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. x + 209 pp. Spirituality might be understood as a realm that welcomes the surprising, strange, and unexpected. In the spirit of spirituality, I begin this review of Elizabeth Anderson's study Material Spirituality in Modernist Women's Writing perhaps atypically with her conclusion. Anderson writes her concluding "inconclusive words while sitting at her desk" which is "alternately bathed in light that dazzles her computer screen" and is "plunged into shadow" (136). Anderson notes the objects on her desk that abide with her in the shifting light and darkness of the writing experience: a "stoneware mug and my coaster," "drifts of papers, library books, post-its, bookmarks, lip gloss, conkers, cough drops, boxes of tea, tissues" (136). Objects, Anderson finds, exert a spiritual influence on a writer; they inspire her to stay patient with a writing project, keep going, remain open to surprise, and notice more. Objects teach gratitude. Anderson includes her "community of mugs and a certain felted dandelion" in her book's acknowledgements (x). Spiritual transcendence is generally understood to be a privileging of the unseen and a disavowal of material objects. But Anderson studies four women writers — H.D., Mary Butts, Virginia Woolf, and Gwendolyn Brooks — who narrate a different version of the sacred. Each writer "finds the divine within the things around her" (16). Common objects at home — such as thread, pebbles, dandelions, pencils — might be simple, but they are also to these writers "spirited matter" that spurs a "rethinking of transcendence to locate it materially in this world" (8). "Divine objects," these items are conduits "to explorations of personal consciousness" and vessels to "crossings between interior and exterior." Each object "takes on a spirit of timelessness" and "enters a domain of the immutable" (26, 78, 79, 110). Because women have been traditionally occluded from "leadership in the academy and the church, … writing became a forum for women to explore spiritual ideas and experiences" close at hand, at home (5). Released from masculinist pressures, women writers were thus perhaps freer than men to express the ways in which everyday domestic items — from knitwear to china and stairways — open questions rather than confirm answers about "subject-object relations … and everyday enchantment" (89). In narrating objects' and humans' "entangled intersubjectivity," these writers "present a different mode of selfhood" that is entwined with sociopolitical categories such as race, gender, religion, and even the human, but is not fully determined by them (14, 72). Despite growing interest in modernist spirituality, modernist studies, Anderson points out, tends to focus on modernity's secular and masculine strands. The body of scholarship that addresses matters of the spirit tends to emphasize modernists' "jaded" critique of institutional religion (135). Less has been said about the "heterodox spiritual practices" and experiences of "enchantment" associated End Page 382 with everyday objects narrated in modernist writing in general, let alone writings by women, who are "still under-represented in this scholarship" (14, 135, 4). By studying women's narrations of divine agency immanent in objects, Anderson follows a path through modern literature sparsely traveled by critics. She finds that H.D., Butts, Woolf, and Brooks are less interested in reproducing the common modernist (male) injunction to "make it new" and are more inspired by renewal. Their interest in restoration rather than only novelty prompts in Anderson a rethinking of literary theory, particularly in new materialist studies. The current new materialism that finds agency in objects may have forgotten that it, too, is more renewal than the new. Anderson writes that "new materialists" have often "disavowed a religious element to their projects, yet one of the problems of naming of this field of inquiry 'new materialism' is that this nomenclature occludes the many ways in which such thinking is not in fact new but replicates the relational ontologies of Indigenous knowledges" (11–12) as well as "an older history of West African cosmologies that privilege the material world as a place of spiritual liveliness" (91). Anderson reinvigorates understandings of modernist literature by showing that some of modernism's most influential women writers ask...