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Beyond Solipsism: Narrative and Consciousness in Dorothy Richardson's Deadlock

In 1923 D.H. Lawrence imagined himself a doctor called to the "the dismal, long drawn out comedy of the death bed of the serious novel." His manifesto "Surgery for the Novel-or a Bomb" diagnoses the "pale faced, high browed, earnest novel" as "dying in a very long-drawn out fourteen volume death-agony, and absorbedly, childishly interested in the phenomenon. 'Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn't I?' asks every character of Mr Joyce or of Miss Richardson or M. Proust. 'Is the odour of my perspiration a blend of frankincense and orange pekoe and boot-blacking, or is it myrrh and bacon-fat and Shetland tweed?'" (142). The "fourteen volume death-agony" Lawrence refers to is the autobiographical novel Pilgrimage, and its author, Dorothy Richardson, draws the bulk of Lawrence's ire. Despite Lawrence's dire prognosis, the health and popularity of the "serious novel" rallied, yet compared to the other modernist works Lawrence critiques, Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage fails to draw the same amount of critical or popular attention.1 While the last decade has seen a small renaissance of critical interest in her work and life, this discrepancy raises the question: is Richardson's autobiographical novel any more insular and "childishly" self-absorbed? How does stream of consciousness modernist experimentation address the idea of excessive self-involvement and solipsism? The critique of literary solipsism Lawrence levels could well be considered the foundation for one of the central ethical questions within early twentieth-century literature and modernist studies today. After all, if one of the defining characteristics of modernism as an artistic movement is an ongoing concern with finding new ways to represent the interior life of individuals or the complexities of individual perception, then how do authors avoid the ethical hazards (and the off-putting dismal "death-agonies") Lawrence outlines? As interest in the study of ethical intersubjectivity grows in both contemporary continental philosophy and modernist studies, the value of outlining the ways early twentieth-century phenomenology and modernist literature articulate the unique complexities of intersubjective ethical relationships also grows in critical importance. The relentless and single-minded focus on the protagonist Miriam's perspective that drives Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage makes it an ideal site for such an investigation.By moving beyond Lawrence's blithe dismissal to examine Richardson's Pilgrimage closely, we can see that it serves as a revealing test case for exploring how modernist experimental literature approaches the problem of other minds. While philosophers since Descartes have wondered how it is possible for anyone to know the inner life of another person, or even to know whether another person has an inner life, Richardson's literary experimentation in Pilgrimage stands out for staging this question in the ethical spaces between the author, reader, and protagonist. Pilgrimage's focus is the fictional life journey of Miriam Henderson, and because the plot so closely follows Richardson's own biography, from the very beginning Richardson had to carefully consider not only these similarities, but also the spaces between herself and the character Miriam. These spaces between Richardson the writer and Miriam the creation are not always easy for readers to perceive or define. Kristen Bluemel contends this occurs partly because Pilgrimage, "rather than announcing the author, tries to make us forget the author at every moment. This is possible because the novel's use of narrated and quoted interior monologue cleverly hides both the author and the authorial narrator within the idiom of the protagonist's speech" (37). As Stephen Heath writes, "Miriam and Dorothy run into one another" (133). Miriam's family size and story, travels, and employment history all mirror Richardson's own closely, but while there are distinct similarities, Richardson is doing much more narratologically than creating a veiled autobiography. …