In search of an everyday heroism : three novels from the 1930s

Abstract

In “On the Heroism of Modern Life”, Baudelaire directs his flaneur’s gaze to marginalized individuals to “open our eyes to recognize our heroism”. This thesis aims at a similar undertaking – to attend to marginalized texts in the thirties to recognize the heroism in the banal. Through this dissertation, I define everyday heroism as one that embraces the mundane and the anti-heroic in our everyday life. In particular, I focus on the everyday heroines depicted in three 1930s texts: Patrick Hamilton’s The Plains of Cement (1934), Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight (1939) and Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper (1936). Women are good bearers of this alternative heroism due to their marginal position in traditional heroic narratives. Locating heroism in the everyday also provides another way to read the Thirties. These selected novels are by no means the representative texts of “everyday heroism”. Nevertheless, I argue the female protagonists examined here challenge the radical nihilism in the everyday by being open to their anti-heroic everyday. Ella in The Plains of Cement endures the quotidian, while Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight embraces daily dissolution through radical passivity. Finally, Pompey in Novel on Yellow Paper engages with her everyday through speech and ultimately transcends it with symbolic imagery.