The problem of the social unit : sociological modernism in the work of Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston

Abstract

The late nineteenth-century north Atlantic world saw a sudden outpouring of new ways to formulate the social unit. A breakdown in confidence in the individual as an indivisible unit of science made the existence of society suddenly seem unaccountable, creating an opportunity to imagine new ways in which social collectivities were held together. The unaccountability of the social unit prompted attempts to imagine new elements, new relations, and new explanations of how these formed unitary wholes. Thinkers like Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas were formulating complex new systems under the rubrics of “society” and “culture’.

This thesis explicates this new concern as an early twentieth-century anxiety and paradox: that something holds society together as a unit, but it is unclear what that something is. I argue that this tension was productive for both social theory and modernist literature. The central concern of literary works by Naomi Mitchison, Virginia Woolf, W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston was the social unit itself. These writers saw literature as a way to access the relationship between the social unit and its unaccountability from a different angle than sociological or anthropological writing. I set these writers’ literary works against the writings of the sociologists and anthropologists of their day, reading the three fields together through a combination of texts which have not been compared before.

Social theorists were excited by unaccountability and found it to be a striking solution for their projects. For the writers under analysis here, it was instead a premise. This meant they viewed the unit’s very unaccountability as a source of ongoing possibility. By reading literary works by these four writers alongside sociological and anthropological writing of the period, this thesis advances a new understanding of the relationship between the fields of literature and social theory in the early twentieth century. Through this contrast, I show that literature, not confined by the demands of empiricism, was approached by the writers under analysis as a means for radically new kinds of unity to emerge.