Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2025

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Program

Comparative Literature

Advisor

Nico Israel

Subject Categories

Comparative Literature

Keywords

midlife, World War I, psychoanalytic theory, May Sinclair, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf

Abstract

The apparent parallels between the social and political crises of the 19-teens’s to 1930’s and those of today is a source of popular fascination and commentary. Some have argued that much of our current anxieties about impending global doom harken back to the widespread doomsaying of exactly a century ago in relation to World War I, the 1918 Spanish Influenza and the rising authoritarianism of the 1930’s. Exploration of the midlife experience amid 21st century political and social crises has been prolific and can also be seen to echo literary representations of this particular life stage from the seemingly kindred era. In this paper, I first examine three such texts: May Sinclair’s “Red Tape” (1914), Rudyard Kipling’s “Mary Postgate” (1917) and Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925). I frame the first two short stories as direct and explicit representations of the confluence of midlife and socio-political turmoil, a perspective that is notably lacking in the relevant critical discourse. I then consider the far better-known Mrs. Dalloway as a novel which has long been understood as a representation of both midlife and social trauma but less commonly or directly discussed for the relationship between the two. I seek to draw out a nexus of political violence, widespread death, and potential for midlife change or stagnation similar to that which I’ve traced in “Red Tape” and “Mary Postgate”. I propose that a way to more meaningfully understand what is happening in these stories is through psychoanalytic conceptions of midlife, principally the theories of Carl Jung, Erik Erikson and Elliott Jaques. With this framework in mind, I then turn to a comparative discussion of “Red Tape”, “Mary Postgate” and Mrs. Dalloway as exemplars of the modernist return to narratives of maturity in which I argue that psychoanalytic theory elucidates and amplifies the peril and potential of midlife amid social and political discord as represented in the texts. Finally, I posit a reversal of perspective, by which the potential for the individual in midlife to affirmatively contribute to social progress (rather than simply dealing with personal challenges compounded by social and political conflict) is foregrounded. I offer Antonio Tabucchi’s Periera Maintains, published in 1998 and set in Portugal of 1938, as a sort of postscript text here in which the titular middle aged protagonist’s resistance to authoritarianism, although perhaps detrimental to his material well-being, allows hope for extraordinary purpose in midlife.

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