Innocence and Experience: Mothers and Children

This seminar is a hybrid event, available to join in person or online via Zoom. 

Daniela Caselli, ‘D.H. Lawrence’s Elementary Botany’

Since the composition of the seven poems comprising The Schoolmaster series in 1911, published by Ford Madox Hueffer in the Saturday Westminster Gazette between 11 May and 1 June 1912, D.H. Lawrence used the classroom as a space to explore the child’s aptitude to represent ‘the fears, furies, appetites, and losses of the people around it, back to themselves and to others’, showing what David Ellis has described as a ‘willingness to acknowledge in himself feelings that most other people would choose to ignore’ (Sedgwick, 1990, 199; Ellis, 2002, ix).

Focusing on the period 1911-1920, the paper will analyse Lawrence’s engagement with late romantic poetry’s investment in the otherness of children in ‘A Snowy Day in School’ and ‘The Best of Schools’ (tracing echoes of the sentimental otherness of babies in ‘A Baby Asleep After Pain’ and ‘A Baby Running Barefoot’) and reflect on the seductive power of the wondering child in ‘To One of My Boys’. It will then focus on Birkin’s explosive condemnation of Hermione’s ‘pornographic’ desire for the absolute otherness of innocence in the ‘Class-room’ chapter of Women in Love (1920).

The paper builds on previous work on Lawrence and education (Joy and Raymond William’s anthology, 1973; Natasha Periyan, 2019), and acknowledges that Lawrence’s repurposing of the English romantic tradition (poetically and philosophically) accounts for his critique of childhood innocence, at least partially. However, the paper’s main contention is that the revelatory, if uncomfortable, meeting of child and sexuality in the Lawrentian classroom can be best explained through an understanding of elementary botany in his work. Botany was a subject in which he excelled while training to become a teacher at Nottingham University College in 1906-8 and taught while working as an elementary schoolteacher at Davidson Road School in Croydon in 1908-11. Looking at his botany notes, especially his Second College Notebook (L9; Sep. 1906-Feb. 1911), his copy of Alfred J. Ewart’s The New Matriculation Botany (1906), and the student juvenilia ‘On the Study of Nature’, the paper will argue that elementary botany provided a language to discuss reproduction and sexuality in the classroom: it enabled Lawrence to address the often infuriatingly intractable relation between child, nature, knowledge, and sexuality.

Daniela Caselli is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Insufferable: Beckett, Gender and Sexuality (CUP, 2023), Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s Bewildering Corpus (Routledge, 2009), and Beckett’s Dantes (MUP, 2005). A study of Winifred Holtby, anti-fascism, and sexual politics in the inter-war years is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity (2025). Previous work has appeared in Comparative Literature, Parallax, The Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature, Feminist Theory, and The Oxford Companion to Dante. She sits on the editorial boards of Feminist Modernist Studies and the Journal of Beckett Studies. She is currently working on a monograph entitled The Modernist Child.

Shaul Bar-Haim, ‘Revising the notion of Inner Life: The “Maternal” as a Site of Hidden Emotions’

The ever-growing influence of the brain sciences over the human sciences in the past few decades (Leys, 2010; Baraitser, 2017), puts into question some of the traditional perceptions about the existence of people's interiority, psychic reality, or the unconscious. At the same time, however, so-called ‘therapy culture’, social media, and our ordinary language are all being occupied constantly by the thinking of ‘inner life’ not only as a fact but also at the authentic space of one’s ‘real’ self. This duality with regard to different understanding of ‘interiority’ and ‘inner life’ has a great impact on the humanities and the social sciences.

For example, over the last decade, history of emotions took over the central space that was occupied by cultural history ever since the 1980s. In practice, historians working under the influence of new materialistic frameworks in the study of emotions, and very often tend to focus mainly to do a mapping work of images with bodily expressions, texts in which emotions are being discussed more explicitly, or other primary sources where emotions can be easily identified and fit into a descriptive historical narrative. In topographical terms, many of them tend to deny the hermeneutic demands that entail discourses assuming the ‘inwardness’ of the psyche.

In the first part of the seminar, I will suggest that historians should move away from investigating specific emotions as if they are specific objects, and to think of emotions as always plural (i.e., set of emotions), always social, and always relational. The task of the historian would be to look for archives or sites of historical ‘hidden emotions’ rather than mapping manifestation of specific emotions such as hate, love, humiliation, and so on. Thinking of emotions as ‘hidden’ (rather than visible, as some scientists imply), and as a human experience that is very often not fully understood to the subject herself requires the restoring and protecting of some modernist notions of ‘interiority’ and ‘exteriority’ of the self.

I will demonstrate some of these theoretical suggestions by drawing on one case study: the discourse of the 'maternal' in 1930s Britain. During that time, the fascist crisis in Europe, and the popularity of new 'maternalist' strands in psychoanalysis, turned motherhood into a psychosocial domain of anxieties, phantasies and desires. The ‘maternal’ turned in the public imagination to a 'site of hidden emotions', which contained all sorts of a collective emotional experiences The exploration of this case study will enable me to highlight the importance of preserving the interest in what Denise Riley called 'feeling of private inwardness' in an age that is dominated by neuroscience, AI, political reactionism and state surveillance.

Shaul Bar-Haim is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. He is the author of The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood and the British Welfare State (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021); and co-editor (with Elizabeth Coles and Helen Tyson) of Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life (Routledge, 2021). He is currently working on a new research project entitled ‘Revising the “‘Internalization Paradigm”’: History, Emotions, and Identity’. Some findings from this research will appear in a forthcoming chapter on ‘Jewish Self-Hatred in the Age of Identity Politics: A Psychoanalytic Perspective’, in: The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Jewish Studies, ed. By Stephen Frosh and Devorah Baum (Palgrave, 2025).