Sapphic Primitivism: Productions of Race, Class, and Sexuality in Key Works of Modern Fiction

Robin Hackett examines portrayals of race, class, and sexuality in modernist texts by white women to argue for the existence of a literary device that she calls "Sapphic primitivism." The works covered vary widely in their form and content, and include Olive Schreiner’s proto-modernist exploration of New Womanhood, The Story of an African Farm; Virginia Woolf’s high modernist "play-poem," The Waves; Sylvia Townsend Warner’s historical novel, Summer Will Show; and Willa Cather’s Southern pastoral, Sapphira and the Slave Girl. In each, blackness and working-class culture are seen as representing sexual autonomy, including lesbianism, for white women.

Sapphic Primitivism exposes the ways that several classes of identification were intertwined with the development of homosexual identities at the turn of the century. "Sapphic primitivism" as a concept is not, however, a means of disguising lesbian content. Rather, it is an aesthetic displacement device that simultaneously exposes lesbianism and exploits modern, primitivist modes of self-representation. Hackett provides a major contribution to literary studies and identity theory with revelations of the mutual interests of those who study early twentieth century constructions of race and sexuality, and twenty-first-century feminists doing antiracist and queer work.