Writing to Sarah Gertrude Millin in March 1922, Katherine Mansfield rhapsodised: “I cannot tell you how glad I am to hear from you, how interested I am to know about your work. Are you really going to send me a copy of Adam’s Rest when it comes out? It would give me great pleasure to read it.” If Millin (1889–1968) is now remembered at all in anglophone letters, it is as the author of God’s Stepchildren (1924), a historical novel whose treatment of miscegenation and racial “purity” in South Africa has, for a half century or more, been widely considered embarrassingly racist. William Plomer’s 1925 Turbott Wolfe (Hogarth Press) provocatively cast racial mixing as a solution to the “race problem” in South Africa; Millin (Jewish and a migrant as a child to South Africa from present-day Lithuania) had, in God’s Stepchildren and other work, cast it defensively as tragedy. J. M. Coetzee set the tone for much critical accounting for Millin’s inheritance of eugenicist discourse in a seminal essay from 1980, though others have more recently sought to complement his reading by suggesting that Millin’s work itself pushes against the extra-textual opinions of its author. In the spirit of the collection, this chapter looks not to Millin’s most famous work, but instead to a lesser-known text from 1922: Adam’s Rest (Collins). It sets out to ask what reading this text, from the miracle year of Euro-American literary modernism’s self-constitution, both with and against the insights of global modernist studies, reveals about works not otherwise understood as “modernist.” Taking Mansfield’s respect for Millin (and expectations for Adam’s Rest) as its starting point, the chapter asks what “pleasures” contemporary scholars might derive from an engagement with this little-known work. Millin’s work, like Mansfield’s, made its way to the modernist metropolis by way of settler-colonial societies haunted by histories of trauma and dispossession. Where Mansfield’s prose’s experimentalism is widely acknowledged, Millin’s work is less formally avant-garde than overtly—if ambivalently—modern in its self-conscious engagement with politics. As a reviewer in the Spectator noted in July 1922, this novel’s “theme” was “more accurately described as a peg upon which the author has hung an acute and illuminating analysis.” The novel itself, however, in its psychological acuity, undermines the rigidity of Millin’s own analysis, and in this Adam’s Rest offers itself as a useful test case for the affordances—and ambivalences—of form in work that may come from the margins of metropolitan modernism, but is aligned in other ways with the exploration of the discontents of models of personality, psychology, and subjectivity that are at the heart of how we understand modernism(s) today.

Modernism, Racism, and the Colonial Banal: Sarah Gertrude Millin’s Adam’s Rest (1922)

章节
发表日期：

2025年

查看全文

Andrew van der Vlies

摘要

Writing to Sarah Gertrude Millin in March 1922, Katherine Mansfield rhapsodised: “I cannot tell you how glad I am to hear from you, how interested I am to know about your work. Are you really going to send me a copy of Adam’s Rest when it comes out? It would give me great pleasure to read it.” If Millin (1889–1968) is now remembered at all in anglophone letters, it is as the author of God’s Stepchildren (1924), a historical novel whose treatment of miscegenation and racial “purity” in South Africa has, for a half century or more, been widely considered embarrassingly racist. William Plomer’s 1925 Turbott Wolfe (Hogarth Press) provocatively cast racial mixing as a solution to the “race problem” in South Africa; Millin (Jewish and a migrant as a child to South Africa from present-day Lithuania) had, in God’s Stepchildren and other work, cast it defensively as tragedy. J. M. Coetzee set the tone for much critical accounting for Millin’s inheritance of eugenicist discourse in a seminal essay from 1980, though others have more recently sought to complement his reading by suggesting that Millin’s work itself pushes against the extra-textual opinions of its author. In the spirit of the collection, this chapter looks not to Millin’s most famous work, but instead to a lesser-known text from 1922: Adam’s Rest (Collins). It sets out to ask what reading this text, from the miracle year of Euro-American literary modernism’s self-constitution, both with and against the insights of global modernist studies, reveals about works not otherwise understood as “modernist.” Taking Mansfield’s respect for Millin (and expectations for Adam’s Rest) as its starting point, the chapter asks what “pleasures” contemporary scholars might derive from an engagement with this little-known work. Millin’s work, like Mansfield’s, made its way to the modernist metropolis by way of settler-colonial societies haunted by histories of trauma and dispossession. Where Mansfield’s prose’s experimentalism is widely acknowledged, Millin’s work is less formally avant-garde than overtly—if ambivalently—modern in its self-conscious engagement with politics. As a reviewer in the Spectator noted in July 1922, this novel’s “theme” was “more accurately described as a peg upon which the author has hung an acute and illuminating analysis.” The novel itself, however, in its psychological acuity, undermines the rigidity of Millin’s own analysis, and in this Adam’s Rest offers itself as a useful test case for the affordances—and ambivalences—of form in work that may come from the margins of metropolitan modernism, but is aligned in other ways with the exploration of the discontents of models of personality, psychology, and subjectivity that are at the heart of how we understand modernism(s) today.