Rebecca West was a protean artist (author of, among other works, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon [1941]), a leading public intellectual, and a visionary commentator on the twentieth century. This paper shows the connection between her major philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas and her attitude towards exile. Following a brief historical overview of the main kinds of responses to the state of exile, from Ovid’s laments to modernist celebrations, I document Rebecca West’s fear of exile, so powerful that it could override even her dominant philosophy of process, her revisionist thinking, and her love of metaphor. Twentieth-century artists and thinkers tended to associated the state of exile with heightened artistic creativity, linking it with epistemological “privilege” (Simmel), or seeing it as instrumental to self-invention (Olsson). For West these ideas were not acceptable. Her patriotism, determinism, existentialism, and essentialism combined with her encounters with refugees during the 1940s and the 1950s to bring about a powerful conviction regarding the misery of exile, one that challenged other parts of her own belief system. June 2010: Bernard Schweizer is associate professor of English at Long Island University, Brooklyn campus. His publications include three monographs: Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s (Virginia UP, 2001), Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion, and the Female Epic (Greenwood, 2002), and Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2010). Schweizer has edited several essay collections in literary studies, including Approaches to the Anglo and American Female Epic 1621--1982 (Ashgate, 2005), and Rebecca West Today: Contemporary Approaches (University of Delaware Press, 2006); he has also edited Rebecca West’s posthumously published Survivors in Mexico (Yale University Press, 2003). He is currently president of the International Rebecca West Society. |
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