III On being a Woman Writer in the Netherlands
 

Twenty-five years ago, in the spring of 1983, the Dutch Sinologist and professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Utrecht, Douwe W. Fokkema, delivered the three Erasmus Lectures. In these lectures he presented the major results of his research into the literary conventions of Modernism and Postmodernism, mentioning among other Modernist writers the Dutch woman writer Carry van Bruggen. One year later, back in the Netherlands, he and his co-author Elrud Ibsch published their pioneering book on European Modernism. Distinctly new in their approach to Modernism was that the authors not only analyzed the works of Joyce, Larbaud, Proust, Gide, Virginia Woolf, Italo Svevo, Robert Musil and Thomas Mann, but also explicitly inscribed three Dutch writers into the modernist canon: Menno ter Braak, Eddy du Perron, and Carry van Bruggen, the woman writer who is the central figure in these lectures. Another four years later, in 1988, Fokkema and Ibsch’s book was published in an English edition. Now, as it turned out, the chapter on Carry van Bruggen was omitted and replaced, as suggested by the editor, with one on Eliot.
 

Today’s lecture follows the search of the writer Carry van Bruggen for what being a Jew and a woman meant in the postwar years. The relation of herself to others formed the theme of her last novel, Eve, of 1927. I shall concentrate on a few cultural historical aspects of this novel and on its contemporary reception. Eve immediately came to play a role in the debate conducted in the 1920s on the ‘women’s novel’ that was for the new generation of Dutch writers the symbol of the old realist literary convention that they wanted to distance themselves from. The ideas about femininity which circulated in literary criticism betrayed the same essentialism as that which we came across in the discussion of Carry van Bruggen’s Jewish identity. Now femininity was deployed as something distinctive in the construction of a new literary canon.
 

‘On or about December 1910 human character changed’, Virginia Woolf remarked in the well-known essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, the defence of Modernism that she delivered before a puzzled Cambridge audience in 1924. She went on to explain:
 

The precise date is debatable, but she was right in pointing out a new way of looking at the world and a new conception of reality that grew rapidly in the prewar years. Carry van Bruggen’s change of sensibility can be traced in the same period in her novels The abandoned from 1910 and Helen from 1913. In the first novel, the son Daniel refused to obey the absolute truth of orthodox Jewry, in the person of his father, any longer; in Helen the girl who was growing up came into conflict with the truth that was taken for granted and presented as reality by the world around her. In both novels the realities confronting the protagonists were called into question, but at the same time the newly won insight was regarded as a loss with which neither Daniel nor Helen could live. While in these two novels Carry van Bruggen was already reasoning as she weighed up the value of different realities, in the essays that she wrote during the war she only applied the procedure of unmasking to patriotism and chauvinism. In her essay of 1919, Prometheus, she gained the insight that it was impossible to distinguish clearly between true and false, right or wrong. As a consequence, objectivity and causality could not be applied when it came to judging human actions.
 

To support her view of Prometheus as a Modernist work, Elrud Ibsch lists a series of Modernist elements. Carry van Bruggen’s alternative to the old dogmas and authoritarian attitudes consisted of humour, tolerance and historical awareness, which were signally lacking in the positivism that she called ‘the foundation of modern dogmatism’. But despite the calling into question of certain values, her new view of reality still made it possible to opt for a position, albeit combined with an awareness that another’s opinion was equally defensible and provisional as her own. At the end of Prometheus, referring to the story ‘Inn of Tranquillity’ by the author whom she admired so much, John Galsworthy, she wrote that even the ‘Inn of Tranquillity’
 

This metaphor is strongly reminiscent of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus of 1910 which is propelled towards the future by the storm of the past.
 

I consider that not just the 1927 novel Eve, but also the second series of Jewish books by Carry van Bruggen admit of a Modernist interpretation. Ambivalence and being an outsider were the theme of her prewar Jewish novels, and such ambivalences certainly put her on a Modernist track. Carry van Bruggen’s Jewish identity did not just play a very important role in the rise of her Modernist awareness, but it also continued to play that part. The problems connected with being different from others that characterised her first series of Jewish novels before the war, such as In the shadow and Little knitting school, were resumed after the war, though now from a very different perspective. One of Carry van Bruggen’s biographers, Ruth Wolf, strongly emphasised the different character of this second series. She wrote: ‘The phase of commiseration soaked in bitterness, the urge to demonstrate the meaning of Jewishness by means of extreme examples, is over – obliterated in her wrestling with the Prometheus motif’.  According to Wolf, it was now a nostalgia for lost certainties, ‘for the irrevocably lost protection of the Jewish home’, that drove Carry van Bruggen ‘to bear witness to the richness of her old roots’. It was thus an À la recherche du temps perdu – and as in Proust’s most famous work, it is scents, colours and melodies that seem to effortlessly evoke the flood of childhood recollections for Carry van Bruggen:
 

Now that the programmatic character of The abandoned and The little Jew in particular has gone, the naturalist tendency of her prewar novels is gradually replaced by a new way of writing, in which many Modernist techniques can be distinguished. Language and style, the construction and technique of the stories, are subordinated to what goes on in the minds of the characters – which increasingly becomes the mind of the author herself. That is the only place where the coherence of the stories can be found, for hardly anything takes place in the stories, which have neither framework nor end and are only minimally supported by facts. Narrative unity is achieved by devices such as parallelism in the chapters, in the grouping of the characters, in the obsessive repetition of sentences and phrases, of images that become symbols, in the echo of the beginning at the end of the story, or in the reflection of a character’s emotional state in the landscape. Carry van Bruggen’s style of writing also uses cohesive elements to express her view of the unity of perception and vision, of thought and knowledge, and of knowing and feeling. In Little Adventures (1922), for instance, she writes: ‘The word “Norway” smells of the planks that lie on rafts in the water’. In a perceptive study of Carry van Bruggen, Jacobs writes that the mood of the characters is ‘caught up in a continuous movement of feeling, experiencing, feeling again, experiencing again, feeling differently and experiencing differently. Moving, flowing, shifting closer together or further apart, growing and dying out, everything is on the move. The unchanging being simply does not exist’.
 

This is well illustrated by a passage from The little house beside the water (1921):
 

But Jewish identity is not something that can be shaken off just like that, if at all — not even by someone who had come to found her view of the world on rootlessness, mobility and changeability. To a very large extent, the origin of that relativistic view of the world adopted by Carry van Bruggen lay in her Jewish identity, and that is in fact the main theme of this series of postwar books. It is the mental world of the little Jewish girl, who now unmistakably was Carry van Bruggen herself, that she now, after Prometheus, wanted to elaborate in prose. ‘As long as we remember something’, Carry van Bruggen was to write later in Eve, ‘we have not yet lost it, as long as we can give it a name, we still possess it.’
 

Carry van Bruggen’s Four Seasons remembered him in the form of four stories. The two children of the gazzen (the cantor in the synagogue) from Zaandam, both born in the same year — 1881 —, had been very close to one another as they grew up. They were still in close contact with one another in the years before the First World War and shared the same interests and circle of friends. Her brother’s rigorous embracing of the orthodoxy of the Mezrachist Jews during the war alienated them from one another, and his emigration to Eretz Israel in 1919 meant a rift between brother and sister. His death was a great shock to her. Four Seasons, which was published in the year of his death, presented the Jewishness that she shared with him, the almost twin brother who had been so close to her. Each of the four seasons in this book was the pretext to illustrate one aspect of the personality of Jacob Israel de Haan: his [self-?]tormenting sympathy with the persecuted (which was so strong that he even went to visit Russian prisoners before the war, and on which Carry van Bruggen also published); his intense interest in linguistics (which she shared with him); the love of the celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles in the autumn (she also looked back lovingly to the warmth of the Jewish festivals); and the pride at being a descendant of the respected rabbi and scholar Heele Arjei (of which she was also proud).
 

The equilibrium that the protagonist achieves at the end of the novel is bound to be temporary: ‘She is a human being, a woman, and is not yet dead, so she continues along the road that goes upwards-downwards’. Every aspect of spiritual life crops up in this novel: aesthetic experience, intellectual thought, moral judgement, religious and mystical experience, sexuality. Eve is the account of a female change of sensibility, expressed in the novel in the way in which the female protagonist experiences the awareness of the relativity of time and distance; how she has linked her recollections with music, with names and places; how unhappy she is that she is different from the others because of her search for meaning and the comparison of words — her reflection on such terms as human being, time, space, life, death, love, sacrifice, instinct, will. Eve is the testing of Prometheus on woman’s reality — her mind and, finally now too, her body. I shall illustrate this with a single example, the description of the birth of her first child.
 

It was a new generation of critics in the Netherlands, connected with the magazines for young people that began to appear after 1916, who used the term ‘women’s novel’ mainly in an ironical and pejorative way. The attack on the alleged character of this genre clearly had a literary purpose. There was a reaction to the broad stream of novels in the naturalist-realist tradition, which were predominantly the work of women authors. These novels were accused of being extremely limited in terms of vision and content. They displayed ‘a shared confinement to a certain kind of living room problem’, wrote Menno ter Braak, applying the analysis of Virginia Woolf to discredit the Dutch women writers. An enormous gulf between the ‘women’s novel’ and ‘genuine literature’ gradually appeared in the perception of the critics.
 

Menno ter Braak’s words of appreciation seem to include Carry van Bruggen in the new literary canon that he and Eddy du Perron were elaborating. However, although he considered Eve to be superior to the category of ‘women’s novels’, he was still unable to categorise it as a novel pur sang. He called Eve ‘the female accent’ in literature, thereby relegating the novel to the margin of ‘genuine’ literature. It could not be denied that Carry van Bruggen was a thinking and writing woman, but she was not a fellow writer on an equal footing. Years later, in 1935, Menno ter Braak returned to the subject of the ‘women’s novels’. It was a pity, he wrote, that there was no Virginia Woolf or Katherine Mansfield in the Netherlands, although Carry van Bruggen’s Eve was a good example of such a ‘female accent in literature’.
 

The connection between literary text and sexuality — the question of the woman as writer — was a key theme in the work of Virginia Woolf. She claimed that women should have emancipated themselves from the male image of their sex, the model of The Angel in the House, that was the product of an ideology of the self-sacrificing, subordinate, sexless and passionless woman. The reason why women originally wrote using pseudonyms was that this enabled them ‘to free their own consciousness as they wrote from the tyranny of what was expected from their sex’. Victorian women writers were forced to make their heroines sexless creatures: the female reproductive function was taboo as a literary subject, and women were not supposed to have any sexual feelings at all. That era was now largely a thing of the past, but Virginia Woolf herself still suffered from its consequences: ‘Telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved’, she wrote. In A Room of One’s Own she wrote that the ideal woman writer was one ‘who has forgotten that she is woman’. For such a writer, men were no longer ‘the opposing faction’. The masculine and feminine elements would be as one in the ideal artist’s soul.
 

And in the middle of the war Carry van Bruggen wrote her essay Prometheus. Thinking in terms of a difference between the sexes had no place in the philosophy that she presented in that work. She was interested in the difference between types of people, between ‘men of fact’ and ‘men of idea’. There was no room for gender difference in that vision, because both men and women could belong to either group. One of the most successful talks that Carry van Bruggen gave in those years was entitled ‘De opheffing van de vrouw’. It took a while before the expectant audience realised that in this case the word ‘opheffing’ meant not the moral uplifting of woman, but her sublimation:
 

He had no objection to the fact that, when Annie Romein published a study of that new phenomenon, the Dutch female novelist after 1880, she discussed Carry van Bruggen’s work under the title ‘The feminine woman’. Romein wrote that she considered the work of Carry van Bruggen to be marked by ‘a triple inferiority complex: as a Jew, as a self-taught petite bourgeoise, and as a woman’. It is fortunate that Carry van Bruggen, who was more aware than any of her contemporaries that sex, race and class are not the essence of an identity, but a construction, did not live to see that remark in print.
 

To conclude:

It has been claimed that Carry van Bruggen has to be rediscovered by each successive generation in the Netherlands. For the Modernist appraisal of the literary generation of the 1930s, including Menno ter Braak, it was her 1919 essay Prometheus that was particularly important. For the generation that came after the Second World War, this essay was a point of reference in the debate on postwar nihilism. In the early 1980s not only Prometheus, but also Eve and several of her Jewish collections of stories, such as In the shadow and the Little house beside the water were reissued. The interest of this postwar generation in her work subsequently faded out; her importance was only occasionally mentioned by a few.
 

In these three Erasmus lectures on the history and civilisation of the Netherlands and Flanders, I have taken the work of Carry van Bruggen out of the cupboard again because the life and work of this Jewish woman writer have been a good point of entry for me to investigate what being a woman and being a Jew meant in Dutch culture and society in the period from 1900 to 1930. It has not been my intention to provide a biographical sketch of Carry van Bruggen, although her life is in need of a new biography. My aim in these lectures has been to use the work of Carry van Bruggen as a guide to show to what extent the writing of the Dutch history of this period still suffers from a strongly national approach, leading to a serious neglect of important aspects of Dutch culture from that period. That is why I have adopted an explicitly transnational approach to the work of this Jewish woman author.
 

In the first lecture I focused on the history of Jewry in Europe on the eve of the First World War. I showed how much the debate on Jewry and culture in Germany was echoed in the Netherlands, and to what extent Carry van Bruggen’s prewar stories and novels should be interpreted in that light. The picture that emerged was one of a Dutch historiography whose national, ‘integrational’ approach to the history of Jewry has paid little attention, if any, to the profound changes that Zionism and the international debate on Jewry and culture brought about in the Netherlands.
 

The second lecture was devoted to showing how much of an impact a war in which the Netherlands was neutral nevertheless made on Dutch society and culture. Carry van Bruggen’s essays are strongly marked by the experience of the First World War, and are comparable in many respects with the way in which culturally coming to terms with that war is regarded in current English and French historiography. In the light of the Dutch neutrality, the history of Dutch society and culture during the period around the First World War has always been placed in a strictly national framework, which is why the importance of a study like Prometheus has never been properly recognised.
 

This third lecture has been confined to the collections of short stories and to the novel Eve, Carry van Bruggen’s work of the 1920s. I have connected this work with the international Modernism of the period and made a brief comparison of her work with that of Virginia Woolf. The reception of Eve shows how the so-called ‘feminine accent’ of this novel prevented its female author from being included within the ranks of ‘genuine’, that is, male literature. In Dutch literary history the debate on the nature of Modernism only got off the ground at a relatively recent date. Once again, the reason for that should be sought in the strong national orientation of Dutch researchers, who — with a few exceptions — regarded Dutch culture as falling outside the international Modernist canon.