A God-Haunted Absence: The Persistence of Presence in the Modern Novel
Date of Award
12-12-2024
Degree Name
M.A. in English
Department
Department of English
Advisor/Chair
David Fine
Abstract
This paper brings together Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951), and Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat (1970) to explore the landscape of secular modernity and femininity in twentieth-century Britain, ultimately illuminating the ways that modernity is haunted by persistent presence. Robert Orsi writes in his 2016 book History and Presence that modernity is characterized by a spiritual absence (a vacuum in which spiritual presence, God or otherwise, cannot be accessed), leaving the modern subject isolated and alienated. Three female characters in these novels — Miss Kilman, Sarah Miles, and Lise — experience this absence in various ways. Through Miss Kilman’s story, Woolf’s novel illustrates how absence is institutionally enforced in public society. Despite Woolf’s identity as a secular author, Mrs. Dalloway demonstrates surprisingly spiritual themes. Catholic convert Greene later uses Sarah Miles’ controversial journey towards faith and eventual sainthood to attempt to enforce presence. However, the varied critical reception of The End of the Affair revealed that its secular, modern readership was yet ready to accept such a blatant account of presence active in public. By the time Muriel Spark pens her biting and satirical novella in 1970, presence has disappeared entirely; Lise can only articulate that she is seeking “the lack of an absence.” I argue that The Driver’s Seat becomes an experiment in what a world devoid of presence would look like; when society has so structurally and institutionally limited the modern subject’s access to presence, she can only seek to escape absence, which underscores how women’s “liberation” actually manifests itself in a secular world. This paper concludes with an examination of the modern novel as a sacred space within which readers can encounter presence.
Keywords
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Graham Greene, The End of the Affair, Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat, presence, absence, Robert Orsi, Charles Taylor, secularism, secularization, modernity, religion, disenchantment, buffered identity, porous identity, sacred space, femininity, women's liberation, modern novel, Miss Kilman, Sarah Miles, Lise
Rights Statement
Copyright © 2024, author.
Recommended Citation
Milligan, Katie Lynn, "A God-Haunted Absence: The Persistence of Presence in the Modern Novel" (2024). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 7480.
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/graduate_theses/7480
