‘Something other than Bored’: The Dialectics of Boredom in Modernism

Abstract

Being born female, and for that reason marginalized, put into the services of others, and in actual fact expelled from active and public life creates an almost insurmountable hurdle to self recognition and progress in women.  Even the modernist literatures are abundantly fed with women in ‘receding roles’, the question of what a female self can be – and whether it can be? – within the modern conception of the individual is to be explored,  reworked and re-established. In male territory the female self is an alien, not only the traditions rule out her, but even the biological necessities that prohibit her full participation in a life of desire and possibilities. It seems demanding to delve deep into the concept of ‘female boredom as a defence mechanism’ as modernism engages boldly with the human sexuality. When boredom was read and interpreted by modernists in quite a few points of view, it seems good to understand how boredom can work with respect to a few celebrated works from prominent writers. In English, boredom reaches its literary apotheosis in the works of Samuel Beckett, whose characters waits, repeat actions, words, do nothing, and experience odd relationships to time. Boredom and the experience of emptiness that signals its curiously negative presence are implicit in modern and modernist writings. But when accepting boredom along with other ideas of identity and agency which shapes modernism it is necessary to think ‘whose boredom and whose modernism?’ “. . . to think and write what is truly new means above all to think about what has never been thought and write what has never been written: that huge, constant are of suppression- religious and cultural, individual and social, spiritual and physical.” (Adonis 100-01)