“We are being made the victims of our own metaphors”: Language acquisition and streams of suppositions in May Sinclair's Mary Olivier : A Life (1919)
Résumé
This paper revisits Sinclair's use of stream of consciousness techniques as a means to explore Mary Olivier's psycholinguistic development. Sinclair's pre-, para- and metalinguistic versions of the stream of consciousness provide a complex, fictional response to one of her earlier philosophical discussions of “the limitations of language” (1917, p. 346), which stressed the lack of fit between the way other theorists defined the term “consciousness” and her personal understanding of the concept. Mary Olivier's complex acquisition, appropriation, exploration and deconstruction of language also shed light on Sinclair's idiosyncratic integration of psychology, philosophy and feminism into her fiction and thus appears as a distinctive and hybrid feature of this modernist Bildungsroman.