Modernism’s Queer Parents: Parenthood in Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust

This volume offers the first critical examination of how societal pressures compelling individuals towards parenthood are experienced, processed, and enacted by queer characters in selected works by Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust—authors now widely regarded as queer, despite not having claimed such an identity in their own time. The selected texts include Mann’s Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow and Death in Venice, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Orlando, and key sections from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. By engaging these texts in a pairwise dialogue, this book argues that Mann, Woolf, and Proust employ a shared repertoire of motifs and narrative strategies to depict queer characters’ struggles with the institution of parenthood. However, it contends that each author articulates a distinct and nuanced approach to this theme, shaped in part by the specific cultural contexts in which they wrote. To substantiate this argument, the monograph draws on insights from queer theory, metaphor theory, and the social sciences, predominantly from late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scholarship, thereby reinforcing its commitment to linking literary modernism to contemporary lived realities. At the same time, the analysis situates these works within the broader socio-historical framework of the early twentieth century, which is to say the modernist period, with which these authors are conventionally associated.