Who cares about the stream of consciousness? On Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage

This article brings the concept of care into the discussion of the literary representation of the stream of consciousness in Dorothy Richardson's thirteen-volume novel sequence Pilgrimage . I begin by looking at recent theorizations of care by Joan C. Tronto and Berenice Fisher, by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and by Sandra Laugier. I show confluences between this work and May Sinclair's famous essay on Richardson — in which the term “ stream of consciousness ” was first applied to a literary text. I then explore three interrelated forms of care that are central to Richardson's work. Subsequently, I isolate a particular strand in Pilgrimage in which Richardson's protagonist, Miriam Henderson, consistently conceives of her own consciousness in terms of care. I reflect in conclusion on the broader ramifications that care might have for considerations of the stream of consciousness in relation to the modernist novel.

. The surrounding context of Sinclair's famous statement might lead a reader to consider care in relation to Richardson's writing; but the critical focus has tended to remain instead with the more literal implications of Sinclair's idea of nothing happening, and of a "stream of consciousness going on and on". Care is certainly an abiding concern in Pilgrimage, though, and this article seeks to think through the links between this concern and the representation of the single stream of consciousness that encompasses it.
The task of thinking through care in Pilgrimage finds an important precedent in recent scholarship on modernism and affect. Care might be added to the list of those modernist affects that Julie Taylor shows to be "under-researched" in part because "scholars have tended to emphasize modernists' aesthetic preferences for irony and detachment over embodied sentiment" (Taylor, 2015, p. 2). Therefore, throughout this article, I address the affective dimensions of care while also acknowledging that an account of care as a concept needs more than just the discourse on affect. In all, scholarship on literary modernism and affect is most valuable to my purposes in this article as a model of how to conceive of a concept that is broad, multifarious, and often diffuse, but at the same time vital for understanding critically neglected elements of a literary text. As an example of this correspondence, take the capacious "axiomatic" description of affect from the "Glossary" section of Jonathan Flatley's Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism: affects are irreducible, in the sense that they operate according to their own systemic logic; they involve a transformation of one's way of being in the world, in a way that determines what matters to one; affects require objects, and, in the moment of attaching to an object or happening in the object, also take one's being outside of one's subjectivity. (Flatley, 2008, p. 19) It is indicative of care's status as an affect that we could readily substitute the word "affect" for the word "care" in Flatley's description without any distortion of his meaning. But equally, care can serve as a similarly shaped category as affect. Care's multiple meanings and locations are an important feature of the present article. One of my major underlying points is that Pilgrimage is significant for its capacity to include them all.
By proposing care as a term for analysis in relation to Pilgrimage, I also aim to bring discussion of the literary representation of the stream of consciousness into dialog with recent work in philosophy and the theoretical humanities. Much of this work on care is indebted to Joan C. Tronto and Berenice Fisher's essay of 1990, "Toward a Feminist Theory of Care," in which care is defined as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our "world" so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. (Tronto & Fisher, 1990, p. 40) For Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Tronto and Fisher's definition draws focus onto care "as a concrete work of maintenance, with ethical and affective implications, and as a vital politics in interdependent worlds"; at the same time, this definition also allows acknowledgement that such different dimensions of care do not "sit together without tensions and contradictions," constituting instead a set of "ambivalent terrains" that are often "held together and sometimes challenge each other" (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 5). As an illustration of the latter, Puig de la Bellacasa notes that "the work of care can be done within and for worlds that we might find objectionable" (p. 6), a notion that resonates with my discussion of Pilgrimage below. Ultimately, for Puig de la Bellacasa, care is "about thick, impure, involvement in a world where the question of how to care needs to be posed" (p. 6): care cannot be measured against a priori moral precepts, and offers no path to virtue, but this is not to say that it is irreducible to theorization, nor that it does not possess a vital ethical charge. The concept of care poses awkward questions of both abstract ethical thinking and the everyday worlds to which this thinking might pertain. As such, thinking and writing about care becomes itself an act of "adding layers to perceptions of care, by avoiding the smoothing out of its disruptive potential" (p. 12). Sandra Laugier articulates a comparable definition of care to that of Puig de la Bellacasa-a specifically feminist ethics of care that draws on the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell. For Laugier, such an ethics of care "gives voice and attention to humans who are undervalued precisely because they perform unnoticed, invisible tasks and take care of basic needs" (Laugier, 2015, p. 218). Though contrasting with Puig de la Bellacasa's interest in posthuman and nonhuman worlds, Laugier's understanding of care, nevertheless, displays a set of common characteristics: The notion of care is best expressed not in the form of a theory, but as an activity: care as action (taking care, caring for) and as attention, concern (caring about). Care is an activity necessary to maintaining persons and connections; it is work carried out both in the private sphere and in the public sphere, and it is sensitivity to the "details" that count. Care is something concrete, embedded in the ordinary details of human life, and it ensures the maintenance, sustainability, and continuity of the human world. (Laugier, 2015, p. 224) In Laugier's and Puig de la Bellacasa's work, care constitutes a family resemblance of attitudes and practices characterized by being situated and relational; for both, too, care is intensely directed while also being profoundly flexible and scalable. Laugier and Puig de la Bellacasa also share a sense that care provokes a metalinguistic challenge, with its definition and description troubled by a potential broadness and circularity-the latter demonstrated by the fact that the very act of describing care requires what is also best named as a kind of care itself.
We see similar emphases and pressures in May Sinclair's description of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. Sinclair is equally as sensitive to Richardson's aesthetic innovations as she is to the challenges these innovations pose to received forms of aesthetic response: criticism up till now has been content to think in clichés, missing the new trend of the philosophies of the twentieth century. All that we know of reality at first hand is given to us through contacts in which those interesting distinctions are lost. Reality is thick and deep, too thick and too deep, and at the same time too fluid to be cut with any convenient carving-knife. The novelist who would be close to reality must confine himself [sic] to this knowledge at first hand. (Sinclair, 1918, p. 57) But at the same time, expanding on her claim that "nothing happens" in Pilgrimage, Sinclair states "and yet everything that really matters is happening; you are held breathless with the anticipation of its happening" (p. 59). The irony of Sinclair's refusal of a criticism "content to think in clichés" is clear given the subsequent adoption of the stream of consciousness as the critical cliché par excellence in discussions of modernist prose fiction. The notion of care might offer one way of making good on Sinclair's critical ambitions. In talking about Richardson in terms of contacts and distinctions, thicknesses, depths, and fluidity, closeness and knowledge at first hand, and the things that matter, Sinclair marshals a vocabulary analogous to those used today to describe care. And if Sinclair uses this vocabulary to describe a stream of consciousness narrative, then, from here, we might begin to see the strength of the conceptual confluences between care and the stream of consciousness in Richardson's work. In this article, therefore, I begin by considering care's thematic importance in Pilgrimage. I then move on to show how care also grounds Pilgrimage's narrative in a more fundamental sense. The connection between these dimensions of Richardson's novel sequence leads me to propose a revaluation of the stream of consciousness as a term for understanding Pilgrimage, something that is considered in the wider view of Richardson's modernist context.

| CARE AS A THEME IN PILGRIMAGE
Care's many meanings and modalities are central to Richardson's writing. As a theme, care features in the narrative of Pilgrimage in three specific and always interlinked ways: care for the self, care for the other, and caregiving as a social role. Firstly, Richardson's semi-autobiographical protagonist, Miriam Henderson, is constantly shown enacting what Michel Foucault showed to be the preeminent pre-Christian form of care for the self. Foucault's late thought sought a revaluation of one characteristic aspect of the Greco-Roman world, wherein "in order to behave properly, in order to practice freedom properly, it was necessary to care for self [sic], both in order to know one's self […] and to improve one's self, to surpass one's self, to master the appetites that risk engulfing you" (Mornet-Betancourt, Becker, & Gomez-Müller, 1987, p. 116). In Foucault's account, with the rise of Christianity, this idea was supplanted in the West by a contrary sense of self-care as "a kind of self-love, a kind of egoism or individual interest in contradiction to the care one must show others or to the necessary sacrifice of the self" (Mornet-Betancourt et al., 1987, pp. 115-116). Though gendered differently, Richardson's writing consistently values the same practices and traits as Foucault does for his classical subjects.
In the article "Women and the Future," written for Vanity Fair in 1924, Richardson theorizes her notion of a distinct "feminine egoism," in which "[o]nly completely self-centered consciousness can attain to unselfishness-the celebrated unselfishness of the womanly woman. Only a complete self, carrying all its goods in its own hands, can go out, perfectly, to others, move freely in any direction" (Richardson, 1924, p. 40). Feminine egoism is key to the development of Miriam Henderson's identity in Pilgrimage. By Interim (1919), the fifth volume of the sequence, Miriam prizes solitude on the same terms: "There must always be a clear cold room to return to. There was no other way of keeping the inward peace. Outside one need do nothing but what was expected of one, asking nothing for oneself but freedom to return, to the centre" (Richardson, 1979b, p. 321). And in the last two novels of the sequence-

Dimple Hill (1938) and the unfinished March Moonlight (1967)-Miriam begins to see the possibilities offered by
Quakerism for the care for the self. Attending a Quaker meeting, Miriam regrets that the "labour" of Quakerism had "not been, consciously, from the beginning of her life, her chief concern" because of its capacity to allow participants to "remain always centered, operating one's life, operating even its wildest enthusiasms from where everything fell into proportion and clear focus" (Richardson, 1979d, p. 497). Both as defined in Vanity Fair and depicted in Pilgrimage, Richardson sees feminine egoism to be a practice of care for the self. In Pilgrimage, Miriam's increasing capacity to practice and to formulate self-care marks her developing maturity: a coming into being that is also a coming to writing. But Richardson needs to position self-care as a goal in Pilgrimage's narrative because, from the start of the sequence, Miriam is primarily called to care not for the self, but for the other. These two forms of care are clearly intertwined in Pilgrimage, but are shown across the sequence to be in the process of attaining order and balance. To repeat the claim of "Women and the Future," only "a complete self, carrying all its goods in its own hands, can go out, perfectly, to others, move freely in any direction," and Richardson shows the young Miriam to be incomplete in this respect. As a consequence, in the earlier novels of the sequence, Richardson predominantly narrates the specificities of caring for others-the localized minor acts that constitute this kind of care-as a fraught enterprise. Most powerfully, in the closing pages of the third novel of the sequence, Honeycomb (1917), Miriam is shown caring for her mother, convalescing by the sea, in the last desperate days before Mrs. Henderson's suicide: "It was not affection and sympathy. [Miriam's sister] Eve gave them; so easily, but they were not big enough. They did not come near enough. There was something crafty and worldly about them" (Richardson, 1979a, p. 486). In these scenes, Richardson combines a description of Miriam's acts of care with her reflections on the constitution of care as such.
For Miriam, care is defined against the more socially legible and easily abstractable concepts of affection and sympathy. Instead, care is both bigger than, and nearer than affection and sympathy: a contradiction (surely smaller and nearer are more congruent terms?) that encompasses the complexities of care.
Ultimately, through caring for her mother, Miriam comes to an understanding of care that reflects Laugier's sense, as quoted above, of "something concrete, embedded in the ordinary details of human life" that "ensures the maintenance, sustainability, and continuity of the human world." Miriam's reflections at the end of Honeycomb find some temporary solace in the fact that: There was something true and real somewhere. Mother knew it. She had learned how useless even the good kind people were and was alone, battling to get at something. If only she could get at it and rest in it. It was there, everywhere. It was here in the kitchen, in the steam rising from the hot beeftea. A moon-ray came through the barred window as she turned down the gas. It was clear in the eye of the moon-ray; a real thing. (Richardson, 1979a, p. 486) Miriam is mentally directed toward her mother, and is worried about her too: her mother dominates her thoughts, is her sole cause for concern. Care here is as much about caring-for and caring-about as it is an affective dispositionbeing careworn and full of care. But if affection and sympathy are remote abstractions, regulated through social convention, then Miriam realizes that to care for another constitutes grounding them in the phenomenal world, for it is a grounded experience of this world that constitutes the "true and real" thing that Miriam and her mother seek. The resulting, desperate act of care that Miriam enacts is attentive to small things-to the making of tea, to the fleeting ray of the moon glimpsed through a barred window. But, ultimately, if Miriam is shown to feel some responsibility for her mother's suicide-however much a reader might feel such a judgment to be unwarranted-this sense of responsibility derives from Miriam's awareness of her failure to care for her mother by maintaining Mrs. Henderson's groundedness within a world of temporal particulars and minor events.  (Winning, 2000, p. 96). In light of the present discussion, however, we might go further in suggesting that Richardson uses this parallel to draw a distinction between the care Miriam provides for her mother and the care she provides for Eleanor Dear.
Through Eleanor Dear, Miriam comes to reflect on the broader forces that concretize the role of caregiver: the power dynamics that trouble the act of care, the negative patterns care forms, and care's broader social uses and abuses. Eleanor Dear introduces Miriam to Mr. Taunton, a curate to whom it turns out Eleanor is engaged. By detailing Miriam's exchanges with Mr. Taunton about Eleanor Dear, Richardson shows Miriam's growing sense of the ways in which care work and all of its attendant affective labor is disproportionately loaded onto women. Richardson includes a pointed echo of Miriam's reflections on her mother's care as Mr. Taunton praises Eleanor's "exceptional power of inspiring affection-affection and the desire to give her the help she so sorely needs" (Richardson, 1979b, p. 279). Miriam already knows that care cannot find its basis in affection. Mr. Taunton's insistence that it suggests that the imperative to care for another is often tainted by pre-existing power dynamics.
Though Miriam "judicially" responds to Mr. Taunton's claim about Eleanor Dear's "exceptional power of inspiring affection" with a closed "Perhaps that is it," internally she reflects further: But you are very much mistaken in calling on me for help … "domestic work and the care of the aged and the sick"-very convenient-all the stuffy nerve-racking never-ending things to be dumped on to women-who are to be openly praised and secretly despised for their unselfishness-I've got twice the brain power you have. (Richardson, 1979b, p. 279) Regarding Mr. Taunton's responsibility to care for Eleanor Dear, Miriam soon concludes that he wants "to shelve it. Anyone would. But, being a man, you want to shelve it on to a woman. You don't care who hears the long tales as long as you don't…." (Richardson, 1979b, p. 282). Who cares and who does not have to care is a central theme of Pilgrimage. As Miriam comes to these realizations, we can reflect back through her trajectory as a character. The first three novels of Pilgrimage see Miriam working as a teacher and a governess, as well as looking after her mother. In this way, Miriam Henderson is a typical character for her time and place: a young, economically precarious late-Victorian woman, allotted as a default to caregiving roles both professionally and domestically. Pilgrimage is in many ways the narrative of Miriam's difficult liberation from this destiny.

| THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND CARE
If care has a central role in Pilgrimage's narrative, what relation does it have to our understanding of the stream of consciousness? Richardson's opposition to the term "stream of consciousness" is well-known: in a late interview, she called it "a muddle-headed phrase," given that consciousness was in fact, for her, "not a stream, it's a pool, a sea, an ocean." In this interview, Richardson goes on to elaborate that consciousness "has depth and greater depth and when you think you have reached its bottom there is nothing there, and when you give yourself up to one current you are suddenly possessed by another" (Brome, 1959, p. 29). But in resisting Sinclair's term, Richardson only offers an alternative set of metaphors rather than refuting the referent of Sinclair's own metaphor. The idea that Pilgrimage represents consciousness is not in doubt.
Charlotte Jones has recently made the important point that Sinclair's original attribution of the term "stream of consciousness" to Richardson's writing is too often abstracted and read out of the context of the wider essay, which is less about identifying or defining a single new literary technique than discussing the myriad attempts by writers to represent the nature of reality as it was experienced and understood in the early twentieth century. (Jones, 2018, p. 95) For Sinclair, the stream of consciousness names a literary content not a form, a theory of mind not a theory of the text or of representation itself. From here, questions might follow about what exactly defines or characterizes consciousness in Richardson's account. To return to some of the theoretical terms sketched out at the start, I would suggest that the consciousness presented in Pilgrimage is shown in a constant state of-to quote Laugier again-"maintaining persons and connections," in both "the private sphere and in the public sphere," with a consistent "sensitivity to the "details" that count" (Laugier, 2015, p. 224). This recent theorization of care functions well as a description of Pilgrimage's themes and contents. For the remainder of this article, however, I want to suggest that an event recalled in retrospect as she waits for a train to take her back to her Bloomsbury lodgings. Miriam's experience at the Wilsons' has evidently been negative. We are told how she "felt eagerly forward towards" the train: Heartsease was there. She would be able to breathe again. But not in the same way; unless she could forget. There were other eyes looking at it. They were inside her; not caring for the things she had cared for, dragging her away from them. (Richardson, 1979b, p. 109) Miriam then reflects that Alma "does not care for me, personally […] she does not care for anyone, personally. Neither of [the Wilsons] do." Miriam concludes that all she could do with Alma was to "admire her bravery and say you did not care. But it was not quite real; it was too excited and it was wrong, certainly wrong, to go down not really caring" (Richardson, 1979b, pp. 109-110). The experiences to which these comments refer are opaque: the reason for Alma's "bravery" can only be guessed at, and though Richardson subsequently narrates some of Miriam's experience at the Wilsons', the exact constitution of those things that Miriam cares for (and that the assembled guests do not) stays open to interpretation. All that remains concretely is a sense that Miriam synthesizes her experience in terms of care.
But even this synthesis has its ambiguities. Miriam's invocation of care in this passage slides between a sense of care as a practice, and care as a particular affect-something more akin to interest perhaps. However, Miriam's figuration of her time with the Wilsons-and the two definitions of care it raises-is further clarified later on in The Tunnel. One of the friends Miriam makes upon her move to London in this volume of Pilgrimage is Miss Szigmondy, who introduces her to certain artistic circles. But accompanying Miss Szigmondy on a visit to a sick friend, Miriam asks herself, "Why did Miss Szigmondy go to these things? She had not cared, and was not disappointed at not caring" (Richardson, 1979b, pp. 157-158). Such an attitude literalizes what Miriam perceives at the Wilsons': in undertaking an act of care-attending to an ill person-Miss Szigmondy does so without caring. For Miriam, this disconnect between outward action and the disposition toward that action is typical of the social world she immerses herself in, often with creeping dismay, in The Tunnel. As shown by her observations on Miss Szigmondy, care as a term grounds Miriam's sense of a disjunction between intention and action. Care's ambiguities are therefore constitutive of a deeper singularity in Miriam's ideal version of being in the world. In diagnosing a kind of radical inauthenticity in the interactions she experiences, Miriam measures peoples' attitudes against her own, which is defined by its attitude of care. Even the very act of internally asking "Why did Miss Szigmondy go to these things?" constitutes an act of caring that is out of keeping with the social contexts that Miriam finds herself in at this point in Pilgrimage. By this point in the sequence, we can surmise that, were Miriam in Miss Szigmondy's place, her act of care would be carried out with a corresponding attitude of caring.
A little further along in the novel sequence, Richardson exposes the same tension between, on the one hand, an assumed imperative to practice care for things, care for others, care for the world we are in, and on the other, a social world that seems to run on and valorize an attitude of not-caring. But Pilgrimage is the narrative of the development of Miriam Henderson's mind and person, and so as the novel sequence progresses, Richardson shows a maturer Miriam beginning to perceive this tension analytically rather than merely chafing against it. In Revolving Lights (1923), the seventh volume of Pilgrimage, Miriam is back with the Wilsons, this time on holiday. Here, following a passage where Miriam is stirred to jealousy about Hypo's attentions to the novelist Edna Prout, Richardson depicts Miriam's subsequent reflections: […] there was a lively intensity. A demand for a search; for a thought that would obliterate the smear on the blue and gold of the day. The thought had been there even at the moment of shock. The following tumult was the effort to find it. To get round behind the shock and slay it before it could slay.
To agree. That was the answer. Not to care. To show how much you care by deliberately not caring?
People show disapproval of their own actions by defending them. By deliberately not hiding or defending them, they show off a version of their actions. That they don't themselves accept. (Richardson, 1979c, p. 366) This passage, light on concrete detail, and moving sentence-by-sentence according to a constantly unfolding connective logic, is indicative of one of Pilgrimage's more abstract registers. Miriam sees a social scene where the "shock" of any internal revelation must immediately be slain rather than attested to, where cool consistency and casualness should be maintained at all costs. The opaque intransitivity of the verb "care"-"not to care" for what?-is the passage's gravitational centre. In this instance, care does not lack an object; everything is its object. Miriam's access to the conventions of the social world she encounters is oriented around care, a predisposition toward the world that is simultaneously acknowledged as it is outwardly denied by default. Care metastasizes and constantly reveals itself as a ground and condition: even to try too hard to show you do not care, it is implied, is a form of caring too much; a kind of passivity in the face of an underlying care is the best alternative that can be mustered by a social world to which Miriam is negatively inclined.
In all, to see Pilgrimage as representing the stream of consciousness is to name the capacity shown in the pas- Miriam made her way downstairs to the unsuspecting Michael" (Richardson, 1979d, p. 294).
The examples given here share a common thread: in each, Miriam is shown consistently to perceive her authentic and fundamental affective predisposition to be one of care. Richardson brings this perception into relief both by having Miriam placed into situations where she performs or encounters acts of care, and by having her witnessing and then reflecting on one of care's opposites, a social world characterized by a disturbing absence of care, both in the sense that this absence constitutes a lack of devotedness and caring, and a lack of carewornness or anxiety. In Clear Horizon, Miriam has learned to subvert the latter opposition by performing a lack of caring, maintaining this performance with the care that is her natural and authentic disposition, and so completing her perfect circle of care as she looks after others. Miriam's consciousness is characterized in its own broad definition by care, by carefulness, and by caring, whether in its fundamental underpinnings or in its outward expression. Care encompasses for Richardson a wide range of the affects and actions that are filtered through Miriam Henderson's consciousness: sometimes adjacent, sometimes analogous, sometimes superimposed. To return to Puig de la Bellacasa's terms, these affects and actions do not always "sit together without tensions and contradictions," but certainly provide "ambivalent terrains" that are "held together and sometimes challenge each other" (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 5). To understand what might be called the stream of consciousness in Pilgrimage, then, we could do worse than care.

| CONCLUSION: MODERNIST CONCERNS
The stream of consciousness is, to this day, perhaps the signature critical term used to describe the modernist novel.
At a more local scale, the stream of consciousness has also proven to be a concept big enough to encompass the literary achievement of the text it was first brought into the literary domain to describe-Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. However, Richardson's place within the wider modernist landscape also exposes a tension within the discourse on the literary representation of the stream of consciousness. In Richardson's own time, the features of her writing that led it to be considered in terms of the stream of consciousness also opened up a space for critique by her modernist contemporaries. If, for example, the notion of a stream of consciousness describes Pilgrimage's capacity for a detailed description and attention to the ordinary world, then it also allows for Virginia Woolf's claim that "sensations, impressions, ideas, and emotions glance off" Miriam Henderson, and do so "unrelated and unquestioned, without shedding quite as much light as we had hoped into the hidden depths" (Woolf, 1965, p. 122). Similarly, if the stream of consciousness also names a kind of writing that allows for intense focalization and a faithful depiction of interiority, then, at an extreme, charges of morbid solipsism might follow. D. H. Lawrence's condemnation of Richardson's novels (as well as those by James Joyce and Marcel Proust) is typical in this respect, with its complaints about "self-consciousness picked into such fine bits that the bits are most of them invisible, and you have to go by smell," and narratives preoccupied with characters "so absorbedly concerned with themselves and what they feel and don't feel, and how they react to every mortal trouser-button" (Lawrence, 1985, p. 152).
Though different in substance and tone, both Woolf's and Lawrence's judgments share the same critical maneuver, jumping from a summation and attempted categorization of Richardson's aesthetic to the question of its value.
We might take Woolf and Lawrence, then, to be prototypical not just of subsequent assessments of Richardson's work, but of such assessments of the modernist novel in general. Questions of categorization and value often end up defining discussion of the stream of consciousness in relation to the modernist novel. The stream of consciousness is often seen as evidence of the modernist novel's innovations. But once recognized, such evidence is rarely conveyed in value-neutral terms. The stream of consciousness can confer critical value on a novel because of its relation to modernism: a novel is either stream of consciousness ergo modernist ergo good, or stream of consciousness ergo modernist ergo bad. Though Lawrence's reception history took a different path, Woolf's as much as Richardson's novels have routinely been read along such lines in the past hundred years. The problem with this routine process of evaluation is that it leaves the stream of consciousness as a vanishing mediator between an individual text and a broader conception of modernism as such. Therefore, perhaps intermediary terms are needed in critical writing on narrative representations of the stream of consciousness in order to hold off the leap to literary-critical and literaryhistorical abstraction.
Care is just such a term for Richardson's work. Care is clearly a prominent thematic concern in Pilgrimage, and is equally prominent as one of the novel sequence's recurring terms of its own self-conception. Care draws focus onto Richardson's writing as primarily attuned to details that are relational and situated rather than isolated or arbitrary.
Care can help us understand that dual and interrelated portrayal of affect and action in Richardson's representation of a stream of consciousness. Moreover, through attention to care, Miriam Henderson's consciousness is revealed to be expressive of a personal, social, and historical context. Perhaps, then, one of the benefits of introducing a concept like care into a discussion of Richardson's work is that it narrows and clarifies the ends to which the representation of the stream of consciousness are directed, and highlights the particular literary affordances that result.