Travelers in residence: Women writing New York at mid -century.
Item
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Title
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Travelers in residence: Women writing New York at mid -century.
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Identifier
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AAI3159243
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identifier
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3159243
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Creator
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Peters, Ann M.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Rachel M. Brownstein
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation considers the fiction of early and mid-century New York women writers and explores the connection between genre (the satirical novel) and space (New York skyscrapers, apartments, streets, and most particularly, the Manhattan hotel). Arguing that the spatial realities of early 20th century New York inform the topography of novels, I look at how a city filled with hotels and skyscrapers and mapped as a grid might contribute to a different kind of novel than London, a more labyrinthine landscape of low-slung houses, bed-sits and Bloomsbury parks. The project concentrates on the New York hotel, a space of growing popularity, both as residence and as meeting place, for many women moving to the city in the early twentieth-century. I consider the socio-economic significance of this space for women, and I also read it as symbolic of the literary move that New York women writers---in particular, Edith Wharton, Dawn Powell, and Mary McCarthy---were making. Theirs was a move away from sensibility to satire, away from the writing of heroines to the writing of crowds, away from a "private" novel to a more public one. In privileging subsidiary characters over identification with a central hero or heroine and in writing episodic scenes rather than the Woolfian ramble, these writers were turning their backs not just on the traditional heroine-centered plot but also on the psychological interiority found in the novels of sensibility written by women novelists across the Atlantic. In the case of Edith Wharton, she was turning her back on the "house of fiction" favored by Henry James. Wharton, Powell, and McCarthy aimed instead to write a room of full of acquaintances: a hotel lobby, a swing door leading out unto the street. Included in this dissertation is also an analysis of the decline of hotel life in the early sixties when so many hotels were destroyed to make way for office buildings and apartment projects and when so many women (and men) were leaving the city for the suburbs. I conclude with a discussion of a other writers from the fifties and sixties---Isabel Bolton, Jean Stafford, and Hortense Calisher---to argue that their fiction, more akin to Henry James's or Virginia Woolf's, suggests a move from satire back to sensibility.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
