The world wars and the female gaze.
Item
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Title
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The world wars and the female gaze.
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Identifier
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AAI9417462
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identifier
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9417462
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Creator
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Gallagher, Jean.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Jane Marcus
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Date
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1994
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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, English | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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My project is to read texts produced in the first half of the twentieth century by five American women who have made the processes and contradictions of seeing central to their representations of the intersecting discourses of war and gender in the Modernist period.;Part One, "The Great War and the Female Observer," examines two instances of Great War propaganda, both written by American women living in France in 1915, both invested in inscribing the female gaze as the basis for writerly authority in an "eyewitness" narrative. Chapter 1, concerned with Edith Wharton's Fighting France, shows how the enlistment of the female gaze involves women within a wartime specular economy which tightly both regulates their positions as subjects and objects of militaristic sight and allows for a potential disruption of that economy. Chapter 2 is concerned with how the female civilian narrator of Mildred Aldrich's A Hilltop on the Marne is transformed into a militarized observer during the Great War and with how the gaze and body of the female observer is a crucial site both for participation in and resistance to militaristic discourses.;Part Two, "Regarding Fascism," turns to texts written just before or during the Second World War. I am interested in examining how these texts work as an antifascist documents, not only in their subject matter but also in their inscriptions of what is and is not visible. Chapter 3 looks at how Martha Gellhorn's 1940 novel A Stricken Field provides a range of gendered seeing positions within, and in opposition to, the visual ideologies of fascism. Chapter 4 reads Lee Miller's war correspondence and photography for Vogue magazine in order to explore how she constructed herself and her predominantly female American audience as antifascist observers of war through working both with and against some of the conventions of surrealist and fashion photography. Chapter 5 examines H.D.'s textual exploration of how being a female civilian under the Blitz invokes a kind of vision quite different from what is normally construed as seeing in the other texts I have been examining: hallucination, mystic or "visionary" experience, or "visual disturbance.".
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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.
