Liberated women in American fiction of the 1920s.
Item
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Title
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Liberated women in American fiction of the 1920s.
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Identifier
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AAI9820588
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identifier
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9820588
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Creator
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Walden, Mirell L.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Morris Dickstein
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Date
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1998
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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 | Literature, Modern
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Abstract
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The revolution in manners and morals that took place in America during the Twenties profoundly changed women's lives. Large scale redefinitions of women's social and sexual roles challenged Victorian ideas about female identity, allowing women to be regarded in new sexual lights. At the same time the breakdown of an outmoded morality affected and shaped novelistic content, encouraging Twenties writers to incorporate women's liberated sexual behavior into their novels.;This dissertation examines Twenties novels in their historical and cultural contexts, highlighting how changing social conditions and sexual roles affected literary themes. At the same time, the authors gender is designated as an important variable. In the Twenties, female authors Ellen Glasgow in They Stooped to Folly Edith Wharton in "The Old Maid," and Nella Larsen in Passing raised disturbing issues about the emerging and competing standards surrounding female sexuality. Male authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises and Theodore Dreiser in An American Tragedy appropriated different novelistic territory, and were more intent on examining and commenting on the flapper's image.;This dissertation also accounts for differing male and female authors' reactions to women's changing sexual practices. It does so by contrasting and analyzing the punitive treatment of sexually active female characters in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms, Dreiser's An American Tragedy, to the more forgiving treatment of female sexuality in Cather's My Antonia, A Lost Lady, Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground and They Stooped to Folly, and Edith Wharton's "The Old Maid." These authors' responses to sexually liberated female characters are viewed as a reaction to the changing Twenties' social and moral climate, and their dramatically differing perspectives underline the influence of authorial gender on the perception of female sexuality.
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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.
