This dissertation argues that authors use the specific aspects of the short story genre to enact formal and social innovations. As short story theory has developed, the problem of definition has ...continued to pervade it, creating what Susan Lohafer calls an “aristocracy of genres” wherein the novel reigns supreme. However, as Wai Chee Dimmock notes, genres only exist in the “plural.” To move away from this aristocracy but retain the usefulness of a comparative study, I ask what the short form can do. My dissertation examines the ways in which authors treat the formal features of the short story to manipulate reader expectations and narrative progression, and I draw on novelistic examples which highlight generic differences. The short form has historically been guided by a sense of formal rigidity, exemplified by writers like O. Henry, who enjoyed mass popularity for formulaic plotlines and trick endings. Aspects such as episodic storylines, constricted settings, and stereotyped characterization have come to define the form, even as scholars often view these formal features as liabilities. However, other authors writing at the same time as O. Henry undermined the expectation of formulaic or episodic elements; they incorporated ambiguity and modernist narrative styles or tested the limits of the constriction that characterized the short form. In this project, I turn to American authors, Henry James, Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin, all of whom enacted formal manipulations of the novel and the short story at the turn of the twentieth century. James' “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903), Wharton's “The Muse's Tragedy” (1899), and Chopin's “At the 'Cadian Ball” (1892) and its sequel “The Storm” (1898) all retain the constricted focus of a single marriage plot, but each author uses it to craft a multiplicity of progressions, endings, or identities. James experiments with how a refusal of action can become the only action in the tale; Wharton uses multiple, unreliable narrations to simultaneously create a sense of bounded-ness and to defy narrative closure; and Chopin manipulates the expectations of a sequel by undoing the work of the preceding story and concluding ambiguously. Examining these authors' use of the short story not only reveals how the genre can be used for itself, but also exemplifies its malleability.
This dissertation defines and partially delimits literary Darwinism and adaptationist criticism, relatively new critical paradigms that combine science and art to explore the multiple ways that story ...creation and consumption help us adapt to modern social environments. In Chapter II studies from cognitive psychology are used to analyze various autobiographical narratives, poems, novels, stories, and essays by Latina/o authors Tomás Rivera, Cherríe Moraga, Américo Paredes, and Gloria Anzaldúa, to show how these narratives help establish existence, persona, agency and status for the author, and how these functions can be extended to members of the larger culture represented by that author. In Chapter III studies from anthropology and biology are used to analyze the cultural functions of journey and origin myths, to look at how these stories can either establish claims to property or act as surrogates for lost property for people in exile, expatriates, emigrants, immigrants, subjects of colonization, or otherwise de-territorialized people. The developed analytical hypotheses are subsequently applied to Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony, to demonstrate specific critical implications of the new theoretical set. In Chapter IV studies from evolutionary psychology are applied to works by Edith Wharton and John Steinbeck, to show how elements of the new paradigm can open up established texts and reveal new facets of those works. The project ends with a summary and response to critiques of the new paradigm, and discussion of further implications.
This thesis represents a study of Kate Chopin's groundbreaking novel, The Awakening. Further, it applies Nietzsche's principles of Dionysiac and Apollonian impulses to the literary analysis of the ...novel. I argue that the protagonist of the novel, Edna Pontellier, embarks on a quest to determine how she may live an authentic life—that is, a life whereby she is true to her self above all others. Ultimately, her search for self is overwhelmed by the imbalance of the Apollonian and Dionysiac impulses against which she struggles. Because Edna cannot successfully mediate this struggle, she reaches the conclusion that she may only attain a truth to her self if she finds that truth in death.
In the Nineteenth Century, needlework, and embroidery in particular, became a signifier of feminine identity. Needlework was such a significant part of women's lives and so integral to the ...construction of femininity in nineteenth-century America that both pictoral and narrative art demonstrate numerous representations of women embroidering. The sheer volume of these representations in the Nineteenth Century suggests that the practice of embroidery provides a way of speaking for women—a representation of the voice of subjectivity silenced by patriarchal ideology. Because needlework serves as a signifier of ideal femininity, it provides uniquely fruitful and previously unexplored opportunities for investigating how women negotiated with the constraints of ideal femininity, especially as represented in fiction. Indeed, needlework in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Mary Wilkins Freeman's "A New England Nun," and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence reveals a character at odds with patriarchal ideology. In each of these three texts, the representation of the embroidering woman—Hester Prynne, Louisa Ellis, and May Welland—not only reveals the "falseness" of the gender ideology constructed around her but also suggests that the practice of embroidery in fiction serves to critique that ideology, opening a space of possibility in which women can negotiate their participation in or refusal of the ideological constraints of gender.
If we accept Emerson's understanding of his age as one which "conceived of the camera as a powerful symbol for his age's scrutiny of character" (in Meehan 13), the question remains: what did this ...scrutiny imply for the conception, perception, and creation of the American Author? Upon the introduction of the photographic medium, prominent citizens were displayed, most unambiguously in Matthew Brady's Gallery of Illustrious Americans, and their frozen images stood as emblems of what the nation was to become. In examining the symbolic relationship between author and image, and its affect on their literary productions, this study examines the ways in which each author confronted the central symbol in the nineteenth and early twentieth century American mass-market - the photographic frontispiece. Both Hawthorne and James rejected the photographic form as their own symbol of the American Author - in its stead, the two literary figures insisted on implementing the symbol of shadows. The two authors' subject and author positions were based, therefore, on self-proclaimed authoritative, voice-positions based on shadows of a narrative past. This perspective stands contrary to Douglass's and Wharton's strategic use of the medium. Both embody visual 'otherness' in the American landscape of Representative Men, and it is through their play with "Types" prevalent in publications and other literary productions that they were able to disrupt their own fixedness, offering instead a disruption of images and a fluid yet firm image of themselves as the nation's authority. By embodying 'the other', the authors were able to reflect or reveal what lay behind the mirage of a discernible American portrait. Hence, both figures managed to play with not only the image that was conveyed in their own portraits, each author also implemented the metaphors of photography in their writings in order to disrupt these public images of themselves, thereby allowing each to enter into the gallery of representative American Authors.
Autobiography is a statement of reconstruction of self. In his/her autobiographical narrative, the writer interprets the memory traces already transformed by personal expectations, prejudices and ...needs, and fictionalizes the past in the context of socio-cultural factors, linguistic tools and literary traditions. Autobiography in the conventional sense is based on the legitimate story of an autonomous, rational, and independent man. When the autobiographical text and the writer’s actual experiences are questioned, a paradox emerges that also proves the originality of woman’s story. The paradox is that of choosing between the account of writer’s life-story mirrored in the text or the shared experiences of community that has passed through similar stages. The female writer, in an effort to represent the voice of woman which resists the feminine roles imposed by the patriarchal society, expresses her specific consciousness and approaches to life. The gender-based distinction observed in autobiographical writings results from the environmental conditions and conflicting social dynamics that modify the course of psychological development in boys and girls. Girls tend to continue the relational patterns they have internalized in their early formative years and define themselves as part of their lifelong relationships, whereas boys make efforts to form an independent identity determined by their strong ego boundaries.In this study, the autobiographies of two women writers are selected: Halide Edib Adivar’s Memoirs of Halide Edib and Edith Wharton’s A Backward Glance. Remarkable parallels between their lives and the significant roles they take in the social change and cultural transformation of their country make them worthy of comparison. To explain the writers’ stages of individualization and to display how they describe their distinctive selves, textual identities are retrospectively analyzed and broken into parts, and their past experiences and relationships are examined within the framework of familial, social, cultural and psychological factors, and these fragmented parts are arranged into a new whole to reinterpret and realize the discovery of the selves. Released from the shadow of male writers, Halide Edib who describes her journey of self-discovery in all its aspects, and positions herself as a distinctive “subject” taking full responsibility of her words and life Edith Wharton on the other hand underlines the career path of an art laborer in her autobiography, leaving almost invisible footprints as if to preserve the silence identified with woman, and remains merely an “object” of her work and fails to surpass the traditional norms in order to be accepted by the society as a writer.
Edith Wharton's 1905 novel The House of Mirth documents a twenty-nine-year-old debutante's disinheritance-from money, family, power, love, and social position. On a more profound level, however, the ...novel pursues the opposite end. Although Lily Bart is plainly vulnerable to the whims of what Charlotte Perkins Gilman called the "sexuo-economic relation," she is nonetheless dramatically resistant to the attritional ravages of racial disintegration. This paper argues that race in The House of Mirth is an essentialist-if deeply problematic-answer to the cultural slippages of class and gender. By locating the novel within the diverse range of cultural phenomena that contributed to its racialized logic, this essay connects Wharton's fears of class mobility, mass production, immigration, and "race suicide" to the taxidermic aesthetic of racialized stasis. Part of a rare and endangered species, Lily becomes Wharton's decadent specimen of racial permanence.
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The scene of the tableaux vivants begins with the male gaze, but it ends with the gaze of one who is not usually in the privileged position of spectator. While the other women appear on stage, Gerty ...Farish takes her seat in the audience so as not to "miss seeing it all -- and especially Lily herself" (193). Gerty keeps a photograph of Lily in her room and is "content to look through the window at the banquet spread for her friends" (216); she is the novel's female spectator, and Lily is her favorite spectacle. But Gerty also aligns herself with Selden's male gaze: "`Wasn't she too beautiful, Lawrence Selden? Don't you like her best in that simple dress? It makes her look like the real Lily -- the Lily I know.' He met Gerty Farish's brimming gaze. `The Lily we know,' he corrected" (197). Selden's vision of Lily coincides with Gerty's: he has seen the "real Lily Bart." While the emphasized "we" conjoins Gerty and Selden in their spectatorship of Lily, this is only one of several erotic triangles in the novel. Equally important is the one comprised of Lily, Selden, and Rosedale. Although this triangle obviously links Lily to her two principal suitors, this linkage through desire should not belie the processes of identification. While Selden and Gerty claim to see and know the "real Lily Bart," the gaze of the Jewish parvenu, Simon Rosedale -- who, like Gerty, subverts the traditional hierarchies of spectatorship -- suggests a more accurate knowledge of Lily and her "realness." Although it is not without irony, this description of Gerty hints at her lack of femininity through references to her plainness, her unstylish attire, and the absence of curves. Gerty lacks the mystery that characterizes Lily: her straight lips are not "haunting" and her clothes do not serve as disguise or enhancement. Lily expresses her ambivalence toward Gerty as she wavers between pity and impatience. Although Gerty's vocation is social work, Lily associates her with the dreary life of the "workaday" lower class -- the women Gerty associates with only through her philanthropy. Lily appears to fault Gerty for her poverty, for being "fatally poor and dingy," but this description foreshadows the identification between the two women; if any character turns out to be "fatally poor," it is Lily, whose despair at her own destitution at the end of the novel leads to her death, possibly by her own hand. Gerty, however, acquiesces to her "dinginess" by wearing clothes of "useful" colors and "subdued lines" (134). Although Lily is the one supposedly constrained by femininity, repeatedly Gerty is described as passively "subdued" (216). In fact Lily faults Gerry not for her poverty, but for her failure to resist her lot by choosing to perform another identity. Her friend's unfeminine and unfashionable appearance provokes Lily's reflections on her own ability to bring her femininity into being: "In the consciousness of her own power to look and to be so exactly what the occasion required, she almost felt that other girls were plain and inferior from choice" (134). Lily may declare that she is not free and Selden may see her as chained, but she herself asserts her power: "a power to look and to be." Lily, too, has a choice; her femininity can be interpreted as the source both of her power and her enslavement. How, then, do we reconcile the typical view of the New Woman, who is free to make her own choices, with this view of Lily's self-fashioned femininity?
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The Love That Dare Not Bark Its Name Brottman, Mikita
The Chronicle of Higher Education,
09/2014, Volume:
61, Issue:
2
Journal Article, Trade Publication Article
The author notes that at the age of 37, she entered into a relationship with a willful and charismatic creature named Grisby who became, for the eight-and-a-half years of his life, the fixed point of ...her turning world.
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