“A Grievous Necessity”: the Subject of Marriage in Transatlantic Modern Women’S Novels: Woolf, Rhys, Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

“A Grievous Necessity”: the Subject of Marriage in Transatlantic Modern Women’S Novels: Woolf, Rhys, Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date:___________________ I, _________________________________________________________, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in: It is entitled: This work and its defense approved by: Chair: _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ “A GRIEVOUS NECESSITY”: THE SUBJECT OF MARRIAGE IN TRANSATLANTIC MODERN WOMEN’S NOVELS: WOOLF, RHYS, FAUSET, LARSEN, AND HURSTON A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.) in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences 2004 by Kristin Kommers Czarnecki B.A., University of Notre Dame 1991 M.A., Northwestern University 1997 Committee Chair: Arlene Elder ABSTRACT “A GRIEVOUS NECESSITY”: THE SUBJECT OF MARRIAGE IN TRANSATLANTIC MODERN WOMEN’S NOVELS: WOOLF, RHYS, FAUSET, LARSEN, AND HURSTON My dissertation analyzes modern women’s novels that interrogate the role of marriage in the construction of female identity. Mapping the character of Clarissa in The Voyage Out (1915), “Mrs. Dalloway’s Party” (1923), and primarily Mrs. Dalloway (1925), I highlight Woolf’s conviction that negotiating modernity requires an exploratory yet protected consciousness for married women. Rhys’s early novels, Quartet (1929), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), portray women excluded from the rite of marriage in British society. Unable to counter oppressive Victorian mores, her heroines invert the modernist impulse to “make it new” and face immutability instead, contrasting with the enforced multiplicity of identity endured by women of color in Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929) and Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Hurston’s last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), indicts American race and gender relations in the story of a white woman’s modification of her identity within an abusive marriage. In each novel, marital crises reflect the experience of becoming “modern,” of attaining female selfhood in sexually, socially, and racially complicated milieus. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first like to thank Alison Rieke and Amy Elder for their unfailing support of my work. Their scholarly expertise, their warmth and friendship, and above all their deep love of literature continue to inspire me. I am also indebted to Maggy Lindgren, Wayne Hall, and Marty Wechselblatt, whose courses, conversation, and kindness guided me throughout my studies at the University of Cincinnati. Very special thanks goes to Drew Shannon for countless hours spent listening to my ideas and assuaging my angst. Special thanks also to Traci Curl for her friendship and, due to her own Ph.D., her understanding of the challenges of doctoral work. I would like to express my gratitude to my parents, Donald and Nancy Kommers, for their support in this and all of my endeavors. Most of all, I wish to thank my husband Paul for his love, encouragement, and sacrifices over the past five years. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ………………………………………………………………………2 Chapter One – Clarissa Dalloway’s Modern Marriage ………………………….17 Chapter Two – “Cut to an Echo”: Jean Rhys’s Immutable Modernity ………….65 Chapter Three – Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, and the Multiplicity of Modern Identity ………………………………………………113 Chapter Four – Modified Female Identity in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee …………………………………………………..173 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………….215 Works Cited ……………………………………………………………………222 2 Introduction In October 1928, Virginia Woolf was preparing the Cambridge lectures on women and fiction that would become the text of A Room of One’s Own the following year. In October 1928, Zora Neale Hurston apprenticed herself to a voodoo priestess in New Orleans as part of her research on African-American folklore. On the surface, two more dissimilar women and experiences could hardly be found, yet Virginia Woolf and Zora Neale Hurston do warrant comparison. Both were vanguards of their literary coteries. Both sought to articulate human experience through literary innovation, creating complex female characters and narratives. Both located similar expressions of intense emotion. In her fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), for instance, Woolf writes that war veteran Septimus Warren Smith is overcome after hearing his wife utter the word “time.” In his mind, “The word ‘time’ split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time. He sang” (Mrs. Dalloway 78). In Hurston’s short story “The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933), Joe May is devastated to find his wife with another man. “The great belt on the wheel of Time slipped and eternity stood still,” Hurston writes. “The shapeless enemies of humanity that live in the hours of Time had waylaid Joe. He was assaulted in his weakness. Like Samson awakening after his haircut. So he just opened his mouth and laughed” (Hurston Reader 213-14). Woolf and Hurston’s choice of the same metaphor to convey inner conflict, with characters crying out when faced with time’s magnitude and brutality, is one of many parallels between Anglo and African-American modern women’s literature. My dissertation, “A Grievous Necessity”: The Subject of Marriage in Transatlantic Modern Women’s Novels, examines works by Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Jessie 3 Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston as they explore the construction of women’s identity in marriage throughout their novels and stories. In many ways emancipated in their own lives, they nevertheless focus in their narratives upon women’s entrapment in marriage. The juxtaposition of literary innovation with repressive social tradition is a hallmark of transnational women’s modernism and the means by which they dissect matrimony, the “grievous necessity,” the foremost requirement of patriarchal discourse. My title comes from Helga Crane’s opinion, in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), of the social importance of marriage for women. The writers I explore, of English, Anglo-Caribbean, African-American, and Danish-West Indian heritage, bridge cultural, racial, and international divides in locating marriage as a crucial site of modernist efforts at establishing women’s subjectivity. Each narrative underscores the discrete nature of consciousness. Together they highlight the crosscurrents among culturally constructed gender roles and domestic tropes, demonstrating, in Paul Gilroy’s words, that “the distinctiveness of the modern self might reside in its being a necessarily fractured or compound entity” (46). Just as Jennifer De Vere Brody “mines the intersection of the supposedly distinct fields of Victorian studies and African American studies” in her book, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (1998 6), my thesis knits together the academically distinct yet intriguingly corresponding realms of Anglo and African-American modernism.1 The term 1 Scholars note the divisions between Anglo and ethnic/non-Western literary studies and acknowledge that the latter generally receives short shrift. Houston A. Baker, Jr., believes the Harlem Renaissance “has frequently [and erroneously] been faulted for its ‘failure’ to produce vital, original, effective, or ‘modern’ art in the manner, presumably, of British, Anglo-American, and Irish creative endeavors” (xiii). Baker states that African-American writers of the time produced work just as innovative as that of Joyce, Eliot, or Pound, and establishes, in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), a definition of modernism particular to African-American writers. Bonnie Kime Scott’s anthology, The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), expands upon traditional concepts of modernist writing by including writers of color, thus challenging ‘language-centered interpretations of modernism favored in the canonization process” (5). Her thesis relates to Fauset, whose novels are stylistically traditional but thematically progressive. In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), Paul Gilroy laments 4 modernism denotes a period of artistic innovation and cultural experience from roughly 1910 to 1950. Stream-of-consciousness, nonlinear storytelling, and explorations of human psychology are characteristic of literary modernism, spurred by seismic shifts in society effected by the end of Victorianism, World War I, and the Great Migration of African-Americans moving from rural to urban areas. Certain women modernists, such as Woolf and Hurston, have garnered significant scholarship, while others have only begun to receive the recognition they deserve, particularly women of color like Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, whose male Harlem Renaissance counterparts have traditionally received much greater acclaim.2 Still other women modernists, including colonial British-West Indian writer Jean Rhys, are not easily categorized and often remain on the margins of academia.3 Studying Anglo and African-American women writers together establishes a more comprehensive modernism, illuminating the unity between seemingly disparate
Recommended publications
  • 9781474451062 - Chapter 1.Pdf
    Produced by Irving Thalberg 66311_Salzberg.indd311_Salzberg.indd i 221/04/201/04/20 66:34:34 PPMM 66311_Salzberg.indd311_Salzberg.indd iiii 221/04/201/04/20 66:34:34 PPMM Produced by Irving Thalberg Theory of Studio-Era Filmmaking Ana Salzberg 66311_Salzberg.indd311_Salzberg.indd iiiiii 221/04/201/04/20 66:34:34 PPMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Ana Salzberg, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Monotype Ehrhardt by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5104 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5106 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5107 9 (epub) The right of Ana Salzberg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 66311_Salzberg.indd311_Salzberg.indd iivv 221/04/201/04/20 66:34:34 PPMM Contents Acknowledgments vi 1 Opening Credits 1 2 Oblique Casting and Early MGM 25 3 One Great Scene: Thalberg’s Silent Spectacles 48 4 Entertainment Value and Sound Cinema
    [Show full text]
  • Sight & Sound Films of 2007
    Sight & Sound Films of 2007 Each year we ask a selection of our contributors - reviewers and critics from around the world - for their five films of the year. It's a very loosely policed subjective selection, based on films the writer has seen and enjoyed that year, and we don't deny them the choice of films that haven't yet reached the UK. And we don't give them much time to ponder, either - just about a week. So below you'll find the familiar and the obscure, the new and the old. From this we put together the top ten you see here. What distinguishes this particular list is that it's been drawn up from one of the best years for all-round quality I can remember. 2007 has seen some extraordinary films. So all of the films in the ten are must-sees and so are many more. Enjoy. - Nick James, Editor. 1 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu) 2 Inland Empire (David Lynch) 3 Zodiac (David Fincher) = 4 I’m Not There (Todd Haynes) The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck) 6 Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas) = 7 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik) Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) No Country for Old Men (Ethan and Joel Coen) Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg) 1 Table of Contents – alphabetical by critic Gilbert Adair (Critic and author, UK)............................................................................................4 Kaleem Aftab (Critic, The Independent, UK)...............................................................................4 Geoff Andrew (Critic
    [Show full text]
  • Virginia Woolf's Carlylean Pilgrimages
    Revisiting a Great Man’s House: Virginia Woolf’s Carlylean Pilgrimages MARIE LANIEL LTHOU G H MANY EARLY TWENTIETH -CENTURY WRITERS TEND TO disparage Thomas Carlyle’s moral earnestness, emphatic A hero-worship, and stern authoritarianism, most of them also feel strangely compelled to express ambivalent feelings of involuntary allegiance towards the Victorian sage. Enveloped in spiritual turmoil, Bertrand Russell found comfort by reading Carlyle’s account of his own religious crisis in Sartor Resartus (1833– 34) and felt obliged to acknowledge that he was oddly “moved by rhetoric which [he] could not accept. Carlyle’s ‘Everlasting No’ and ‘Everlasting Yea’ seemed to me very splendid, in spite of my thinking that at bottom they were nonsense” (27). Such remarks help to explain Carlyle’s curiously cloaked influence in the novels of the period, ranging from E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) to D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920). In these circumstances, it was perhaps inevitable that James Joyce should recognize the advent of Carlylean rhetoric as a momentous stage in the development of English prose writing by including a true-to-life, if slightly irreverent, impersonation of the Victorian prophet in the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter in Ulysses (1922). Of all modernist writers, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was perhaps the most reluctant to acknowledge any debt towards Carlyle. Throughout her life she was impervious to his egotistical rhetoric and critical of his authoritarian streak. In a letter to Margaret Llewelyn-Davies (23 January 1916), Woolf derides his oracular tone and dismisses his gloomy insights as the ravings of a misguided prophet: “I’ve been reading Carlyle’s Past and Present, and wondering whether all his rant has made a scrap CSA 24 2008 118 CARLYLE STUDIE S ANNUAL of difference practically” (Letters 2: 76).
    [Show full text]
  • Oblivion's Edge Jeremy Strandberg
    Lawrence University Lux Lawrence University Honors Projects 5-12-1998 Oblivion's Edge Jeremy Strandberg Follow this and additional works at: https://lux.lawrence.edu/luhp Part of the Fiction Commons, and the Liberal Studies Commons © Copyright is owned by the author of this document. Recommended Citation Strandberg, Jeremy, "Oblivion's Edge" (1998). Lawrence University Honors Projects. 53. https://lux.lawrence.edu/luhp/53 This Honors Project is brought to you for free and open access by Lux. It has been accepted for inclusion in Lawrence University Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of Lux. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ivion's Jeremy Strandberg Submitted for Honors in Independent Study 5/12/98 Prof. Candice Bradley, Advisor The year is 2042 ... ( Tech no Io g y i s a part of us ... High tech is stylish and chic. Computers have crept into every aspect of life, and billions of users are jacked brain frrst into the internet. Biosculpting can make people look any way they desire. Cybernetic implants-eyes, ears, and prosthetic limbs-break the limits of the human form. Biotechnology feeds billions while saving the lives of millions more. The train from New York to Miami takes under three hours, and there's a bustling tourist trade on Luna. The Veil has thinned ... Supernatural and paranormal phenomena are on the rise. There has been a resurgence of spirituality and superstition. Meditation is taught in grade school Psychic powers are accepted as fact, and most people have encountered a ghost or spirit at least once. Alchemists and fringe scientists are kept on salary by corporations.
    [Show full text]
  • Papéis Normativos E Práticas Sociais
    Agnes Ayres (1898-194): Rodolfo Valentino e Agnes Ayres em “The Sheik” (1921) The Donovan Affair (1929) The Affairs of Anatol (1921) The Rubaiyat of a Scotch Highball Broken Hearted (1929) Cappy Ricks (1921) (1918) Bye, Bye, Buddy (1929) Too Much Speed (1921) Their Godson (1918) Into the Night (1928) The Love Special (1921) Sweets of the Sour (1918) The Lady of Victories (1928) Forbidden Fruit (1921) Coals for the Fire (1918) Eve's Love Letters (1927) The Furnace (1920) Their Anniversary Feast (1918) The Son of the Sheik (1926) Held by the Enemy (1920) A Four Cornered Triangle (1918) Morals for Men (1925) Go and Get It (1920) Seeking an Oversoul (1918) The Awful Truth (1925) The Inner Voice (1920) A Little Ouija Work (1918) Her Market Value (1925) A Modern Salome (1920) The Purple Dress (1918) Tomorrow's Love (1925) The Ghost of a Chance (1919) His Wife's Hero (1917) Worldly Goods (1924) Sacred Silence (1919) His Wife Got All the Credit (1917) The Story Without a Name (1924) The Gamblers (1919) He Had to Camouflage (1917) Detained (1924) In Honor's Web (1919) Paging Page Two (1917) The Guilty One (1924) The Buried Treasure (1919) A Family Flivver (1917) Bluff (1924) The Guardian of the Accolade (1919) The Renaissance at Charleroi (1917) When a Girl Loves (1924) A Stitch in Time (1919) The Bottom of the Well (1917) Don't Call It Love (1923) Shocks of Doom (1919) The Furnished Room (1917) The Ten Commandments (1923) The Girl Problem (1919) The Defeat of the City (1917) The Marriage Maker (1923) Transients in Arcadia (1918) Richard the Brazen (1917) Racing Hearts (1923) A Bird of Bagdad (1918) The Dazzling Miss Davison (1917) The Heart Raider (1923) Springtime à la Carte (1918) The Mirror (1917) A Daughter of Luxury (1922) Mammon and the Archer (1918) Hedda Gabler (1917) Clarence (1922) One Thousand Dollars (1918) The Debt (1917) Borderland (1922) The Girl and the Graft (1918) Mrs.
    [Show full text]
  • The Faded Stardom of Norma Shearer Lies Lanckman in July
    CORE © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyeditMetadata, version of citation a chapter and published similar papers in at core.ac.uk Provided by University of Hertfordshire Research Archive Lasting Screen Stars: Images that Fade and Personas that Endure. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40733-7_6 ‘What Price Widowhood?’: The Faded Stardom of Norma Shearer Lies Lanckman In July 1934, Photoplay magazine featured an article entitled ‘The Real First Lady of Film’, introducing the piece as follows: The First Lady of the Screen – there can be only one – who is she? Her name is not Greta Garbo, or Katharine Hepburn, not Joan Crawford, Ruth Chatterton, Janet Gaynor or Ann Harding. It’s Norma Shearer (p. 28). Originally from Montréal, Canada, Norma Shearer signed her first MGM contract at age twenty. By twenty-five, she had married its most promising producer, Irving Thalberg, and by thirty-five, she had been widowed through the latter’s untimely death, ultimately retiring from the screen forever at forty. During the intervening twenty years, Shearer won one Academy Award and was nominated for five more, built up a dedicated, international fan base with an active fan club, was consistently featured in fan magazines, and starred in popular and critically acclaimed films throughout the silent, pre-Code and post-Code eras. Shearer was, at the height of her fame, an institution; unfortunately, her career is rarely as well-remembered as those of her contemporaries – including many of the stars named above.
    [Show full text]
  • Novel to Novel to Film: from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway to Michael
    Rogers 1 Archived thesis/research paper/faculty publication from the University of North Carolina at Asheville’s NC DOCKS Institutional Repository: http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/unca/ Novel to Novel to Film: From Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to Michael Cunningham’s and Daldry-Hare’s The Hours Senior Paper Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For a Degree Bachelor of Arts with A Major in Literature at The University of North Carolina at Asheville Fall 2015 By Jacob Rogers ____________________ Thesis Director Dr. Kirk Boyle ____________________ Thesis Advisor Dr. Lorena Russell Rogers 2 All the famous novels of the world, with their well known characters, and their famous scenes, only asked, it seemed, to be put on the films. What could be easier and simpler? The cinema fell upon its prey with immense rapacity, and to this moment largely subsists upon the body of its unfortunate victim. But the results are disastrous to both. The alliance is unnatural. Eye and brain are torn asunder ruthlessly as they try vainly to work in couples. (Woolf, “The Movies and Reality”) Although adaptation’s detractors argue that “all the directorial Scheherezades of the world cannot add up to one Dostoevsky, it does seem to be more or less acceptable to adapt Romeo and Juliet into a respected high art form, like an opera or a ballet, but not to make it into a movie. If an adaptation is perceived as ‘lowering’ a story (according to some imagined hierarchy of medium or genre), response is likely to be negative...An adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary.
    [Show full text]
  • The Harlem Renaissance: a Handbook
    .1,::! THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE: A HANDBOOK A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF ATLANTA UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF ARTS IN HUMANITIES BY ELLA 0. WILLIAMS DEPARTMENT OF AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES ATLANTA, GEORGIA JULY 1987 3 ABSTRACT HUMANITIES WILLIAMS, ELLA 0. M.A. NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, 1957 THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE: A HANDBOOK Advisor: Professor Richard A. Long Dissertation dated July, 1987 The object of this study is to help instructors articulate and communicate the value of the arts created during the Harlem Renaissance. It focuses on earlier events such as W. E. B. Du Bois’ editorship of The Crisis and some follow-up of major discussions beyond the period. The handbook also investigates and compiles a large segment of scholarship devoted to the historical and cultural activities of the Harlem Renaissance (1910—1940). The study discusses the “New Negro” and the use of the term. The men who lived and wrote during the era identified themselves as intellectuals and called the rapid growth of literary talent the “Harlem Renaissance.” Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925) and James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan (1930) documented the activities of the intellectuals as they lived through the era and as they themselves were developing the history of Afro-American culture. Theatre, music and drama flourished, but in the fields of prose and poetry names such as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Zora Neale Hurston typify the Harlem Renaissance movement. (C) 1987 Ella 0. Williams All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Special recognition must be given to several individuals whose assistance was invaluable to the presentation of this study.
    [Show full text]
  • John Halperin Bloomsbury and Virginia W
    John Halperin ., I Bloomsbury and Virginia WooH: Another VIew . i· "It had seemed to me ever since I was very young," Adrian Stephen wrote in The Dreadnought Hoax in 1936, "that anyone who took up an attitude of authority over anyone else was necessarily also someone who offered a leg to pull." 1 In 1910 Adrian and his sister Virginia and Duncan Grant and some of their friends dressed up as the Emperor of Abyssinia and his suite and perpetrated a hoax upon the Royal Navy. They wished to inspect the Navy's most modern vessel, they said; and the Naval officers on hand, completely fooled, took them on an elaborate tour of some top­ secret facilities aboard the HMS Dreadnought. When the "Dread­ nought Hoax," as it came to be called, was discovered, there were furious denunciations of the group in the press and even within the family, since some Stephen relations were Naval officers. One of them wrote to Adrian: "His Majesty's ships are not suitable objects for practical jokes." Adrian replied: "If everyone shared my feelings toward the great armed forces of the world, the world [might] be a happier place to live in . .. armies and suchlike bodies [present] legs that [are] almost irresistible." Earlier a similarly sartorial practical joke had been perpetrated by the same group upon the mayor of Cam­ bridge, but since he was a grocer rather than a Naval officer the Stephen family seemed unperturbed by this-which was not really a thumbing·of-the-nose at the Establishment. The Dreadnought Hoax was harder to forget.
    [Show full text]
  • A Novel Way to Learn: Black Educational Fiction from Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance
    A NOVEL WAY TO LEARN: BLACK EDUCATIONAL FICTION FROM RECONSTRUCTION TO THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE BY ARJA KAROLIINA ENGSTROM DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2014 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Dale M. Bauer, Chair Associate Professor Stephanie Foote Assistant Professor Nancy Castro Associate Professor Peter Mortensen ii Abstract A Novel Way to Learn examines the development of black fiction in tandem with black educational advancement from Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance. By reading education in the novels of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sutton Griggs, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Jessie Redmon Fauset, I reveal an underexplored genealogy of black educational thought from initial calls for educational access to more independent, ideological, and pragmatic modes embodied in the texts of black fiction writers. Ultimately, I argue that black educational fiction constitutes a key strand of African American writing before the Harlem Renaissance. iii Acknowledgements It is only thanks to the wisdom, generosity, and guidance of many people in academia that I can write these pages of appreciation. I want to thank my doctoral committee: my director Dale Bauer, Stephanie Foote, Nancy Castro, and Peter Mortensen. I will always be grateful for Dale’s guidance, intellect, and vision as well as her kindness and patience. She is truly phenomenal, and I could not have completed this project had she not been my advisor. Stephanie Foote is second to none when it comes to seeing the potential for greatness in a draft, and I am very lucky to have had her read my work.
    [Show full text]
  • Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi………………………………………
    Celal Bayar Üniversitesi CBÜ SOSYAL BİLİMLER DERGİSİ Yıl : 2013 Cilt :11 Sayı :2 EXPERIMENTAL MODERNISM: THE SUBVERSION OF ROMANCE FORMULAS AND THE DISMANTLING OF REALIST REPRESENTATION OF THE CITY IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S NIGHT AND DAY Araş. Gör. Dr. Çiğdem ALP Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi, Fen Edebiyat Fakültesi, İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü ABSTRACT Virginia Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day (1919), has generally been conceived as a typical example of the traditional English novel, which is characterized by the realistic rendering of common life and ordinary people. Some aspects of the book such as chronological order, omniscient narrator, and the traditional plot of love and marriage undoubtedly point to the realist tradition that the novel resides in. However, it is misleading to evaluate the text simply as a realist work because the narrative strategies Woolf employs throughout the book subvert the earlier literary conventions and signal the commencement of modernist literature that has changed the form and content of the English novel in the following decades. Throughout this work, Woolf questions both social and literary conventions by subverting romance formulas and describing psychologically-perceived London. While the subverted romance structure exposes the established views on gender and marriage, the portrayal of London through the consciousness of the characters prevents the novel from being a wholly realist work. The aim of this paper is to analyze how Woolf challenges traditional form and subject matter, and hence lays the ground for her later modernist works. Keywords: Virginia Woolf, Night and Day, realism, modernism, romance, city, feminism MODERNIZME GEÇİŞ: VIRGINIA WOOLF’UN NIGHT AND DAY ROMANINDA ROMANS GELENEĞİNİN VE REALİZMIN YIKIMI ÖZ Virginia Woolf’un ikinci romanı Night and Day (1919), edebiyat eleştirmenleri tarafından genellikle realist İngiliz romanın tipik bir örneği olarak kabul edilir.
    [Show full text]
  • A Comparative Critical Study of Kate Roberts and Virginia Woolf
    CULTURAL TRANSLATIONS: A COMPARATIVE CRITICAL STUDY OF KATE ROBERTS AND VIRGINIA WOOLF FRANCESCA RHYDDERCH A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF PhD UNIVERSITY OF WALES, ABERYSTWYTH 2000 DECLARATION This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not being concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree. 4" Signed....... (candidate) ................................................. z3... Zz1j0 Date x1i. .......... ......................................................................... STATEMENT 1 This thesis is the result of my own investigations, except where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by footnotes giving explicit references. A bibliography is appended. Signed (candidate) ......... ' .................................................... ..... 3.. MRS Date X11.. U............................................................................. ............... , STATEMENT 2 I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organisations. hL" Signed............ (candidate) .............................................. 3Ü......................................................................... Date.?. ' CULTURAL TRANSLATIONS: A COMPARATIVE CRITICAL STUDY OF KATE ROBERTS AND VIRGINIA WOOLF FRANCESCA RHYDDERCH Abstract This thesis offers a comparative critical study of Virginia Woolf and her lesser known contemporary, the Welsh author Kate Roberts. To the majority of
    [Show full text]