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The New Woman Painter in American Literature Jennifer Leigh Moffitt

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The New Woman Painter in American Literature Jennifer Leigh Moffitt Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2014 Representation and the Modern Female Subject: The New Woman Painter in American Literature Jennifer Leigh Moffitt Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES REPRESENTATION AND THE MODERN FEMALE SUBJECT: THE NEW WOMAN PAINTER IN AMERICAN LITERATURE By JENNIFER LEIGH MOFFITT A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2014 Jennifer Leigh Moffitt defended this dissertation on October 27, 2014. The members of the supervisory committee were: Leigh Edwards Professor Co-Directing Dissertation Paul Outka Professor Co-Directing Dissertation Karen Bearor University Representative Andrew Epstein Committee Member Dennis Moore Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii For Drew, who waited. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the unwavering support of my committee, friends, and family. I would like to begin by thanking the members of my committee – Dennis Moore, Andrew Epstein, and Karen Bearor – for their guidance and kindness throughout my graduate career. For my co-directors Paul Outka and Leigh Edwards, I am particularly grateful. They offered much needed wisdom and humor, and were unflagging in their patience and encouragement. Their generous mentorship will never be forgotten. Graduate school would have been a dismal experience without the dear friendships of Catherine Altmaier and Rebecca Lehmann. I will forever be thankful that our paths crossed in Tallahassee. Lastly, I would like to express my enduring gratitude to my family: my fiancé, Drew Smith, my “sister,” Anne O’Brien, and my remarkable parents, Karen and Lee Moffitt. Thank you for your love and understanding, and for always believing in me, especially when I didn’t. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures .................................................................................................................................................... vi Abstract.............................................................................................................................................................. vii INTRODUCTION: THEORIZING THE PAINTER HEROINE....................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE: REFRAMING WOMEN: BLAKE, PHELPS, CHOPIN AND THE PAINTER HEROINE........................................................................................................................................................21 CHAPTER TWO: HOWELLS, MAGRUDER, AND THE POPULAR NEW WOMAN OF THE MAGAZINES..................................................................................................................................................64 CHAPTER THREE: THE NEW WOMAN PAINTER OF COLOR IN EATON’S MARION AND FAUSET’S PLUM BUN .....................................................................................................................93 CHAPTER FOUR: SPECTACLES OF WOMANHOOD IN WHARTON’S THE HOUSE OF MIRTH AND LARSEN’S QUICKSAND ................................................................................................130 CONCLUSION: THE PAINTER HEROINE AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY......................................................................................................................................................149 APPENDIX A. FIGURES ..........................................................................................................................160 BIBLIOGRAPHY .........................................................................................................................................171 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ......................................................................................................................181 v LIST OF FIGURES 1 Mary Cassatt, Modern Woman, 1892-93, oil on canvas, 15 x 64½ ft. Mural, Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893...........................................................................160 2 Alice Barber (Stephens), The Women’s Life Class. Illus. for William C. Brownell, “The Art Schools of Philadelphia.” Scribner’s Monthly 18.5 (Sept. 1879): 737-50. ....................................161 3 A “BLOOMER” (in Leap Year) and Strong-Minded “BLOOMER.” Cartoons from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 4.20 (Jan. 1852): 286...........................................................................................162 4 Engagement in High Life. Cartoon from Punchinello 2.32 (5 Nov. 1870): 87................................163 5 The Two Mothers. Engraving. Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine 86.515 (May 1873): 392.........164 6 J.H.S. Mann, Hush! He Sleeps. Engraving by J. Franck. Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine 78.464 (Feb. 1869): 110. ...............................................................................................................................165 7 Charles Dana Gibson, Social Nuisances: The Female Artist Who Has Ceased To Be Feminine. Cartoon from Life 16.397 (7 Aug. 1890): 64-65...........................................................................166 8 Charles Dana Gibson, A Widow and Her Friends: She Goes Into Colors. Cartoon from Life 37.949 (10 Jan. 1901): 30-31............................................................................................................167 9 Frank O. Small, “My mother had Indian blood. See?” And she turned her profile. Illus. for The Coast of Bohemia by William Dean Howells. The Ladies’ Home Journal 10.4 (Mar. 1893): 5....................168 10 Charles Dana Gibson, The Beautiful Young Woman…Had Stepped Back From Her Easel. Illus. for The Princess Sonia by Julia Magruder. The Century Illustrated Magazine 50.1 (May 1895): 5.... ...169 11 Militant Suffragette. Cartoon from Life 70.1829 (15 Nov. 1917): 782..........................................170 vi ABSTRACT “Representation and the Modern Female Subject” examines the socio-cultural work of the fictional woman painter in novels by women authors writing in or about the United States between the years 1870-1930. I focus on representations of women painters to explore the shift that occurs when women take control of their self-images. It is my contention that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American women writers employ the self-reflexive figure of the painter heroine to promote an ideological and iconological awareness of the discursive and visual natures of gender construction. The second order act of gender- and self-making produced by the woman author writing the woman painter, who in turn produces ekphrastically rendered images, foregrounds the ways that gender is articulated in art, literature, and the popular media. These self-reflexive representations, therefore, anticipate questions raised by constructivists about how gender ideologies are produced, by whom, and to what effect. In this way, authors such as Lillie Devereux Blake, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Kate Chopin, Julia Magruder, Winnifred Eaton, and Jessie Fauset deconstruct hegemonic representations of womanhood or femininity, from the True Woman to the Gibson Girl, to enable a plurality of divergent, sometimes paradoxical, femininities. Implicitly, then, these authors suggest that gender is constructed and negotiated through language and image and, crucially, that women must take an active part in those processes if they are to obtain autonomy. vii INTRODUCTION THEORIZING THE PAINTER HEROINE In 1893, American expatriate painter Mary Cassatt unveiled her mural Modern Woman, a companion piece for Mary MacMonnies’s Primitive Woman, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Figure 1). The two murals gracing opposing ends of the Hall of Honor in the Woman’s Building were, according to Bertha Palmer, president of the Board of Lady Managers, intended to project “something symbolic showing the advancement of women” from her “primitive condition as a bearer of burdens and doing drudgery” to the “position she occupies today” (qtd. in Webster, 62). Given free rein in her conception of “modern woman,” Cassatt produced a series of three allegorical paintings, appropriations of classical female imagery, separated by embellished borders but united by a vivid color scheme. Together the tableaux invoke education, achievement, and the professions, endeavors pivotal to the women’s movement, and operate as, in the words of Sarah Burns, “a symbolic manifesto of feminine autonomy, value, and self-worth” (par. 8). The mural’s central panel, Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science, a reworking of the Biblical story of Eve, depicts a group of young women of various ages gathering apples from an orchard. On the left, Young Girls Pursuing Fame continues the theme of self-fulfillment through an image of three animated girls chasing a personification of Fame. The final panel, Art, Music, Dancing, portrays three women in a grassy field, two of whom engage in the latest fads: the first performs a provocative “skirt dance” and the second picks a banjo. The third figure, representing Art yet pictured without the marks of her trade (brush, palette, or canvas), looks on.1 1 Webster points out that these three women – Art, Music, and
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